EP 39: Leading with Generosity and Love with Terces Engelhart

business leadership podcast Nov 05, 2021

Leading with questions instead of leading with answers is a powerful practice.

Sure, in times of crisis, steady, knowing leadership is calming and often necessary.

But the pressure to have all the answers all the time limits creativity and possibility.

Having the capacity to ask questions instead of offering all the answers is what brings out the best in you and those around you.

When you move from a position of knowing to one of curiosity you build trust, both within yourself and in those around you.

Not knowing all the answers has the ability to deepen team cohesion and cultivate creativity and innovation that would never have come from you trying to figure it all out on your own.

Yet so many leaders feel a responsibility to have everything figured out and they push themselves to exhaustion for fear of anyone finding out that they don’t have all the answers.

But courage reminds us that there is a different way to lead and it supports our ability to be vulnerable and say, “I don’t know.”

Today’s guest spent a year doing just that as a way to deepen her recovery and capacity to lead herself and others well.

Terces Engelhart is the founder of Cafe Gratitude and Gracias Madre plant-based restaurants. Her heart is in serving others and her life’s lessons are the springboard of the stories she shares where her challenges have become opportunities. In 2014 she participated in TEDx at Occidental College. She recently launched her podcast called Unreasonably Grateful. Her calling is to help people trust their inner guidance. She is an author, speaker, wife, mother and grandmother of thirteen. She lives and works on their organic farm, Be Love Farm, with her husband, Matthew, in Vacaville, Ca.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

How Terces processed a betrayal in her team by committing to let go, but keep caring
Four directives that have guided her recovery and the way she lives today
How her love of learning helps Terces keep going, and start over when she fails
How answering questions with “I don’t know” helped her heal a need for control
Why Terces sees generosity and gratitude as states of flow

Content note: This episode discusses eating disorders, sexual abuse and addiction.

Learn more about Terces Engelhart:

Scroll Down to Access the Full Episode Transcription:

Terces Engelhart: I spent a year of my life in pretty early recovery saying, "I don’t know" to every single question that was asked. It's a great exercise, because I think we can so easily get caught in our know-ness, our knowingness, and when you say, "I don’t know," there's an opening.

Rebecca Ching: Leading with questions instead of leading with answers is a powerful practice. Now, I have such deep respect for leaders who can admit to not knowing in a culture that worships the certainty of quick fixes and those witty comebacks, right? Sure. In times of crisis, steady knowing leadership is both calming and needed, but the pressure to have all the answers all the time limits creativity and possibility. The linear model of leading through telling people what to do shuts down inclusive perspectives and fresh ideas.

I'm Rebecca Ching, and you're listening to The Unburdened Leader, the show that goes deep with leaders whose burdens have inspired their life's work. Our goal is to learn how they’ve addressed these burdens, how they rise from them and become better and more impactful leaders of themselves and others. Having the capacity to ask questions instead of offering all the answers is what brings out the best in you and those around you. It sure is easier said than done to say, "I don’t know, what do you think? I'm not clear, tell me more. I need help, can you show me?" The dated knowing-it-all way of leading is still present in so many spaces. So it still feels like you're risking being seen as weak or incompetent when you ask these questions instead of immediately offering solid answers. When you move from a position of knowing to one of curiosity, you build trust both within yourself and in those around you.

00:02:00

Now, not knowing all the answers has the ability to deepen team-cohesion and cultivate creativity and innovation that never would have come from you trying to figure it out all on your own. Courage reminds you there's a different way to lead, and it supports your ability to be vulnerable and say, "I don’t know." But dang, I know so many leaders who feel such a responsibility to have everything figured out. So they push themselves to exhaustion while suffering silently for fear of being found out: they don’t have all the answers.

Of course, being led by someone who asks more than tells isn’t always easy. Followers are used to top down leadership too. I see this in my kids. They ask me a question and I annoyingly answer them back with another question. Many of you who are or have labored through homework with young people may have a special appreciation for this tension. The other day, my son just threw up his arms, exasperated, and then proceeded to tell me I need to be a good parent and just tell him the answer to his math problem because it was hurting him trying to figure it out on his own. Now, cue restrained eye-rolls. But really, there is something so cool struggling with him to get the best answer to find the problem, and I love seeing his face light up when he gets it or when we both are struggling to find the answer and we figure it out because of our collaborative effort.

Now, on some days, sure, we carry a little extra weight for those in our charge, but when you feel like you need to have all the answers, it's often rooted in feeling responsible for everyone and everything. This kind of over-functioning is a form of protection from being misunderstood or disappointing someone, all too familiar to so many people, right? I experienced leadership over the years where I was told what to do and then waited for leadership to approve my work or critique my work.

00:03:58

Now, this approach was wrought with scarcity and unhealthy competition, so as a result, my brain still leaps to what I think is the answer and it takes a lot of effort to not default into answering before asking more questions. Now, my guest today, she spent a year saying, "I don’t know," as a way to deepen her own recovery and capacity to lead herself and others well. Terces Engelhart is the founder of Café Gratitude and Gracias Madre, plant-based restaurants. Her heart is in serving others, and her life's lessons are the springboard of the story she shares where her challenges have become opportunities.

In 2014, she participated in TedX at Occidental College, and she recently launched her podcast called Unreasonably Grateful. Her calling is to help people trust their inner guidance. She is an author, speaker, wife, mother, and grandmother of 13. She lives and works on their amazing organic Be Love Farm with her husband Matthew in Vacaville, California.

Listen for Terces's Four Live Directives. They are so simple and also so powerful. Pay attention to some important lessons Terces has learned about leading her business and a team about a tough litigious betrayal from former staff, and notice what inspired Terces to keep on trying, fall after painful fall. Now, please welcome, Terces Engelhart to The Unburdened Leader podcast!

Rebecca Ching: Terces, welcome to the podcast!

Terces Engelhart: Thank you, Rebecca! Great to be here.

Rebecca Ching: Ugh, I have so much I want to cover with you today. I'd love to start our conversation by going back in time 10 years to 2011 (which is weird to think that's a decade ago), when you and your husband both made the really hard decision to close your Northern California Café Gratitude restaurants.

00:06:00

I'd love for you to walk us through this decision and detail how you were feeling at the time.

Terces Engelhart: Well, let's see. So we had started Café Gratitude in '04, and so we had several years under our belt, so to speak. I was explaining to somebody yesterday, we were really a unique community. You know, there was no plant-based food in the mainstream world. There was no almond milk. There was no cold-processed coffee, and we kind of ushered all of those things in. Change always brings up a lot of emotions for people, and, you know, we had all the affirmations on the menu. At that time, they were written on the wall because we had a counter service.

So part of our community was we took care of each other, and we were really good at it. You know, we financially helped people, emotionally, physically, and the community sort of fell into that pattern. However, we're also a business, and a business comes under a lot of restrictions and guidelines and legal definitions. One of the things that we did (and it's kind of a gray area, it's still true in the restaurant business) was we shared our tips with the back of the house, because everyone was working equally as hard. It wasn’t like the front of the house (which would be servers, bartenders, bussers, those people) worked any harder than the people who cooked or prepared the food and did the dishes. And so, every year we always had the front of the house vote because they were the people -- by the very strict letter of the law, they were the people who could get paid from the tips. And so, we voted, and they would always vote to share amongst everyone.

00:07:57

However it goes, someone in a community feels like they don’t get their fair share, and they want more, and a lawyer gets ahold of that emotion or that feeling and attempts to build cases promising large amounts of money or trying to create a class-action suit, and that's sort of what hit our community. We just weren’t prepared to defend ourselves. We didn’t have a line item on our P&L for legal defense. We just -- we didn’t know. As naïve as we were, we didn’t think that would ever happen, and we certainly thought if it did happen, we'd be able to resolve it at the community level.

Anyway, I think everyone has to go through betrayal as part of their process, and the tough part for us was these people that were involved in this were people that we had taken great care of and perhaps done more for than other people. But, you know, one of the dangers of what we do is we create a familial environment. When you work in a familial environment, it brings up lots of your mother, father, family of origin stuff, and then your employers begin to be perceived as a maternal or paternal figure. There's just a lot of healing that has the potential for happening, but it also has the potential for upset, betrayal.

Anyway, that's when we bought the farm. So that's what began our LA expansion. Our sons went down to LA along with a handful of employees, and they all lived in a house together and that's what birthed the LA community. We moved to the farm and just kind of hunkered down and stayed out of the mainstream.

00:10:01

Then, of course, we had to deal with selling buildings and terminating leases and selling equipment and, you know, all of the things to take it down.

How it felt at the time, I would say it felt -- dealing with what we experienced as betrayal, I think, is always difficult. However, I learned one of the most important lessons that I've kind of navigated the rest of my life with which is -- historically, how I and how other people that I know of resolve a betrayal is they convince themselves they don’t care. So they're like, "I don’t even care. I don’t even care anymore." In my view, it's kind of a backdoor way of dealing with the tough emotions that are connected to betrayal. However, I did care. I loved these people. I cared about these people. And so, the lesson I learned in this process was to keep caring and still let go.

Rebecca Ching: Ooh.

Terces Engelhart: That was a pivotal lesson for me, and I've had lots of conversations with people, and some people think you can't do that, but I actually know you can do that. I still care about these people, and if I saw them today, I would still be grateful to see them. So yeah, for me it was definitely a challenging time because we had so much invested in our community and we had to lay off a lot of people. I think we laid off, like, 230-some people, and we kept open only the restaurants that could survive without the use of a central kitchen, and we owned the central kitchen building, so we also lived there. We sold that and moved out.

00:11:56

Really, a whole community disbanded physically, but the truth is that community is still very connected, and we're still very much in communication with one another, and there's still an amazing comradery, love, and respect. Those early days of Café Gratitude were pivotal in everyone's life that was involved in it. I'm super grateful for my lesson, and as far as the impact and the cost of what you might call betrayal medicine, I think we did a good job navigating that. I'm grateful that LA came along at the same time and we had the opportunity to continue the legacy, really, that Café Gratitude and Gracias Madre are.

Rebecca Ching: You just said you're grateful for the lesson. Do you have clarity on that what that lesson is?

Terces Engelhart: Well, the one that I was sharing with you. Well, obviously, there's the lesson: prepare for attack, right? We have a legal defense fund that's part of our P&L, but that's not the lesson I'm proud of. That's just some of the hardcore necessities and what people have to navigate in business today, but the lesson for me was to let go but not quit caring.

Rebecca Ching: You have on your Café Gratitude website your core values, and two of them are love and gratitude. I was curious about how you reconcile those values with betrayal. Is it love and gratitude that help you stay caring? Am I connecting those dots? How do you stay caring even in the midst of betrayal?

Terces Engelhart: Well, I think if we're all honest with ourselves, the reason it even feels like betrayal is because we care so much.

Rebecca Ching: Yeah.

Terces Engelhart: Otherwise, it wouldn’t really feel like betrayal.

Rebecca Ching: For sure.

Terces Engelhart: And so, I think betrayal uncovers how much we care, and the key is can you hold onto that and then resolve whatever the issue is.

00:14:02

So, you know, the sad part about how the legal system works is we were never allowed to talk to them, and they were never allowed to talk to us. And then, there's all these hush-hush orders and stuff, which is such a shame. But I believe that they felt that they were doing the right thing, that somehow, they felt that they had been inadequately compensated. They must have felt that way. I suppose really, the only sadness I have is that whoever we were being, they didn’t think that they could come directly to us and we could resolve it.

So, you know, that's a great lesson for us: to make sure that we maintain the type of relationship and connection that people recognize. Should anything ever come up between us that feels as if it needs some conversation and resolution, that they know that we are people that they can have those conversations with.

Rebecca Ching: Now, that's a powerful takeaway, and my brain is just wandering to they're just breaches or disconnects that happen, and it still feels like it comes out of nowhere sometimes. I just am resonating with that feeling of ugh, we could have handled this differently. This could have been different. You mentioned adding a new line item to your P&L for legal defense. Are there any other things that this experience changed or impacted how you run and lead your businesses today?

Terces Engelhart: Well, you know, again, fortunately unfortunately, I would say because Matthew and I were the figure heads that kind of took that place of maternal, paternal -- when the LA group happened, we step back more and were way less present. Our kids run the day-to-day and our business partners.

00:15:56

So I'd say there's less of an emotional transparency than there once was and probably that's felt, but, you know, there's also probably more efficiency and there are things that people do look to a business for. We really merged the lines of business, work, and what most of us would consider family which is really loving and caring for people. I think, now, we do a great job of that. I mean, one of the ways that that's demonstrated for me is if an employee has something traumatic happen in their family, they usually contact the community of Café Gratitude first, either a manager or GM or administrator, which says a lot. Not too many people, if something traumatic happened in their life, would they contact their employer first for emotional support.

That says that it still exists within our community. It's just not that small kind of lovey-dovey feeling. There's more of a professionalism for sure. There's plusses and minuses to that. Fortunately, because I'm the elder in the community, I still get to be the lovey-dovey one. [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: [Laughs]

Terces Engelhart: I never write up someone or terminate someone. I get to just be the person that is there to support people and encourage people and bring out the best in them. I have the best job.

Rebecca Ching: You do, and you do it well. I've seen you in action, and I'm just thinking about something I say a lot to those I work with of how brave it is to commit to keep caring. It is a daring thing to just commit to keep caring verses hardening up and protecting ourselves from the hurt and, like you said, saying, "I don’t care anymore," which is just a protector.

00:18:02

It's just hiding the deep care. I appreciate that. It's such a dance when you are all in with your work and your life and what you believe and dealing with the complexity and messiness of humans amidst that.

I was really struck when I first heard you share that story and how you rose from that. I want to bring you back to a recent conversation you and I had chatting in your kitchen at Be Love Farm last month. Knowing some other aspects of your story, I noted that the very things that brought you so much pain (food and relationships) are a vital, vital part of your life and recovery today. You were in recovery from an eating disorder, long-term abuse, and you speak openly about your recovery in these things. I'd love for you to walk us through the intersection of your recovery and your work today.

Terces Engelhart: Well, I think -- first of all, let me share with you a definition which I don’t know that everybody would agree with me.

Rebecca Ching: Sure.

Terces Engelhart: It's my experience that people who deal with addiction, in my view, are usually really gifted people, and somewhere along the line, something happens, or something shifts in a life. I think people pick something to invest in that could be addictive or addictive behavior to avoid being responsible for the gift they carry. And so, I think I have a different experience of the addict, so to speak. Obviously, I'm using that term very generalized, but there's lots of versions of what addiction looks like in our culture. My experience is those people are highly gifted and have yet, perhaps, to grow into being responsible for utilizing, fulfilling, and gifting that gift.