Jeffrey Deckman: Understanding How Critical Human Capital is For Your Compan

Would you like to manage your business efficiently?

Award-winning entrepreneur and author Jeffrey Deckman has over 40 years of management experience under his belt and has been a serial entrepreneur for 35 years. During that time, he has built two multi-million-dollar companies and several non-profits before he founded Capability Accelerators in 2005.

Over the past 15 years, Jeffrey has coached, mentored, consulted and trained hundreds of executives and managers to better their companies.

“My passion is to help you to build what you want to build.”- Jeff

His experience and commitment to business entrepreneurship has been acknowledged by three governors. Jeffrey has been appointed to create and serve on statewide boards and councils focused on economic, workforce, and entrepreneurial development initiatives.

“Never before has leading with Authenticity, Integrity, and Respect been more important to our companies, our communities, and our culture” – Jeff

Learn more about how Jeffrey Deckman can coach you to better your company by listening to this episode of The Thoughtful Entrepreneur above and don’t forget to subscribe on  Apple Podcasts – Stitcher – Spotify –Google Play –Castbox – TuneIn – RSS.

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0:01
Welcome to the thoughtful entrepreneur show, I'm Josh Elledge, founder and CEO of up my influence.com, where we turn entrepreneurs into media celebrities, grow their authority, and help them build partnerships with top influencers. So we believe that every person has a unique message that can positively impact the world, even you stick around to the end of this show, where I'll share info on how you could be our next guest, three times a week, five to 15 minutes each learn from successful business owners and professionals, it's time to get inspired. Let's go. All right with us right now, we've got Jeff Deckman. Jeff, you are a national recognized thought leader and award-winning author on we call it conscious leadership, you do some consulting your coach, your speaker, and your book is gotten some awards. Apparently, it's got some good content in it. It's called developing the conscious leadership mindset for the 21st century, which it sounds pretty general. But I think we're going to get pretty specific on exactly what it includes. But very importantly, I think what we want to talk about in this conversation, is we want to talk about the concept of human capital, because that's, that's basically, a lot of what you teach is around that concept. And human capital, to me sounds like something that would be really relevant. If we were an enterprise-level company. And you know, we really want to, you know, do an analysis of who we've gotten to the large organization. But what I'd really like to do is try to serve our audience, and our audience generally tends to be smaller organizations, a lot of SMEs, and even, you know, might be a founder of a company, and they just have a handful of contractors. And so to start off, can you kind of just assure that audience? Oh, yeah, I got something for everybody here.

2:05
Well, you know, I'm smiling here, because that is my tribe. I love people in that space. I, I built, I'm actually on my third company now. But my first two companies who are in the telecommunication space first was a cable TV company, contracting company in a second was a telecommunications integrator. And I started them both with almost no money. So I had no financial capital, what I had was human capital. And the fallacy that human capital is only a big company. discussion is really exactly that. It's a fallacy. Human Capital is so critical to the small to medium-sized business owner, because oftentimes, we struggle to get the funding we need, we have cash flow issues, we have all kinds of challenges around that. So human capital is far more valuable to a company than financial capital, because money doesn't make money anymore than it loses money. It takes it takes people to do both, and you get the human capital side, right? The financial capital will show up. It's that simple.

3:18
Yeah, and helped me with the vocabulary, definitely just define human capital.

3:22
Human Capital is the knowledge, the experience, the capability, and the effort of the people that you have working for you or with you, whether it's an employee, or a subcontractor. They have a collective genius, I call it the bigger know, you know, what, you know, they know what they know. And together, you have a bigger now. So it's that it's the knowledge and the I call it the collective genius and the collective energy of the people that you're working together.

3:57
And why is this important for us to measure this be aware of it? I guess my concern is, is this concept of human capital? Is this just seemed like something that's just more scholarly? Or is this you know, how can we use this concept to perform better or increase revenue or growth, that sort of thing?

4:18
Well, it's essential, you can't grow your company without having people that not only have grabbed the oars and are pulling on them, but are pulling on them in the right direction. It's a myth that this is an academic exercise. It's not, it's absolutely essential that the owners and managers of small to medium businesses actually maximize the capabilities of their people, you know, you hear the term employee engagement. Right? And what what they're talking about with that is, how engaged are the employees? Are they highly engaged? Are they disengaged, are they actively working against the company, because to the degree people are engaged in their work, and they like their work determines the level of performance, the level of performance determines level of profitability, and that's where n capital, it ties in to creating your financial capital. And it's really simple, you know, I don't do a lot of measurements, there, okay. But for people on the front lines, you know, you need to get results. And, you know, you can find your measurements based on are people happy, as is my workforce cooperating with me, etc. So it really boils down to what type of relationships do I have? I talked about leading with air. And air is an acronym for authenticity, integrity, and respect. And when I had my little companies that started nothing, in the first one, I built a four and a half million. And the second one, I built the five and a half million. The way I got that was not I didn't have a lot of money to pay a lot of people but I created an organization were we felt as though we were all working together. And I was authentic, I was transparent. And I treated them with respect. And that really created a culture where we, we, the entire organization valued that. So we work together when there was a problem, we didn't hide it, we talked about it, so we could resolve it quicker. And it was really important to build a powerful tribe, which when you function that way, that's what you get where everybody's vested in your success,

6:30
with without really focusing on human capital, can a decent leader, just chance chances and just, you know, by exercising good interpersonal skills, can they you know, can they still get the same outcome? Or what is what do you think is missing in the typical small organization where they're really not leveraging this principle,

6:54
that's the only thing they need to do, frankly. That's it, just see the human in the human, treat people with respect. Work with them, teach them be vested in them? You know, a lot of my lot of my clients say I want greater employee engagement. And I asked them, well, how engaged Are you with the employees that needs to start with you. And you start with that, and human beings are human beings, if I see that you care about me, and you're working with me, then I'm going to care about you. And I'm going to work with you. And so I'm just really a soured employee, which is an indication of somebody should probably, you know, is not, not in the best place for them. But yeah, it's really that simple. You don't have to be an academic. You know, there was a book came out long time ago by Robert Colburn said called everything I ever needed to learn about life I learned in kindergarten. Yeah. This is the same basic thing, you know, do you play nice in the sandbox? Are you respectful of people, so it's if this is not complex, everything in my book is highly, highly intuitive. Maybe the first time you heard it, but it'll click with you. Because, as humans, we've been interacting with humans for 100,000 years, maybe more. So we know how to do it. And companies are nothing more than another form of it's a modern form of a tribe. And we're designed it's in our DNA to function well, and their tribe, as long as we have a healthy tribal leader. And that just boils down to someone who cares as much about the tribe, maybe even more than they do about their own well being. Okay? It's really simple. It's not hard.

8:32
So Can Can someone just bypass your book and just say, you know, what, I'm going to treat people with respect, and that's good enough? Or is there more to it than that, like, you know, treating people well, you know, treating people with respect, you know, trying to foster, you know, a good, you know, team mindset. So these things, they sound like common sense. And at the same time, I don't want to overcomplicate that. But But I want to feel like there's there's some sort of major takeaway I would get, if I were to spend some time studying this, whether that's reading your book, or, you know, really diving into this, I guess, I'm just trying to figure out what would what am I going to change?

9:18
Okay, so that's a really good question. Because

9:23
the first thing that you have to change is yourself. Right? I, one of the things I talked about in the book is leadership is a state of consciousness. And the first path, or the first step on the path of leadership is an inward one, and so are all the rest. The thing that holds people back from being good egos, even though their intentions may be, or I'm sorry, good leaders, even though their intentions may be good, is the fact that they have things that their ego does that may be in their blind spot that actually pushes people away from them. So becoming self aware, and having the courage to be able to look at your, your, your weaknesses as as well as your strength, and really do self assessment. That is, that's essential to becoming a good leader at any step. And you can do that through reading the book really is designed to help you do that. Also, if you're on a spiritual path, that that can help you as well. But it all starts with with really knowing yourself and self awareness, you have to lead and manage yourself before you know how to lead manage Anybody else?

10:27
Sure, sure. And so what what, like, what does an assessment look like?

10:33
What does a self assessment?

10:35
Yeah, self assessment? So if I want to know, if I want to figure out my blind spots? I mean, is there just a simple way? So I guess what I'm looking for would be, you know, is there a mini test that I can take to say, ooh, I really need to start getting a little bit more introspective here.

10:54
Yes, in fact, there's a there's a section in the book that I talk specifically about blind spots, and how tricky they are and how, you know, we, when some things that are blind spot, we're sure that it isn't there. And I actually give an exercise in there. That's, that's quite simple. But you have to have the courage to take it, we're basically what you do is you identify four, maybe five people that know you well and care enough about you To tell you the truth. And you reach out to them. And you say, Hey, what do you think are some things that I do that? I don't know I do.

11:28
It's sound scary?

11:30
Well, I was just going to say, you know, it's, you got to put your big boy and your big girl pants on for that one. But if you're really interested in being an effective leader, and actually having a better life, it's an awesome experience to have, The only caveat I put in there is, well, there's to first of all, be open to whatever it is you hear. And second of all, don't make those who like you enough to tell you the truth to pay a price for their honesty.

11:55
Right, right, because most people be honest with you. And so you have to find a way to ask that in a way. say, look, you know, my goal here is I want to be able to grow. And so you know, you being nice to me, are you censoring yourself? It doesn't really help me. Right? And that might I would imagine that would be part of that ask?

12:17
It is and I go into detail on that about a page and a half in the book is exactly how to do that and things to watch out for the show. It doesn't. It doesn't blow up on you and and you don't end up offending your friends.

12:31
That's great. All right. Well, Jeff Deckman, thank you so much for joining us again, the name of the book, developing the conscious leadership mindset for the 21st century. It's on Amazon. And of course, they can also go to your website. It's a Jeffrey deck men.com. Jeff, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Josh. Appreciate it. Thanks for listening to the thoughtful entrepreneur. If you are a thoughtful entrepreneur or business professional who would like to be a media celebrity and be on our show. Please visit up my influence comm slash guest. And while you're at it, take our free quiz and learn your authority score that's available for you right now at top my influence.com slash quiz. And please do us a favor. If you liked the guests that was just interviewed. Would you share this episode on social media. Also in your podcast player right now, please give us a thumbs up or a rating and review. We promise to read it all and take action. See, we believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. Your feedback helps us fulfill our mission to help create more media celebrities. Make sure to hit subscribe, binge listen to our previous episodes. And we'll send you the next episode three times a week, automatically five to 15 minutes exactly what you need to inspire yourself just a little bit more, learn from others and grow. With that. Thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of the thoughtful entrepreneur revolution.