CIO Gray Nester on fostering a culture of success
Or it may mean saying, ‘Hey, I know we have a personal relationship, but I’m your leader, and we have to be successful here, and I need you to understand how this action impacts your success inside of Brown & Brown.
Or it may mean saying, ‘Hey, I know we have a personal relationship, but I’m your leader, and we have to be successful here, and I need you to understand how this action impacts your success inside of Brown & Brown. I don’t want to tell you how to act, but I can tell you that what you’re doing limits your ability to achieve your goals and objectives.’ But if you don’t spend enough time on the people side of things and getting to know your team, then you don’t know their goals and objectives, so how can you help them reach them?
That is what courage is about for me. But it comes back to something very simple: I’ve already won the game. I have a wife who loves me. I have a son who loves me. I couldn’t be more proud of them. I’ve got two amazing bulldogs that love me to death. I can get a kiss any night of the week, even if I’ve done something wrong or made a wrong decision. Ultimately, this doesn’t matter. It’s very, very important, but it doesn’t define me.
I wanted to talk about a couple of your go-to leadership expressions. You’ve said ‘progress over perfection’ is the foundational cornerstone of your success. Why?
I say that because I’ve had the opportunity to meet so many people from a network perspective, and a lot of people are potentially more talented than me, more gifted than me, and more intelligent than me, but they are afraid to do the next thing.
I’ve got a business partner here who says, ‘If I can just do three yards every day, I get a first down every time I’m on the field.’ A lot of people think about the Hail Mary, but they don’t think about, ‘I’ve got to get a lot of first downs to be any good.’
Progress over perfection is something that has really defined how we deliver work. Back before Agile was cool, we were out kind of going three yards at a time, just ensuring that we got something done every single day instead of spending time in a sort of analysis paralysis and never achieving anything. So that’s how I think about progress over perfection. And I think over the last four years, Brown & Brown has been a great example of that.
You also like to say, ‘None of us got here without a network and without getting knocked down.’ Talk about that expression and how it helps build resilience.
When I think about my network and the people who help me every day, it’s also about the fact that I haven’t learned anything from being successful; I’ve only learned through my failure. It was great to hear from Jeff [Drye] and Will [Shupe] on the podcast, and there are a hundred more people I could have thought of and brought forward. What’s impactful to me is the fact that these people invested in me and that, through their investment, I’m a better person.
I also have learned, even through mentoring in the Tech LX program, that as I invest in people, I can’t ‘out-give’ myself. I learn more from the people I give to today than they’ve ever learned from me.
But when Jeff talks about the ability to anticipate and see around corners, all of that comes from the scars that I have. It’s so easy to get knocked down two or three times and go, ‘I don’t like getting knocked down.’ But you only learn from getting knocked down. So, the sooner you get back up, the sooner you engage, the sooner you’re able to re-engage and be super clear with yourself — that self-awareness — determines whether you make it or not in this world. Learning through your failures and being willing to say what you could do differently, even if it wasn’t your failure, that’s what will lead you to a higher level of success. Because you can only control how you accept something that happens; you can’t control the thing that happens.
For more from Gray Nester and how his intentional approach to leadership is setting him and his teams apart, tune in to the Tech Whisperers podcast.
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