Jeff Henderson is an entrepreneur, speaker, pastor, author, and business leader. Since 2003, he has helped lead three of the North Point Ministries churches in the Atlanta, Georgia area. Prior to serving as a pastor, Jeff worked in marketing with Atlanta Braves, Callaway Gardens, Chick-fil-A where he helped lead the company’s sports and beverage marketing efforts.
Jeff was also named by Forbes magazine as one of the 20 Speakers You Shouldn’t Miss The Opportunity To See.
In this episode, Jeff discusses how purpose and profits go hand-in-hand, why it’s okay if your current vision outpaces your current resources, the main area where non-profits shouldn’t be penny-pinchers, the importance of having clarity around what your organization wants to be known for and how his book can help with that clarity, the four “presenter voices” and how they can help us carry our vision forward, why you need to understand the presenter environment you’re in as well, the value of talking with your customers instead of at them, how being humbled helps with your voice of influence, and more!
Mentioned in this episode:
- Jeff Henderson’s Website
- Jeff Henderson’s Book | Know What You’re FOR: A Growth Strategy for Work, An Even Better Strategy for Life
- The Four Voices Assessment
- John C. Maxwell
Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Transcript
Hey, hey! It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. We’re so glad to have you here today. Today, I have with me Jeff Henderson. Jeff is an entrepreneur, a speaker, pastor, and a business leader. Since 2003, he has helped lead three of North Point Ministries’s churches in the Atlanta, Georgia area. Jeff was recently named by Forbes magazine as one of the “20 Speakers That You Shouldn’t Miss.” So this is going to be a good one, you know already. Prior to serving as pastor, Jeff worked in marketing with the Atlanta Braves, Callaway Gardens, and Chick-fil-A where he lead the company’s sports and beverage marketing efforts. So, Jeff has founded several organizations, and I’m excited to talk to him today about his book as well. He is the author of Know What You’re FOR.
Andrea: So, Jeff, it is really good to have you on the Voice of Influence podcast.
Jeff Henderson: Andrea, I’m so honored to be here, and I really love your podcasts and your initiative because we’re talking about our voice of influence today. We’re going to talk about how we can increase our voices of influence in our lives and our businesses and organizations. So thanks for having me.
Andrea: Yeah. Okay, so you have done a number of different things. Your experience is broad and deep, and it spans both nonprofit and for-profit. Do you have any particular things that you have learned from both that maybe nonprofit can learn from profit, that profit can learn from nonprofit? Is there anything in particular?
Jeff Henderson: Absolutely. I think it’s a really exciting time because.. I think it’s interesting, Andrea, how we have terminology for these two worlds. Over here, it’s the “We’re FOR profit,”; over here, “We’re NOT for profit,” as if profit is this evil thing. And I know, you know, there’s taxation reasons why we do that. But why I think it’s an exciting time to be a leader both in nonprofit and for-profit is that I don’t think that profit and purpose – let’s use the word purpose for nonprofit – I don’t think profit and purpose have to be mutually exclusive. That if you have profit that means you’re off purpose, and if you have purpose, you can’t have profit.
And so what I’m discovering is that thriving organizations understand that purpose fuels profit and profit fuels purpose. And when you can actually bake purpose into each purchase, with every purchase you have more purpose. And what we’re seeing – and research is actually playing this out – consumers want to do business… consumers or participants want to participate in organizations that are doing good for the world. And what that means for us – and this is why I think with your emphasis of voice of influence – doing good is good for business, doing good is good for organizations.
And so what that means is, if you can have more influence, then you can grow your organization. And I think growing, healthy organizations help the world improve. And so what I’ve learned is that if for-profit leaders – let’s say business leaders – if they can learn how to really be more focused on “What is our purpose?”, and then if nonprofit leaders can learn some of the strategies about how to articulate what their organization is about, then if you can have both purpose and profit, then you grow.
And even with nonprofit leaders… I talk to nonprofit leaders and say, “Here’s the tension you woke up with this morning; your vision far outpaces your current resources.” And everybody says yes. But here’s the good news… and that may seem challenging – and it is challenging – but here’s the good news, if your future vision outpaces your current resources, you’re on the right track, because it means that you have a clear and compelling vision. But your strategy, your goal, should be to shrink the gap. And there are some things about shrinking the gap that we could learn from the business world. So to your question, yes, there’s a lot of things that both sides can learn.
Andrea: Okay. So, let’s start with the nonprofit side of things. There is that tension that you talked about waking up with, your vision far exceeds your resources, and yet I think there’s also that tension of, “But we should be penny-pinching,” or “We should be really resourceful.” And then how does the idea of being resourceful… or not just resourceful but almost the penny-pinching kind of thing, kind of get in the way of perhaps making profit in order to be able to sustain the nonprofit?
Jeff Henderson: Fantastic question. So, I think in the nonprofit world, here’s one of the things that… you know, our mantra is “We keep overhead low,” as if overhead is the problem because I believe talent matters. And if you’ve got a talented team and you pay them more, you will get greater results. I think that has been proven out throughout history. Research will tell you that the better leaders you have, the better results you’re going to have.
If we want to penny-pinch and kind of have a poverty mindset with our nonprofit world, then we’re going to get those results, and I just firmly believe that. Now, I also believe, Andrea, that great ideas don’t necessarily come with a lot of money. Innovation and creativity usually happens with constraints, not abundance. So large organizations who have all kinds of resources, they wake up one day, and they see smaller organizations that are out-creating them and out-innovating them because those smaller organizations have constraints.
So, I think we should be frugal. I think we should spend money wisely. But I also believe we should hire great people and pay them accordingly. Now, it doesn’t mean that the nonprofit world is going to be the same pay rate as the for-profit world, I totally understand that. But the reason a lot of nonprofits struggle is because they don’t raise money to hire great people. And it’s just a proven fact… I mean, everything rises and falls with leadership. John Maxwell has taught us that, and the better leaders you have on the team, the better the team is going to be.
So, yes, we should be frugal and, yes, we should be wise with our money, but if we have a vision worth funding, then we should go ask for the money, and we should go for it. And one of the best fundraising questions to ask for nonprofit leaders is simply, “Will you help me?” So you cast your vision, you ask, you know, for the resources, and then you just say, “Will you help me?” And then what you have to do, Andrea, you have to be quiet and let that awkward space, whether it’s a coffee shop or a room of the few people or a lot of people, you just have to let that awkward silence fill the room, and then they get to respond back.
And typically you’re going to get, “Yes, I’ll help you,” or “No, I won’t,” or “I’ll pray about it,” which means, “No, I won’t.” But, yes, I think to your question, yes, we should be absolutely frugal. But a poverty mindset when it relates to nonprofit world, it really bothers me because I just feel like if they’ve got a compelling vision, let’s go fund it. Let’s go for it. We don’t need to be doing stupid stuff, but we don’t need to sacrifice what could be because, “Well, you know what, we can’t really afford it.” We should go for it if it’s worth it.
Andrea: Hmm. You know, it’s interesting. I’ve seen this play out before in nonprofits – and even sometimes businesses, but mostly nonprofits – where the person who is sort of leading the charge might be feeling like… I don’t know, bringing their own ideas about how much things cost and how much things should cost to the big picture. Have you seen that and that go awry?
Jeff Henderson: Yes. I think if I’m the sole person making decisions like this, I think I need to get a team approach. I think a board and the directors and all that. We need to be wise stewards. We need to be as debt free and all that. I’m totally on board with that. But I see great organizations that have a great mission that just continue to have a gap between their future vision and their current resources. And I don’t think it has to be that way.
I’ll give you a marketing example. You could put flyers on a laundromat that says, “Come to our bake sale,” or you could spend more money on a Facebook live strategy or a social media strategy, pay a little bit of that and have greater results. You might pay a little bit more, but the results outpaced the results that you would get with flyers at the laundromat. And so my concern is, is we’re so focused sometimes on costs that we don’t see the potential ROI that is not being returned to us on what could be. And again, I’m not suggesting that we frivolously spend money, but I do believe investing in your people is incredibly important.
Andrea: Hmm. Yeah. I mean, if your people are overextended, then how can they give the best to the nonprofit too? Okay, so looking at the profit side of things then, and maybe this is part of being known for what you’re for or however you put that exactly – Know What You’re For – how can they learn more about how to really dial in on their purpose and why it matters? What if they’re having a hard time? They say that, you know, they kind of have an idea, but they’re not totally clear on that. How do they go and get clearer?
Jeff Henderson: So if there’s confusion among the leader or the leaders, if there’s confusion in the office space, there will be confusion in the marketplace. So, if we’re not sure as a team, then the people we’re trying to serve or the customers we’re trying to reach or serve – the same with nonprofit, the people we’re trying to serve – if we’re not quite sure what we’re doing as an organization, then there will be mixed signals and a lack of clarity, and that lack of clarity slows things down dramatically.
And so basically the whole book, Andrea is built on two questions. “What do you want to be known for?” is the first question. And I ask leaders to do a vision inventory. To just walk around and ask the team, “Hey, what do you think we want to be known for?” “What do you want our organization to be known for?” And just write down notes, just listen. It’s kind of, you know, just an anecdotal survey, but just listen, and if you hear some differing answers, then you’ve got an issue. If you see a consistent answer, that’s great because you’ve got focus.
But the second question is “What are you known for,” and that’s the customer’s question to answer. And that’s their reflection on whether or not they are experiencing the vision of what we want to be known for. And if they’re not, what that means is there’s a gap between those two questions of “What do you want to be known for?” and “What are you known for?” The first question is ours to answer; the second question is the customer’s to answer. And so it’s fairly simple, but it’s a lot of hard work. It’s a lot of hard work to try to get that statement in a rallying cry. This is your organization’s rallying cry. And so if there’s confusion about this, then your organization will bog down in a lack of purpose.
Andrea: Okay, so I know that you’ve done this before. You’ve done this before with your organizations. Do you have an example?
Jeff Henderson: Sure. So, I’m a lead pastor in Atlanta in a church called Gwinnett Church. We have a couple of locations, and that’s what we did. We asked the question, “What do we want to be known for?” and “What are we known for?” When we started, we weren’t known for anything because we weren’t… I mean, we didn’t have a place to meet. So we asked it globally. I said, you know, “What is the church known for?”
And in this meeting, it was just a few of us, someone said, “Well, you know, many people are more familiar with what the church is against rather than what the church is for. We should be known for what we’re for.” And I thought, “Wow, that’s true.” And so I said, “What do we want to be known for?” “Well, we wanna be known for being for people, for Gwinnett kids, and for Gwinnett families, and for Gwinnett students because God’s for them.” And so that really became a rallying cry for us and it was just “For Gwinnett”.
And when we bought the property of the church where we’re at, I just put a sign out there and it didn’t say, “Gwinnett church is coming soon,” it just said, “#For Gwinnett.” That’s it. And I got feedback from people saying, “Hey, how are they gonna know that’s a church?” And I said, “Exactly, they’re not. They’re gonna have to go ask somebody.” And then we gave everybody T-shirts that says “For Gwinnett.” And we said, “Hey, when people ask you, ‘What is that sign up there, what is that being built?’, you need to just tell them our vision statement of, ‘Many people are more familiar with what the church is against. We want to be known for what we’re for.’”
And, Andrea, in those early days, that really began to gain traction with us. But my point, larger point on that rather than just the church point, is the clarity that that communicated, and the fact that people could communicate that in grocery store aisles, ballparks, and restaurants… that’s really important. Because what we were trying to do is to create more vision carriers that can carry that language and carry our vision, because the more vision carriers you have, the more vision casters you have.
And so whether you’re a business, nonprofit, you have an idea, you’re a solo entrepreneur, you’re a podcaster like yourself – what you’re doing with the voice of influence – you’re trying to gain more vision carriers because you have an important message to get out. And so one of the reasons I wrote the book is to try to help organizations clarify how to get to those statements and how to break through the clutter. So, this isn’t something I, you know, came up with for a couple of weeks, and said, “I’m gonna write a book on this.” This is something I’ve been living and seeing for a number of years now.
Andrea: Hmm. All right, so once you kind of have the vision or you kind of have a vision in place, I know that you have to disseminate it. You have to get it out there to everybody and help them to kind of latch onto it and that sort of thing. I think you talk in your book about the four presenter voices?
Jeff Henderson: Right.
Andrea: So, can you tell us about those and how those help you and how we can kind of understand those to help us carry our vision forward?
Jeff Henderson: Absolutely. One of the ways that you can be for the customer, or your team, or your larger community is to be for you. What I mean by that is that you and I need to grow. We need to continue to progress. We need to remain inspired and part of our roles is to communicate. And the better you communicate, the better you lead. And it really… it kind of comes down to that. And eventually, leadership comes with a microphone, either literally or figuratively. At some point, you’re standing up in front of a group of people, or you’re in a coffee shop across from somebody, and you’re trying to share, “Here’s the problem I see,” or “Here’s the opportunity I see and here’s where we’re going.”
And what I’ve discovered in coaching… I’ve coached communicators for over 20 years now, and it’s kind of a hobby of mine. I enjoy it. I used to play golf. It wasn’t good for my spiritual life, so I gave that up. And as a hobby, I just love coaching people too as they communicate, whether it’s a business person, an entrepreneur, pastor, or nonprofit, whatever. And over these 20 years, I’ve discovered there are four presenter voices. There may be more, Andrea, I don’t know, and it goes with my book Know What You’re FOR. So there you go.
Andrea: There you go.
Jeff Henderson: There’s the voice of the teacher, the voice of the motivator, the voice of the storyteller, and the voice of the visionary. So storyteller, visionary, motivator, and teacher; and each one of these voices has a strength, and each one of these voices has a weakness. And when you understand your strength and avoid the weakness, it helps you present better.
I’ll give you an example. Let’s take the voice of the teacher. So, the voice of the teacher, the strength is content. So, if you have the voice of a teacher, what that means is one of your tensions is, “I don’t have enough time to get through all my content because I’ve got great content.” That’s great. That’s awesome. The weakness of the teacher is the first five minutes of a talk. It’s the connection because a lot of the teachers assume that everyone is just as interested in this topic as they are.
So, they zoom through the first five minutes and just go right to their content, and they haven’t connected with anyone. They haven’t connected with the crowd, because what you want them to do in the first five minutes is to go, “Oh, I’m so glad I came here,” or “I’m so glad I’m here. I’m gonna listen to this. I’ve always wondered about that.” So I tell teachers the most… if you’re giving a presentation, if you have the voice of the teacher, the most important part of your talk is the first five minutes, and you have to give me a reason to keep listening. And if you can do that then you lean into the strength of the fact that you’ve got great content.
So each one of these has a weakness, each one of these has a strength. The good news about the book, what I’ve done is I’ve given you a free survey. All you got to do is you take it. It’s a twenty question survey. At the end of it, it says you’re a motivator or you’re a storyteller. And there might be many of us that have maybe a predominant voice and maybe a kind of a secondary voice, that’s true. And I think intuitively, we probably know which one of these we lean into. It’s just helpful to understand that the voice, the strength of the voice, and the weakness of the voice so that you can really become a better communicator by avoiding the weakness and leveraging the strength.
Andrea: Hmm, very interesting. So how often do you see people integrating these different voices well once they kind of understand that they need to?
Jeff Henderson: Well, the other thing we have to figure out is there aren’t just four presenter voices, there are also presenter environments. So, for example, there’s a teaching environment, there’s a motivating environment, there’s a storytelling environment, and there’s a visionary environment. An example of that would be today. So as you and I talked [about] before we started recording, I’m at a hotel, I’m speaking in a conference. The environment that I’m in is a motivating environment. We want to motivate you to build your business. Well, that’s a great one for me because I have the voice of a motivator. So, here I am as a motivator in a motivating environment. That’s great.
Let’s say I’m going to a university, and I’m going to teach on marketing. Now, I’m a motivator voice in a teaching environment. Knowing that that’s the case, I’ve got to make sure that my content is really good and really strong. Not that it doesn’t need to be in a motivating environment, but if you’re there to motivate people, that’s a natural strength of a motivator. Because interestingly enough, when it comes to the motivator, their strength and weakness is the exact opposite of a teacher. They easily can connect with the crowd in the first five minutes, but their weakness is in the middle part of the talk with the content.
And you can tell if a motivator has done their work or not by about the ten minute mark of their talk. And I can tell if he or she has really worked on it because you can tell that they’ve naturally got the gift of connecting with the crowd and that’s great. But then if they haven’t done their work, that starts to get a little unclear in the middle. And what they’re doing is, is they’re leaning on their natural gift in the first ten minutes, and they’re now in the tension part of their talk because they’re not as good at content.
So, you got to understand your voice, but you also have to understand, “What environment am I going into?” And if it’s a teaching environment with someone like me who has a motivating voice, I got to make sure that my content after the ten minute mark is just as strong as the beginning.
Andrea: Context is so everything, isn’t it?
Jeff Henderson: It is, it is. Yeah, for example, before this talk I’m doing, I had to ask the question, “What is the win? Who’s coming to this? Who are they? When they walk away, what do you want them to feel? What do you want them to have?” All of that is really important work you’ve got to do up front.
Andrea: Yeah. Okay, so what if you’re wanting to motivate customers? If you’re wanting to sort of intrigue them, whether it’s nonprofit or profit – I mean, your customer in a nonprofit would probably be somebody that would accept the message or participate or donate – how do you use this with them?
Jeff Henderson: I’ll give you a great example, and that’s a great question. I think where marketing is shifting and messaging is shifting is we feel the natural inclination to talk about how great our organization is and “Look at what we’re doing,” and “Look at our products,” and all of that. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that, but what I’m saying is we need to shift spotlight more onto the customers and the people that we’re trying to engage with, and to say, “Hey, our organization is for you and we want to talk more about you than we do about ourselves.”
An example of this would be… it’s as if you could use a sports analogy, and let’s just pick on the business world for example. If we’re in a stadium, the business is on the field trying to score touchdown, and the customers are in the stands trying to cheer them on, “Hey, look at you. Look how great you are. You’re better than your competitors.” What I’m seeing, what I’m really pleading with organizations and churches is they need to flip the script. They need to put the customers on the field and cheer them on in their lives and say, “Our business is here for you.” And an example of that would be, where this isn’t working, is in social media.
In social media, many businesses and nonprofits do this as well, it’s all about what’s happening inside the four walls of the organization, if you will, or “Look how great our products are,” or “We’re cheaper than our competitors.” And you know, the consumer is so sophisticated now. It doesn’t surprise us that they think they’re better than their competition. That’s not new information to us, but can you start talking about me and my life and what we’re doing and what’s going on in our lives.
So, I say that to say, when we start talking with our customers, we need to make sure that we are talking with them, not at them. And most of marketing is talking at people, and we need to talk with them. And an example that would be I was sharing this at a large nonprofit in Charlotte, and someone raised her hand and said, “Hey, I think I know what you’re talking about. So, I’m a big Starbucks fan, and I posted a picture of a Starbucks mug, and I just tagged them. And then they commented on back on my Instagram and said, ‘Thank you for loving Starbucks, we love you too,’” or whatever. And she said, “I took a screenshot of that and sent it to all my friends and said, ‘Wow, Starbucks talked to me today.’” And I said, “Okay, let me ask you a question. What other Starbucks Instagram posts have you taken a screenshot on and sent to your friends?” And she said, “Oh, I’ve never done that.” And I said, “Exactly.” The more remarkable you are in talking with your customers instead of at your customers, that’s where this is going.
And the organizations that can shift the focus toward “with” instead of “at,” they’re going to gain greater traction because people are experiencing that and they’re going, “Wow, they actually noticed me. They’re actually for me, I’m going to be for them.” So that’s a real simple but powerful example, I think of where this is all changing.
Andrea: So good. It’s so true too. Okay, we’re kind of wrapping up now. So, if you could really just sort of give one of your best tips for somebody who wants to have a voice of influence, what would you say to them?
Jeff Henderson: Be humble or be humbled. It’s a principle throughout the pages of history, be humble. But here’s the deal, Andrea, humility is this really odd thing in the sense of… “You know what one of the best qualities about me, Andrea, is I’m a really humble person.” Okay, you’ve already admitted that you’re not at that point, right? So, I think we have to understand humility is one of these things that it’s not so much something that we attain to, it’s something that we practice.
So, every day, I’m going to practice humility because at heart, I’m a prideful person, so what I need to do today is I need to practice humility. The reason I think from a voice of influence that’s important, a mentor of mine said that “God resists the proud and so do we.” And I think that is so true, people want to follow humble leaders. And when you have humility, genuine humility, along the way will come influence. It’s remarkable how that works.
And I’ll give you an example. When I was working in marketing at Chick-fil-A, one of the markets I worked for was the Denver market in Denver, Colorado. And we were opening our first Denver free-standing unit in Chick-fil-A. So, I was flying out for the grand opening and Bubba Cathy is the son of Truett Cathy, the founder and vice president of the company, and he was flying with me. So, we walked up to the Delta counter – this is, you know, way before 9/11 and all that, so security wasn’t as tight as it is now as we walk up. And they typed my name, and then they see Bubba Cathy and they say, “Oh, the Cathy family, they spent a lot of money with Delta with Chick-fil-A.” So, they said, “Mr. Cathy, we are so grateful for your family. We’ve gone ahead and upgraded you to first class for your flight to Denver.”
So, Bubba looks at the flight attendant and says, “Hey, thank you so much for doing that, but could you do me another favor?” And she said, “Yes sir.” He said, “Could you give my first class ticket to Jeff instead of me?” And I’d never flown first class before, so my ticket is in literally the back of the plane, right? So, Bubba gets my back-of-the-plane ticket, I get his first class ticket. Andrea, I’d never been up there before as I told you. They give you these hot little towels for your hands. It’s amazing.
And now here’s my point. Would it have been wrong if Bubba had taken the first class seat? Not at all, that would not have been wrong at all, but I would not have been talking about it twenty-two years later. And here I am twenty-two years later, and there’s a principle in the scriptures that says, “If you will humble yourself, you will be exalted.” So, Bubba, in that moment, humbled himself, and here I am twenty-two years later talking about this. The reason I think that’s important, Andrea, is that I think it ties directly into what you’re doing is influence. And one of the ways that we can influence people is to let them go first, to serve them, to be humble. And when you are humble and practice humility, people are influenced by that and you have more credibility with them.
So, I would say, and I teach my kids this, you got one of two choices. You can be humble or life will humble you. Be humble or be humbled – your choice, and life will do a fantastic job of humbling you if you don’t go first. So, let’s go first. But when you go first, you will get influence.
Andrea: Hmm, very good. Awesome! Okay, so Jeff, if anybody wants to connect with you, how can they do so or find your book?
Jeff Henderson: I would love for them to just search for Barnes & Noble or Amazon, Know What You’re For. And I would love for them to get the book and – my friend Bob Goff did this, but I thought it was a great idea – so I put my cell phone number in the back of the book, so people are texting me every single day, and I absolutely love it, and they’re telling me what they learned or they have a question about. So, if you’ll get the book, buy the book, and then text me after you read it, I promise you – I’m 100% so far – I will text you right back.
Andrea: That’s fantastic. All right, thank you so much for being with us here today, Jeff, and for being a voice of influence for our listeners.
Jeff Henderson: So honored.