Leading with presence and building strong partnerships

Successful leadership isn’t just about making the right calls—it’s about fostering meaningful relationships that drive long-term success. This week on Pave It Black, NAPA President & CEO Audrey Copeland returns to the studio for an insightful conversation with Christine Shaw, President and CEO of Naylor Association Solutions. With a partnership spanning over 20 years, Naylor and NAPA have worked together to provide essential resources for the asphalt pavement industry.

In this episode, Christine shares how partnerships, humility, and visibility play a crucial role in leadership. She discusses the importance of acknowledging blind spots, building strong teams, and continuously seeking growth—not just as a leader, but as an organization.

Whether you’re a seasoned executive or just beginning your leadership journey, this conversation will challenge you to think differently about leadership as a process of learning, adapting, and giving as much as you receive.

Here’s a brief insight into the conversation between Audrey Copeland and Christine Shaw. Listen to the full episode to explore how partnerships are vital in sustaining successful leadership. Listen wherever you get your podcasts

What are the good qualities of a good association besides being mission-based, and how are you helping create those communities in partnership with those associations?

Naylor currently works with a little more than 1500 associations, and they range in all sorts of industries. In terms of what makes a good partner, it’s a couple of things. One, it starts with if they have a problem that they need to solve. Most of it centers around member engagement and retaining and growing the membership but also adding value to that membership. It’s not about numbers. It’s about the quality and how the membership feels about the value. What we do well is we create services and solutions around member engagement that could include things like an A.I. Newsletter, which we do with you, or a buyer’s guide or a magazine or digital environment or show. In terms of what makes a good partner is sometimes hard because at the end of the day, we are a vendor, but when you treat us like a partner and there’s that trust, it starts with building trust with the association and Naylor, right? It starts with us listening to what your needs are. And the association being willing to be open and sometimes humble about what they’re good at what they’re not good at. We love to start with data and insights, like we want to understand, get under the hood: what are the true pain points that you have or your members have? What did they need to feel good about it? 

When you come into a new organization and you’re looking at some of these possible friction points or areas of weakness; how do you approach that as a leader?

What I have found and this is even if you think about personal relationships, whatever, right? You get comfortable, you forget to do the little things. And so what you first have to ask yourself is it that or did the relationship just turn sour? Because if you don’t correct it and seek to understand, you’re just going to repeat those behaviors in the next relationship, whether it’s a vendor or personal. So in terms of how I practice as a leader, the very first thing I do is ask the employees. I do employee surveys. I want to know what’s on their mind. What are they frustrated with? What they’re not frustrated with. I’m always transparent and say, ‘I’m not going to be able to solve every problem or fix everything you’re unhappy about, but I’ll be transparent about what I can and can’t do.’ And same with customers. 

One thing that’s hard to do, but when you get really good at it, it really benefits both parties, is to not get defensive, to listen with the intent here and not to react. That’s one of the hardest things to practice. It takes a real discipline mindset and I’m not always perfect at it. I think what’s important as leaders of companies, whether you’re talking about your employee base or customer base is that be willing to ask the questions, be willing to hear and be willing to be humble and acknowledge and then solve it.