Spheres of influence are more than just networks—they’re strategic relationships that define how you lead, grow, and succeed. In this thoughtful conversation, Brad Englert—author of Spheres of Influence and former CIO at the University of Texas at Austin—breaks down what it really takes to cultivate authentic relationships inside and outside the workplace. Drawing from his decades at Accenture and in higher education, Brad shares the three core principles every leader needs, how to manage up, down, and across, and why middle managers are the unsung heroes of every organization.

Check out the full series of Career Sessions, Career Lessons podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/brad-englert

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Expanding Your Spheres Of Influence, With Brad Englert

Technologist, Advisor, And Author Of Spheres Of Influence

My guest is Brad Englert. Brad is the Founder of Brad Englert Advisory and an Author Advisor Technologist. He spent many years working for Accenture, including ten years as a partner. He then served the University of Texas at Austin for eight years, including seven years as the Chief Information Officer. In our discussion, we’re going to be talking about Brad’s new book, Spheres of Influence: How to Create and Nurture Authentic Business Relationships. Let’s dive in.

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Brad, welcome and thank you for joining me on the show.

Thanks for inviting me.

I covered a bit about your background in the show introduction but give us the quick rundown on your career and what you’re doing professionally.

I was with Accenture for many years and ten years as a partner. My focus was high rated consulting, so Ohio State University, Columbia Vanderbilt, Illinois, Cal State, and even Texas A&M. I happily retired in regard to the call for the University of Texas at Austin. They needed an IT strategy and that’s where I went to grad school. Our week pro bono in October. It was time by March and full-time by June. I was for eight years and seven as the Chief Information officer then I retired again. Hopefully, it’ll do better this time and I thought it’d be nice to package my several years of stories into a book to share with the wider audience.

The Genesis Of “Spheres Of Influence”

Tell us a little bit about it and how the writing process kicked off for you.

The firm was good at mentoring and coaching. It was baked in from day one.

When you say firm, do you mean Accenture?

Yes, and from day one, they said, “Your client may become your boss one day. They may become customers again one day. The person you’re working with and the firm may also be your boss one day.” Several years later, the person I started with at the firm became the chief information officer of this huge organization the same year I became chief information officer at the University of Texas at Austin, so it came true.

Even as a partner, you were expected to mentor people, grow the team, and go to the training center at least once a year to teach classes. I enjoyed that and I had great mentors. I went through 22 years of annual reviews and watched how they coached me all the way along to become a partner. I had a liberal arts undergraduate degree. My graduate degree is in public affairs. I wasn’t technical but they gave me the technical skills, how to code, design programs and manage coders and designers, then they would give me field promotions.

Brad Englert: To truly connect with customers, peers, influencers, and strategic vendor partners, be strategic and intentional. Focus on your best customers.

Even though as a senior consultant, they would assign me into a manager role so I could try out being a manager in a very less risky environment. When I was a senior manager, they tried me out in an associate partner role and like I was associate partner the same thing with partner roles. There’s a way to hear imposter syndrome because you have to do the job. It was a learning experience. That culture when I got to the university, I wanted to work with my directory reports and my organization with 330 people in Central IT with about a $40 million budget.

The culture was real and heroic. They rewarded heroics and fire drills and that’s the opposite of me. I wanted proactive customer service. It took about a year, but the first thing I did in the first 90 days was just talk to customers and talk to my people about what’s working, what’s not working and what our values should be. The number one value is family first. Why would we do that? I live in Austin, Texas. We have all the multinational tech firms here. I can’t compete on salary, but I certainly can compete on an 8-hour day, whether a hybrid or remote. I had a network engineer who’s extremely talented. He went to go to a startup and I said, “I don’t say this to everybody, but if you don’t like it, you can come back.”

Weeks later, he calls and he goes, “This place is a zoo. I took the job because they gave me equity. I thought it would be good for my family, but they feed me and do my dry cleaning because I never get to go home. Can I come back?” It was like, “Of course, you can.” He’s still there fifteen years later. The other values of collaboration being truthful, consistent and just having integrity. I had to replace 3 out of 7 directors. Over time, as we hired new people, we turned the ship to be proactive and customer focused.

We’d have quarterly meetings to talk about the values and bring in customers. We’d give kudos to staff who were proactive and customer focused. I wrote a blog once a week for years that would also talk about the values and set expectations. I don’t want you to check an email for 24 hours. I want to go to the doctor when you’re sick. Don’t come to work when you’re sick. Take vacations and go to training. I would model those behaviors.

I’m sure the staff appreciated that and your blog gave you a lot of the raw material for what ultimately became your book.

That’s correct.

Relationship Building: A Hard Skill, Not A Soft Skill

The book is ultimately a series of influences about relationship building. You describe relationship building early in the book as a hard skill and a soft skill. From your perspective, why is that distinction important?

You don’t have to be born to be able to do it. You just have to practice, get out there and get on people’s calendars. Send the agenda beforehand. As for their feedback, get out the word. When I got to the university, I met with the professor. He’d been there for 40 years and I worked with them 15 years prior on a statewide network design or statewide network implementation, which is very successful. He’s a crusty old guy. I said, “Give me some advice.” He goes, “Get out of the office and tell people you give a damn.”

That was the best advice because I wasn’t the imperial CIO where he had to come to the Ivory Tower and supplicate. I would get out there and meet with my peers and with my directory ports in their offices, so their team saw me show up once a week to work with their leader. It’s more fun that way to be intentional about it.

There’s a difference between the relationship building that you were prescribing and traditional networking that you talk about in the book. Can you help us understand how this is different?

Traditional networking in my experience is superficial and transactional. I’ve been to many networking events over the years and collected several stacks of business cards. I never got one customer from those interactions. After one event and about a week later, this person asked me for a donation to their not-for-profits. It’s like, “I don’t even know you. Why are you asking me?” It’s just not very fulfilling. Ninety-nine percent of the people hate traditional networking and 1% are lying.

This transactional me first compared to networking. The people who write about networking like Keith Ferrazzi who would probably be the most famous among them would argue that that’s exactly what you should not do. It needs to be a two-way street that you have to focus on or give before you’re asking. Mutually beneficial.

You made a point about the fact that skill you can learn. People put so much effort into learning other hard skills, like the technical skills and your example of learning to code and manage software engineers and things like that. Why do you think people don’t apply the same order to relationships skills that they do to their technical skills?

No one teaches them of the importance. I did all my electives at the business school. They never talked about relationships. They talked about business plans and this and that, but no one ever said, like I learned at the firm. It’s your responsibility to build lasting trusting relationships because that will pay for it over the years.

Beyond Traditional Networking: Cultivating True Connections

With my MBA, I can’t think of anything that focused on relationship building either but certainly, you worked at Accenture and I was at McKinsey for not nearly as long as you were at Accenture but I came up through the ranks. I became a partner and said what you will about the consulting firms. They’re good at hiring. They’re good at developing people and reinforcing the relationship building aspect and the trust space aspect of the business that they’re in because that is what is core to them.

I learned a lot about how to build relationships with people and to establish rapport reasonably quickly when needed from all of those projects where you walk in the front door one day and you’ve got, at best, a few weeks to come up with something insightful to go back to the person who hired you. You can’t wait. You got to get it and those firms are good at that.

The file that was prepared for my partnership candidacy, you had to list your professional relationships like how long have you been working with these people and what are the results. You couldn’t have a blank page.

For a good reason because that’s according to the business. The books have been divided into internal and external spheres. Why did you separate the two?

When I met with my editor, she said, “Inventory all your stories and we’ll get on a whiteboard and we’ll find a structure.” The stories fell into these buckets. There were stories about the boss, direct reports, executive leaders and all your staff. Those are people you’re probably meeting with once a week or at least monthly or quarterly. That’s your inner sphere. You have a lot of influence with those relationships then I had the customers, peers and influencers and strategic vendor partners who you probably aren’t meeting with weekly. They’re very important, probably more of a monthly cadence and that’s your external sphere of influence. It fell into that structure.

Anybody’s going to have different mixes of these things that they’re going to need to be managing. How do you deal with all of them in parallel?

The internal is pretty self-evident. You’re going to meet with your boss once a week, I would hope. You meet with your current reports once a week. All your staff probably quarterly. With executive leaders, you might have an assignment where you’re asked to help them on some initiative, so you have to be prepared for that. For customers, peers and influencers and strategic vendor partners, you need to be strategic and intentional.

You don’t have to be with all your customers but who are your best customers? Who are your repeat customers? Accenture had 80% to 90% repeat customers. Why? Success breeds success and there’s trust being built. At the university, I work with my biggest customers like the Texas Advanced Computing Center. They have fourteen supercomputers. They need a network. That’s my responsibility, so we need to talk. The VP for Public Safety is responsible for keeping people safe. I met with him and probably the first peer I met with. I said, “It’s not if something would happen. It’s when it will happen and we need to be ready when it happens.”

He went to the Ohio State University and had all this stuff on the walls and everything. That was one of my best clients at Accenture. I love that University, so we just bonded immediately. We would talk every month about what’s coming like the Commencement with 100,000 people in the football stadium every other week and in fall, what would we do if there’s a situation? We’ve made sure the emergency operations centers were tested and working.

Once a year, we would do tabletop exercises. What happens if the power goes out? We generate our own power. What if it goes out? What if there’s a cyberattack or hurricane? We’re close to the coast. A year after one of those tabletops, the power did go out but our emergency operations center all had copper phone lines just in case the power goes out because there’s no network, then the bomb scares. I was out of the mall with just my phone and my backpack. They wouldn’t let me in the building because it’s a bomb scare, we had a standard operating procedure where my team and his team would get on a conference call. They’re connected to the executives and we worked the bomb scare from the mall.

Which wireless technology gives you the ability to do, but you got to prepare for all those things. You’re reminding me as you’re saying all of this that university environments are very hard things to manage. You’ve got thousands and thousands of people and most of them under the age of 22. You’re constantly having to manage the stupid things that they’ll want to do online that will put the network in jeopardy and all the other things that you talk about in terms of the range of things from supercomputers to public safety. I can imagine that your days were pretty full on.

It was fun. You had a mission and that was great. Your people had a mission and that was fun and just the energy on campus. There’s a good mission and that helps a lot.

You described the litmus test of a true relationship being the ability to pick up where you left off the last time we spoke. What do you mean? What does that feel like?

I had a client who was terrific and brilliant and I worked through three very successful projects. Many years later, I’m at the university and she calls me. She goes, “Brad, my son is an attorney and he wants to move to Austin. He’s applied for a job at the University. Will you talk with them?” It’s like, “Of course, I’ll talk to them,” but we hadn’t talked in years. It was just that instant trust in connection. I talked to her son.

Brad Englert: When it goes wrong, we need to be careful and consistent in how we inform people. We apologize, but more importantly, this is what we’ll do to keep it from happening again.

I knew her son when he was five years old. That’s how I met him. He was a little blond-haired kid and now he’s a lawyer. I said, “Universities all share information.” When I had a contract with Google, my lawyer contacted the University of California, Berkeley and got their Google contract. Find that association of university attorneys, look at their website, and find out what the issues are. He did and he got the job.

The Three Pillars Of Lasting Relationships

There you go. The other thing you talk about in the book is this organized around the idea that every relationship needs to have three principles. 1) Understanding of goals. 2) Management of expectations. 3) Caring about the other person’s success. Give us your color on that.

I didn’t uncover the three principles until I finished the manuscript. I literally stepped back and said, “What’s common across all these?” The comment thing was, ask the people what their goals and aspirations are. Ask your boss. Some people are scared to do that. They’re afraid. Some bosses are not good at articulating, so you need to ask them. I had two phrases, use your words. People are not mind readers. When you’re the boss, you need to use your words and tell people what your goals and aspirations are.

I always welcome that discussion, then set and manage expectations. I was bad at that early in my career. I was trying to please everybody and I worked too much. In fact, my second or third year, the coach in the annual review said, “You are a bad role model for your staff. Stop working so hard to get. Put some balance. It’s good for you and your family. You need to be a good role model.” I thought that was pretty cool.

I read a book called Managing Expectations by Naomi Karten, who’s a psychologist who became an IT professional. She came up with the phrase, “Say, well.” I read the book and literally the next day, the boss calls and I’m trying to get out on time to have dinner with my wife. She goes, “I need a white paper. Hold the white paper.” I was scared but I said, “When do you need this?” She goes, “Let me check my calendar. I will meet with the client in two weeks.” “How many pages do you want this white paper to be?” “Three pages.” I was thinking of ten.

“Do you have an example of the white paper?” “David and I did one in X, Y, and Z ten years ago.” I went home and had dinner with my wife. Now, before I learned to say whoa, I would have called her and canceled dinner, upsetting her and me. I would have stayed up all night and delivered the next day a ten-page paper and gotten yelled at for not meeting the expectations. After that, I never missed a vacation. I never missed training and a school play. I just learned to manage those expectations, and you can do that with clients, too.

I am at this huge Midwestern University and they needed me to run this transformation project. It’d be a little more in the year and I said, “I’d love to come help you. I’m having lunch with the Provost and the CFO, but this was not October. Maybe next summer. I have a trip plan to Australia. I was supposed to go in 2024. I was an exchange student. It was my 25th anniversary but I cancelled it due to work. My wife and I and the boys have our passports. We have bought the tickets. It’s three weeks next June.” They said, “Sure.” When we get to May, things are going well. We’re in our monthly meeting with the president. I said, “Mr. President, I want to remind you, as I have the last three months, I’ll be in Australia in June”

His hands started shaking and I’m just slow motioning canceling my vacation. The CFO goes, “Hold on, Brad. Mr. President, when Brad joined this in October, he mentioned this long-standing vacation. It’s important for him and his family. We should let him go. It’s a good time for him to be away. Diane will be in charge. We should let him go.” I went and didn’t check email and voicemail. Diane did a great job.

Ten years later, I’m in that Midwestern City having dinner with the CFO and his wife and my wife and we talked about that. He goes, “Brad, when you were gone, we were scared to death.” They have held their commitment because I was good at setting and managing expectations and genuinely caring. People want your help and they want you to care about their success. I just found those three principles are universal.

Navigating Boss Relationships: Common Mistakes & Style Alignment

Let’s talk a little bit more about relationships with bosses. You talked about one mistake that people make just not asking their boss. What are their goals? What are some of the other relationship mistakes that people make when it comes to managing things with their boss?

You don’t want to be on any lists. In 22 years, I never had a late time report. Why is that? I want to be reimbursed with expenses but I didn’t want to show up on a list of not having that type. The firms are driven by peace, too. Never be on a list for not having all your annual reviews completed for your staff. That’s important. You need to not be on a list of delinquent evaluations and billing. If you build within a month, no interest. You bill next month. You have to pay interest to the firm. Don’t be on the list of late billing. It’s just being responsible and accountable.

You talk about the importance of aligning style as well.

I’m a night owl and there’s a famous article at Wall Street Journal about, if you’re a night owl, how to work with morning larks. Morning larks are all chippy and happy in the morning and then night owls kick in at night. Night owls think the morning larks are lazy because they’re scooting out of the office early. Early meaning 5:00. The larks think night owls are lazy because they don’t roll until 9:00. When I had a morning lark boss, I would just get to the office at 8:00. I wouldn’t talk to anybody. I would guzzle coffee but I wouldn’t roll it at 9:00 or 10:00 because that would be seen as not good behavior.

I always struggle, especially in my McKinsey years. I’m generally a plan in advance person and I was always working with people who would not think about things until literally the last minute. When you’re a planner working for a firefighter, there’s not much you can do about it because they’re not going to engage in a way that you need them to engage until the day or two before some big meeting or presentation. At that point, you’ll have lost control of your life. I tried to survive those instances by just reminding myself when we were 2 or 3 days out.

I’m like, “It’s only 48 or 72 hours. Surrender these 48 or 72 hours. After that, you can go back to at least trying to plan things out as best as possible for the next few weeks before the cycle starts all over again.” It was hard when you have that clash in style. Sometimes, it’s a big enough issue that you realize things like, “I can’t work with this person because we’re just too different.”

You have the old-school command and control boss who is barking orders. In this day and age, that doesn’t work. You have to be a team player and a coach. I had a boss who had an open-door policy. The first time I walked through the open-door, he basically yelled at me for 30 minutes for bringing up these issues. It’s like, “That’s the last time I’m going through your open-door.” All his directory boards all knew you can’t talk to him. You just get yelled at.

It was one example you gave that I thought was very practical about when you have a boss that doesn’t necessarily like to make decisions in the moment. You got hit twice. You call it the Texas two-step. The first time, you’re just looking for input but you’re putting it on their radar. The second time, you’re clear that you’re coming back for a decision or an answer or whatever.

That boss went to another university. I called the CIO and I said, “Texas do stat.” She said it worked.

Simple things like that just started calling him coping mechanisms or whatever you want to call them, ways to deal with trying to align yourself with the way that your bosses choose to work because you’re not going to change them. You can give them feedback and hopefully, they’ll listen to at least some of it but you just can’t change your boss. You have to find a situation that works.

When I was the boss, I would try to be conscious of it. If I’m asking someone to do something, let’s have a dialogue of who, what, where and when. As my partner who needed the white paper, it sounded like you, and I had to be careful to make sure that I used my words.

Shifting gears a little bit. In these organization structures that you have now with lots of functions and lots of regions. How do you manage the influencer relationship building outside of your own group? Not up down, but across and even across beyond the peers who have the same boss as you.

You’re working with some peers more than others. I would prioritize the people I am working with more and make sure I’m on their radar more than. With vendors, I looked at, we’re spending millions of dollars a year. Who am I spending the most on? I would meet with the account rep and the account rep’s boss, my purchasing director and his person who did IT procurement. We would meet with our strategic vendor partners once a quarter. We would talk about what’s coming down the line, what are our priorities, and were we being good citizens. A huge bureaucracy. Did we pay you on time? Sometimes we didn’t, but we wanted to make sure it was usually beneficial.

I had one vendor and we’ve been using their software for ten years. They thought they had us over a barrel. We couldn’t change. The account rep would show up once a year for his maintenance check and if we had a problem, they were slow to respond. I hired them to upgrade software that broke things at work for five years. I was on vacation and back to Azerbaijan with my oldest son and I’m sending the flaming emails of this guy. I have 54,000 of my closest friends showing up in two weeks to fix this.

The vice provost for curriculum was frustrated because she couldn’t change the classroom. She went to record lectures and have more discussion in the classroom. This tool is clunky. It was the 1990s. I could not securely connect email to it, which is unacceptable. She and I teamed up and we went to the market to evaluate fifteen learning management systems and the faculty and students picked the top candidate. Her organization and mine over two years helped transition to this new cloud-based modern secure standard base tool ten years ago and that affected everybody. The senior vice president for sales of the new company would call me once a month and ask how it’s going.

He said, “I’ve got my team standing ready. You’ve got the red phone on your desk. If you need me, call me.” I still talk to that guy. We still talk because he just cared about us. I was so happy to fire the incumbent legacy vendor who didn’t even see the bullet coming. It’s like, how clueless can you be? We had this celebration when we finished. We were at the bowling alley. We had pizza and I had a cake made in the shape of a tombstone. I put the legacy vendor’s name on it. I put, “Rest in peace.”

Rekindling Trust: Apology And Action

I’ve had some of those celebration events, too. That brings up another question. When you have a relationship and there’s been a breach of trust, what do you do to regain that trust? Your first vendor didn’t do it, but what could they have done?

Get on my calendar. Our priorities for the year are on the website. Our values are on the website. Don’t show up not doing your homework but. If I have a situation where I lost track, it’s probably because I didn’t uphold a commitment and I learned the art of apology. When you have a quarter million devices in the network every day, things are going to go wrong. I told my staff, it’s not if someone called wrong. It’s when it goes wrong. We need to be careful or consistent of how we inform people the problem, apologize for that but more importantly say, “This is what we’ll do to keep it from happening again.”

I found a lot of opportunities to apologize if it’s sincere and if you’re fixing things. I had a woman who worked for me and she said, “You didn’t have my story in the book.” I said, “What story? When you demanded that I go meet with this person who hated us and didn’t trust us.” “I thought you were insane. Why would I go meet with someone who doesn’t trust us and hates us?”

There was a lot of bad prior behavior. We apologized for all that and said that’s not how we’re working going forward. After about 78 months, that person became an advocate for us because she was inside the tent helping us not outside the ten throwing rocks. Her boss who also had some examples of lack of breaking trust became an advocate. You don’t solve standing in your office and hiding behind the screen.

What are the situations in which you just need to walk away, whether an internal situation or an external one?

I don’t think the customers are always right. Sometimes, the customers are wrong. I had a customer who wanted a payroll system done in 90 days. I got up on the whiteboard in his office and I said, “We got 30 days to get it set up and when are we going to convert the data?” He just turned beet red and threw me out of the office. I haven’t been thrown out of the office before, but you can’t do it in 90 days. Sure enough he hired another firm. Six months to nine months later, they’re both gone. The firm’s gone and CIO is gone because you just can’t do it. You have to be honest.

I had a customer on campus who we were supporting, but his person kept sticking their fingers in and then blaming us. I took him to lunch and explained the situation. He looked up and said, “You’re firing me is a customer, aren’t you?” I said, “Yes, I am. I’m buying lunch. You don’t have to pay me for any services rendered, but this is not working.”

It’s funny your discussion about the guy who threw you out of his office. Sometimes, I like to say in some of these big deals, you get in the heat of them and everybody wants to win them. I sometimes feel like you win by losing because whoever ends up getting this deal has been beaten into submission so much that there is no way that they’re going to get it done. I’m sure in your Accenture career, you saw a lot of those situations.

I had one agency where their executives rewarded their people by beating the vendor to get free stuff. Once a week like Kabuki theater, they would ask me for free stuff. I said, “Stop asking me for free stuff.” “A firm like Accenture should.” “No, we needed the X, Y, and Z report.” I said, “We did but you didn’t ask for it, so why would I bid for something and be the high bidder?” I’d be happy to do a change order for you. I added 30% pain in the ass contingency because there’s such a pain in the ass and they knew that. I was transparent. I said, “You’re a pain in the ass. Whatever my change order is, I’m adding 30%.” She said, “I get it.”

Those are always hard clients. I’ve seen them firsthand. My sister was describing a situation to me where in the heat of all the tariff things going on. One of their customers came to her company and said, “We need you guys to come up with ideas to save us money because we’ve got to deal with this tariff situation.” They went back and had a bunch of ideas on how they could save a few million dollars together. They said, “Do you want to implement them?” They said, “No, we just want you to give us the $2 million dollars or $3 million or whatever.” That’s so much bad faith.

Corporate Culture, Remote Work, & Mentorship: Strengthening Your Sphere

The problem is, when they’re a big customer, what do you do? This is where these situations get very tricky. It’s when you are picking truly among the lesser of evils. Coming back to corporate culture, relationship building and the bigger sense of joining a company. Once somebody comes in new, what do you recommend to them to learn the unwritten rules of how to navigate the hallways and build influence?

Build relationships with my peers and I would seek out a mentor. If there’s no formal mentor program, I would seek out. The person who fired me at the firm became my mentor. He went to the same grad school I did and we thought alike a lot about a lot of things. He was my guide for that but having a network appears and some more senior mentors would be helpful.

Are there any particular things that you would recommend for somebody who’s in a remote environment or working in a hybrid company where maybe people aren’t in all that often where you don’t get the opportunity for desk to desk or hallway conversations?

For a few years at Accenture, I had a virtual team of about 90 professionals that were all over North America and then we would go to different projects and assemble teams for different clients. I would get on a good old-fashioned conference call every Friday with my direct reports and we would talk about what’s going well, what we could be doing differently and what the opportunities are coming up, who’s available and how do we put people in the best roles that will help them grow in their careers.

In addition, I would go visit project sites and I refer them to my Winnebago trips. I’d go to Harbor, Michigan, and meet with the team there. I’d meet with the clients, as how things were going and from their perspective. I would meet with everybody on the team, all levels. I’d take them to dinner. I went to New York City, Atlanta, and San Francisco. When we did the 360 reviews, everybody loved the Winnebago trips. Twice a year, we get together in person to have some personal connection but this was remote before the remote was cool a long time ago.

You talked a little bit about the writing process and working with your editor. How did your own thinking about influence evolve while and after you’ve written the book?

I’ve been pleased with the reception from people early or mid-career and that’s been fun for me. A lot of people my age has given the book to their adult children and said, “Read this.” That’s been fun. One of my Amazon reviews said, “No one ever talks about middle management, but what you did is you taught us how to manage up, how to manage across and how to manage down. We always forget. I’m going to give this to all my middle managers so they know what they should be doing.”

I have a presentation I’m giving in a couple of weeks on common middle management mistakes. The group that off gets ignored while all the real development money gets sent on the handful of people at the top.

I remember when I was a middle manager. One of my annual reviews, I feel like I have the pack on marching across the desert and I don’t see partnership.

When I made partner at McKinsey, somebody said, “Congratulations, you’re partner. Welcome to middle management.”

You always have a boss.

At that point, you had multiple layers of partners, so there was some truth to it. Was there any other feedback from readers or early readers that surprised you?

Focusing on something that no one talks about has been helpful and that’s why I wrote the book. I still mentor 2 or 3 people a year but that doesn’t scale. I wanted to reach a wider audience and I can’t clone myself, so my editor said when we finished, “You have an important message.” I thought that was fun.

I agree. That was part of what appealed to me in terms of setting this up. It’s a topic that hasn’t explored a whole lot with guests on the show so far. Influence is just more and more important. The way that you develop it, the way that you build relationships, especially as you said up, down and across and a variety of settings, internal and external with people who may be in different parts of your organization or different parts of the world. It matters.

Frankly, it’s rewarding. It’s more rewarding than not doing it.

It makes going to work a lot more fun when you feel like you’re part of a collective group and you’ve got relationships that you deal with people. You’re not blinded in that you ignore everything that’s going on even in the next group over. Any one or two last things that you want to leave our audience with in terms of what they can do to strengthen their own spheres of influence?

You don’t have to boil the ocean. Start small. Start with one relationship. Start with your boss or if you’re directly reporting. Sit down and ask, what are they trying to achieve and if you can help them, help them. If you know someone else who can help them, help connect them. Get out from behind the screen or you can do it via Zoom but let them know you care.

That’s a good way to wrap things up. Brad, thank you again for doing this. It was good to meet you and get a little bit of color behind the book. I appreciate your time.

Thank you. I enjoyed it.

—

Thanks to Brad for joining me to discuss his book, Spheres of Influence. The discussion provided lots of valuable lessons and practical ones that you can take away. As a reminder, this episode was brought to you by PathWise.io. If you’re ready to take control of your career, join the PathWise community. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up on our website or the PathWise newsletter. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

Important Links

• Brad Englert
• Brad Englert on LinkedIn
• Brad Englert on Instagram
• Spheres of Influence: How to Create and Nurture Authentic Business Relationships
• Accenture
• Texas Advanced Computing Center
• Managing Expectations
• PathWise on LinkedIn
• PathWise on Twitter
• PathWise on Facebook
• PathWise on YouTube
• PathWise on Instagram

About Brad Englert

Brad Englert is the founder of Brad Englert Advisory and an author, advisor, and technologist. Brad worked for Accenture for 22 years, including 10 years as a partner. He then served The University of Texas at Austin for eight years, including seven years as the Chief Information Officer (CIO).

During Brad’s career with Accenture, he worked in a variety of information technology leadership and operational roles for large, complex institutions of higher education (Ohio State, U of Michigan, U of Illinois, Cal State), state governments (Texas, California, Minnesota, Montana), and commercial organizations (Best Buy, Caterpillar, Whirlpool, Bell South, Deutsche Bank, and Wyeth). When Brad retired as a senior partner in 2006, he had a proven track record in information technology operations, large scale information systems implementations, and strategic planning.

At The University of Texas at Austin from 2009 to 2017, Brad led the modernization of mission critical information systems serving 54,000 students, 4,000 faculty, and 21,000 staff. Prior to Accenture, Brad held managerial positions in payroll/human resources and labor relations at the Internal Revenue Service, and was a high school teacher in Maitland, New South Wales, Australia

Brad earned a masters of public affairs degree from The University of Texas at Austin and a bachelor of arts degree in social sciences with honors and distinction from Shimer College, which is now the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois.