Aggie Legends Podcast S1E8: Flip & Susan Flippen

FLIP FLIPPEN:

There’s nothing as dangerous as a person with a great education and no character. And that sums up what we’re after.

BEN WIGGINS:

Welcome to Aggie Legends where we talk with founders, CEOs, and other successful Aggies about the lessons in leadership they’ve picked up throughout their careers. I’m your host, Ben Wiggins, Mays MBA class of 2018. And today we are talking with Flip and Susan Flippen, the namesakes of the Flippen Leadership Institute, which produces this podcast. Thank you both for being here.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

Thank you.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

It’s our pleasure.

BEN WIGGINS:

Flip and Susan are the founders of the Flippen Group, where they develop processes and systems that bring out the best in people. One of the only couples ever named Ernst and Young’s Entrepreneurs of the Year, the Flippens have impacted thousands of schools, Fortune 500 companies, sports teams, and government organizations. A New York Times bestselling author, Flip serves as chairman of the Flippen Group, and Susan is the CEO. They are widely celebrated as leadership experts and for their commitment to philanthropy. Again, thank you so much for being here today.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

Thank you.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

Yeah, it’s fun.

BEN WIGGINS:

So the two of you have built education and leadership development programs that have had impacts around the world, and now your work has inspired a leadership institute right here at Texas A&M University. Tell us a little bit about that journey, if you would.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

It means a lot to me because it’s a blessing to get to work all over the world, but to get to work in your backyard is super special, and we love living in College Station with all the 20 year olds everywhere.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

Yeah, 80,000 20 year olds.

BEN WIGGINS:

They keep us young, right? They keep us young.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

Oh yeah, it’s a blast. We love it.

BEN WIGGINS:

Tell us a little bit, if you would, then about the Flippen Leadership Institute. What is it? We’ve got institutes everywhere all over the university. How is this one unique? What is the mission here? What are you trying to do with this?

FLIP FLIPPEN:

Well, first of all, this institute is going to work with all the other leadership programs on campus. We all want to help lift each other up, and that’s what the institute is about. We all have more to give, we can all learn from each other, we all can serve more powerfully, and that’s exactly what Texas A&M intends to do, help us all do that better.

BEN WIGGINS:

Wonderful, and so the students here are obviously college age and, you know, a little bit older, some graduate age, but children and education are clearly a driving force in everything that the two of you do. Why does that, why do kids speak to you in such a specific way?

FLIP FLIPPEN:

It’s the future. I mean, you shape the whole country. If you shape K-12. You’ve got to stop and think, Ben, there’s 47 million kids in public school, K-12, and, man, they are the future. What they experience, what they learn, their worldview, their whole concept of life, their approach to life, everything. That literally shapes the future of our nation, and that’s critically important to both of us.

BEN WIGGINS:

The two of you both experienced some challenges in childhood. How did that shape your journeys?

FLIP FLIPPEN:

Everybody faces challenges.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

Well, for me, I spent part of my formative years in foster care, and, not that I would ever ask to be put in that situation, but it was such a learning time for me. I got a front row seat to what people go through, and it just gave me a real heart to never judge a book by its cover. Never assume because people go through some pretty serious things, and it gave me a heart to do something about it, and so we get to do that in our public school work.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

That’s true. I mean, you know, honestly we think that character is formed in brokenness. I think that’s the most fascinating concept because, you know, everybody in this room has been broken in some way at some time, and if you haven’t been, you will be, and you find the bottom of yourself and then you find out, well, there’s actually more. And, you know, brokenness is fascinating because it’s a gift that you get that you don’t want, but the challenge is you don’t want to regift that gift. You don’t want to pass that kind of stuff on, and so, you know, I came out of a professional family with lots of secrets and there were hardships and things, but, you know, I actually am grateful, to Susan’s point, we don’t wish those on anybody by any stretch, but you learn from them. You grow from them. I mean, that’s the beauty of hardship is it stretches you and it stresses you, so your capacity for stress grows immensely. The character that comes from that is phenomenal, if you let it. You just have to learn how to forgive and let go and not let your past define your future.

BEN WIGGINS:

Susan, going back to what you said about experience in foster care. What do you think is the piece of wisdom that you bring into the adult world, in the professional world, that runs most counter to what people would think of foster care? What is the thing that would surprise people the most to learn about foster care, either good or bad?

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

Well, I think sometimes people can be judgmental of parents. I don’t think anyone hopes “one day, I hope I’ll be a terrible parent.” Right? There’s brokenness, to Flip’s point. And, what we care about is helping people know what they can do about the brokenness. We don’t have to stay stuck. Together, we can be better.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

And it’s also driven us to take in kids and raise kids, and that’s why we’ve adopted and raised kids and taken in kids, and the reason for that is there is so much potential there. You know, it goes back again to that brokenness. I mean there’s great beauty and strength in that, and that’s been a great joy for both of us.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

A good friend of mine that I work with said to me “Susan, do you know who the most important person in the world is?” And I said, “Who?” And he’s like, “The person right in front of you.” And I think being in foster care, and really being anywhere, just remembering that everyone has value and what we care about is how do we help bring out the best in everyone? We’re all going to win when that happens, right?

BEN WIGGINS:

How do the two of you, when the two of you are working hard to bring out the best in people, what do you think is most unique about your approach to that?

FLIP FLIPPEN:

We do that with each other. I’m better because of her, I hope she’s better because of me, but yeah, that’s, that’s what a good marriage should do. That’s what a good team should do. Constantly encouraging and inspiring, motivating each other.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

I don’t know if it’s unique, but we definitely know that serving others, really caring about the people that you work for, genuinely, not just words on paper, makes a difference, and we spend a lot of time building relational capacity, so teams, our team, but then the teams that we serve learn how to trust each other to a higher degree, so they can get more done together. And it’s way more fun when you trust your teammates.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

You know, Ben, there’s interesting research on that too. You know high-trust teams as opposed to low-trust teams, high-trust teams produce, in the marketplace, about 253% greater returns. And people don’t even look at those data points, and, it’s like, why would you not build deep relationships with your team. If you have shared values and a shared mission, my gosh man, you can set the world on fire.

BEN WIGGINS:

Right. So then if your goal is to build deep relationships with your team, obviously retention makes some difference to that because, at some level, there’s no substitute for time, right? But then how do you build those deep relationships quickly. Not that your goal is necessarily to do it quickly, you’d rather do it well than to do it quickly, I assume, but how do you establish that trust in the first place?

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

Spending time intentionally, asking questions like, “What are you excited about, Ben?” “What are your dreams?” Knowing what those are and finding those connecting points so we can work on things together.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

Yeah. Tell me about you, you know, do you have kids? Do you have family? What are you doing? Where did you come from? Who are you? Tell me about your life, I mean.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

Yeah.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

You know. I mean, it’s actually being genuinely interested in the person in front of you. It’s not glad-handing somebody and looking to see who’s the important person in the room. The important person is the one in front of you right now. I mean, our housekeepers, we introduce them as colleagues. And people are like…

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

They’re my friends…

FLIP FLIPPEN:

Yeah and they are our friends. But honestly, I mean I quite commonly say, yeah we share an office, and of course everybody kind of laughs, but that is the reality of it. That’s why we have lower than 1% turnover rate. That’s why we have insane longevity in our company. Do you know what it costs to replace somebody? I mean the damage they do, that’s lost.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

But here’s the really neat thing about that. Yes we do experience that, but the reason we experience in our company, it’s what we do, and we get to go pour that out in other places because every company can have that. Every classroom can have that. We just have to be intentional about it. Prioritize the right things.

BEN WIGGINS:

Tell us more about the work you are doing and the impact that you have had, worldwide.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

Let me tell you, we operate, we own and operate 10 separate companies. We’ve built 12, sold some, bought some, but the two great passions that we have is in our corporate organizational development side and that company’s called “Teamalytics,” and then on the education side is “Capturing Kids’ Hearts.” And in Capturing Kids’ Hearts we are in 48 states, we’re the largest teacher training company in the nation. We’re in front of about 8 million kids every day, we’ve had 2.5 million kids go through our curriculum for course credit in high schools. That thing’s exploding all the time. I mean, we are literally training tens of thousands of teachers, and on the corporate side, we’re, I mean, we’re spread out all over the world. We do business heavy in private equity, oil, energy, gas, finance, hospitality, defense sector.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

We all had teachers, going back to the education part, that you really want, everybody wanted to be in their class. You were learning, it was engaging, it was fun, the class was a class, there was community, and one of the things we do in Capturing Kids’ Hearts, that’s possible for all teachers. You can learn from what the great teacher is doing. How do we break that down into steps that people can learn and be developed to do? The same thing in corporate, some leaders naturally connect with people better. How do we help more people do that?

FLIP FLIPPEN:

That’s right. And Ben, candidly, there’s some cool neuroscience in this that we are fanatics about, but, you know, I can reach over and pat you on the arm and you experience a physical touch, it touches a certain spot in your brain, but actually everybody in this room that sees that, it actually touches the same spot in their brain without the physical stimuli. So if you know that, then you’re able to engage one student and at the same time touch many others. And people can say, “oh Flip, how is that true?” Well think about the movies you watch, and how you have emotional responses to things that aren’t even real. It’s because you’re experiencing that exact same thing.

BEN WIGGINS:

You jump when someone else gets hit in a movie. This is the positive version of that.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

And you smile when they smile, and you nod your head when they do, like you’re doing right now.

BEN WIGGINS:

Sure, sure.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

Those are cool concepts.

BEN WIGGINS:

Without a doubt. So I would imagine, so you guys have your own research, and I’m sure there’s, you know there’s some interplay between this and kind of the John Hattie of it. What do you find is the lowest hanging fruit for, let’s say, just an average teacher who has not implemented your principles yet like, so, without spoiling too much of the secret sauce, I guess.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

I know one of my favorites, and it’s free to every school in the world.

BEN WIGGINS:

What is it?

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

We help students learn how to start the class with good things. They celebrate. “All right, tell me something good that happened this weekend,” and we celebrate each other’s good thing, and I mean, it just, it can take a couple of minutes. It doesn’t take up the whole class, but it just changes the atmosphere and changes the tone to be celebratory and focusing on the possibilities.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

And in that process, we’re also really not just looking for, I’m looking for the bad thing. I’m waiting for the kid who says, I don’t have any good things.

BEN WIGGINS:

Oh, okay.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

That’s what I’m after, because I’m trying to reframe that. I want to be able to say to him, “Hey timeout, timeout, dude. You got me. Man, it doesn’t get any better than this. You got your class. You got your classmates. I mean, you’ve got your clothes on, you’ve got a desk, you’ve got a room, you’ve got air conditioning, you’ve got books, you’ve got friends. I mean, come on, let’s think about it.” It’s reframing because we all go through hard times. And we are the most fatherless generation on the planet right now, Ben. Think about how many kids are sitting in a classroom, and they never get affirmations. They never learn how to reframe the pain that they experience in their own life, and so that’s a easy thing right there.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

I love it. The other thing “good things” does, something so simple, it helps get students engaged. A lot of classes people just want to, like, frozen “I’m not going to say anything,” but we all know how to talk about something good that just happened, and so it starts taking down the barriers so that students can access the learning part of their brain and be free to engage in the class.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

And that’s all tied to social anxiety, you know? I mean, you ask 1st graders if if they can sing, all of them can sing. Ask a 9th grader in a choir and they’re not even gonna raise their hands. Why is that? It’s because the anxiety of peer pressure, etc. What if you could remove or greatly reduce that? And it increases risk taking which is critical to learning. Because I’ve got to be able to fail to be able to figure out how to get it right. If everything, if I get everything right, there’s not a lot of learning taking place in that.

BEN WIGGINS:

So we thought we’d all sing. No. (Ben singing) You go for it.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

No, I’m good. But I love that Flip, and the other association that I’m hearing here is gratitude. It sounds like some of what you guys are teaching is gratitude.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

Oh, it’s huge.

BEN WIGGINS:

Which we’ve heard over and over again, that that’s one of the things that’s most associated with happiness is flexing that gratitude.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

He doesn’t know, does he? You don’t know our house burned a year and a half ago.

BEN WIGGINS:

No, I did not know that.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

That puppy just burned.

BEN WIGGINS:

It did. Yeah.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

I’m so sorry.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

No, hey, it’s okay. It’s not a tragedy, it’s just an event. We’re grateful we were home. We’re grateful we got out. We’re grateful there was nobody else there. You got it? We’re grateful we got insurance. We’re grateful we had a hotel. We’ve got friends.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

I’m grateful for College Station Fire Department who was there in like 5 minutes.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

I mean everything we are constantly thinking about what can we be grateful for in this situation? We lost one of the sons that we took in, okay? Evans Afriyie-Gyawu. He died 3 years ago. His PhD is in toxicology from A&M. He’s part of a phenomenal research team. You know, I can easily cry over it right now, but you know what? I am grateful we had him. I’m grateful we loved him. I’m grateful he knew it. I’m grateful he had a phenomenal career. I’m grateful in his short life, he had a massive impact. I’m grateful he was in our family. I’m grateful he knows that. You know, Ben, if you’d asked me that in the first month or even the first 12 months, I’d have just cried on the spot, but the reality is, I am grateful I had him. So even in the worst things, you have to come to a point. Because if you don’t, you’re lost in despair and hopelessness. Bitterness and resentment.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

Yeah.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

It’s true. Thanks, babe. She’s patting on me.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

So, babe, tell them about the Wall Street guy who called you the day he lost everything.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

Oh, this was crazy. You know, I’ve got a friend, I was talking to a business friend of mine in New York, and he’s like, “Flip, you know, I’ve gone broke,” and, I mean, I was commiserating with him because it’s horrible. Covid destroyed his company. And then he said, “you know, I’ve lost everything,” and I was like, “wow, I didn’t realize that.” And he’s like, “have you not been listening?” “You know, I just told you I’ve gone broke.” And I said, I get that, but, you know, your assets, I mean, you haven’t lost those. He’s like, “what?” And I said, you haven’t lost your character, you haven’t lost me, you haven’t lost your wife, you haven’t lost your children, you haven’t lost your reputation, your experiences, your honor, your dignity, your trustworthiness, your education, your relationships. You follow what I’m saying? I mean, Ben, that’s the things that people build their lives out of, and so when we think about the Flippen Leadership Institute, those assets under management that do not show up on your balance sheet. Everybody comes here and they say “oh Ben, what are you going to do?” “What are you guys going to do with your career?” “What are you studying? What’s your plan?” That is not the question. Honestly, Ben, I don’t care what you do. I don’t care a hill of beans about that. What I care about is who are you going to be? That’s the question, because when you answer that right, I promise you, whatever it is you do, you’re going to do very, very well at it.

BEN WIGGINS:

Living with purpose.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

That’s powerful, isn’t it? It really is.

BEN WIGGINS:

I think business is starting to assimilate some of this, the transition from referring to a particular set of skills as soft skills, to calling it core skills, for example. What of all of the stuff that you’re teaching is, as you said, Flip, really valuable stuff, what are the pieces that you find still missing the most often?

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

I see a lot of people, they still approach business in a transactional way. But that’s not going to work, that is not going to hold in the future because people want to do business with people they trust and they respect, and over time if you’re not bringing that to the table then people are not going to do business with you.

BEN WIGGINS:

What that calls to mind for me is I think more and more business these days is inbound. Everyone we need is a LinkedIn message away, an email away, a phone call away, a text away, a chatbot away, and the idea that we don’t have to wait for someone to come tell us “hey, you need this thing.” We know where to find everything we’re looking for, and so who we look for is who we trust, to your point, earlier.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

I was just thinking, I was just in D.C. a few weeks ago and we’re not political people, not at all. But they’d asked if I could help resolve some things, and when I sit down in the meeting one of the questions asked is, well, Flip, how does this affect your company? And I said, this hasn’t got anything to do with me. These are funds that are being locked up for the Title II, Title III, Title IV, and they need to be released because of this. And they said, “but this doesn’t affect you?” And I said, “not at all.” “Then, why are you here?” I mean, it was kind of a surprise to them that I didn’t have my hand out for something. I went, “I don’t need anything from you guys.” “This is the right thing for y’all to do.” And guess what they did? Three weeks, well actually, a week and a half later, they released $7 billion. And so I look at that, it’s, you know, I mean, if you go in with a heart to serve your customers, your team, your relationships, I’ve never had anybody say, hey, I don’t want that. I don’t like that. Give me less of that.

BEN WIGGINS:

One of the most powerful answers you can give to something in that kind of situation is “because it matters.”

FLIP FLIPPEN:

Yeah.

BEN WIGGINS:

Because this matters.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

That’s right.

BEN WIGGINS:

Yeah. What are the one or two outcomes that you’d like to see most from the institute.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

Well one of the things is I think there’s an even bigger chance for students to experience a bigger sense of community. I love the Aggie Spirit, and it’s friendly and all of that, but I think there’s more and we all thrive when we’re in really connected relationships, so I would love to see that happen. I also would love to see students be challenged to live more on purpose. I think they hunger for it, and for the university to take time, and the university wants to and is in many ways, but there’s more to help students. Like Flip said, they don’t need a job, they need purpose.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

Yeah and for me I think the content that’s going to be in the institute, the courses that are being developed right now that Steve Courtright, Dr. Courtright, is working on, we’re very involved in that. That certainly is a piece of it, and that’s going to touch a lot of students. There are a lot of things you can look at here, but in the business community when you hit those realities, every day, you start thinking, you know, “how do I do this?” And there are compromises made, there are things that get into your life simply because you see people around you getting away with things that make it harder for you to live a certain life, and so for us to be able to, to be able to really present strong case studies for why these things work long term, what is the outcome of that?

BEN WIGGINS:

Being prepared for ethical dilemmas before they arise.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

Yeah, that’s right.

BEN WIGGINS:

If I have a degree in finance, that’s great, but it’ll be really great if I know how to live that out and handle ethical dilemmas well when they happen.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

And a good example of that Ben, we wrote the ethical case study dilemmas for West Point. Okay? So if you’re in combat situations and you stop and think, you know, some of our team that worked on that, they did amazing work there. Well, those same ethical dilemmas exist in business all the time. It’s not black and white. This gray zone is massive in business, and how do you navigate that?

BEN WIGGINS:

How indeed.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

It’s based on your values.

BEN WIGGINS:

So what is, and you can each answer this question if you want to, but what is the hardest ethical dilemma that you have each had to deal with, whether it’s something imaginary or something real.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

That got real, real quick. When you say the hardest, I would have to think on it for a little bit.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

I don’t. Well, I will tell you that this past week I made a decision to walk away from a significant amount of money, for the simple reason that the person that I was involved with, I did not, I did not respect the way they were doing business at all. And I’d rather walk away and leave the money on the table that I had to be attached to, in some way, a business relationship that I do not respect their ethics. I don’t want my name tied to it, and I don’t want an association with it. And people can say, “well, Flip, you could have taken legal action,” and, you know, I could, I could do all of that, but I can also just walk away. I walk away with my integrity, feel really good about it, and go on about business. We don’t spend time looking in the rearview mirror. I mean, our windshield is huge, and we’re looking forward, always. I’m not trying to figure out who did me wrong or what did they do. I mean, literally, we shake it off and we go on about business.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

I respect that.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

Yeah. Yeah it’s a good way to live.

BEN WIGGINS:

All right. Top lessons in leadership, what do you got?

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

Treat people with honor. Start things right.

BEN WIGGINS:

When you say, sorry to cut things off, when you say honor, I hear treat people with respect, treat people with this, that, or the other. When you say honor, what does that mean to you?

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

Value, value them and that they bring something to the table, they may not even know how to bring it yet, but there’s value in there.

BEN WIGGINS:

I hear Dale Carnegie there.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

I did go to Dale Carnegie a long time ago.

BEN WIGGINS:

Give the other person a great name to live up to. Anyway. So I cut off your, I’m sorry, I cut off your principles.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

That’s okay. But treat people with honor… Start things right. Be present with people, like, be, when you’re with them, be with them. One of my mentors taught me that. Think ahead. Think in terms of the people you’re serving. How does that, how does it impact them, not just how does it impact me. I could go on for a long time.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

Well, there are a couple of things I’d add to that real quick before we close, but one is that be sure you got your values aligned. That’s a really really key thing, and then, as a leader, do not accept unacceptable behavior or tolerate intolerable behavior. It contaminates your team. It insults the high performers and it reinforces the low performers.

BEN WIGGINS:

How do you ensure alignment early on? Do you just flop the sheet with the core values on the table and say, hey, this is what we stand for, or is any of that a problem?

FLIP FLIPPEN:

We didn’t write the core values. We didn’t write our social contract. Our teams do that. Our teams write their social contract, “this is how we are going to conduct ourselves, this is how we are going to do business.” And then we hold each other accountable to that.

SUSAN FLIPPEN:

With intentionality, we revisit those things, keeping them in front of us.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

Always, it’s not laminated and hung on the wall someplace. It’s a living document. We talk about all the time. And after we have meetings, we have after-meeting meetings, we call them after-party party, and we take apart the meetings so we can figure out how to make the meetings better. But let me, you know, Ben, let me answer that question with a quote I wrote a long time ago, and that is, it’s three parts, so indulge me. You know, “There’s nothing as sad as a child without an education. There’s nothing as hopeless as a child with an education and no opportunity. And there’s nothing as dangerous as a person with a great education and no character.” And that sums up what we’re after. They’re getting a great education here. I want them to walk out of here being able to say “this is who I am,” “this is what I believe,” “this is how I will live, and this is what I stand for.”

BEN WIGGINS:

Powerful. Thanks for sharing that.

FLIP FLIPPEN:

Yeah. Thanks for having us.

BEN WIGGINS:

Absolutely. Thank you Flip and Susan, for sharing your lessons in leadership with us today. On behalf of Mays Business School, I’m Ben Wiggins. Thanks for watching. Please remember to like and subscribe. It really helps others find the show. Here at Mays Business School we’re building a better future through business, and we thank you for being part of it. Thanks again.