Is there a single human being who’s ever been a complete leader? Nope. Leaders become complete when they have a team that makes up for what they lack. Elliot Begoun’s guest in this episode is Xavier Naville, who was the Founder and CEO of Creative Food. Creative Food is a key supplier to major restaurant chains in China, like McDonalds and KFC. Join in the conversation and discover how you can form a team that strengthens your weaknesses. If you believe in humility, vulnerability, and honesty, then this episode is for you. Tune in! 

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How To Be A Complete Leader With Xavier Naville

Before I start, I want to do my favorite 30-second founder shout-out. I’m going to do a shout-out to Michael Bell of Manukora. Manukora is a kiwi-based company, a kiwi-based brand of Manuka honey but they’re just not another Manuka honey brand. They recognize that the category in the US is nascent. It’s undeveloped and is ripe for disruption and innovation. They’ve doubled down on that. They’ve invested in a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility, incredible team and supply chain. They are adamant about revolutionizing the category, bringing the health and immune properties that are inherent in Manuka in a different form, factors, ways that can be integrated into your daily habits, whether that’s a daily dose of immune in a very interesting mix of botanicals, whether that’s a single-serve sachet that you can throw into your cycling jersey or in your gym bag.

It’s a lot of cool stuff going on. It’s great branding. They’ve been fantastically successful online and are bridging the gap to jump to brick-and-mortar. Check it out. You can catch them at any of the usual social places. Go to their website. Give it a try. Go to Amazon. Go to Manukora.com. Order some products. Let them know that we sent you. I’m biased. I think every episode is important and every message is key. Honestly, they come from the conversations that we’re having every day with founders about the things that are top of mind, the challenges, the opportunities and maybe some of the subjects that we don’t talk about that often. One of those that we don’t talk about is leadership in general.

For many of you, you wake up one day and go, “I’m a leader.” You’re almost accidental leaders. The opportunity to be more proactive around that, work on being a complete leader. Doing those things, thinking about culture and how you’re going to show up every day, those things can have a huge impact on the trajectory of your business, the direction that you’re able to take it and the efficacy that you as an entrepreneur have on your team, both your internal team and your external team.

I have a guest with us. He’s going to talk a lot about that. Not only because that’s what he does day in and day out but he’s also walked the walk as an entrepreneur and has unmasked some of the mistakes that many of you are making unknowingly. Let me introduce you to Xavier and have him give you a bit about his background, and why he’s here. We’re going to dive in and talk about all things leadership. Xavier, thanks for joining. Please share with the audience a little bit about yourself.

Thanks, Elliot. I’m glad to be here. I’m French, so you’ll have to forgive me sometimes I put the wrong emphasis and the wrong syllable. When I speak English, people struggle to understand me, so I’ll do my best. I live in Oakland, California. I was an entrepreneur. I spent many years in China. I went there in ’97 when I was a young finance guy coming from a multinational. I started a business that did all the processed vegetables and fresh foods for KFC, McDonald’s, Starbucks. If you go to Starbucks in China, in one of their 5,000 stores and you eat a sandwich, wrap, soup or salad, it’s likely coming from one of my 8 or 9 plants in the country.

I sold a business in 2008. I ran it for another four years. Since 2012, I’ve been on my own doing strategic consulting in the food sector in China and more advising small size businesses here in the US as a business growth coach. The idea behind that is I did a lot of things right in China but I did not do it intentionally. I made little mistakes. I drove the company on the verge of bankruptcy, created tremendous trauma for my organization and because I did that, it created certain bonds, cultures that ended up being very successful. When I wrote the book that I call The Lettuce Diaries about my story in China, I figured that I could document in a more structured way, the path that I took to leadership and share it with my clients here in the US. I wanted my client to be more intentional than I was about building an organization and being a complete leader as I call it.

I want to spend a little time because you and I’ve had a few chats about this. I find your definition and your concept of a complete leader fascinating. It’s also extraordinarily instructive for those reading to understand what that looks like and what that is. The point you made is that you figured it out but you figured it out a bit by fumbling around in the dark and making some mistakes I’m sure in hindsight would love not to head to had made. Let’s first dive into a little bit about what you mean when you say a complete leader. What are the elements of a complete leader?

The first assumption is that we’re all incomplete as leaders. The idea that we’re supposed to know the answer is completely wrong. There’s a few characteristics of a complete leader. None of us as individuals are able to cover that. We’re usually good at a couple of them, sometimes 3 of them out of 4 but we’re not good at everything. The complete leader for me leverages his team and becomes complete through his team. It takes some discipline to do that. The first one is to come in with a humble mindset. It’s contrarian in a way because most emerging leader thinks that they have to be the hero, that there’s this voice in your head that tells you when there’s an issue at a meeting. You’re supposed to know that because you wear the hat. You’re a fraud if you don’t know that.

This idea that you’re supposed to know it all to be the hero, to be the decisive leader is wrong because the world is more complex. I did it in China where the operating environment was completely different than here but here in the US, it’s the same. It’s changing fast. It’s very complex. You need your team to become complete as a leader. The first theme in my complete leader program is a humble mindset. Meaning, you ask a question not to show that you’re the smartest guy in the room or to validate your assumption. You generally ask inquisitive questions. You ask for help. You say, “I don’t know that.” You show vulnerability.

If you mess up, you say, “I messed up.” By doing that, you create that sense of safety among the people in your team. It’s the opposite of what I thought it would create. Many of my clients tell me, “Am I going to look weak if I do that?” That’s the opposite. People don’t think you’re weak. People think that suddenly they have an opening to express their own ideas, to give you feedback and participate in the construction of the organization. That’s the first point. The second point is to create a shared context. Some people call it corporate culture. That’s important.

When I built my business, I was a financier. I was all about creating the right product, making money, addressing the needs of the customer. I was not very intentional about creating a shared context, a company mission or purpose, company core values and a clear vision for the organization. I thought it was the soft stuff. I thought it was something that I could dedicate to HR. This is probably the one most important thing that a CEO has to do. The third element of the complete leader is the idea that you can be humble, have a flexible mindset, can build a shared culture but you also want to be disciplined about holding your people accountable. There’s a number of disciplines to do that. One of these disciplines is to create very disciplined meetings with them so that you avoid the one-on-ones on the side and the side meetings to solve all sorts of difficult problems. You bring everything back into your meeting with them. As a team, you don’t report on each other’s department. You pick problems and you solve them together.

A couple of things I want to revisit there and then jump into some of the questions that came through on our community here. The complete leader is she or he sees her or his own weaknesses rather than trying to hide them, escape them, she invites the team, brings the strength of a team to the weaknesses or to the skillset may be that he or she doesn’t have and build the complete leader by its parts, not by anyone individuals. Is that the hypothesis?

I’ll give you an example. In my book, The Lettuce Diaries, I explain how I wanted the hero type of leader, the patent type of leader, the inspirational leader. I drove the company on the verge of bankruptcy. When the company had no money and I woke up every morning with a knot in my stomach because I didn’t know how to make payroll at the end of the month, I had no choice but to talk, to listen to the Chinese people who were around me. I let go of all the ex-pats in the organization and how the people who didn’t speak proper English, call me in Chinese. At the time where I wanted that inspirational leader decisive, I had people who were calling me. I had to make them repeat three times in their language what they wanted to tell me because my Chinese was the level of a two-year-old. That was the opposite of what I wanted to be.

Guess what happened? Instead of people looking at me as a poor leader, they felt empowered. They said, “If we formulate our questions properly in simple language, then you will make decisions fast and we’re going to get moving with our life.” It became the culture of the company. People call me, prepare their questions properly and I decided on the goal. There were no long rambling or no long discussions because I could not afford to. My level of Chinese did not allow me to have these long discussions. That became the culture of the company. Fast, quick on their phone, rather than long emails and long PowerPoint presentations.

What I find fascinating in your recap there of some of those elements is that they’re also very similar elements to what we talked about in terms of building a tardigrade brand, a brand that is nimble capital-efficient, resilient. One of the things you hit up on was the importance of discipline, rigor and the other one is accountability. Those are not the sexiest topics. Entrepreneurs often don’t wake up going, “I wanted to be an entrepreneur because I love rigor, accountability and discipline.” For many, the reason why they became entrepreneurs is that they push back at rigor, discipline and all of those things that often came with larger companies or corporations. What’s the blend between that accountability, discipline, the inherent flexibility and freedom of an entrepreneurial or startup culture? How do you balance those two?

It comes with a certain mindset. I tell my clients, “People become CEO or start their business to have more freedom, independence, fun, doing the things they like.” You need to adjust your mindset. When you’re a CEO, it’s a privilege. You need to have a motive that goes beyond just having fun or doing what you like. You’re responsible for an organization with sometimes hundreds of people, stakeholders, suppliers, contractors, people who trust you. When you accept that, then you’re more willing to do things that you don’t automatically enjoy or think you have fun with. That’s where the discipline comes in but it’s important to do that. It’s a privilege. It’s not about having fun.

One of the things too that I said at the onset is that when you’re an entrepreneur of an early-stage business, you don’t always enter into that or aren’t always cognizant of the fact that you’re also a leader. Oftentimes, you become what I would term an accidental leader. It wasn’t your intent. You didn’t think about it. The same holds true with culture. I’ve had this conversation before. I see a lot of entrepreneurs push away the mindfulness or intentionality around culture and dismissiveness. I worry about that as I get bigger, as the company gets bigger. Now, there are 2 or 3 of us, some fractionalized people and so forth. I don’t have to worry about it.

What often happens is that then the culture is determined despite your involvement. You have a culture that is not what you wanted or what you plan to build. The horse is already out of the barn and you’re trying to gather it. When is the right time in an early-stage entrepreneurial journey to start putting some focus, energy and intentionality around yourself as a leader and the culture you’re trying to build?

From day one, that’s the number one job of a CEO. I completely ignore that myself. I thought culture was the soft stuff. That’s the stuff that you dedicate to HR. “You’re the senior HR person,” saying you’ll take care of culture. That’s the number one thing, why? The thing that is so difficult to do as a CEO is to say no to a number of opportunities. In order to say no to an opportunity and manage this complex tradeoff that you have to make as a leadership team, you need to share context. You need to create that cultural environment. I see three points essentially, a clear purpose or mission. Why you’re here? Why did we create this company? Why is it important beyond money that this company exists and grows?

The second one is a clear vision. Where do we want to be in ten years? The third one is a set of core values, the core value that you have as a founding team that exists. They’re not aspirational. They are what they are. You want people who joined this company to share this core value. That leads to a different number of things. When you have somebody coming in with a strategic initiative or new product ideas, you constantly ask the question. “Does it further our purpose? Does it help us progress toward our vision in the future? Is it in line with our core value?” You know that, Elliot, as well as I do. When you do that and you come to a conclusion that is, “No, you get a much higher level of commitment from your leadership team.”

People are not frustrated that you’re rejecting the idea because you don’t like the idea. They understand that you all agree on that shared context, these three points. That doesn’t fit. Through a discussion, you agree on that. That’s where being complete is as a leader. You’re not saying no because you don’t like it. You have a prank discussion and you’re making these complex tradeoffs. If you don’t do that, if you’re not vigilant about that from day one, then you start to hire people who don’t share your company’s core values. They bring their own core values from their previous company or their personal core values. They dilute your own values. The people who believe in your value suddenly look at this and say, “Xavier or the leader is not serious about what he says, so I’m just going to leave the company.” You have no direction anymore. I don’t know if I’m answering your question on that.

You need to start from day one. It feeds into this question that came in. We’re a small company. We have three employees plus fractional. I’m in the day-to-day. How do I justify? When do I justify working on culture and leadership? Before you answer, I want to circle back to what you were saying. From day one, in my mind, you don’t want to dismiss the importance of this based on the fact that you’re not a “big business” yet or have a big team. What I see too often and I want your feedback on this, is that by doing so you wait until it’s too late and the culture is formed. Your incompleteness as a leader is slowing down the pace of growth. It’s something that you should be working on with intentionality from day one. What advice would you give these earlier stage folks who work with fractional teams, who don’t necessarily have a lot of full-time employees? How do they know how to dedicate the appropriate amount of time to leadership and culture building?

It starts with you modeling the values that you want alive in the company as a leader, even in a small organization. Employees are like children. They don’t listen to anything you say but they watch everything you do. The fact that you say it or that you write it on beautiful boards in your meeting room is not going to change your culture. They have to see you do this. There are a couple of things that you can do. When you have complex decisions to make about the company’s direction or strategy, you bring it back in that shared context. You asked the question, “Is it helping us further our purpose?”

An example in my case, if I had to postface what our purpose was at my company in China, we were making lettuce and serving it to 5,000 KFCs and McDonald’s around China. We were buying it from 30,000 peasant farmers around China. What we did is that because we bought every day at a steady price, we provided a very steady income for these farmers who before that were depending on the boom and bust of the wholesale markets. Our purpose would have been to provide an increasing and steady income for the peasant farmers of China. It’s not about profit. It’s what gets you up in the morning when things are tough. You’re saying, “This is not just about making money. It’s about doing this.”

That’s one. That’s the purpose, bringing each of the decisions that you have in your meetings saying, “Does it help? Is it in line with our purpose? Does it help us progress to our vision of building that gigantic company?” On the core values you can make it part of your job descriptions, when you hire a new person, you’re not just talking about skillset. You’re talking about the core value. You’re drilling into that deeply in your interviews by trying to ask examples of how these people pull this core value alive.

Another example is that you’re willing to dismiss high-performers in your company who don’t live the core values. I call them toxic A players. These people are often salespeople. They’re not nice people. They’re super high-performing. They’re making their targets. They don’t talk to anybody. They don’t collaborate. They might even lose their temper with other people. By dismissing a person like that because he doesn’t need to call that, you’re sending a clear message to the rest of the organization by saying, “I’m serious about that. This is not acceptable.” These are some examples. I’ll let you pick it up from here if you want to.

The last one you mentioned is something that is very hard and often very difficult to talk yourself into because you’re looking at the short-term success and likely sacrificing the long by keeping that person versus letting that person go. You’re sacrificing the short and keeping the long. That is a balance that a lot of entrepreneurs have to make because there’s a lot of people they have to appease. They have to make their investors happy to get cashflows. They need the revenue, all of those kinds of things. The decisions that you make as a leader should always be looking downfield. They should not be what is right in front of you. We talk about this a lot.

This isn’t in any industry but this industry, in particular, the natural products industry and CPG more generally, almost every decision, if not every decision has a tradeoff. There’s nothing that doesn’t come with yang to the end. There’s a counterforce to it. Being a leader means that you’re able to think through what that counterforce is, what that tradeoff is and make the right tradeoffs consistently. That’s not easy. Here’s an interesting question. How do I know if I’m an effective leader or not? I’m an entrepreneur. I know how to be an entrepreneur but I have no idea if I’m an effective leader or not. How do I self-evaluate?

I’m happy to take some time with someone. I gave you a link to do an assessment and have a discussion about that. I’ve got a simple ten-point list of questions that can provide a base for a discussion on that. I would say there are few indicators. If you’re exhausted, you’re probably not doing something right. If you feel lonely and you have the feeling that everybody’s pulling in different directions, there’s probably something that is not working right in your organization. That’s usually that people don’t have that shared context so they all get back to their own little department interests. They work on behalf of their department. They’re pulling in different directions.

You’re the one who goes out, sells the company to investors, come back to the company and people telling you, “I don’t understand the strategy.” You’re like, “I sold the company to sophisticated investors. I clarify the strategy and they’re telling me they don’t understand the strategy.” If you’ve got this feeling that you’re alone, you’re pulling everything and more things are falling back on your desk, there’s probably not the right dynamic inside the organization.

There are two other interesting questions here. One is, what if I recognized as an entrepreneur that I’m not inherently a leader? Does that mean I should go out and hire a CEO or COO? What do you recommend?

If you look at the research, there are four essential characteristics of a leader. A leader has to be making sense of the environment, identifying the patterns so that he can define the right value proposition for the business. That’s what I called sense-making. The second element is some people are more relational. They are able to build trust with their team. The third one is that our people are visionaries. They can create images of the future. The fourth one escapes me as I speak. The point is you’re never good at the four of them. You’re good at 1 or 2. What does it mean to say under a good leader? We all have the capabilities to be good leaders. We just have to identify what we’re good at, recruit people and develop measurement mechanisms so that we leveraged these people to complete us.

This is my question. Do you think leadership either something you have or don’t have is innate or learned? What’s your sense? They’re my opinion.

I was not a very strong operator, for example, and the mistake I made is that I was trying to become good at operation. You have to work on your strengths. Identify your strengths and try to make your weaknesses relevant by leveraging your team.

I personally do not believe that leadership is something that is either present, absent or is innate. Everyone has the potential to lead. Everyone has the potential to follow. First of all, it means that you have to be self-aware enough to know what your strengths and weaknesses are, what your leadership style is going to be, not try to be something that you’re not. One of the things that I hear quite often following up on that last question about, “What if I’m not a good leader?” is I’ve been doing this for years and I’ll tell you what I’ve learned. If you are somebody who’s saying outwardly, “Maybe I’m not a good leader. Maybe I need to find someone to lead,” you have all the elements to be a great leader because the very first one that Xavier mentioned was humility.

You’re humble enough and vulnerable enough to admit that maybe you don’t have all the answers. Maybe you don’t have all the confidence and so forth. Ultimately, those are tremendous leadership traits, the ability to be humble and be vulnerable. The entrepreneurs that I’ve met who shouldn’t be leaders are the ones who think they’re great ones. They think that they’re the best leaders. The ones who question or feel insecure about their leadership, who have the potential with some guidance, with some support, with surrounding them by their team and their community of champions have that ability to be tremendous leaders. I’m not in belief that leadership is something you either have or you don’t have nor do I think that vulnerability, humility, a little bit of fear and doubt are antithetical to good leadership. I feel that those are all characteristics of good leaders.

I’ve seen great leaders say, “I messed up. I’m sorry for what I said when I lost my temper. I need help.” People don’t react by looking down on you or thinking you’re weak. They react by appreciating that. Behind the question, “Am I a good leader?” There’s this assumption may be conveyed by the media stories who always describe a company’s success in a linear way, forgetting all the ups and downs that the leader is a hero. The leader is the guy who knows it all. The leader is the guy who decides that he’s going to learn it all, not know it all. That’s a completely different mindset. It empowers your team. You get the best out of your team. The best leaders I’ve seen were not these amazingly charismatic leaders. Very often the charismatic leader is the smartest guy in the room. I had a boss like that. He had the answer to everything. You were intimidated to even bring up the suggestion because he had an answer for everything. It reduces the productivity of the team.

My brother, who’s a rabbi was in one of those classes. He had posted a question to those in attendance. He said, “How many of you have met an arrogant person?” Everybody raised their hand. He said, “I’ve never met an arrogant person. I’ve only met an insecure person who clubs their insecurity and arrogance.” That’s what we see in a lot of leaders. Here’s another question, Xavier. As an entrepreneur, a lot of the people that we surround ourselves with or I surround myself with as I grow my business are agencies, fractional, contractors, so forth. Does that change your approach as a leader when you’re working with a disparate group of people who are not direct employees?

My answer is no. I would go further than that. I would even expect my other stakeholders like suppliers and vendors to share the three-legged shared contexts that I described, the common purpose, believing the purpose that we have, believing the vision that we have and share the core values. It doesn’t change anything. You want to work with people who share the same core values because these people are going to manage talent that you hire or junior talent that you hire. They don’t share their core values. They’re going to undermine what you’re trying to build as a culture.

I’ll take it one step further. What I have witnessed and experienced is that true leaders don’t ever lead by leverage. They don’t lead by power or by the ability to manipulate. It doesn’t matter if the people you are leading or guiding are employees, contractors, freelancers, agencies or what. They lead through purpose, vision, humility, shared experience, those types of things. It doesn’t matter how a person is attached to an organization or what their role is formally or informally and the people you have around you. You’re right. All the stakeholders from suppliers to customers, to employees, to contractors, to investors, need to share that common purpose, those core values, that sense of something greater than themselves. You’re the guy. You’re the Sherpa that is trying to knit all of that together.

There are a couple of points on vulnerability. It takes tremendous courage to be humble and vulnerable. By being humble and vulnerable, you’re opening up without controlling how the other person is going to perceive or react. That takes courage. Humble leaders are courageous leaders. They’re not weak leaders. People are smarter than that. They see that. Your employees see that. The second point I wanted to make on this idea of providing a shared context and this culture that you’re building from day one is, it helps when things are going wrong. If it’s just about profit, what happens when the company’s not making a profit anymore? What gets you out of bed in the morning? What gets your employees out of bed? What prevents them from leaving the company to go and seek something more steady and stable?

By having that purpose that is shared by the rest of your organization, people say, “I’ll stay here.” Research shows that when the employee leaves, salaries or money is usually reason number seven. It’s not the main reason why people leave. If you can provide that cultural context, you’re going to build a stronger base of a safe space in which your people feel valued and they feel they can grow. By doing this, you can overcome most challenges. If you’ve got a steady team, then you build learning inside that team and then you can overcome the challenges. Otherwise, you’re constantly restarting your person from zero.

Bobby has a good question here. Bobby is an entrepreneur and a leader who I find to be in possession of some great wisdom. “Leadership is defined in your ability to build win-win positive relationships with all those who touch your business, employees, vendors, colleagues, customers. Can you address your thoughts about that?”

The question is driven by the assumption that leadership means that you’ve got to be the hero, the tough guy, the know it all and that you don’t need to care about others. You’re the one pulling forward and everybody has to follow. It’s wrong. It’s a complex world where everything is changing, you can’t do it alone. You need the team. In order for the team to be there for you when shit hits the fan, then you need to create some incentive. The incentive is that people feel listened to, valued, that they have a contribution. We talk a lot about the culture here but when we talk about accountability and execution, one of the things I do is that a lot of staff meetings or weekly meetings are boring. People report on their job and so on.

What force people to work with this is to pick issues that are common to the leadership team, not just to one department, discuss them as a team, work out the complex tradeoff together and find a solution. By doing this, you increase the trust within the team. You talk about a win-win relationship. When I’m an engineer, I can contribute to a marketing issue because I’ve got some good insight, then I feel valued. I feel good in this company. It’s not just about career or money.

Here’s a question that comes from Jared that can work with, one, I had to chuckle when he said they’re not profitable anymore. There are a lot of folks reading here who said profitability is some aspiration further down the road in a CPG startup. This is a common question for many. When we’re hurling towards a cliff, a startup entrepreneurial business, there are cliffs and brick walls in front of entrepreneurs all the time. They could be cash cliffs. They could be any of those kinds of things. Jared was always told to shield employees and members of the team from those existential threats to the business but he’s hearing others that say, “I share everything. I’m open and honest in saying, ‘If I don’t close this fundraising, we may be out of money in three weeks,’” that type of thing. What’s your take about what to share and what not to share, when to share or when not to share?

I’ve been there. I’ve been on the verge of bankruptcy. I remember that interaction with my assistant who you have ever seen because she was listening to my calls. We were sharing the same office. A Chinese lady is speaking to me so directly. She said, “It drives me mad that you look all cheerful in front of the organization while I know we’re on the verge of collapsing.” My answer was, “This is your role as a leader to absorb some of that complexity and not immediately reflected on the rest of the organization. My rule is, you share it with your leadership team. The 3, 4 people who you meet with every day, every week, every month, every quarter you discuss the strategic issue, you owe them the truth. Ultimately, you’ll make the difficult decisions but you owe them to be transparent. It doesn’t mean you share it with the rest of the organization.”

What about a small startup that basically everybody is on the leadership team? This might include advisors, investors but also the 1 to 5 employees and 1 to 5 contractors?

I’ll ask you a question. When people join your leadership team, they make tradeoffs. They might have lost some of their salaries because they believe in the purpose of your business. They might have had to negotiate with their spouse that is thinking they have to do that. Do you think you have to be transparent with them about the situation of the company, knowing that they’re part of the solution, too?

Ultimately, it comes back to if you’re walking the walk of your core values. For example, for TIG brands, one of our core values is radical transparency. We don’t hide things from the founders we serve. We don’t hide things from each other. We’re transparent. If we were ever to be in that situation, I wouldn’t think twice about sharing that with every member of our team. “I’m struggling. There are some things in the future that are scary. I want to let you know.” Not only let them know out of fairness, out of respect and out of a commitment to walking the walk of our core values but also because I value them enough to know that they might help me see something I’m not. They may help me think about something that I’m not.

In your core values as a company, one of them is to always promote positivity or to create a safe working space. You have to ask yourself how you’ve built and communicated the people you’ve brought in. Most people coming into an entrepreneurial enterprise recognize that they’re joining something that has a higher degree of risk and upside. My personal take and belief as a leader is that I’m somebody who likes to go full monty, full kimono. I share everything because I want everything shared in return. It’s something that you have to ask internally. It’s something that you need to decide.

The last comment I’ll make on that is I also feel like this is a conversation as you bring people into your organization to let them know. Sometimes we court people. We bring people in. We try to paint them a very rosy picture. Something like this happens and they’re shocked. People need to understand just like investors need to understand that although you’re going to do everything you possibly can to get to the other side of the rainbow and to the pot of gold. There’s a journey here. It’s filled with potential challenges and things can happen along the way.

There’s a way to say that. You can be humble, vulnerable and share the situation as you say we’re going to deal with the complex situation but at the same time, you’re ultimately the leader. You’re going to have to make the call. You don’t just throw in the air. I’ll give you an example. I had a client. We’re in a restaurant. He was naturally humble. I had to tell him to stop doing that. He was going from table to table in restaurants and saying to the patrons, “I don’t know anything about restaurants. Tell me. How is it?” I said to him, “You can’t do that. You want to be inquisitive and ask a question. You want to go to the chef in the back of the kitchen to ask questions about how they operate. You don’t start by saying, I don’t know anything.”

In that kind of situation, rather than saying, “This is a horrible situation. We’re going to go bust. I don’t know what to do,” it’s more about, “This is a difficult situation. I need your help in figuring out the solution.” There’s this primal fear that if you share the truth, people are going to run away. I don’t believe that. People will appreciate that you share the truth and they will value you more as a leader.

That’s a big discernment. What you don’t want to do is say to somebody, “We’re at a cliff. I have no idea what to do. I’m just going to sit back and nip at my flask.” That’s not leadership. Leadership is, “We’ve got a challenge. I see this downfield. We’ve got to try to bring some money. I’ve got a plan to do it. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to give it every effort. I’m inviting you in terms of any suggestions you have, anything that we’re not thinking about, any other ideas but we’re going to work together on this. We’re going to do everything we possibly can to get through this together.” That’s leadership. You’re letting them know they’re at risk. You’re letting them know there’s a challenge downfield but you’re not telling them that you’re abandoning ship. You’re not telling them that you’ve given up hope because you can’t afford to do that anyway. Never do that.

I turned to the story of me trembling and having my hands shaking when people were calling me by phone because I knew I had to make them repeat several times. I don’t think at any point I considered that the company could go bust. I believe that people felt it. I did not say it because it sounds fake if you say it but people felt it. If you got this belief in the future of the company, that’s the time to bring it back into that shared context. What is our purpose? “We were working for something more than just the money or the short-term cashflow situation. That’s where I need you.” In the context of that purpose, the set of values and the ambitious objective that we have, what kind of plan can we build together?

The other thing I’ll say and this is a bit of philosophy as well is that you have to recognize as a leader where you have influence and where you can take action. You can’t do anything about the past and the future necessarily. What you can do is affect the now. When you see challenges and you see a problem that your team is working together on, the focus is on this moment. What action can we be taking now? Keeping your people focused on that and the things that you can influence and change. Too often, we spend our time worrying about what-ifs and that can be exhausting. It can be exhausting for you as a leader. It could be exhausting for everyone around you versus, “Let’s worry and focus on what is. Let’s get the things that are right there done.” One last question and that is coming back from China, coming back to the states, and focusing on coaching, supporting and developing leaders of smaller businesses, why did you want to come back and do that? What was the compelling motivation behind that? That’s my question, by the way, just of curiosity.

There’s a couple of ways to answer that. There’s a personal one and a professional one. The personal one is that I had two biological children and I adopted a third one. It was not planned. We found her and kept her with us. My wife is American. As we adopted her, American Law requires your permanent presence in the US to give citizenship to an adopted child. You can pass it on to your biological children but you can’t pass it on if you’re not a permanent resident to an adopted child. That’s a personal reason that brought us back to the US. She had medical needs, so we also needed to be next to top-notch hospitals.

The second one is that after I sold my company, I continued to do a lot of strategic consulting with multinationals. My clients are having $1 million-plus businesses. I felt that often with the work I did, I had sometimes difficult seeing the reward in the struggle. I had a lot of requests from my clients. They said, “Can you accompany us on the execution of it?” That’s what drove me to business coaching, working with smaller ships. Not Spanish galleons, more like catamarans. It’s much more rewarding because when you talk about culture, you talk about practical actions to do that. Entrepreneurs execute on it if they buy into it. It’s very rewarding to see immediately the change versus the multinational that takes months and months to pivot. That’s what I enjoy tremendously in business coaching, this idea that you’re working with catamarans.

I measure success. What excites me, what motivates me every day is impacted. Years ago, I would be less than truthful if I wasn’t trapped in more of the banalities of motivation around status maybe and money but neither of those are true measures of success impact is to me. That’s what gets me up and that’s what motivates me. What I’m hearing from you is that you can viscerally feel, touch, see the impact that you’re making when you’re working with catamarans versus Spanish galleons. How do folks learn more about what you’re doing, Xavier? If they want to learn more, have a conversation with you, what’s the best way?

You click on the link that you’re going to send to people. It’s going to direct them to my book page. I offer to book a 30 minutes meeting with me to have a conversation. If we think there’s an interesting fit, they can take their assessment where we can go point by point through what I described to you at the beginning of that call and see if there’s a benefit in working with a coach from the company.

Thanks so much for joining. I appreciate you sharing your wisdom. It’s a great topic. I urge everyone to check out the book. We’ll catch you all next time on TIG Talks. Have a great day. Take care.

Thank you.

Important Links

• Amazon – Manukora

• Manukora.com

• Xavier Naville

• The Lettuce Diaries — Xavier Naville will take a 30-minute meeting with entrepreneurs who want to better understand what he does. Going through the Complete Leader assessment results will provide a good base for discussion.

About Xavier Naville

Xavier is a quadrilingual experienced business leader with a professional track record serving in executive roles across many organizations around the world.

Born in France, Xavier showed a competitive edge early in life as a member of the French national fencing team. He received highest honors graduating from business schools in Europe, and began a long and fruitful journey into international business, moving to China in the late 90’s. There, Xavier started Creative Food Group, taking the food processing company from its startup phase to a scaled model with eight factories and four farms in mainland China, with over 1,500 employees across the country serving large restaurant chains like Starbucks, KFC or McDonald’s.  As CEO, he oversaw all aspects of daily operations for seven years before he sold the company to London listed Bakkavor Group from the UK, a strategic buyer, for a successful exit.

Xavier served as CEO at Bakkavor China for several years, leading capital strategy through growth financing from capital markets, spearheading market expansion strategy, and most notably, managing the business during the Financial Crisis of 2008-2009, ensuring a healthy balance

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