301: Take Your People to the Gym of Life with Andy Hite
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Andy Hite, Founder of Scaling Minds Coaching & Consulting, is on a mission to help leaders navigate complexity, align their teams, and drive meaningful results by transforming both self-leadership and organizational leadership.
We explore Andy’s Six Shifts Leadership Operating System: Trust, Candor, Ownership, Empowerment, Alignment, and Leadership—a framework that turns groups of executives into high-performing, strategically aligned leadership teams. Andy shares why self-leadership is the starting point for culture change, how to move from hub-and-spoke decision-making to empowered departmental ownership, and why peer accountability and “The Gym of Life” are essential for lasting leadership growth.
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Take Your People to the Gym of Life with Andy Hite
Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Andy Hite, the founder of Scaling Minds Coaching and Consulting, helping leaders navigate complexity, align their teams, and drive meaningful results. Andy, welcome to the show.
Hey, Steve. Thanks for having me. I’m excited for the conversation.
Yeah, you’ve got a great story. You’ve got a great business. And let’s get into it with my favorite question, which is, what is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest it in your business?
Yeah, I love that question. Because most people can answer what is your “Why.” They might reach for something, but I love the follow-up. What are you actually doing to manifest it? Because that’s the part that a lot of people don’t always consider. I have a personal and a professional “Why.” My personal “Why,” I really landed on seven, eight years ago. My personal “Why” is to show my children that they can do and be and achieve anything they want. My kids are now 19, twin daughters, by the way. And as most parents do when they’re younger, as they’re growing up, we tell them these things. Hey, you can do anything, you could be anything, you can create anything. But I was confronted maybe eight years ago with walking the walk, not just talking the talk.
I had a corporate gig and the thought and idea of starting this business was there. And for a while, I kind of put blinders on because truthfully, as many of your listeners can imagine, I’m sure you can imagine as well, leaving something that’s steady and secure to start over in your forties is really, really scary, and most people, I talked to a lot of people, entrepreneurs, they’re like, I can’t do it. I have a family of obligations, I have bills. And I was confronted with that. I’ve been telling my kids this forever, am I living it? Am I actually going after the things that I want? And so I didn’t want my words to be hollow. So I started walking the walk. I left that work and I started this business. And every day, as entrepreneurs know, can be a struggle as we’re building. And so it’s really just showing them, hey,
if you're willing to put in the work, you can create anything. You can be anything.
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So that’s a long-winded answer, Steve, of what my personal “Why” is and how I get up every morning thinking about, don’t be a hypocrite, go do the work and show them.
I tell this to my kids as well, that the biggest thing about being a father is that, or any parent, is that there’s nowhere to hide. So, you really have to evoke, otherwise you are a hypocrite and it’s not always easy. You have to really do the right thing, not just pretend you’re doing the right thing because they’re gonna see it.
Yeah, well, and I didn’t want my words to just be for them or hollow. So I was forced to kind of walk the walk and thank God I did.
Yeah. Okay, well, I’m sure that there is another motivation behind this. It’s not just the show for the kids. You’ve got to love what you’re doing. So, tell me a little bit about what you do and specifically you develop the leadership operating system called Six Shifts. I’m very curious for you to talk about that and to share with our audience what it’s about.
Sure, happy to. Just in terms of what we do, I started out as an executive coach, typically just working with CEOs, senior leaders. My passion is leadership. So, I am on a mission to educate folks the difference between management, getting things done, moving things down the line, and leadership, which is more transformational. How do we take this thing and grow it into a bigger, better thing, something different? And so I really then started working with leadership teams, which is the bulk of what I do now. Working with leadership teams, helping them coalesce as a team and working together. I kind of think of the work that we do like a leadership team mechanic. How do we tighten this, fix this, replace this so that we’re a high performing machine and not just a group of five, six men and women together to move the thing along. And so that’s the work we do. We work with leadership teams in small to mid-cap organizations all across the country.
Yeah, that’s lovely. So why did you feel like you wanted to develop an operating system for leadership?
Well, a lot of it stemmed from me trying to organize my thoughts. In working with teams, it became clear where the obstacles were and where the misalignments were. And so we would often work on those elements, but in the beginning had no real system to help teams move through. And also no real system for me to help once we get here. And then where do we go? So, it was just sort of born organically from the work that we were doing and what we were seeing teams struggle with. I just sort of codified all those thoughts and put it into something that I frankly can understand and clients can understand so that they can see oh we’re gonna start here and then hopefully we’ll end here.
Yeah, okay. So, it’s basically you productized the system so what are the Six Shifts?
So, the Six Shifts are starting with trust. This isn’t really unique to me, Patrick Lencioni, Brene Brown,
many of the bigger thought leaders in the leadership world are all in agreement that trust is the foundation for all teamwork.
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And we’re not talking necessarily just transactional trust. Do I trust that you’re gonna show up on time or do I trust that if I loan you trust that you’re going to show up on time? Or do I trust that if I loan you something, you’re going to return it? Really more, frankly, vulnerability based trust as Lencioni talks about if we can, as Lencioni says, strip down emotionally buck naked in front of our peers and colleagues, they tend to trust us, they lean on us, they allow us to be candid with them and have really good productive conversation without it being personal or without conflict being something that gets in our way. In fact, good conflict helps to build us and the team and the products and services that we deliver. And so we start the first shift in building trust in the team so that we can stack the remaining five shifts on top of that. Shall I just move through them? Do you want to talk to anything about them?
You’re talking about trust. So, Lencioni has a pyramid and trust is the bottom. So, I guess that’s the first gear.
That’s the first gear. Oh, I like the gear. Maybe we’ll just move with the sort of car metaphor. The second is without trust, we can’t really have handed, open, truthful conversations. So the second shift is candor. How do we say the thing that is real in the moment to the person that can do something about it with care and respect so that we can move our team and what we’re up to along. So, when we have trust, folks allow us to be much more candid so the thing that are unsaid or that we soften can really be true in the moment. I was just working with a team two days ago in Austin and been working with them for over two years. And we’re still finding where when we’re in leadership team meetings, people are holding back. And if we hold back, we’re missing opportunity. And the thing that takes the hit are the results that really matter. Execution stalls, trust, and those things become diminished. It costs human energy.
So we really want to build the trust so that we can have the real, honest, candid conversations that need to happen to move the organization and the team along.
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