The Pit Stop is your chance to gain expert perspectives from our teams on the track! Growth rarely happens in a straight line—and neither does leadership. We sat down with COO Neal Frick to talk about what it takes to guide organizations through change, make complexity manageable, and use technology to help people do their best work.
You started in recruiting and moved into operations and executive leadership and you now lead major modernization efforts—what has that journey taught you about how organizations actually grow and evolve?
Recruiting is a surprisingly good place to start on the path to executive leadership. When your entire job is finding people to fill positions across an organization, you get a holistic view of how things work, and you really learn how impactful good leadership can be. You also learn how corrosive a bad leader can be, and it informs your career growth.
Companies don’t grow smoothly – the line doesn’t always go up. They grow, they break, they restructure. The process that worked at 20 people doesn’t work at 50. The strategy at 100 breaks at 500. Every growth stage turns something that used to be a strength into a weakness, and you have to constantly iterate on what makes you stand out. A leader’s job is to notice what’s broken, plan for what will break, and make repairs before they take the team down. Most leaders wait until the break is undeniable; at that point, you’re just doing triage.
You’ve worked closely with Tina in the past and now again at Vetegrity. How does that shared history shape the way you approach leadership and execution today?
I met Tina when she came to CyberCore as CEO. When she moved on, I took over in her place. Over the 8 or so years we worked together, we learned how to work incredibly well, we more than tripled the size of the organization, and we wrote a book together about our shared leadership philosophy. We’ll both tell you that we had a lot of friction early on because we’re very different operators. Tina is more direct and decisive; I prefer to think about things and take time. When working together, we influence each other’s approach. I tempered quick decision making with additional discussion, and Tina pushed me to move faster. We complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses very well.
A lot of your focus right now is on modernization—things like infrastructure, automation, and AI tools. What does “doing more” really look like in practice?
My dad owns his own insulation business, and early on he told me that his guiding philosophy was “work smarter, not harder.” And I fully agree, “doing more” is really “doing less more effectively.” When I see a team overburdened with tasking, I see waste. When you automate the task, you can restructure teams so they’re focused on things that matter. That can sometimes look like doing less; work shifts from “complete 10 invoices a month” to “meet with partners” or “take your team out to lunch to celebrate a win” – it’s more about strategy and building the business than completing a task list. Regardless of the industry, it’s the people side of a business that grows it.
Most of the buzz about AI lately is “how do we reduce our cost and replace our people with AI” and it’s shortsighted. You’re seeing that reflected over and over again as companies lay off and rehire people. Modernization efforts should create a foundation that your team can grow from and become the most efficient versions of themselves, directly supporting the top and bottom lines through growth initiatives.
spoken and written about leadership, including co-authoring a book- nice! How do empathy and accountability show up in your day-to-day leadership style?
It’s been five years since writing the book, and my leadership style has evolved – that’s a good thing, it will continue to evolve over the rest of my career. Empathy is still a critical part; I will die on the “people-first” hill; if you do right by your team, they’ll do right by your customers and everyone comes out ahead. Having said that, I’ve refined my approach.
Empathy doesn’t mean overlooking bad behavior, and it doesn’t mean going easy on people. Empathy helps us understand the “why” of behaviors and what people need to feel safe, to be successful, and to be the best versions of themselves. There’s a balance between being empathetic and holding people accountable. It’s about what we all owe to each other: making each other’s work lives easier by showing up and doing the work.
You’ve been described as someone who brings order to complexity—processes, systems, and scale. What’s your approach to turning something messy into something that runs smoothly?
I watch, and listen. When inheriting chaos,I find that a lot of peoples’ first instinct is to make a lot of very quick moves and impose structure. Almost every mess I’ve worked into has had at least one workaround holding something critical together, and if you try to “fix it” before you understand it, you’ll break everything in favor of a nice flowchart.
I find where the work actually happens—from invoicing to hiring to contract deliverables—and look at where it lags. That’s where you find the “why,” like someone setting up a series of steps in a process to solve this one issue from 2018 that’s no longer applicable.
Fix the highest-pain things first, not the easiest. Take the pressure off, help the team, make the situation better. That buys patience for the rest of the (very long) process.
Finally, know when to stop. Not everything needs a procedure, not everything needs documentation. Over-processing a small team is dysfunction wrapped in a well-formatted document.
We heard you’re big into Dungeons & Dragons and creative writing. Do you see any connection between storytelling, strategy, and the way you think about leadership or operations? Tell us about it!
I do, and I actually just started writing a series of essays about it on my Substack. The ties between collaborative storytelling and leadership are strong, and I’m genuinely a better leader for having played D&D.
D&D presents complex, ambiguous challenges requiring group solutions. Players have to synthesize different perspectives and skill sets to solve problems while dealing with real consequences. Failure is a set-back but not catastrophic. It requires vulnerability and a willingness to look silly and fail publicly. Playing different characters forces you to consider other viewpoints and motivations, making it a great tool for developing empathy. It’s kind of the perfect management training.
Collaborative storytelling is all about working together as a team to solve a problem. The GM (Game Master) is basically the manager—they set the rules for the world and try to help the team achieve what they want to achieve. The biggest difference is managers shouldn’t throw giant monsters at their team to fight. A lot of them still do.
