In Episode 129 of “The Trusted Advisor,” RSPA CEO Jim Roddy shares insights on the important but often overlooked leadership trait of prudence.
Prudence: Don’t make reckless choices. Use good judgement. Analyze, compare, calculate, and project. Accurate critical thinking (what’s true, what’s false, what’s relevant). Open-minded. Flexible. Lack of prejudice or bias. Keep things in perspective – don’t make mountains out of molehills.
“The Trusted Advisor,” powered by the Retail Solutions Providers Association (RSPA), is an award-winning content series designed specifically for retail IT VARs and software providers. Our goal is to educate you on the topics of leadership, management, hiring, sales, and other small business best practices. For more insights, visit the RSPA blog at www.GoRSPA.org.
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Full episode transcript via Apple Podcasts:
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Roddy: Welcome to another episode of the Trusted Advisor podcast and video series, powered by the Retail Solutions Providers Association.
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Roddy: Our goal on the pod is to accelerate the success of today’s and tomorrow’s leaders in the retail IT industry.
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Roddy: I’m Jim Roddy, back with you again.
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Roddy: Thank you so much for joining us.
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Roddy: Now, as always, the focus of our podcast is leadership, and today is the first episode of a new format we’re going to occasionally integrate going forward.
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Roddy: Now, we’ve done solo episodes before where it’s just you and me talking, but the unofficial name of those is a Roddy rant.
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Roddy: But here’s where these episodes are going to be different.
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Roddy: There’s a few different elements.
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Roddy: First, these podcasts are going to shoot to be right around 15 minutes long, so much shorter than our usual long format interviews.
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Roddy: Secondly, what we’re going to do on these episodes is share with you a character trade or leadership trade or some of the dos and dotes from my book, The Walk-On Method to Career and Business Success.
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Roddy: Then unscripted, I’m going to share either that trade or leadership action with you.
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Roddy: And then I’m going to share my perspective, just like I do when I’m coaching RSPA VARs and ISVs, when those leaders are asking me for advice.
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Roddy: Now, our other episodes, they’re going to continue to feature leaders discussing their leadership journeys and what they’ve learned along the way.
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Roddy: These solo episodes are going to focus on the key principles that form the foundation of their successful leadership.
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Roddy: Now, before I reveal today’s topic, one of the fundamentals of the RSPA is we couldn’t do anything without our major sponsors.
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Roddy: We want to thank these companies who support the RSPA community and make this podcast and video series possible.
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Roddy: Our Platinum sponsors, Blue Star, our Gold sponsors are Cocard, Epson, Heartland, and ScanSource.
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Roddy: We also want to make sure we remind you to save the date for RetailNOW 2025, the Retail IT channel’s number one trade show, education conference and networking event.
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Roddy: This year’s event is set for July 27th through 29th.
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Roddy: It’s Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
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Roddy: For more information, visit gorspa.org, forward slash retail now.
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Roddy: RetailNOW is where the industry meets.
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Roddy: All right.
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Roddy: Today’s topic is the character trait of prudence.
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Roddy: And I’m sure people hearing the word prudence and either saying, well, I’ve never heard the word prudence in forever, or that kind of seems like a letdown, doesn’t seem like a very exciting character trait.
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Roddy: But I keep a list of character traits in the front of my binder, I still keep track of my appointments, not just electronic, but also paper as well.
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Roddy: And the first two items in there are about character traits, because these are really what guide me individually, and what I’ve seen have guided other folks in terms of their successful careers.
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Roddy: And so prudence, what it means is I’ll read their separate elements to it.
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Roddy: And then I’ll pause along the way and we’ll talk about breaking each one of these down.
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Roddy: So first, it says, don’t make reckless choices.
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Roddy: Use good judgment.
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Roddy: Analyze, compare, calculate and project.
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Roddy: Now, there’s a temptation for leaders a lot of times for them to make reckless choices, because they say, I’m the owner, I have the title, right?
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Roddy: I’m in charge here, and so I should be able to one who calls the shots, right?
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Roddy: A lot of times leaders get drunk on their leadership power.
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Roddy: They might not do that on day one, though some do, but over time, they feel like, hey, I’m entitled to be the one who calls this and makes this decision.
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Roddy: They’ll shortcut around the folks that they’re working with, instead of analyzing, comparing, calculating, and projecting with folks on their team.
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Roddy: I can say, I remember when I was first named CEO of the RSPA, one of my coworkers said to me, well, you’re going to be making the decisions on this going forward.
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Roddy: And I said, I might have to be the final decision maker on this.
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Roddy: However, we need to work together, and I’m really looking for you to recommend to me, what would you do?
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Roddy: You are way closer to this situation.
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Roddy: You have way more experience than I do, just because I have this new title that doesn’t anoint me as smarter than everybody, or having more experience than everybody, or more skills, or anything like that.
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Roddy: So don’t fall into the trap as a leader of thinking, I’ve been doing this a long time, pretty smart person, these other people, they know the same title as me, they’re not the owner, right?
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Roddy: So you have to make sure you’re embracing prudence.
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Roddy: Another part of prudence, and we’re going to expand upon this in one of these future Roddy Rantz’s, accurate critical thinking, what’s true, what’s false, what’s relevant.
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Roddy: So in the future episode, we’re going to go through the six steps of critical thinking, I won’t get into them today.
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Roddy: But there is a process that you should follow when you’re making an important decision and it highlights it here.
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Roddy: Figure out what’s true, what’s false, and what’s relevant.
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Roddy: You really have to fully understand the situation, not just go with your gut or, oh, I’ve done this a whole bunch of times before, I’ve been in this situation a bunch of times before, and lead to the conclusion or the next step.
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Roddy: You need to pause and figure out, is this similar to what I’ve done before, right?
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Roddy: It doesn’t mean you throw out your past experience or throw out anything that you’ve learned as a leader.
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Roddy: You factor them, but you also have to pause and make sure you’re appropriately calculating, is this situation identical or similar, or sometimes when you dig into it, it’s altogether different.
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Roddy: The next part of Prudence, it talks about being open-minded, flexible, a lack of prejudice or bias.
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Roddy: That ties in with what I’ve been talking about earlier as well.
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Roddy: It’s really difficult to be open-minded when you’ve been leading the business for 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 years.
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Roddy: When you’ve been working morning, noon and night, thinking about the business, it’s really difficult to be open-minded.
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Roddy: But think about flexible.
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Roddy: There are so many organizations that got caught doing, here’s what we do, we are not planning on changing.
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Roddy: I can still think about a leader of a reseller organization that I ran into at RetailNOW one time.
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Roddy: And I was asking him, what do you think about the as-a-service business model and all the recurring revenue and managed services and things of that nature?
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Roddy: And he said, oh, I’m a POS guy, I’m a cash register dealer, that’s what I do, I’m not into these new and fancy things that other people are doing.
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Roddy: I don’t see that person at RetailNOW anymore.
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Roddy: I don’t see that person at any events anymore.
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Roddy: That lack of flexibility, that lack of open-mindedness, my prediction is, again, I don’t know him exactly what happened to his business, but I can suspect that his business isn’t a going concern anymore because of that lack of flexibility, that lack of open-mindedness.
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Roddy: The last thing about prudence is it says, keep things in perspective.
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Roddy: Don’t make mountains out of molehills.
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Roddy: So keep things in perspective.
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Roddy: And sometimes you’ll have to coach folks on your team in terms of keeping things in perspective.
00:07:05.987 –> 00:07:07.067
Roddy: Oh my gosh, this is panic.
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Roddy: This is a terrible situation.
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Roddy: This is going to totally wreck the company.
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Roddy: Maybe it will, maybe it won’t.
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Roddy: You might have to talk people down off a ledge.
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Roddy: And then there’s also a thing that I see some leaders doing from time to time is they overreact.
00:07:20.727 –> 00:07:22.167
Roddy: They get angry.
00:07:22.167 –> 00:07:23.887
Roddy: They get short with somebody.
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Roddy: They snap.
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Roddy: They get rude.
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Roddy: Give me that and take that away.
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Roddy: I remember somebody one time, it was my boss actually, and he was working with somebody else, and he said, get out of here.
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Roddy: You make me want to throw up.
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Roddy: I’m thinking, well, that was not constructive, right?
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Roddy: And when we talked about it afterwards, he said, how did you think that went?
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Roddy: I said, I think that’s going to do more harm than it does good, right?
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Roddy: Keep things in perspective.
00:07:45.187 –> 00:07:49.567
Roddy: I think we were talking about somebody made a couple errors in an article, right?
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Roddy: That’s not a good thing.
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Roddy: It’s something you need to wrestle to the ground.
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Roddy: We’re in the magazine publishing industry, but it’s no reason to tell somebody, I’m going to throw up and get out of here.
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Roddy: I see this a lot.
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Roddy: I follow a lot of coaches.
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Roddy: Basketball is one of my passions.
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Roddy: I’ve been a basketball coach off and on for many years, and I do see a lot of coaches just completely flipping out, and you’re like, why?
00:08:11.947 –> 00:08:16.727
Roddy: Because they allowed a basket, because they dribbled the ball off their knee.
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Roddy: What are we losing our mind over?
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Roddy: I understand passion.
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Roddy: I understand taking the business seriously.
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Roddy: I understand taking the game seriously, but don’t overreact.
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Roddy: You have to go back to, again, originally, what we had to start off prudence, using good judgment, analyze, comparing, calculating, and projecting.
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Roddy: That involves being calm and making a decision with a very clear mind.
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Roddy: All right.
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Roddy: So that does it for this episode of The Trusted Advisor.
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Roddy: We hope you enjoyed our discussion.
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Roddy: If you did, be sure to subscribe to the RSPA YouTube channel and The Trusted Advisor podcast so you never miss an episode.
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Roddy: Before we go, thanks to RSPA Marketing Director Chris Arnold for his production work, Joseph McDade for our music, and last but not least, thanks so much to you for listening.
00:09:02.527 –> 00:09:09.487
Roddy: Our goal at the RSPA is to accelerate the success of our members in the retail technology ecosystem by providing knowledge and connections.
00:09:09.487 –> 00:09:13.267
Roddy: For more information, please visit our website at gorspa.org.
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Roddy: Thanks for listening and goodbye everybody.