David Horsager:
Welcome to the Trusted Leader Show. I’m your host, David Horsager. Join me as I sit down with influential leaders from around the world to discuss why leaders in organizations fail top tactics for high performance, and how you can become an even more trusted leader. Welcome to The Trusted Leader Show. It’s David Horsager, and I have a special guest today. We have, she’s 30 year, 33 year veteran at Chick-fil-A. She helped develop culture and talent there. She is a three time bestselling author. She has become a friend. We share the title of experts in residents at Highpoint University. And so we’re, we get to cross paths there once in a while. I’m excited to have on the show. Thank you for being here, Dee Ann Turner.

Dee Ann Turner:
David, it’s my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

David Horsager:
Well, this is a treat. Before we get into culture and talent and all the great work you did at Chick-fil-A, now you do in your own consulting firm and you know what you’ve written about in your books. Tell us, tell us a couple things we don’t know or need to know about D Turner.

Dee Ann Turner:
Oh, there’s so much that I spend time talking about from my long career, but, you know, I have a couple of other, I, in fact, I just came from speaking at a church. My first role in life was a pastor’s wife, and a lot of people don’t know that, but my husband, I used to say I was married to a pastor. Well, I’m still married to the same man. He’s just not a full-time pastor anymore. But that’s something that not many people know about me, that that was a role that I had once in life and it actually shaped a lot of who I am.

David Horsager:
Sure. Absolutely. Well, Jen, let’s jump in on that. You know it’s, it’s something to whether running a church or any kind of organization shaping culture, shaping, you know, teams. I want to jump in on this culture you develop. When I looked at the data not too long ago, it, the average per store revenue of a Chick-fil-A. So we’re gonna go back first and we’re gonna go into what you’re doing now, but how you created that culture, the average per store revenue without working on Sundays and a whole lot of other things was almost double McDonald’s or anywhere else. It’s, it’s a fascinating story. They but the way you build culture there, the way you run lines there you know, people with DMVs would love to have Chick-fil-a take over line situation, but you, you have similar people to other places, and yet, you know this it’s my pleasure by, by the way, we’ve had Horse Schultz on, of course, who is the founder of Ritz Carlton. And he said he was in the room with the Kathy’s, you know, when, when he said, Well, we say my pleasure, and you won’t wanna do that, You’ll wanna do something else. But and pretty, I think it was Truet Kathy who said, No, that sounds good. , but horses.

Dee Ann Turner:
Exactly right. That is how it happened, .

David Horsager:
But maybe you can tell us a little bit about maybe that story and just, you know, a little bit how this culture became so strong.

Dee Ann Turner:
Okay, well, that’s a lot right there. Let’s start with, let let’s start with this culture piece, and in the words of Jim Collins, the hedgehog concept for Chick-fil-A is the operator agreement. It’s that, that Truit chose when he expanded his business starting in 1967. He started in 1946, but he started expanding Chick-fil-A restaurants in 1967, and he decided right then that he didn’t want managers that were paid a salary because he didn’t think that, that they would be as bought in as somebody who had skin in the game. So he came up with an agreement that provided operators and opportunity to make a small investment into the business, and then the, and then share in the profits of the business. And Truett’s philosophy was, is that he couldn’t be everywhere. So he wanted this operator to want to run that business just like Truet would, as if he were there.
And it was, it was a genius concept because he, he didn’t go after people who were franchising types, you know, people who just wanted to buy a territory, develop it, hire managers to work there. He wanted to select individual franchisees that would be the onsite leadership. And they started in all shopping malls back in 1967. And so they used to call those Chick-fil-A operators or franchisees that are interchangeable terms, the mayor of the mall. And that was the goal, be the mayor of the mall, grow the community, be the you know, the top employer in the mall. And be a place that people came because not only did they enjoy great food, but they enjoyed the great service and experiences that went with it. As the business expanded those opportunities grew. Obviously, when we went out of malls and into freestanding locations, that provided more opportunity for those franchisees.
It also required us, by the way, to select a different kind of leader because it’s much more complicated business at that point. So it changed what we were doing from a franchisees selection standpoint. But they’re the secret sauce in Chick-fil-A. Those individual franchisees that have been so carefully selected, you might have read that. And I, I can’t quote numbers today cuz I haven’t been at Chick-fil-A for a few years, but when I was there, we were receiving, you know, around 70 to 80,000 inquiries a year for only a hundred and, and 1,520 opportunities a year. And there are lots of people that wanted to be a Chick-fil-A franchisee. So the competition to be one is fierce. They’re very carefully selected. My question when, when I was selecting franchisees is I would ask myself, would I want my one of my three sons to work for this person? That was my final question. And sometimes I even asked the candidate, you know, oftentimes I did, Why would I want my three sons to work for you? And so that’s the, the kind of culture that true it built there.

David Horsager:
You know, I think that hiring was, you know, you had this aligned growth, You know, I’m part owner if I’m an operator. So that was, that alignment was great. Tell me a little bit more about that hiring process. It’s so hard to get that right for many people. And in your case selection process, that selection of the operator, you know, that’s that, Like you said, you’ve got all these people, so that helps that want one, it’s great, but, but it wasn’t always that way. How did you select great from this pool? What are a few parts of why you are so good at selecting the right talent?

Dee Ann Turner:
Well, thanks for mentioning selection, because it starts with a mi that mindset. I like to say that I never hire people, but instead I select talent. And that’s certainly what we did at Chick-fil-A was to select talent in, There’s a world of difference when you’re looking at talent, you’re looking at qu quality. You know, do you have the person with the right skills versus quantity? Do you have enough people? So as that selection process, it began and it was different over time. You know, one of my first territories as an operating recruiter early in my career at Chick-fil-A was the northeast where they couldn’t even correctly say Chick-fil-A often they said Chick-fil-A or Chick-fil-A. And it was as much a marketing job as introducing people to the organization. And then you’re gonna try to get them to go and, and run this small business at the time that they, you know of this place that they’d never heard of.
So early on, it was really introducing the brand and the great product to people and then looking for people who would be just, that they would be on site leadership. That didn’t mean literally frying chicken and waffle fries, but it meant being there and supporting their team and, and working on the business instead of at the business. So, you know, being that community spokesperson having the right marketing strategy in place, having having all the controllables under control and really being a leader of the people of the business and growing leaders beneath them, as time went on and bigger opportunities am available for Chick-Fil-A operators, part of that selection process was how many leaders did they grow up underneath them before they were able to move on to something else. But just real quickly, strong interviewing process, really the ace in the hold to me for Chick-fil-A, at least at the time I was there, I, I don’t know the process today, but at the time for decades, we did really strong referencing of our candidates.
So not just the interviews, but really talking to other people that they’ve been accountable to and, and hearing from other people that we had the right leader that was going to be a strong influence, that had a heart for service that was purpose driven, that focused on teamwork. Those are some of the things that, that we looked at and the way we went about it. The other thing is we really wanted to make sure they knew what they were getting into. And so, so they went if they had no restaurant experience, they would go and work in the restaurant. Mind you, at the time that I was there, two thirds of Chick-fil-A franchisees were one time team members. So a lot of them had that experience, but a third of them didn’t have that experience, and that’s okay. Truit used to say, You can teach anybody to make a chicken sandwich. It’s all the other leadership skills that we’re looking for. But they would go in, make sure they knew, Hey, you’re gonna come home smelling like peanut oil and all those other things that you get involved in in the restaurant. So,

David Horsager:
So what? So you’ve got the leaders. There’s a selection process, a big bias for the, for referencing, which makes a lot of sense. I think a lot of people are having difficulty with hiring today. And first of all, first and foremost, they don’t have a funnel for grabbing that many people to go from, It sure helps. If you have a thousand, you only need 10 from that thousand, you know, But, but once you’ve got ’em, you’ve developed leaders. How are you developing those leaders? How are you equipping them? How are you building this culture? You’ve got your people selected across, you know, distributor organization or even at hq. How do you, how are, what’s the process for, in a systematic way, building this high trust culture?

Dee Ann Turner:
So, at the time that I was there, what I’ll share with you, and as that, you know, the franchisees are independent contractors, so they’re developing their own leaders, their brand standards around many things at Chick-fil-A. But when it came to selection of talent and the development of leaders, we, we really only had a few touchpoints that we were able to influence because of them being independent contractors. What we did first of all, we believed that you had to select the right leader to start with. So again, going back to this franchisee selection, when we selected the best leaders there, then we felt like that they would have the capability. And that was part of what we interviewed on, was their experience of growing other leaders. From a Chick-fil-A standpoint, what my experience was, was an in terms of leadership development was a lot of exposure.
That I think is very unusual. Starting very early career ver a strong commitment to learning and development. So much so that, I mean, you know, an entire function is resource for that. And, and everyone at least when I was there, everyone at the support center is what Chick-fil-A calls, it had an individual development plan and they had a budget associated with it, and they were expected to use it. And to and how they used it was really up to the supervisor. So it might be skills based, it might be a performance issue that needs to be addressed, and they’re getting skills based. It might be a personal issue. Maybe the biggest need they have that year is they’re having physical issues and they wanna focus on their physical health. So they’re gonna get a personal trainer and they’re gonna use that money for that, just as an example.
Or they’re gonna join a, a weight reduction group because that’s what’s good for them, or they’re going to invest in stress reduction in some way. So it’s not just about, you know, the, on the job skills, but it’s about developing the whole person so that that is the first way they start. And then you know, there’s, there’s constant opportunities to re-skill and to update those skills, whether in, in throughout the training function that Chick-fil-A offers. So there’s a big, there’s a big focus on in-house training, but then there’s external opportunities too. They, a, they offer some of the best executive education opportunities in the world. They you know, they fund everything from the next great book you wanna read to whatever course it is that you need to attend to internally or externally to increase your leadership ability. But I think the, I think some of the practices that are most effective there at least when I was there, you know, mentoring is a big commitment there. Every leader there has at least one mentee, and most of them have several formal mentoring relationships, not to mention a culture of informal mentoring. H

David Horsager:
How, okay, we gotta stop there. Sure. How do you do that? People are asking me all the time about that, you know, mentoring, I talk about it in my last book a little bit, but how do both the formal, and how do you actually say you create a culture of informal cause say, you know, people talk a lot about mentoring, but they haven’t created a space for it, created a way of doing it, created a, a what that even looks like. Tell me a little bit more about what does that look like? What was the formal mentoring? What does that look like? And then informal,

Dee Ann Turner:
The formal mentoring program was part of the so we had a nine box process for identifying future leaders leadership capability and performance. And there were associated development opportunities depending on where you were in that nine box. And so those believed to be future leaders would be put into a mentoring program with somebody senior to them. And so, for instance, highest level of leadership in the organization with the executive committee, and they would have vice presidents that would be assigned to them. And you can trickle that on down throughout the organization. You know, that started when as we got into this, we realized we had to pass the culture down. And that became a big part of the li the mentoring process was just being sure we were growing so fast that we were able to communicate that culture throughout. So that was, those are assigned responsibilities.
It’s quite a, at least when I was there, it was quite an honor to be selected for that kind of mentoring. One of the things that I think made it work the best is when, and I write a little bit about this in my book, Crush Your Career, but I think that the mentee was tasked with the agenda and so that they set the agenda, they were responsible for the schedule not the other way around. And I think that becomes much more effective because then the mentee is getting what they need. Not that the mentor wouldn’t. I think one of the ways the mentor was able to inject was and one things was most successful, is when that they would bring that mentee along and let them be a part of things that they otherwise would’ve never seen. And give you example, for two years I was mentored by our chief marketing officer, Steve Robinson the original Chief Marketing officer at Chick-fil-A.
And Steve, you know, he took me to the Richards group that created the famous cows. And I sat in on the, you know, the marketing strategy meetings, for instance or to be with him when he’s meeting about Chick-Fil-A participation in the Chick-fil-A and things like that. Things that I, in the HR world I wasn’t normally exposed to. That’s just one of literally thousands of examples of exposure that people get. So I formally, that’s the way that work. What I mean by informally, sometimes formally is not the best click. You, you might learn some things about the business, but sometimes on the personal level, it might not be the best click for someone. So you’ve gotta find mentors inside or outside the organization. Informal mentoring works really well at Chick-fil-A, because one of the original core values with generosity, that included generosity of time.
So there’s an expectation that you’re gonna give to others of your time and your talent as well is treasure when we think of generosity. So that has a lot to do. Why there’s so much informal mentoring and willing to invest in people is that core value of generosity. But, and when you have a, a culture that’s open and leaders that the, the culture is even, you know, the, the head of the company, true at Kathy, you could walk right into his office and ask him something. And when you have that kind of culture, everyone follows along in those same lines. And so it’s very open door, It’s all on a first name basis. That’s not a big deal anymore. Everybody’s on a first name basis. But when I started out, that was the little unusual. And so you have that you know, true, it always went by true. And he was never Mr. Kathy and he was the founder of the company. And that created a culture where people were very open to sharing and giving to one another. One final thing on mentoring that I think is also successful is reverse mentoring. And especially in the area of diversity, equity, and inclusion, when organizations are trying to improve in those areas, that’s crucial that you have some people really help leaders understand these issues. And the best way to do it is to put them in a relationship where they can share both ways.

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David Horsager:
Let, let’s jump in on one of your books. I want to hit on, especially, there’s three great ones at least, but on the bet on talent, how to create a remarkable culture and win the hearts of customers. I wanna drill down just, you know, a lot of listeners here. We’ve got CEOs and senior leaders and managers, and one now they’re trying to, whether they’re trying to create a culture, an organization, a, a nonprofit, a global government, you know, everything has a culture. How, how are we creating, how, what are some steps to create a mo a a remarkable culture where people can perform at their best? We talk a lot about trust, building trust and how do we do that? But what would be a couple things we could take away and say, Oh, I want a higher performing culture that is, in your words, remarkable. What are a couple things I should think about right now as the culture keeper?

Dee Ann Turner:
So, there are three things. Unfortunately, people think culture is a thousand things, and they’re trying to create, whether it’s Friday afternoon, happy hours, or some kind of big team event, or you know, let’s let’s have your favorite college football day or whatever. And all those are important parts of culture. But here’s the core of the culture. It’s three things. First, you wanna have a meaningful purpose. The reason you exist at all, define your reason for being. It’s your why and your why never changes. The second thing is a challenging mission. It’s the big goal you’re gonna rally your organization around. And you’re, you know, I use the for me, I use a mission such as when Kennedy said to NASA in the US that we would put a man on the moon back in 1961, he said, But we’ll put a man on the moon before the end of the decade and bring him safely back to earth. What a big mission. People rallied around that.

David Horsager:
So let’s pick, let’s help, let’s help with this. I wanna get tactical here. I wanna get to number three. I can’t wait. But how do you know so many businesses are similar? Like your consulting company? What’s the big mission? What’s the big goal?

Dee Ann Turner:
Well, the big goal is, it’s funny that you say that cuz I’m, well, help me

David Horsager:
With mine.

Dee Ann Turner:
, , I’m actually in transition cuz the next thing out of my mouth is, and when you achieve a mission then you’re next, then you actually set a new mission for your organization. Now my organization is kind of small, very small. So I’m actually in transition of going for that. And, and I don’t I don’t normally say revenue goals are part of a mission. It can be, I mean, at one time Chick-fil-A was pursuing a mission of becoming a reaching a billion dollars in sales. That was a big thing. But for me, starting out and being three years into it, that was, that was what my mission was about. Now I have a greater purpose of inspiring others to live out their calling. That is my purpose. But my mission is in transition because I’m going through, okay, I needed some revenue goals to keep this thing afloat. I’ve met those what am I going to be about next? What

David Horsager:
Would you say, what, what have been some good ones you hear? Because you can have a mission in some cases, people, people’s mission sounds a lot like their purpose. Like we would say our mission is to develop trusted leaders in organizations around the world. But that mission is unchanging. It’s, it’s our purpose. It’s, we are here to create trusted leaders in organizations around the world. We believe we serve people best when we do that. But this mission, this big goal right now, you could say a number, you could say, I also think sometimes it’s not gritty enough. Like we want to touch a hundred million people with trust like that are, But how do you defining that, we’ve learned that we touched so many people, we can’t even count. It kind of can get, you can’t see that, that, that vision. You could say. What would be some, what are some examples or what are some some commonalities of a great mission?

Dee Ann Turner:
Well, I think commonalities first of all is, is a smart goal. So and, you know, something that you actually can measure and something that is time bound so that you know when you’ve achieved it and you can celebrate it. And I think all of those are, that, that’s the, and that was actually the next thing outta my mouth. When you as we begin talking about this mission and you and asking me of great examples, you know, one of the ones that I love that we had at Chick-fil-A, we went from, we had a mission that was to be America’s best quick service restaurant at satisfying every customer. That was so I mean, you know, lots of data. I mean, it was easy to measure, but it was like, ugh, okay, satisfying. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I’m just not motivated by the word to satisfy.
It’s like, I wanna do something beyond satisfy. But anyway, when we achieved that, when Chick-fil-A became number one, it at customer service in the country, the next mission became something. And I love this mission statement. It’s not as gritty as you might think it needs to be, but I love it because it’s so memorable. And it was simply this be remarkable. And the with the remark italicized because it meant be the organization that people remark about, that they talk about, about how great your products are, your service is and your experiences are. And that became such a long term mission because it started with a focus on, okay, do we need to go back and make sure that we’re meeting all the standards on a Chick-fil-A sandwich? And we did that operational excellence, we focused on is that, you know, is that breast of chicken sitting exactly on that toasted butter bun, like it’s supposed to be in those two pickle slices placed exactly like they’re supposed to be.
And everything about operational excellence on every recipe, everything. We focused on that. And then we went to service and we talked about, you know, it started with this idea of these brand standards around service. But then when it got turned over to the franchisees, they knocked it out of the park, David, they, they they took it all to the next level. Their team members took some brand standards and they turned it into this, these, this remarkable service that people were talking about everywhere. They were talking about, you know, this team member changed my flat tire, jumped off a dead battery, went dumpster diving for discarded dental appliances, jumped out of the drive through window into the backseat of a car to save a child that was choking. These are the kinds of things that they were doing, and they named it second mile service, meaning going above and beyond.

David Horsager:
How did they, how did you do that better than others? Like how, like, I remember with the former, I think the only at the time billionaire, you might have known him too, Soderquist when we got to chat together and meet at his home, and it was a, a privilege for me, but I remember asking him How you drive the culture at Walmart? And he said it was Sunday morning, or I think it was Sunday morning or Saturday morning, 7:00 AM meetings where they, they basically did, in, in what in, in academics is called appreciative inquiry. Appreci talked about the best of here’s the best of here’s the best of, and it, it caught on like everybody started doing and being more the best of Right. But how did you do it there? Because, you know, any other organization, any other fast food restaurant has this opportunity, and yet it seems like the story is shared more, the my pleasure is shared more consistently. You know, the, the, the, the, these types of things are more amplified. What is it that Chick-fil-A did that did, that created that, that drive to do that to be better, to really serve people so well?

Dee Ann Turner:
So I believe some things, I think first of all, because they’re privately owned and family, they’re family owned and privately held, I think that that is a big reason. Because you have that influence. They’re now in third generation leadership that’s been passed down from generation to generation with this focus on we are here to serve. It is the number. We didn’t get to core values by the way, but the core values,

David Horsager:
Oh, that’s coming. Yeah, number three. So share that in that. So number one, so on, on, on, let’s get this back to the come back in. I, I went off the rails, that’s happened before, but we’re talking about what really does it take to create an amazing culture? I was just bringing it back in. How do, in essence, my question was how do you actually cascade that? So that really plays well to number three. So what have we said so far, a meaningful purpose or why a challenging mission or big goal that one, we can, we can change once we’ve accomplished it. And number three

Dee Ann Turner:
Is demonstrated core values. Of course, you notice I said demonstrated because you can have a list on the wall or on the screen saver, but if they’re not being demonstrated from the top down, then they’re not really effective. And that’s what I witnessed at Chick-fil-A. Our, our original core values were words that described who true it. Kathy was, it was what he lived out by the way, he didn’t write all this down early in Chick-fil-a’s existence. All this didn’t get written down until the 1980s, and he’d been in business since 1946. But what got what was written down was what he had demonstrated. And so at the time, the core values were loyalty, generosity, excellence, and integrity. And later those transformed a little bit to be reflective of, of a number of things that happened. Truett passed away. His son Dan became the ceo, Chick-fil-A got a new executive committee, a new board of directors, and a whole new generation of p Chick-fil-A employees.
And it was time to look at this again, core values can change for the right reason at the right time too. And those same words still applied to who Chick-fil-A was, is and wanted to be. But their core values change to a new set, which were, we’re here to serve, we’re better together, we’re purpose driven, and we pursue what’s next. And so that serve piece, you asked me the difference between Chick-fil-A and others, and it’s about this relentless commitment to service. And it starts at the top of the organization. It started with Truett. And by the way, in their organization, and again, at least when I was there, my experience was the, you know, the higher quote unquote, you were in leadership in the organization, the more you were expected to serve. And the person that we were serving most was the franchisee because nothing happened until somebody sold chicken.
And so, and the franchisee, their role was to serve the customer and their team member. The team member mm-hmm. is the vital role. They’re the ones sitting that standing across the counter with a customer with a $10 bill. So this whole relentless focus on service. And, and I really credit Dan, Kathy with bringing that to a new level. He was the one who identified this need. I mean, and it basically came from, Hey, people can copy our products. Let’s differentiate ourselves in this area of service. And then it became, let’s go above and beyond anything a customer would expect. And so there became a a principal within the organization, and the expectation was that every customer on every visit will experience some element of second mile service. At first, the support center tried to dictate what that was, but then we realized that wasn’t gonna work, and we turned it over to the franchisee and said, Hey, by the way, you know your customers, you figure out what that looks like in your community. Here’s some brand standards. We’d like you to like you to do these basic things, but the above and beyond you define what it is. And they defined that so well for their team members. They empowered them to do all these remarkable things that you hear about in the news. And it came from those, those individuals franchisees from the example that was set from Truit and his family and the leaders from there down.

David Horsager:
So that’s a great, I just wanna put an explanation point here on these three keys to culture, and you can find a whole lot more about those in bed on talent and your other books. But let’s just jump to the talent side. Okay. There’s a lot out there of how we recruit and retain talent. I wouldn’t mind talking about that, but how do I be great talent? It’s a little bit about what you’re talking about acing the interview, but what, what if I’m gonna be the right person? What’s that look like?

Dee Ann Turner:
Oh, well, I think it’s I think first of all, culture that matches the organization. So I want my culture to match the organization. It might not be the exact same words and it, I don’t think it should be, but it’s aligned with the culture. And then secondly, I want competency that matches the role. But I wanna look at this organization, what’s its trajectory and what their vision and strategy is, and do I, do I meet what their future needs are? Is that a place I’m gonna be able to grow? And so understanding my competencies and being able to communicate that helps make me great talent. And then lastly, it’s chemistry that matches the team. And when I’m looking for great talent in the area of chemistry is not just you know, it’s not locking arms and singing kumbaya and everybody that gets along. What I’m looking for is somebody who can bring their diverse point of view into the room. They can sit around the table, they can communicate that so well and collaborate so well that they influence others in the room. That to me, is perfect chemistry. So that’s what I’m looking for. When I’m looking for talent is culture that matches the organization competency, that matches the role in chemistry, that matches the team. And if I’m talent, that’s what I’m trying to be.

David Horsager:
I love it. What do you, what do you learn these days? Tell us a bit about what you’re up to and what do you, what are you learning right now?

Dee Ann Turner:
I am in huge transition. I’ve been on book I’ve been in book deadlines for the last seven years, and I didn’t have one in 2022, so that was kind of weird for me, scary because it was a lot of what was driving me through these years. But I’m kind of in transition about, okay, what is my next impact? Because I don’t have a book on the horizon right now. We’ll see what happens. But right now, I, I feel like I’ve said a lot of words in the three books that I’ve written. And I’m one of those, say what you have to say, but don’t keep writing it over and over for people. So I haven’t decided what that is next, but big transition. But I’m spending a lot of time speaking. And of course the big thing is spending, because of the release of Crush Your Career, I’m enjoying investing in young people and, you know, hopefully the future that they represent and, and, and that they’re prepared for that. And so anything I can do to help them with that is a big part of who I am. Not just like my role with High Point but also I have three sons that are in that category as well. And so I spend time coaching my own kids career wise and helping them. And that’s, that’s a lot of what my focus is right now.

David Horsager:
How are you, yourself staying fresh and relevant and capable in, you know, there’s people that are reaching out to you for advice and leading, you know, in leadership. So how do you stay fresh? How are you, how are you staying a learning human?

Dee Ann Turner:
Yeah, I think that the engagement that I have with other organizations is actually really important. I would tell you I probably learned more in the last four years that a lot of my time at Chick-fil-A, because when you’re focused so much on your role within an organization and leading your team and doing things the way your organization does, it is somewhat insulated. But to spend time with hundreds of clients who are doing things very differently sometimes than what I’m accustomed to that keeps things really fresh. And again, I go back to this thing of being with the young people. I mean, when I go to High Point for my role, they’re like, Oh, okay, who am I having dinner with? Which, which students am I having dinner with? Because I learn so much. I love that from them and especially in areas that I need to, whether it’s technology or, you know, what’s the latest, greatest podcast I need to listen to. But that’s a big part is learning from those young people, not just the other leaders that are out there.

David Horsager:
Absolutely. Yeah. We get sharpened every time. We’re, we’re, we’re part of that. And love that, Love what they’re, you know, what they’re doing there is pretty amazing as far as bringing people together. I’m on the board of another university, Bethel University. They’re doing some great things too, and equipping people. And I just love what heis point’s doing as far as really experiential, connecting, sharpening each other. We get sharpened every time we get a be around those amazing, in, in my case it’s MBAs and business school students generally as far as the school that I’m out of. But anyway, I love that. Hey, you know, one thing I’ve learned about great leaders, and, you know, well, I should just say it this way. One thing I’ve, I’ve seen at least is they tend to have habits, personal habits that help them be better at work. So like, I, I, I know that they keep healthy physically, mentally, spiritually, they’re doing things that, that are, you know, they’re intentional about their life away from work and it makes them better at work. What are some of the habits you’ve had over the years that have helped you be even a better leader on a daily basis in this role that is, you know, can be really taxing?

Dee Ann Turner:
Well, I say this a lot, but it is, it was the game changer for me. And it’s when I started spending the first hour when I would, now it’s longer period of time, but when I was younger in my career, I spent the first hour of the day on me. And it was my time for spiritual growth. It was time for exercise, It was a few minutes to read and just center myself for the day. And one of the things I loved about retiring from corporate life is I got to expand that time. I was always like, Oh, my quiet time’s over my exercise, time is over. So I really love that. I have a little bit more time on that to the younger people. It was hard when I had three children at home that I had to get out the door every morning. And a husband that also worked. It was hard and mean I got up at four 30 or five o’clock most days to have that hour. But it made the difference in me as a leader.

David Horsager:
Mm-Hmm. little things make the biggest difference, right? Yeah. Little things done consistently doesn’t consistently make the big difference. So, Well, there’s a whole lot more we could cover and a whole lot more we could talk about. This has been so great. I’m gonna put in the show notes. Everybody knows Trusted Leader show.com, all the places they can find you, find out about you, all the work you’re doing from consulting, writing, Books, Connection. What’s your favorite place? If people could remember while they’re listening, if they’re driving in the car right now, what’s your favorite place for people to go find out about what you’re up to?

Dee Ann Turner:
Oh, just go to my website, deeannturner.com. Deeannturner.Com, and it’ll have every, you can connect to my books, my podcast my, all of my social media handles, blog post, everything’s there,

David Horsager:
Deeannturner.Com. Well, this has been a treat. We always end with one final question. It is the trusted leader show, Dee Ann, who is a leader you trust and why?

Dee Ann Turner:
Well, I knew you were gonna ask me that, so I’ve given it a lot of thought. And I, I get asked a similar question often, you know, who’s your favorite leader? All those things. And I struggle with it cuz no matter who I say somebody listening to this, Oh, this is a reason that person is not. So I thought about just two people that have really helped me since I started my own business. And the thing about them is their abundance mentality. You know, to go from what I did at Chick-fil-A and to have that platform jump off, do my own thing, launch, you know, three books podcast, eCourse, all of those things. And there were two guys that are really well known and just were willing to give them theirselves. There’s actually three, three that have an abundance mentality to give time to me.
One is Pat Lencioni just, you know, so wrote the forward to two of my books, just supported me. Anything I ever asked a question about, he just made himself available to me. And that abundance mentality just really shined through. Another one is Carey Neuhoff Carey did the same thing. I was starting out on my own compared notes. Just supported me in any way that he could and I was really grateful for that. And the, and the other person that’s done that for me is Nido Qubein, same thing. All three of ’em have the same thing in common abundance and mentality. How can I help you? How can I add value to you? And I’ve just been really, really grateful for all three of those men in this season that have helped me in that way. Well,

David Horsager:
There’s lots more we could talk about. Lots more here. Everybody can find about Dee Ann Turner in the show notes. Thank you for being here Dee Ann, Thank you for being our friend, my friend. Thank you for the great work you’re doing in the world. For now, this has been The Trusted Leader Show. Until next time, stay trusted.