Heart First: How Servant Leader Culture Actually Gets Built

If your agency's culture lives in your head and dies when you leave the room, this conversation is the reset you didn't know you needed. 

In this episode, I sit down with Mark Miller, former VP of High Performance Leadership at Chick-fil-A, principal architect of one of the most recognized leadership cultures in corporate America, and co-author of The Secret, 4th Edition with Ken Blanchard. 

Mark breaks down why servant leader culture doesn't happen by accident, why your leadership skills alone won't build the team that follows you, and what Chick-fil-A's 25-year research journey, validated across hundreds of locations, revealed about what actually accelerates leadership development.

 If you're scaling an agency and your bench is thin, this episode is the framework you've been missing.

Books Mentioned

• The Secret, 4th Edition: What Great Leaders Know and Do by Mark Miller and Ken Blanchard
• Culture Rules by Mark Miller
• The Heart of Leadership by Mark Miller
• Uncommon Greatness by Mark Miller

Connect with Mark at leadeveryday.com, reach him directly at mark@leadeveryday.com, or call or text him at 678-612-8441. He gave out his personal cell, which tells you everything about the kind of leader he is. 

Join Dr. William Attaway on the Catalytic Leadership podcast as he shares transformative insights to help high-performance entrepreneurs and agency owners achieve Clear-Minded Focus, Calm Control, and Confidence.

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Transcript

Meet Mark Miller’s Leadership Mission

Dr. William Attaway 0:00

It is a joy and an honor today to have Mark Miller on the podcast. Mark's passion is serving leaders. Whether he's speaking to global audiences or individual leaders, his message is consistent and pragmatic. Lead every day. His career at Chick-fil-A began over 40 years ago as an hourly team member in one of the local restaurants. Shortly after that, he became Chick-fil-A's 16th corporate employee. He retired as the vice president of high performance leadership, where he was a principal architect in building Chick-fil-A's renowned high performance leadership culture. For the last 25 years, he's focused much of his time on helping the organization grow its leadership capacity. They invested a quarter century and tens of millions of dollars searching for and validating ideas that work. Over the years, they focused on numerous topics, including high-performance teams, high performance organizations, employee engagement, execution, personal leadership effectiveness, and culture. In his most recent book, The Secret, 4th edition, What Great Leaders Know and Do, Mark and legendary leadership author Ken Blanchard reveal the simple truth behind extraordinary leadership. Great leaders serve. Mark, I'm so glad you're here. Thanks for being on the show again.

Mark Miller 1:23

Well, thanks for the opportunity. It's always good to see you.

Intro 1:28

Welcome to Catalytic Leadership, the podcast designed to help leaders intentionally grow and thrive. Here is your host, author, and leadership and executive coach, Dr. William Attaway.

Dr. William Attaway 1:46

You know, you were first on this show about two years ago, and your episode really resonated with the listeners as you discussed culture. What has been happening with you these last couple of years? What have you been focused on in learning?

Mark Miller 2:01

Wow. Um been focused on several things, which I know defies the concept of focus, but I've I've tried to be focused on several things. Uh you mentioned my retirement from Chick-fil-A. I feel like I need to address that. Uh yes, in fact, I did retire from Chick-fil-A. And I want to say that I think retirement from a job is totally legit, but I don't think you can retire from a calling. And so my calling is to serve leaders. And so when I left the chicken, I really haven't missed a beat for the last two and a half years because now I'm just 100% remote and I'm still trying to figure out how to serve leaders. So uh I've released a book, I'm working on another one, we've done this fourth edition. We built a team of coaches and trainers who are helping organizations actually uh implement the ideas that we've been writing about and the things that we did at Chick-fil-A uh for several decades. So it's been a busy, busy season, but I'm loving it. Still, still trying to serve leaders.

Dr. William Attaway 3:05

You know, your your book, Culture Rules, is one that I give away often because it so encapsulates, I think, what a healthy and sustainable culture can be. And it helps give people a North Star, a picture of what, what, what they can aim toward as they're leading their teams. Have you heard a lot in respect in respect to that book over the last couple of years?

The Secret Gets The Full Story

Mark Miller 3:28

We've gotten really good feedback. Uh, and for those that aren't familiar with it, I'll just just say this. What we wanted to figure out is why 72% of U.S. leaders say that culture is the most powerful tool at their disposal to drive performance. And yet, when we ask them to rank their priorities, they put building and maintaining culture at number 12. And we said, we have got to figure this out because there's a there's a clear knowing-doing gap. Because most of the leaders I know are rational, thoughtful, uh, at least somewhat strategic individuals, right? They care about performance. And they admitted unaided, unprompted. I mean, they just told us culture is what drives performance, but they're not working on it. So, as you know, thanks for giving the book away. Um, we said we're gonna try to help leaders figure out what they can do. What we decided is one of the impediments, one of the primary impediments to leaders working on culture, they didn't know what to do, not purposefully, not strategically. And so that's why we um uh wrote about the three culture rules. So good.

Dr. William Attaway 4:42

Thanks. You know, your newest one, the the secret, the fourth edition. I think this is arriving at a pretty critical moment in our in our culture, in our day. I see so many organizations all over the world struggling with burnout, with discouragement, with disengagement, and really with a deficit of trust. Is that what prompted this new edition?

Mark Miller 5:08

Well, in full candor, no. I mean, I'm I'm with you. I think the timing is right, but it was the publisher that came to me and Ken and said, hey, we've got something a little bit unusual here. Uh the book was published the first edition over 20 years ago. Wow. And they said, but it's still selling and it's still reaching a global audience. That book is uh The Secret has been translated so far into 32 languages. And I got word yesterday on two more translation deals, and they're expecting more. And and as I look back on that, I I would say, again, to be totally uh straight with you, it's not that great a book. However, however, however, here's the deal it's chopp full of truth. Yeah, it is chop full of truth, and it's a simple story, um, but it but it's it's powered by truth. And so the publisher said, Do you have any new content? Because we I and nor did the publisher wanted to get involved in the marketing ploy of change the cover and say we have a new edition. So they were literally came to us and said, Do you have new content? And honestly, we said we do. And they said, Well, tell us about that. And one of the last projects I did at Chick-fil-A, let's take just a second to unpack this. And when Ken and I did this book 20, over 20 years ago, we started working on it. And we said that leadership is a lot like an iceberg. And if you know, remember your fifth grade um sciences, I don't, but they tell me I studied this in fifth grade. They said about 10% of the iceberg is above the waterline and is about 90% below. And we said, that's a perfect picture of leadership. About 10% above the waterline represents your skills, those things that are uh readily apparent to those around you. They can see your skill set, right? But we said the 90% below the waterline represents the leader's character, their heart. And we said, at the end of the day, if your heart's not right, nobody cares about your skills. But 22 years ago, 24 years ago, we made a strategic decision. The first edition of The Secret and the second and third edition, I might add, were about the skills. And we, and we wrote a, I wrote a separate book called The Heart of Leadership about leadership character. Well, again, just a few years ago, before I left Chick-fil-A, the organization approached me and they said, Hey, we got a problem. And I said, We got a lot of problems. Which one do you want to talk about? And they said, Well, uh, you know, we've got a point of view on leadership. And we've had it for almost a quarter of a century. I said, right? And they said, yes, but it lives in two books. And they discovered, and this was maybe not a revelation, but we had people not only in our organization, but people around the world who had read one book or the other. And therefore, they had a truncated view. They either knew what we thought about the skills or they knew what we thought about the character. And so Chip Millet said to me, Can you put this together in one book? And a quick caveat, they said, and we want a traditional book, not a parable. The thought being we already had the secret, which was a parable. And so I wrote Uncommon Greatness, which is a traditional leadership book about the fundamentals of leadership, and we actually incorporated the heart habits in that new model. So when the publisher came and said, Have you got new content? We said, This will be fantastic. Now we can refresh and update the secret, which is the parable, and it will parallel the content and match the content in uncommon greatness. So that's a long way around the barn to say there were several forces that came together. But we felt like, Ken and I felt like this is the rest of the story. And as I said a moment ago, if your heart's not right, nobody cares about your skills. And so for us to just talk about the skills and the secret, it was certainly valid. And we've gotten feedback from leaders around the world that it has changed the way they lead, and we're thankful for that. But we had never told the rest of the story. And so we're excited the fourth edition gives us a chance to do that. That's so good.

Dr. William Attaway 9:43

You know, so much has happened in the last 20 years, you know, in our culture, in the world. And leadership, I think, is no exception to that. Do you think that the definition of what great leadership is has changed at all since the book was first published?

Mark Miller 10:01

No, which is what's so exciting, which is why I think the book is still selling. And I actually think, without being presumptuous at all, I think it's going to continue to sell because it's based on truth. Twenty years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, a thousand years ago, they they needed and practiced the fundamentals that we wrote about. You know, that's so that's one of the things I think it's been a hallmark of all the books we've done over the years, and I think we've done 13 of them now, is we always begin with the question: what is universally true about this topic? We're not trying to write about the trends, we're not trying to write about the fads, we're not trying to write about what's on the evening news. We're saying what is going to stand the test of time? And we've approached that whether we're talking, we've used that approach whether we're talking about teams or engagement or personal effectiveness or any of those things you mentioned earlier. A culture, you know, we surveyed leaders around the world from 10 countries, thousands of them, um when we were trying to figure out what's universally true about organizational culture, because if if we're going to talk about universal truth, we need to cast a big net. And so because that's been our process over the last quarter of a century, I think it's why all the books are still in print. I mean, it's pretty rare in the publishing world these days to have books that are five, 10, 15, 20 years old that are still in print. That's just because they're true. They're just full of truth, timeless truth.

Dr. William Attaway 11:40

Well, they add so much value. You know, I mean, I think about the culture rules book. You know, that added so much value, and this is why I continue to give that away. The heart of leadership is another one. You know, that when I read that, I was like, oh, this is solid. There is so much truth here. Like you say, it doesn't ebb and flow. This is going to be true now, 50 years ago, and 50 years from now, and 500 years from now.

Mark Miller 12:02

Now, I will say this. There, thank you for that. There there is context that changes. That's one of the things we refreshed in the fourth edition. Uh, you know, 25 years ago, when the Debbie, the character in the book, she wanted to do some research. She went to the library to use a computer. Of course, you you know, you update those types of things. But but the the core content, we're just so thankful that we think we've been able to uh figure out what's true. And I would quickly say that uh for many of the projects we've done, we took the extra step of validation where we would, because Chick-fil-A was sponsoring the work, we might take 30, 50, 100 Chick-fil-A restaurants, uh, create a control group, bring in the business analyst and kind of run a pilot and measure their performance against, you know, when we did um our work on high performance organizations, I was told that it was the most significant intervention in the history of the company because our pilot restaurants outperformed uh a light group in seven of eight key metrics after a 10-month pilot. No new equipment, no new software. We just taught them here's how you build a high performance organization, right? So, so you that's another reason these things stand the test of time, is like we didn't just make it up. There's been a lot of rigor. Uh, and we're just thankful that we're we're trying to steward this truth for the next generation.

Dr. William Attaway 13:33

Yeah, I think about what COVID did to the workplace. You know, almost six years ago now, you know, the remote work was already a thing. Hybrid work was already a thing, but not nearly to the scale that it became from COVID going on. And on this side of COVID, that really seems to have changed a whole lot of how people think about work. Looking at that in that new reality, how has remote and hybrid work changed the challenges that you address in the secret?

Mark Miller 14:05

Well, I think the the bottom line is I believe leadership is harder now. I don't think the fundamental truths have changed. People still need vision, they still need to be engaged, you've still got to reinvent continuously to stay current and stay relevant in a dynamic world and so forth and so on. I think it's harder. Now, I have been challenged. I think it's harder because I'm old. Well, sure. And I spent 45 years, 50 years doing it the other way. So so maybe a decade from now, people won't think remote is harder. But I'm saying casting vision, engaging people, even something like having a brainstorming session. I mean, I'm trying to do it on Zoom and we're using the tools, and but it I have yet to personally feel the spark and the energy that you can get when you're in a room with people. Again, I'm old and I want to own that, and I'm thankful to be old, by the way, as opposed to dying, you know. So uh, but I actually think you can still do the things that we talk about. I think you have to do the things we talk about in the book if people are going to be well led. But I actually think it requires more intentionality, uh more diligence, and honestly more effort when you're you're not gonna build those relationships. You know, one of the things we talk about in the book is the best leaders value results and relationships. Well, it if if you're not intentional, you're not gonna have a meaningful relationship with somebody that you never see. Or you occasionally see them on a screen and they're one little square among a bunch of squares, right? And so what we're finding is leaders then have to be purposeful and allocate time to reach out and connect with people that they would have otherwise seen at lunch or run into in the hallway or sat in meetings with them and could find out what's going on with their family and this, that, and the other. One of the things that I have observed through COVID and since is a lot of the what I would call community building. Some people might call it small talk, but when you're actually getting to know each other and figure out what's going on in people's lives, much of that has been stripped out of the meetings that I'm in. It feels like when the when the lights go on and it's time for the meeting, somebody says, let's get started. And again, I appreciate that to a point, but if you're trying to build genuine community, which all the best teams have, you have to invest some time in that. And I think that's one of the things that leaders have got to be very, very careful. It just doesn't get squeezed out because of the format, because of the technology.

Dr. William Attaway 16:58

You know, one thing I've heard you say that I I quote often is that culture is not the words on the wall. Culture is what happens down the hall. And I and I think you're right, remote work has made that so much more difficult because you can't do the pop-in. You can't just swing by and say, have you got just a second? You know, and and those water cooler conversations. Dating myself a little bit there with the water cooler.

Culture That Shapes Servant Leaders

Mark Miller 17:21

Just drop by somebody's office to, you know, give them a report or ask a question. Hey, have you seen something like this before? Give me your perspective on it. How or a leader stepping by in somebody's room office and or even in their common work area and saying, Hey, any anything I can do to serve you today. I mean, it's you you've got to be more intentional when you when you don't see people. And let me let me quickly say this a word of encouragement to leaders who might resonate with something I just said. Like, it is hard. But if you're the leader, you can still call a meeting. I met with a CEO recently, and I I wasn't sure he wasn't going to break down and cry because he was lamenting the loss of effectiveness within his organization. And the fact he he couldn't he they couldn't replicate the performance that they had seen before. And he said, if I could just get people in a room from time to time, and I reminded him he was the CEO. I said, You can get people in a room from time to time. And uh I know a lot of organizations have tried different strategies and tactics, and I'm not here to prescribe what would work in any particular case, but the organizations that I think are making remote work post-COVID still have some expectation for face-to-face. It's weekly, quarterly, you know, twice a year. Um more and more I'm hearing people finding that the sweet spot is not 100% remote. And and honestly, it's probably hasn't been for a long time 100% in the office. But if you can orchestrate some of those um events and and create opportunities when people are actually expected to be there, and you use it wisely, right? You don't come into the office so everybody can sit in a cubicle and and do their email. Uh again, be thoughtful about why you would bring people together, when you would bring people together. And uh I just I'm continuing to encourage leaders, don't forget you still do have that option. That's a really good word.

Dr. William Attaway 19:40

When I think about the the secret, the servant leadership is what comes to mind. You know, that that is really the through line and and the the main thing I took away from this, the power of that. And how it is not something that's going to accidentally happen. You're not gonna accidentally develop into a servant leader. You have to be intentional. What role does a company's culture play in that?

Mark Miller 20:04

Well, we we define culture as the cumulative effect of what people see, hear, experience, and believe. So if people see, hear, experience, and believe leaders who care deeply about their people. If if we if if we in an organization see leaders that model an other's first mindset, I think it goes a long way toward helping individual leaders embrace a similar style and philosophy. Now, for those that don't have those types of role models, I don't think it lets you off the hook. If you want to maximize your impact, if you want to maximize your performance and the performance of your team, you really do need to figure out how to do the kind of things we're talking about, whether it's supported by the culture or not. I would say the to answer your question specifically, the culture will either be an accelerator or a limiter. But but serving leadership, we we're now uh more and more calling it uncommon leadership. You've got to make that call. You've got to make that choice and and then enjoy the rewards. But don't wait on other people to tell you you can do it.

Dr. William Attaway 21:30

Because you're the leader. That's good. So uh thinking from that perspective, yeah, a lot of the people who are listening to the show are leaders of various levels in organizations. Some are owners uh and they have the ability to call the meeting, like you say. Uh, some are not. You know, when you think about as people walk away from reading The Secret, what is one big takeaway that you want them to walk away with? Uh maybe it's something that they can immediately start doing to improve their own leadership or Maybe it's a way they can begin to lead up and help the leaders that they report to. What's the big takeaway you want them to walk away?

Define Leadership Then Grow Heart

Mark Miller 22:08

Well, you said a couple things there. So let me let me share a thought before I answer your question. You talked about leading up. Uh I uh in a minute, I'm gonna give everybody my cell number. And and I've been doing that, you know this, I've been doing that for decades. I just I don't I don't think I can serve people I can't connect with. Well, let me tell you a question that I get over and over and over and over and over and over again. And it it's it's worded differently, but it's really what advice do you have for me as it relates to my career? Sometimes it's more pointed, sometimes broader, but I get that question a lot. And my stock answer is still make your boss wildly successful. What can you do to help your boss be more successful? And maybe it's doing things that he or she doesn't want to do, maybe it's doing things that he or she is not good at doing, maybe it's doing everything they ask you to do with excellence. So you mentioned leading up. To me, the best way to lead up is to make your boss wildly successful. And I've been trying to do that for 50 years. And so that's not really the key takeaway from the book, but it's my career advice to anybody who has aspirations of more influence and and more community. I love that. So as far as the book goes, you know, it it's a it's a it's a great question. So I'm I think I'll give you a two-part answer. One, there are fundamentals. Now, you may not like them, you may not be good at them. It's like you you might even disagree, but they're still fundamentals. Now, there's probably some sports fans out there. It's like, okay, if you're gonna play football at at any level, you got offense, you got defense, you got special teams, you got some blocking, you got some tackling. You may not like that, you may not be good at that, but those are the fundamentals. And and so, so I I really feel like part of the value. See, let me give you a little bit of the backstory. I know we're short on time here. The reason we did this work initially is Chick-fil-A charged me and I put together a team of really smart people with this idea. How do we accelerate leadership development? We needed more leaders. And I'm guessing that your audience, uh, based on our global study of leaders, a lot of the people listening to this need more leaders. It's kind of a universal problem right now. Uh, you need more leaders because when you have a problem to solve or an opportunity to seize, you want to put a leader on it. And and 25 years ago, Chick-fil-A had problems and opportunities, and our leadership bench was a mess. And so I was asked, how do you accelerate leadership development? And we said the first problem we identified, and I find this to be true in so many organizations, they don't have, we didn't have a common, agreed-upon working definition of leadership. So when we said leadership, everybody would nod. And they had fundamentally different paradigms and different definitions about what it even meant. And once we explore or discovered that, we said, well, this is one reason you can't accelerate leadership development because nobody even agrees on what we want leaders to do. So I think the macro takeaway is if you want to be a better leader or accelerate leadership development in your organization, step one is to define it. And we made a decision 25 years ago that we stood by when we refreshed the book most recently, is we wanted a behaviorally based definition. We wanted to tell leaders here's what you do. Here's what you do. There are a lot of academic and theoretical and conceptual definitions of leadership. In fact, there are thousands of definitions out there. And we said no. So I would want people to know that this is not an intellectual exercise. This is the starting point for building not just great leaders, but you gotta know what you're talking about if you have any shot at building a leadership culture. So I think at the very highest level, that matters a lot. And then if I could give you one more, call it a secondary. Maybe these are these are equal, but we're, I'm really excited. I think Ken's real excited that we've added this fundamental about embodying a leader's heart. I referenced it earlier. If your heart's not right, nobody cares about your skills. That's right. And so many leaders miss this. And I think our listeners may know of a case. In fact, I'd ask them to think about this. Do you know a man or woman who has leadership skills, but people don't want to follow them? And I bet most everybody thinks of someone. Well, if they've got the skills, why wouldn't people follow them? I'll say it one more time, because if your heart's not right, nobody cares about your skills. And so in this fourth edition of the book, we give some very practical and very tactical ideas on what you can do to cultivate that leader's heart. Um, and I think it'll make all the difference. It it is the turbocharger. You need the skills. Leadership's not all about character, but neither is it all about skills. When you put those things together, um, I think you'll surprise yourself at what you can accomplish. So good.

How To Connect With Mark

Dr. William Attaway 28:06

I'm excited for this book to get into the world. I cannot wait for our listeners to pick this up. Mark, I uh thank you so much for sharing so generously today. It's been my pleasure. So much insight, so much wisdom, just a masterclass, truly. I know our listeners are going to want to stay connected to you, learn more about you and about the book. What's the best way for them to do that?

Mark Miller 28:26

Well, let me give you a couple of things. One, um, our website is leadeveryday.com. Leadeveryday.com. Um, my personal email is markedleadeveryday.com. And my cell number is 678-612-8441. And if you'd put that in the show notes, I think somebody's probably driving down the road, can't uh can't capture that. But uh I'd love to stay in touch with you, certainly. And uh any of your listeners, if you think we can add value, please give me a call.

Dr. William Attaway 29:03

100%. We'll have all of that in the show notes. Mark, thank you again.

Mark Miller 29:07

That's my pleasure.