Loading summary
Transcript96 lines
- [00:00]
A
In Beyond Blind Blaming, you talk to people and say, what's really the issue? What's the driver? What is the key thing that you need to look at and then make decisions that move you forward towards your desired goal. When people are firefighting, they don't know where the fire is coming from, they don't know why it keeps starting, they don't know what to do to store things differently so it doesn't catch on fire. You're working in the chaos rather than designing a system, designing a business, or around it, around your vision rather than reacting.
- [00:31]
B
Today I'm joined by Bill Ringle, who works with startup leaders who want to move from heroic firefighting to genuine high performance teams that can execute without burning out or breaking trust. He's based in suburban Philadelphia and is the author of the upcoming book Using AI to Grow Business now for Ambitious Startup Leaders, founder of three tech companies and former Apple Manager for worldwide Training and host of my Quest for the Best podcast.
- [00:57]
A
Self Doubt is what happens when you want something to occur. You've taken as many steps as you could figure out, but you've forgotten one really, really important factor which you of course know, Kevin, which is you haven't asked for help. The Google study laid out very clear that what's often the biggest differentiator between teams that could become high performers and those that are stuck at mediocre or subpar performance is the level of safety to disagree.
- [01:35]
B
Welcome to Beyond Blind Blaming. This is the place where we explore how easily hidden truths can hold us back, trapping us in cycles of frustration and blame, often without even realizing what's truly stopping us. Each week, I'm joined by experts and professionals who share their journey of taking back control of their story and overcoming hidden challenges, and discover how to stop blind blaming from dictating their outcomes. The insights you're about to gain will help you see beyond your current limitations, find the courage to seek new perspectives, and ultimately live a life that's both purposeful and powerful. So if you're ready to break free from blind blaming and discover what's possible, you'll definitely want to listen to my next guest. I'm your host, Kevin Saint Clergy, and today I'm joined by Bill Ringle, who works with startup leaders who want to move from heroic firefighting to genuine high performance teams that can execute without burning out or breaking trust. He's based in suburban Philadelphia and is the author of the upcoming book Using AI to Grow Business now for Ambitious Startup Leaders, founder of three tech companies and former Apple Manager for Worldwide training and host of my Quest for the Best podcast. He runs an eight week program building a high performance team as a startup leader, where founders and managers use their own company as the lab, building a simple team operating system, clarifying roles and decisions, and systematically designing around the traps that quietly derail most teams. When he's not teaching or coaching startup leader, he plays competitive tennis, takes hiking trips, and reads science fiction. Bill, welcome to the show.
- [03:05]
A
Great to be with you, Kevin.
- [03:06]
B
Well, let's just start with your journey. What led you from founding tech companies and working at Apple to doing what you do now, Helping high performance teams.
- [03:14]
A
So I'll back up a little bit. Before I started at Apple, I was the top consultant at Drexel University, which was the first university in the country to require every student coming in to have their own computer. And it was a Macintosh. So this is way, way back. And I had developed all of the systems for being able to manage with a small team. There were 13,000 academic and administrative end users when I was there. And I used to tell people that a good day was when not every one of them left me voicemail. So I had to think about systems and I had to think about how to do this. And I built relationships with the vendors such as Apple, Microsoft, Clarus, Symantec, all of those tech companies. And I would give them ideas for how we were doing things. And they would often bring me on to present at conferences. And Apple had done that. And eventually they said, hey, how would you like to come work with us? I said, that sounds like a dream come true. While I was working at Apple, it was right at the turn of starting the Internet and two things happened. One is there was gigantic demand for people who could help companies get started on the Internet with their first websites. Being able to take form, information, orders, all those things. And then also on a personal side, my son was born and I was going all over the world. I was a worldwide manager at Apple and I realized this has to change. So that's when I decided to look for an opportunity. And actually one came when Steve Jobs came back and I just leaned into it to take a package and start my company.
- [04:50]
B
Oh, wow. Well, I always like to say the only people who remember that you're working late and you're not there are your kids.
- [04:56]
A
Yeah.
- [04:56]
B
And it sounds like you figured that out pretty early. So kudos to you for that.
- [05:00]
A
Thanks.
- [05:00]
B
Well, when I was researching what you do and I read high performance team a lot, when you say high performance team in a startup environment, what does that actually look and feel like day to day for a founder or a manager.
- [05:13]
A
All right, well, it starts like this. It feels like Monday morning, minus the dread.
- [05:22]
B
That's good.
- [05:23]
A
Managers and founders, you open your laptop and you actually know what's happening. It's not to find out what the heck's going on. It's to see that things are happening as planned. Not because you spent the whole weekend in Slack, but because your team uses a simple system to show progress. So specifically for managers and founders, you look at your calendar and it's not jam packed with meetings back to back to back. You've got space to think. When somebody needs your input to escalate a decision, it's the right decision to escalate, not a myriad of decisions that range in importance and significance. So here's the test that I often tell people. I say, could you right now take a 30 day vacation with no communication to the office without everything falling apart? And usually two responses. One is they think about it. Second one is just abject terror.
- [06:19]
B
And somebody. I was in a talk recently. Somebody asked the group if they suffered from the Sunday scaries.
- [06:25]
A
Yes.
- [06:25]
B
And I thought that was pretty funny because I've actually witnessed that firsthand for someone that I used to work with who would basically break down in tears on Sunday because she was so stressed about having to go to work at Monday.
- [06:34]
A
Yep.
- [06:35]
B
Will you talk about. No, go ahead.
- [06:36]
A
No, it's because I have. Remember when I used to work six days a week and that wasn't fun, but I thought that was necessary in order to get to the goals and the objectives that I had promised clients and to keep my team running. And I was like, you know the mad guy you see at a circus or Voville, who's spinning plates and goes down the line, then runs back to the beginning of the line to spin that plate as it starts to wobble. And it's just pressure and there's no time to think strategically. There's no time to really build the kind of life you want, nevermind the business you want.
- [07:10]
B
Well, that's perfect for my next question because you talk about leaders being stuck in heroic firefighting mode and what are some clear signals that a leader or team is operating in that mode.
- [07:19]
A
Yeah.
- [07:19]
B
In addition to what you just said.
- [07:21]
A
So I would go back to the calendar. I think the calendar is such an important operating tool and it's barely used to its potential. So when you're operating correctly and not fighting flyers, your calendar is about 60% full plus meetings and half of them are just quick Meetings, not everything is the standard hour or half hour. Sometimes you just need five minutes to touch base. Everything on track? Yep, we're good. Oh, there's one thing I want your input on. Great. So coordination happens verbally, but there's no system when people are firefighting all the time. Signal two is that decisions are always escalating. And some you have to realize that many entrepreneurs and business leaders and startup leaders find this reassuring that they're in control and they know what's going on when it just becomes a non scalable path. When somebody says, can I approve a $3,000 expense? And you realize you've told them they can decide that without asking. That's when you realize that you're the bottleneck. It's like somehow I've said one thing, it's not a policy, but the practice isn't matching what we said we were going to do. And then the third signal I'd say is when something breaks, nobody knows who broke it or who owns it. It's like. And then it becomes a project just to figure out who owns it, who's the less to touch it and before you could even begin to solve the problem.
- [08:45]
B
Well, that's interesting because that kind of ties into the Beyond Blind blaming topic or the name of the show on my book. Because I would think that when things aren't getting done or they have to form a committee to look at a problem or go through a root cause analysis project, which can take months if not years, sometimes with no solution. How do you see blind blaming showing up inside startup teams, especially when results start to slip?
- [09:07]
A
I've read blind blaming, beyond blind blaming. I've applied the principles. I really think that they're very accurate because you need to look at what the real root cause is. And sometimes it comes to root cause analysis, but that's often reactive when you realize you don't know what the root cause is. In Beyond Blind Blaming, you talk to people and say, what's really the issue? What's the driver? What is the key thing that you need to look at and then make decisions that move you forward towards your desired goal. When people are firefighting, they don't know where the fire is coming from, they don't know why it keeps starting. They don't know what to do to store things differently so it doesn't catch on fire. You're working in the chaos rather than designing a system, designing a business around it, around your vision rather than reacting.
- [09:57]
B
And do you think sometimes that leads to founders eventually blaming themselves or starting to have self doubt. Creepy.
- [10:03]
A
Absolutely. Self doubt is what happens when you want something to occur. You've taken as many steps as you could figure out, but you've forgotten one really, really important factor which you of course know, Kevin, which is you haven't asked for help. You haven't gotten outside perspective. I think I've read in your book, and I've read in other places as well. You're not the one who could read the label when you're inside the jar.
- [10:26]
B
That's right. I like that a lot. I may have to ethically swipe and redeploy. That's what we say, instead of stealing. But I might have to steal that. That's really good. I always like to say, look, people see things when they're looking at you that you can't see yourself when you're looking in the mirror. Sometimes we're really hard on ourselves, like, God, I really need to lose another 10 pounds. And then 10 minutes later, somebody sees you and says, wow, you look great. You've lost so much weight. It's just the difference between looking in the mirror and having somebody look at you through a window. And I think that's where coaches, masterminds, and things like that can make a big difference.
- [10:56]
A
I think it's also important to take a step back and say, have I really set what the criteria is? Just to, you know, jump on and contribute to the point you just made. If you're looking at yourself in the mirror and thinking you always need to lose weight, you've never set what I want to weigh, you've never set the objective criteria for success. So you do something that a lot of startup leaders do, which is you keep moving the goalposts and that leads to burnout, frustration, and you're really modeling for your team how not to manage. And that's why it perpetuates.
- [11:26]
B
Yeah. And I see people that, they work harder, they hire faster, they push more, and then it keeps them trapped.
- [11:32]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [11:33]
B
So speaking of traps, what's one of the most common traps to avoid when building high performance teams? As a startup leader, I go back
- [11:40]
A
to what's a team and why you need a team. And you need a team because you need to bring people in with different expertise and additional bandwidth to accomplish goals. Well, if you're going to go through that much trouble, don't skip the next couple steps which are defining what you want them to accomplish, how you're going to measure success, and how you're going to have an accountability system. So they report back what they found help use your expertise and experience with problem solving and go beyond so that they're actually contributing their own perspectives and adding value in that way. So trap number one is really poor delegation. And it's easily recognized when people delegate a task but not the authority. There's no decision making component in there. And that becomes a problem because, you know, you as the founder or you as the manager, you never clarified what the person can decide on their own. What needs your input? What do you, what do you want to approve? And at what stage are you going to give them the ability to spend the budget and choose a vendor to carry this out, or do you want them to do an analysis and bring back a recommendation for you to discuss? Figure out what it is. There's no one right answer. But the system is build something that everybody knows what success looks like and you'll be much better off.
- [13:00]
B
Yeah, I think what you described and when I was writing my notes is abdication versus delegation, which is something that we talk a lot about in our programs. Too often I think they just throw it on somebody else's plate and then two weeks later they're pissed off because it didn't get done and they're not taking any responsibility for how they delegated it. And I think you call that a fake delegation?
- [13:20]
A
If I got it right, yes. I use that term. I think the other thing that's really important is to realize that system would work perfectly, Kevin, if only one thing were true, and that is if we had the ability to read each other's minds.
- [13:35]
B
Well, if I knew how to do that, Bill, I wouldn't be on this call. I'd be hanging out with my new friends on the beach or my yacht. So here you're there.
- [13:42]
A
We'd be having a conversation in a much more luxurious way.
- [13:46]
B
That's right. Like Turks. I just got back from Turks, so amazing place. Never been, but it was fun. So. Yes, I totally agree. Well, a little bit more. You mentioned things like fake delegation, which I love, by the way. And I want to go back a little bit because of the other note that I wrote down. I'll get back to this. You said something I really liked and that's why I wrote it down. You said what they report back. And I think that's important because I think too many times, leaders, well, constantly, they'll look at the numbers and then they report to the team how they're doing instead of giving them. And tell me if I'm hearing you wrong, but instead of giving them the responsibility and the authority to report back to you how they're doing, so you don't turn into somebody who's pushing. You're actually turning into a coach in a leadership position. Did I hear that right?
- [14:27]
A
Yeah. You're making the space for that relationship to grow beyond simply one way. Do what I say. And that's how you build depth of your management team. That's how you build strength into that. Because now you're giving them the responsibility to actually make the decision to evaluate it, to compare it to what you said success means. And that's hugely important. So giving them the ability to do that and report back to you. And there's another level beyond that where they're not just reporting to you, but you've now checked in with each other, if that's one of your steps. And now you let them report to someone else what the details are. And that pushes down the responsibility further. And many people are afraid to do that. So let me share with you if you're having that sense of, oh, I can't do that, I can't do that, because they wouldn't make right decisions. Understand, one, they're going to make decisions that you wouldn't make, necessarily. Two, most things are reversible if you need them to be. And three, they're never going to grow and learn and develop good judgment without making bad decisions first.
- [15:33]
B
I love it. Well, some other things that I took away from, some of the things you've talked about is an over reliance on heroes. And I'd like to unpack that a little bit and tell me what you mean, because I really like the statement. I need to hear more about it and understand it better. Yeah.
- [15:49]
A
So especially in the United States, I've worked in a lot of different cultures, a lot of different countries, and it gives me the perspective to be able to look at things and say, well, they didn't do that when I was in Japan. Well, they certainly wouldn't do it that way in Spain. They certainly wouldn't do that. You know, in Texas, as compared to Chicago, for instance, there are lots of different values that you get from being able to contrast different industries and different companies that if you've only been working in the same company for 5, 10, 15 years, you. You don't have that same perspective. So I could spot things faster that way. And when you want people to look at things differently and you give them that authority, it makes a better difference. It makes a superior difference to be able to have that perspective. And I'm going to circle back, Kevin because you asked something in particular. I want to make sure I address that. What was the one thing you wanted to make sure? I went back and. Oh, wait, it was about the firefighting. In a lot of different countries, they don't have the same firefighter heroic kind of effort. But people here confuse heroics with adding value. And if they're not adding value at the last minute, they don't feel like they've made the substantial contribution, the contribution that everybody talks about, how they saved the day. Now, I know based just upon our brief conversations we've had, and you know the success you've had as an entrepreneur. You and I, we've both been there, where you have to be the one to step in the gap and hold things together. However, you don't want to always be there, because if you're always the one who's saving the day, first of all, you never can take a vacation. That's right. Second of all, you're not really leading a team to develop them as leaders. You're always saying, I'm going to be the captain, and there's not room for anyone else to hold that role. And third, you're missing what Stephen Covey talked about, which is looking at things in the four quadrants. The four time quadrants of Stephen Covey, where he looks at them, and I think that was based on General Eisenhower's. You read the Eisenhower matrix, but if you look at things and you're always operating in Quadrant one, where things are important and urgent, it feels very exciting, it feels very significant. But the real action of leadership takes place in Quadrant two, where you're working on things that are important but not urgent, so that you're creating systems so things don't become urgent, or it minimizes the things that become urgent so you really can focus on them with clear energy rather than running from one fire to the next to the next, because that's exhausting. It leads to burnout and breakdowns.
- [18:26]
B
Very good. Well, is there a trap that almost every founder you work with initially resists acknowledging and what changes when they finally see it clearly?
- [18:35]
A
So there's one that I think of as the hardest one to get through, and the one that's the most common, I think, is under communication.
- [18:44]
B
Oh, interesting. Tell me more about that. Another new word under communication. Go.
- [18:49]
A
People talk about, oh, you've just got to over communicate. Over communicate. And when people hear that, many times we think, oh, that means say twice. And if the people who, you know, as entrepreneurs are anything like the ones that I know who are Startup leaders. It's very, very much a case where the person who's running a company will have an idea and they'll lay it out for people. And as that person, let me tell you about Peter. So Peter ran a company, it had about 75 people in it and it was a software development firm. And he was going from one project, project meeting and product meeting to another. And I would ask him in our coaching sessions to describe what his day was like. And he would tell me, well I did this and then I had this great idea so I brought it to the next team and on and on. And I said so by the end of the day what did you do? He goes well I was just really happy with all the progress I made. I said Peter, you've just changed the requirements in four different meetings. How is anyone in the first meeting going to know what you learned? And changed in the second meeting, the third meeting and the fourth. And at first he would say oh well, they'll figure it out. And it's like
- [20:05]
B
the assumptive close.
- [20:07]
A
Yeah. And I said well what makes you think that? And he would say it's worked that way in the past. I said tell me about a time when it's actually worked that way. And then we'd get into the details. Oh wait. Well I thought it worked but it really caused a lot of problems. There was a lot of friction. People yelled at each other that they both thought they knew what the standard and the objectives were that we're working toward, but they're working from different sets of requirements. And that's what it means to have under communicated. If you're not giving people the up to date changes so that they could adopt how they dedicate resources so that they could change where they plan meetings and the agenda of their meetings, then you're doing them a disservice. And you've got to take responsibility for some of the craziness you've created by not following through because you didn't know you didn't have any other reason for doing it or any other insights for doing it. As you talk about with blind blaming, they think that the solution to this kind of problem is to work harder when it's not. It's to design a system.
- [21:10]
B
See, I like that. And I think a lot of times when people think about designing a system, they get a little overwhelmed because they start thinking about too many steps ahead. So once a leader is aware or spots a trap, I always call it bns. What's the best next step? And if you focus on that, then it's not so daunting a task. So when they, when they spot a trap, what's a small best next step or concrete step, as you like to say that they can start designing around instead of pushing harder through it is
- [21:37]
A
to write it down. So often in smaller companies especially, and I'll say under 30 people, 30 employees, it's very, very common to have it be what I call a tribal culture, where you learn simply by standing around the hallways and talking to people, getting on a phone call, and it's the meeting before the meeting, when everyone's chatting about what they're doing, and when people start saying, you know, I was thinking we ought to do something a little different, and they go off and talk about that and people say, oh, that's a great idea. We really ought to implement that, those connections are made. But it's really hard because there's no standard of communication. There's no system where everyone says, we're going to put this in Asana or Trello or Jira, and always put into the project management system. So there's what is known in software. It's not my term, but there's a single source of truth and the truth about how we're proceeding with this project, what the real deadlines are. Go look in Asana or Trello, your project management system. That's when you've evolved to a new level of getting out of the under communication trap. You're actually. Everyone knows, first of all, where to look for things, and second of all, when things change, there's communication, there's discussion, and then there's an authoritative decision. We're done discussing the product manager, the marketing manager, the QA manager has chosen a path and now we don't discuss it anymore because we've heard all the feedback and now we're committed to this slightly different direction or slightly different requirement or a slightly different deadline.
- [23:12]
B
I like how you say committed. Let's do this.
- [23:15]
A
So I go back to decision, because a lot of people don't know what a decision means. And it sounds so basic, Kevin But a decision comes from the same Latin root as the word incision, which means to cut off. When you make a decision, you've cut off other options, other paths to pursue, and you're now following the one path that has been chosen.
- [23:41]
B
I like that a lot because as you remember in our book, and when I'm doing my keynotes, I just got done with one at a really cool. It was an ADHD conference for business owners. It's a conference for ADHD business owners was.
- [23:55]
A
That seems redundant to me.
- [23:56]
B
But I believe, I know it's like I think being a business owner creates ADHD is what I keep hearing from clients and friends. But I always ask people what's their biggest takeaway and they're like mfd, I need to make an effing decision. But I love how you take it a step further because I think a lot of people lack a decision making process and I don't think they see it as a process. Can you talk just a little bit about that in your opinion, what, what I mean by that?
- [24:20]
A
So I think process is a wonderful word. I like architecture. What's your decision architecture? And when you have an architecture, you know where the supporting walls are, you know where the load is distributed. And in a decision architecture, you know who has the ability to make decisions on what topics, within what ranges of resources, you know, who needs to be informed, you know, who's the person who's going to deliver the results and who's going to be responsible for working on particular areas to create outcomes. So I think of it as a framework.
- [25:01]
B
I like it.
- [25:01]
A
And once you put those pieces together, you have a document that as you onboard new managers, onboard new team members, first thing you do is you say, all right, first of all, here's our company philosophy, here's our how we do things and here's our day to day operating manual as to how we make decisions and keep projects on track and delight customers.
- [25:23]
B
That's great. Well, I want to move a little bit to your main program. In that program leaders complete an HPT diagnostic at the start and at the end, what's an example of before, after shift that really stay with you or story that you like to share?
- [25:38]
A
Yeah, so that's first of all, if you're doing a program to get new capabilities, which is why I say people ought to take programs and join masterminds and get coaching so that it creates new capabilities. You could certainly solve problems and bring in expertise, but that's more of a coach or a consulting thing where you're bringing an expert to tell you what to do or to do an analysis that you couldn't do. When you do things to develop new insights and skills, I like to say bring that towards a capability you want to bring in and then you're focused on the right area because capabilities you want to be able to measure, you want to be able to say at the beginning, well, it would take us. All right, so one example with Chris, it was somebody who came into the program. And I said, chris, tell me about the most important process that is going on in your company right now. And he says, right now we are in hiring mode. We have a lot of commitments to make, and we've got to bring in the right expertise in order to build out the team. And I said, look at your last three hires and tell me the average of the time it took to bring them on on board, make an offer, have it accepted. And he says, oh, boy, I'm condensing a lot of time in between here. But he looks at his calendar and it was over a hundred days.
- [26:55]
B
Oh, wow.
- [26:56]
A
And I said, so based on that, does that seem like the best you could possibly do with your company, given that this is your top priority? He goes, oh, no. And I said, the fastest route for you is not for me to tell you what to implement, but for us to work with your management team, all of your direct reports together. And I tell you, Kevin, this is a wild time right now, because this is the kind of thing where I've done this for more than 15 years. And 12 years ago, this would take eight to 15 months, over a year to really get them in line to do this. And now I'm able to do it by condensing things, by compressing time with AI tools. So I don't just give people a checklist. You have a little AI tool to chat with that gives you the right set of criteria based upon your company. It knows what your role is. So it's making things that are perfectly aligned with what your responsibilities are and, and what your commitments are. So it really adds to it and it accelerates how quickly people get there. I don't know if you've ever taught people about goal setting and how to write things out, or maybe even just the old Smart Goals acronym. To be able to use things that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. That would take a couple of weeks for people to really get that right now you could write in a paragraph. And then we evaluate it through those five criteria and say, this is good this week. It needs some help. This one you missed completely. You didn't add any timetable in there. And it gives you a rating. And you know not to send it until your rating is above 88%.
- [28:37]
B
Say, I like that.
- [28:39]
A
So it makes it very easy for people to get it, because I think of it again as the architecture. This is the scaffolding that helps people build their decision architecture faster and more robustly so that they develop a stronger business faster and they grow business now.
- [28:57]
B
I love that. I think one change I made this year in my coaching is to get people focused on their number one goal. When I've done that, I started that probably beginning of last year. I was amazed at how much more successful people were. Once we got that goal figured out, we went to the next one. Because I think so many times, entrepreneurs, startups, they've got a list this long and I got to get them narrowed down. I don't know how you feel about that, but we still use smarter, which I stole from Michael Hyatt. But any comments on getting them more focused on not so many goals? And focusing on one, maybe even three, would be better than the 17 they think they have to hit.
- [29:32]
A
So I go back to. You've just provided terrific evidence and support for the comment I made earlier when you were telling me about your ADHD conference for entrepreneurs. I said, that's redundant. Why is it that they would use more words to describe the same thing?
- [29:46]
B
Right. Exactly right.
- [29:47]
A
As people who build businesses, who are always seeing the future and looking to bring people into that future, it's not a common occurrence in the general population. I've read reports and I kind of believe it's about 1 in 200 people have this, which is why when we go to family get togethers, we start talking about our business. Eyes glaze over. But you meet with other entrepreneurs and a mastermind, and there's magic that happens when you're talking to people that really get it moving quickly, being able to accelerate decision velocity, being able to think about things in different dimensions and compare it to the past and think about how it's going to be in the future and what it's going to have an impact on the target market and the industry that you're looking to positively affect and also be able to look at each other's plans and ideas and say, oh, you missed something there. I would think about this. Make sure you answer these three questions. Those are the things that are really valuable when you get people together. So when you say, when you have people focus on a single goal, how does that impact things? I say it brings about a great degree of focusing, especially if you, as the coach, Kevin, are able to say, all right, tell me what you're planning on doing this week to move towards that number one goal and bring it to this level of. Of criteria that we established. Great. Now, when we get on our call next week, I'm going to ask you about this. I'm not going to forget it. You're not going to be able to tell me you thought of something else, that's great or how you did something completely different. I'm going to ask you about this and we're going to have a discussion. And after a couple times they get that you really will remember and hold them accountable. Because in companies I think that one of the biggest disservices that leaders do is that they run roughshod over agendas. You know, people come in to talk about one thing and how many times, you know, a direct report of a CEO will say, I've been trying to tell him this for five weeks in our one on ones and every time I go in, he tells me it's something he just read and it soaks up 20 minutes of the 30 minute meeting. And then there's some important updates that need to be made. There's a decision or two, but then there's nothing about that. Quadrant 2 Working on things that are important but not urgent right away. So that's a huge loss. If you find that you're not finding new things being brought onto the agenda by your direct reports, that's a sign of a firefighting mode.
- [32:14]
B
I agreed. I think along those same lines, what we've done to combat that a little bit is we have each team member lead the weekly meetings. We switch, we do a round robin. So it's not always the leader leading the team meetings. It goes around. And let me tell you something, when somebody else is leading the meeting, they're damn sure going to pay attention.
- [32:32]
A
You find somebody who hasn't prepared or come in late, that's not the case when they're leading the meeting.
- [32:37]
B
Nope, nope. It's made a big difference. And some people are like, oh. And I was like, listen, you got to make sure these meetings continue when you, God forbid, want to take a vacation and take some time away to reset. Well, something else I enjoyed about some of the things you teach. You talk about creating role scorecards and decision maps. Well, first of all, can you define what that means for people? Because I don't think a lot of people understand when you say roll scorecards or decision maps, what you mean. And then I'd love to hear a story of when it worked.
- [33:04]
A
Okay, so a roll scorecard is very much along the lines that you described earlier. You want to narrow people down to focus on the right things so they're focused on fewer things and give it higher quality rather than everybody focused on everything. And you know, it's run, run like a carnival.
- [33:20]
B
Yep, yep, a carnival. I like that too.
- [33:23]
A
So A decision scorecard means that every person in every role has a list of criteria that they're looking to say, by doing this, I'm contributing to the company's success. I know that if I customer service resolves people's questions or queries and it's responded to within one day and resolved within three business days, that's really a big step forward in establishing our presence and our level of professionalism. And it helps our reputation. And I know that by doing that, my metrics can clearly show that I am doing this and my team is doing this so that we're helping operations grow in that way. Salespeople have scorecards that are much more familiar and obvious about the number of accounts they reach out to, about the follow ups that they make and so on. Every role can and ought to have a scorecard so people know and you start getting to think in terms of metrics. And that's one of the strategic advantages or byproducts of being able to give scorecards is that everybody has their own scorecard and they want to make sense of it, so they're really thinking about how it works.
- [34:37]
B
And decision maps, can you talk about that?
- [34:39]
A
Decision maps are something that we talked about earlier where it says in my decision making authority, I'm responsible for these decisions about my products. Say this is a product manager. I'm responsible for making sure that I bring in input from customer support and that I've asked marketing for their input. I've heard from all of the team heads that report to me on my project. So that product is going to get better and better by continuing to do that. And they could show each month how many meetings with each of their heads that they've had. Also making decisions to keep up with technology, also looking at evaluating different feature sets. So a product manager is also responsible for what the release dates are and what the features are that are included in each release. That's a big responsibility. It's not going to always be the founder, it's not always going to be the person who wrote the first version of the software. So if you want people to take responsibility, you have to give them the authority to make those decisions. And that's where the decision map comes in. Understanding who's accountable for it, who's responsible for the work, who needs to be consulted, who makes the decisions, and who just needs to be kept in the loop.
- [35:53]
B
I like that. And I think getting them to be open and honest when they get those results is important. Agreed.
- [35:59]
A
Yeah. There's a whole aspect to it Kevin, people greatly underestimate the power of what you can do with feedback and they greatly overestimate how open they are to receiving feedback in my experience.
- [36:14]
B
I agree, I think. And one of the questions I have for you is because I think a lot of people are a little nervous about either taking or getting feedback. I think it goes back to Carol Dweck's work with a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset, which I is something you have to teach people. It's not common sense, which is what an owner is like. I just felt that was common sense. I was like, look, it's not. Take it from this guy. I had to learn about it too. But what do you think is a safety or feedback ritual from the course or anything that people can use that they can try in their next team meeting to get more honest signals or to get people to be more vulnerable in a team setting with the people that they work with? Which I think is what you're trying to teach.
- [36:51]
A
So the first thing that I do is establish safety. As we've all read or heard about the Google study on what leads to high performing teams, and I'll share these resource links so that you could include them in the show notes for people listening.
- [37:05]
B
That'd be great.
- [37:06]
A
The Google study laid out very clear that what's often the biggest differentiator between teams that could become high performers and those that are stuck at mediocre or subpar performance is the level of safety to disagree. And one of the fastest ways I found to separate this and allow for that safety to exist is to make sure everybody understands there's a difference between criticizing a process or a decision or a feature. And that's different from the person who made it. It sounds so elementary, but it's not what people operate by. They feel personalized. They take it personal when somebody attacks something and you have to teach people not to attack it, but to say, well, you know, here's why I think this is important. Here's the implication of if we did it a different way, and here's the implication of continuing to do it the way that we have been doing it. So it's adding that level of implication that makes it easier to hear the feedback, process it, and then make better decisions as a result of it.
- [38:13]
B
Well, I like that. And I also like how you use the word better decisions. So because I think that's. I think a lot of people. This is one thing I got wrong on the MFD philosophy, which people love. We've gotten them to be more Decisive. We've got them to be more quick. And what I did at the last mastermind group that we just had in Turks and Caicos, you know, sacrificing myself for the good of the organization once again. I definitely got stuck for two days trying to get home, but everybody was like, oh, poor Kevin, his crappy life. So I didn't get any sympathy there. But it was still an incredible meeting. But I said, listen, guys, we need to make sure that you're not just being decisive. You're making the right decisions. So I'm glad you said that.
- [38:48]
A
I'm going to add a little bit further clarification so that the people who you're with at that mastermind meeting can gnaw on this before they come back and have your next meeting. Think about this, guys. There are different decisions that could be made. There are better decisions, and you'll be more open to better decisions when you step back from thinking that there's just a single right decision.
- [39:15]
B
Well, I like that a lot. Thank you.
- [39:17]
A
So make some space for that and give some thought. You have to do it at a time when you have, when you're not reading email and listening to a podcast and sitting in on a phone call. You need to create that strategic time for thinking, reflecting, and then broadening your skill sets, your capabilities.
- [39:33]
B
Well. And I appreciate the advice. Make some space for that because we do the same things like, all right, guys, pull out your calendar right now. Let's not look at this notebook a year from now and say, boy, I really wish I should have gotten to that. Let's make some space now to do it. Yeah, so I see a lot of people when they're looking at programs like you have or coaching programs, you know, whatever we're doing. I think a lot of founders see that as overhead, but more importantly, they see it as just another time suck. How have you designed that course and some of the programs you have so that a time starved, you know, self diagnosed, time starved leader can implement it while running the business?
- [40:07]
A
One of the most important things to look at, and I've been in professional training organizations like Apple, so I know how people look at it and know how you need to measure the output of what you get. And you always want to be able to measure some gain in capability, some gain in your ability to make faster decisions, your ability to execute things better. And I always say it has to be highly, highly practical. So here are three ways that we make all of our programs very, very practical and focused for, for the participants. First of all you know what we're going to be working on, what capabilities we're going to be working on, because you're going to take a pre assessment and a post assessment so we clarify what it is we're going to be working on and focused on. Kind of like when you say pick one goal guy, you're my CEO, I want you to pick one goal you're going to work on for the next 30 days and we're going to measure it each week so you make more and more progress and close the gap between where you are and where you want to be. So we're going to measure it 2. We measure both in the beginning and at the end. There's so many training programs, but I thought this was just obvious and essential and nope, no, that takes too much time. Oh no. I want people to get results. So I very much invest in that time at the beginning and then I even do a 30 day follow up to see how people are doing so I can answer any questions and help them problem solve at a different level because they have another four, five, six weeks of experience that they've been working on to process the tools through and the practices and implement the policies. So it's the measurement, it's the before and after. And then the third way that we really make it very, very practical and useful for people is that we focus on your business as the case study, as the assignment that you work on. I used to teach grad level courses in business and I'd have people coming in from all sorts of different industries and would go through the textbook and everyone worked through the exercise in the textbook. Even if nobody there worked in the airline industry, the example in the textbook would be on an airline. And so we'd have to think about that. And it was useful to certain degrees, but it's highly more motivating, practical and the results are more impressive when you put your own measures up and say like my buddy did when I asked him about his hiring practices and he said it took us over 100 days to go from requirement to hire and then for him to come back and say, holy cow, we're now doing this in a third the time we've tripled our speed in being able to do this. It's just remarkable that they're able to do those things. But when you're measuring your own business, there's nothing more relevant.
- [42:53]
B
I love it. Well, there's one question I like to ask and then we'll get to how people get a hold of you. But I always like to ask each guest one question. You've clearly invested deeply in your own growth. What are your favorite ways to invest in yourself and continue your learning and sharpen your leadership?
- [43:08]
A
So I love to meet people at conferences and masterminds. There's nothing like being in the same room with people. And we also do this where I'll take a group of senior executive team out for a retreat and I say we have to get out of the environment you're in day to day to get better perspective, to bring back results. So I like to be on and lead strategic retreats and I love to go to conferences where you get to meet a lot of people doing inspiring things and hear ideas that in a short period of time that would just take a longer time to be exposed to otherwise.
- [43:45]
B
I love it. I love that. I wish more people invested themselves so well for managers who are recognizing their own team or founders. The traps you talked about today, what's the best next step to explore your programs and how you can help them?
- [44:00]
A
Get in touch with me on LinkedIn. Mention that you heard Kevin and me talking on Beyond Blind Blaming podcast. I'd love to meet you and answer any questions you have based upon what we talked about. And I'm going to send over links, Kevin, to make sure that, you know, as a resource document that we have, you could link to the document and have people be able to get that so they could read about all of the different ways that go a little bit beyond what we spoke about. And we'll just put the link in the show notes. I think that what we've done was set it up is growbusinessnow.com beyond just to make it easy for them to get there and find out.
- [44:38]
B
I love it. Perfect. And we'll make sure we put them in the show notes. Well, Bill, thank you. Amazing conversation. I'm sure we'll have you back on the show and I'm going to be talking about talking to our mastermind group as well. So thank you for taking the time. I know your schedule's busy. Really appreciate your time today. Amazing information, Kevin.
- [44:54]
A
Thank you so much. I appreciate what you're doing because the ideas and toolkits that you provide others make such a difference. You've made a difference to me and I appreciate the opportunity to give back.
- [45:04]
B
Thank you. All right, well, have a great day.