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.

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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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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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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Yeah. So what this brings to mind for me is two ideas. One is peer accountability. I call it peer accountability. Where people are holding each other accountable. The second one is lateral leadership. I don’t know if that’s the right expression.

Yep, I say horizontal, but that’s exactly the same thing.

I think there’s a book called Lateral Leadership, something like that. And the idea here is how do you lead people who don’t report to you, who don’t have to follow you? How do you compel them to do what needs to be done, and how do you convince them, how do you persuade them. That’s a very important skill, especially bigger organizations. Okay, we talked about trust, we talked about candor, so what’s that after ownership?

Yeah, those are the first three foundational, behavioral, leadership competencies. And then we move over into empowerment, which I’m sure you see in the work that you do. Oftentimes, and I’ve mentioned it a bit ago, CEO can become a bottleneck because everything runs through them. I’ve just been working with this group for two years and still discovering that so many things have to go through the CEO before they get executed or decided or move forward.

It’s kind of hub and spoke system.

That’s right.

Yeah, they all have to go through. It’s very inefficient. It drains the energy of the CEO and they’re not able to engage in the high level strategic stuff because they are pulling day to day.

That’s right. And we don’t really leverage the genius of the rest of the C-suite for example. Because we’re dependent on the CEO. So what we want to do is empower each leader to own, back to ownership, own their department, their teams, their decisions, their results, so that the CEO can be a leader of that team and think strategically. But all other decisions, they’re almost a little CEO of their own department. And we find when that happens, so much of the energy in the organization is freed up. It can be creative and isn’t dependent on one or two or three people.

Love it. Okay. So, that’s the empowerment. And then what’s the gear five and the fifth gear?

Yeah. So, once we have leaders who are really empowered to lead their departments, we need to make sure that we’re all in alignment and moving in the same direction towards the same mission. So, shift five is alignment, making sure that we know what we’re doing, how we’re doing it and how we each play a role in the overall strategy of the organization. Oftentimes, we find ourselves just coming in, moving day to day, just trying to get our work done, but we lose sight of what’s the mission, what’s the big vision, and how do we align each person on the team to play their role in achieving the strategy that’s in place.

Yeah. Okay. So we trust each other. We speak candidly. We own our functions. We hold each other accountable. We feel empowered. We get aligned.

Yeah.

What’s the last gear?

And then we try and take all of that as leaders on that team. The last shift is leadership, is how do we as individuals on this team take everything that we know and become that for our teams? How do we transfer all of this growth and knowledge throughout the entire organization? Which really becomes how do we create culture shift. We can’t do that until the leaders are living, eating and breathing that vocabulary, that way of showing up, that type of leadership. So

we build through trust, candor, ownership, empowerment, alignment, and then we take all of that and we filter it through the entire organization.
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So, what happens when a team put themselves into sixth gear? What happens then? What’s the result?

Well, then you really start to see big culture shifts and the team functioning like a well-oiled machine. Let’s go back to that car metaphor. Because we’ve released a lot of the friction points that get us stuck. I also like to use the metaphor of, say, five leaders in a rowboat. But before these six shifts, it’s often like they all have an oar, but they’re rowing in different directions, they’re rowing in different tempos and speed. So we’re moving, but we’re not moving in unison. When we can align all of these shifts, we see that

we really work together to move the organization with much more speed, power, and clarity so that we can achieve that mission.
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Yeah, love it. One of the things that we talked about, which really kind of stuck with me, which is this idea that you have two types of leadership. You’ve got self leadership, you have organizational leadership. What is the difference between these two?

I love it. This is part of my professional life, Steve, obviously we think we know what organizational leadership is, or having a C-suite leader lead their team, and then that person is asking each person in the organization and team to be, to change, to grow and evolve. Well, we can’t really ask that unless we’re willing to do it ourselves. I think Lencioni, Simon Sinek all say leaders go first. And so, self-leadership is looking in the mirror and discovering how do I need to grow as a leader? Where is my emotional intelligence not living up or being the example for my organization? How am I being driven by limited perspectives, the lack of curiosity, fear, doubt, pessimism? What’s driving me that’s getting in the way of my leadership so that I can be an inspiration to the folks that I lead, both horizontally or laterally and down. So, it all starts in the mirror. And that’s the thing that I find most leaders are not thinking about. We’re thinking about mostly management. How do we move this thing along? How do we keep going? How do we do it, make more money, more revenue, and make a bigger impact? But we’re not looking in the mirror saying, how am I, as the captain of this ship, holding us back, creating friction points, not being and living up to the leader that gets those results.

So, that’s self-leadership. But that kind of chimes back to what we started talking about at the beginning of this conversation, that you’re trying to model to your kids what your values are. And essentially, for you to be able to lead, i.e. be a role model for other people, which is kind of similar idea, you have to first do it yourself. How can you lead others if you can’t even do it for yourself. So first, that’s for yourself. And then you’re modeling the behavior for other people, how to lead themselves and then how to lead others.

Yeah, I often make parallels between leadership and parenting. Some people cringe at that because we think of parenting as patting on the head and doing the thing and discipline. I actually see parenting. Our job as a parent is to pull the best out of that kid, to give them every opportunity to grow, to become the best version of themselves. And I think that’s what our job is as leaders. Simon Sinek says, leadership is not being in charge, it’s taking care of those in your charge. And so, I see a lot of different parallels between really good effective parenting and really good effective leadership.

Yeah, no doubt. So how do you teach that to people? Is that the sixth shift? That’s if they do that, then they become leaders? Or is there something else?

So, this is why I also do executive coaching one-on-one and the Six Shifts Operating System. Typically, we’re getting into the more of the self-leadership and executive coaching because we’re looking at how am I showing up as a team member on this team as a leader in this organization and where am I not being as effective. So oftentimes we’re looking at perhaps there were a 360 evaluation, where’s our leadership limited, what’s creating it, and then how do we move beyond it? I was talking to a leader the other day through their 360. And one of the things that we really saw in their 360 is they’re very protective. They can kind of put up a barrier to protect themselves, but that has an impact on the people in the organization. And so, part of self leadership is first being aware that that’s happening. And then how is that protection manifesting itself in real time and then practicing letting that guard down, for example, in this example of this leader. And so, then it’s like getting into the Gym of Life where, okay, we’re gonna practice not putting up this barrier and being open. And then it gets into trust. How do I trust that the people on my team will accept me if I am not protecting myself? How can I trust them that they won’t judge me? How can I trust that they won’t be punitive judgment if I do or say the wrong thing? Because that’s why people protect themselves. So self-leadership comes mainly through practice. How do we grow as leaders through practice?

The Gym of Life as I like to say it.
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Yes, but then I’m wondering, don’t people protect themselves because they’re insecure?

Yes, all of it comes from, typically, I’m not a therapist, not to get too much into therapy, but we’re programmed in how we see and experience the world from a very, very young age. Our parents teach us, our communities, our siblings. And so oftentimes we get this view of the world that is not helpful for us in achieving what we want to achieve. And oftentimes it’s insecurity, it’s fear, it’s fear of judgment almost always, that kind of thing.

So, the Gym of Life is really a kind of a fake it till you can make it exercise. So, you bring all these insecurities and you basically act as if you were not insecure and at some point, you’re going to gain the confidence because you are doing the things that you would be doing if you weren’t insecure and at some point you will be less insecure and stop being insecure to others?

Yeah. We approach it a little bit different. Like, rather than pretend it’s not there and to pretend to be someone different, acknowledge that it’s there, accept that it’s there. And in spite of that, take the courageous and vulnerable leap to stretch outside of that limitation. Oftentimes, if we just try and ignore it or say it doesn’t exist, we’re just powering over it and we’re not actually, not to get too psychological, but we’re not actually working and healing whatever that part of us is that’s insecure. I had a mentor once tell me, you can’t leave a place until you’ve been there. And what I mean by that, it’s kind of like, we can’t grow beyond something unless we actually acknowledge that it’s there and

this is who we are and we want to move from who we are to a new version.
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It’s always like Alcoholics Anonymous that first you have to acknowledge you’re an alcoholic and then you can start to cure yourself.

Yeah, because the proclamation at the very beginning is I am so and so and I’m an alcoholic. It’s just the admission of here’s where I’m starting.

Yeah, okay. I like that. The Gym of Life and how do you build those muscles so that you can let go of your insecurities and become more self-aware and then step by step become a better leader over time. Love it.

Yeah, I like to use Gym of Life because oftentimes in this work, people think, Oh, I’m starting here at A, and I need to go to B. So I’m just going to make a shift and I should be at B. Right. And I try and tell people it doesn’t happen that fast. You don’t go into a gym wanting big biceps and do curls one day and expect that to happen. No, you gotta practice.

You gotta put that thing under pressure for us to grow.
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Yeah, love it. That’s awesome. So this is how to build leadership in your organization. First, maybe build self-leadership by going to the gym and working with an executive coach like yourself and then when you’re ready you take it to your team and help your team become better leaders by building trust, candor, more ownership, empowerment, alignment on the team and then roll it out to the whole organization. So that’s the leadership operating system. But it all starts with doing the exercises, like doing the push-ups, the leadership, in the morning. Awesome. So if someone would like to learn more about the Gym of Life, about the Six Shifts that you can take their organization through, where should they go and where can they learn more?

Yeah. We’re in the midst of revamping our website. It’s been needed for three years. But scalingminds.com, you can find out more about the Six Shifts. I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. If any of your listeners are curious how their team is doing, I have a diagnostic that I’m happy to give any of your listeners to, especially like CEOs, to evaluate how their team is doing and where they might be very strong in one of these shifts and where they might need some growth in one or more of these shifts. Happy to share that.

Awesome. So if you feel like your team is not firing on all cylinders and you want to put them into sixth gear as leaders, implement the Leadership Operating System, then reach out to Andy Hite, who is the founder of Scaling Minds Coaching and Consulting. Andy, thanks for coming to the show and sharing your goodness, your wisdom with us. And if you enjoyed the show, make sure you follow us on YouTube. Give us a rating on Apple Podcasts. Check out our LinkedIn website so that you can watch short videos of all these episodes that we are sharing here. Andy, thanks for coming and thank you for listening.

Thanks for having me, Steve. I really appreciate it.