Cody Sanchez (0:00)

At this place, we are not a family. If you work for a business right now where they tell you that it is a family, you should run away. A business is a high performing team. You're either excellent or this place isn't for you. You don't go to the Chicago Bulls so that you feel comfortable. You don't go play on Kobe's Laker team so that you can do whatever you want and you don't have to get any fucking feedback. Competition is fucking fun, you guys. There's a thrill to trying to see what you're capable of. This is the Big Deal podcast and I'm Cody Sanchez. Today we're going to talk about how to get on winning teams, how to run winning teams. And we're going to talk about what it takes to actually have the life that you want because you can't get very far by yourself. This is kind of a Cody was having a hissy fit last week situation where I was running some stuff with teams. Running teams are one of the hardest things you'll ever do in your life. If you've ever done it, you know, whether it's your kids basketball team or it is your actual company that you're running. The best part about running a business, the people. The worst part about running a business, the people. And so this episode is kind of like the hard truth I want to instill and like bury into the brains of every single human who works for me. And also young Cody. And Cody before she had achieved a lot of things that she wanted in life. And so if you are worried at all about how do you run better teams, if you want to be a winner on a team, this episode's for you. I want to start with a story. And this story is from a book I've been reading lately called Eleven Rings by Phil Jackson, who is one of the most storied basketball coaches of all time. He won with Michael Jordan and Scotty Pippen during the Chicago Bulls area era, sort of like the most famous period in all of basketball in the US and then he went on to win also with Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal in the Los Angeles Lakers. And so he's just a legend. And I want to share some of the stories that he shared. One story I want to share is about how he is called the Zen Master. So this was kind of counterintuitive for, but I believe that the way things start is usually the way things go. And if you don't like it in the beginning, you're not going to like it in the end. And why I like this and relate this to being a Zen master is if you don't know, Phil Jackson was actually, he was a practicing Zen master and practiced Buddhism. So he's like this big, huge former basketball player, kind of known for being fiery, yelling at players. A lot of players didn't like him. He didn't like a lot of players. So he's this intense figure who simultaneously is a Buddhist, which is kind of interesting. And they called him the Zen master because he would have a group of gnarled, you know, intense, sometimes from the hood basketball players like the original Chicago Bulls were, and he would try to get them to meditate. And, and what I think is interesting is the way things start is the way they end. He was pretty famous for every single day meditating in, in the morning. And I know a lot of days, these days self help gurus talk about the importance of meditating. Can I tell you something right now? There would be zero way I could run the number of businesses I run right now if meditating wasn't a part of my practice 60% of the time, not every day I wish I was that perfect. But if you're wondering what you could be doing every single day, that literally wouldn't even be a hard tax on your body would be like stroking yourself like a little cat that needs an itch, it would be meditating. And I get that from one of the hardest dudes I know. And in fact, he even went so far as to tame Dennis Rodman in many ways, who was a psychopath if you didn't know him. Famously friends with Kim Jong Un and, and one of the more wild basketball players of all time. And one of the ways that he did that was by teaching Dennis Rodman meditation. Another story that he told that I thought was really interesting was a story about, was about a Buddhist monk. And, and I'm gonna tell the story to you and then I'm gonna tell you why it matters and how you can use it with your team. Cuz I just told it to them on our Monday call. We do each week, story goes like this. There's a Buddhist monk who travels around to a bunch of towns in China and he shares his wisdom. He's known for these like long, intense philosophical lectures where he speaks to groups of hundreds of monks. And one week as he's giving one, at the end he's wrapping it up and we see all the monks sort of enraptured with his wisdom and brilliance. And. But one monk raises his hand and he says, I actually understood not one thing you said during the last few hours. Could you tell me one simple thing that is true about Buddhism? And the monk thinks for a minute and he just says, everything changes. And why I think this is so important is because a lot of times in my teams I see a little freak out about change. We humans do not like it much. It typically signals some sort of transition in which we could have a threat or something could go wrong with us. But in fact, if we can get used to change, then we can get more used to winning. Because how can you grow a tree but start with a seed? How can the seed become a tree but crack open, expand, get watered, grow into something? Absolutely ridiculous is only by the fact that change is inevitable and it has to go through it. And so I loved that story from him. You know, the idea that Phil Jackson has is one that I try to inspire my teams, which is basically this, that at this place, we are not a family. We're not a family. And I in fact think that if you work for a business right now where they tell you that it is a family, you should run away because it's not true. You don't fire your family unless you know they did something really gross. You don't, you don't yell at your family in a performance review and tell them that they're not meeting company expectations and give a scorecard to grandma. You're just like, okay, grandma. She says inappropriate every time she gets a little ginned up. Okay, fine. You know, it's a totally different thing. So a team is not a family. A business is not a family. What is it? A business is a high performing team. At my companies, we run fast and we grow. And we're some of the fastest companies in our sectors because we operate like the Chicago Bulls. The idea is you're either excellent or this place isn't for you. And hey, no problem. Not everybody wants excellence. And that's okay. You can go do non excellence just about anywhere else in the country. But if you are one of those crazy motherfuckers that can't sleep for the want of becoming a better human, that wants to ring out the capability you have within you, that wants to make as much money as possible, create things that matter in the, in the world, and actually do it with a group of other people who are just as good as you, then you want to work at my companies. And that's what we say. You don't go to the Chicago Bulls so that you feel comfortable. You don't go play on Kobe's Laker team so that you can do whatever you want and you don't have to get any feedback. You go on those teams because you're like, I am the best in the world and I will win at this championship. And if you don't want to win, you play in the B leagues, you have a beer club, like that's fine. Nobody's saying that you have to do that. This is a self selected process. But I think we should be honest about the fact that the best businesses are like teams. You trade players when they don't fit anymore, they trade you when they want a different salary or a different geography. You guys hope that you make each other better, you take care of each other, you exit in the right way, you have good and constructive feedback and you have really harsh conversations. But you don't expect to be tied together for life. If you are tied together for life, that's a partnership and that's something a little bit different. And only a few of the people that you work with through time will actually become partners. My old boss, Jim Bowen used to call it people who would travel through time with. The only people that got partnership, AKA equity at that company were people who traveled through time together. And that I think is very true. The other thing that I wish I realized earlier about teams and being a winner is this. Look at the history. Do you think Scottie Pippen, one of the best basketball players of all time, and Michael Jordan, one of the, arguably the best basketball player of all time, you think they got along the whole time they were at the Chicago Bulls? Well, actually, if you looked at, you know, all of the posters and the paraphernalia, you might think, yeah, they look like best buddies. He's always feeding him the ball. They're like the two biggest names. They built this huge team, but actually they hated each other. Many times they rubbed against each other the wrong way. They had massive friction, they disagreed, they pushed each other. Because the truth of the matter is iron Sharpe, iron sharpens iron. And I think the other thing we have to realize that we've totally lost in this world today. I don't really know why, but we've lost the ability to have really difficult conversations with people and to say, you really want to go there, you actually want to have this conversation? Do you think you're on the right side and push back and have the other person push back too? And the truth of it is you can push back on two people as long as you're excellent. Stops becoming so Interesting. When you're not excellent, then you're just cantankerous. But if you're actually trying to better the team, if you're trying to get better yourself, then that's exactly what you should be doing. And we should be okay with a little bit of creative friction on teams. In fact, if you're running a team right now in the business sense, one of the most important things that I've realized is you have to have built in incentive friction on your teams. So think about this. In basketball, some players are defenders, right? And some people are offense. So some people are going to try to score a basket and some people are trying to stop the other team from scoring a basket. They are inherently at odds. The defenders want to make sure that it's super hard for anybody to make mistakes. The offense wants to make sure that they can push, they can score, they can shoot the ball, they can let the ball out of their hands and shoot it at a net and maybe miss it and maybe have the other side get it. Now, inherently that's not the same thing. And it's the same in business. You need to have people who are saying, I want revenue here, drive revenue, drive revenue, drive revenue. But if you allow the person who drives revenue to also control quality at your business, does that always work? And the answer is no. I mean, we made a big mistake the other day with one of our companies. We actually had a big email list and content used to contain that email list. And the email list then moved to marketing. And marketing used the email list as a revenue driver, as they should. That's what marketing does. But content was sort of asleep at the wheel and not realizing that, oh, wait a second, we should be protecting this asset. This is a product. You can't use this to squeeze an email list for revenue. Do you see the inherent tension? If they both are aligned to only revenue or only quality, then we won't move. This is the left and the right hand side of an or. And so everything in business is basically you as the leader going left and your team starts rowing left and they push all the way through the left stroke and then you go right and they grab the right hand side of the oar and they pull the boat right. And your team's like, how come you keep going left, right, left, right? Why can't we all row the same way? Because that's not actually how you forward propel a boat. You forward propel a boat continuously straight by pulling the left and the right or most of your team is never going to get this, some of them, if you explain it really simply, might. The other thing to realize is that, you know, I love this idea. It's actually a quote from Plato, which is that necessity is the mother of all invention. But, but, but Phil Jackson talked about it because they, they play an interesting game. In sports you have what's called a zero sum game, right? So one person loses, which means one person can win. There are not two winners. There is no participation trophy. There is just one. And in business that's often not the case. Like there are very few industries in which only one person can survive, in which if I sell you X, my competitor has to lose Y. That's not usually the case. And so what about this is? It basically shows you in that instance they're playing the ultimate game. You are either a winner or a loser. And if you think about that in business, we've gotten a little soft to this idea that you, not everybody can be a winner. And that if, you know, if you're in business, that using even the word loser is bad. We lost this, we failed at this. We didn't make it. And I don't think that's true. When you have a loss, you learn more from the loss than you do from a win. What do you do when you win? You celebrate. What do you do when you lose? You ask yourself, what did we do wrong? What happened here? How do we change this? And the best teams, they become better by continuing to push one way or the other. One of the best things that winners do that others don't is they do something called call your shot. That's what we call it. A contrarian thinking. So anytime we set a big goal for ourselves, let's say, I say, hey, we're going to close a big deal. We're going to invest in a company. We're going to make this much money in the next month or two. And I say I am so certain that we're going to do it. I'm so, I want to pit myself against the world. I want to play a zero sum game in which I either hit this goal or I didn't. We say that's called to call your shot. Kind of like you might call your shot at a free throw line like that's going in, or a three pointer or I'm going to score this many points per game. And the reason why you do that is because competition is fucking fun, you guys. You know, I think as we get older, as adults, we forget about this game of competition unless we're athletes all the time playing against one another. There's a thrill to trying to see what you're capable of. And so if you want to be winner, I think a fun thing to do even in your business, even as an employee, is to say, I want to call my shot on this. I think I'm going to be able to hit this thing by this date faster than anybody else. And if you're not even an employee, I think about it. For instance, my mom, who I love, we call her the bulldog. She's an absolute animal. She just gets things done. Or she's like a dog on a bone. She's just like gnaws on the fucking thing until the marrow comes out. And so anyway, we had a problem near the office with a homeless dude. And the homeless dude, whatever, he's staying on a lot by the office. But you guys, and you can only make this up in Austin, Texas. He first he takes over the lot, then he creates like a house on the lot, like a tent house on the lot. We're kind of ignoring him. It's fine. I'm watching to see if there's anything dangerous going on. Well, it escalates when he threatens one of my employees with a knife and tells her that she can't park in front of his property because he is turning into a paid parking lot. And she is in front of his, his parking lot. And so he says, do not park there, threatens her with a knife. Anyway, we call the cops. The cops come and I you not, I couldn't make this stuff up if I wanted to. The cops come and they talk to my husband and they tell him that they can't do anything because the guy says that she was parking in front of his ingress egress and so she shouldn't do that. So you just, you almost have to laugh. So anyway, my mom heard this and was like, this is ridiculous. Law abiding, paying taxes, citizens. We're going to make sure that that is not acceptable. And so what does she do? She like works the problem, works the problem, works the problem. And she says, we're going to finalize this to make sure all of your people are safe. And we're going to do it in the next 30 days. And lo and behold, I get a full phone call today. And she does it. And so I don't want you to think this is just related to business. Call your shot in life, you might surprise yourself at what you're capable of. And then the cool part is you might actually do it. And it could be A small thing, or it could be a big thing. The last thing on Phil Jackson I want to close with is that he has a great saying. So let's say that 2024 was not your year. Team hasn't done what you wanted to do. Your business hasn't, your life hasn't gone the way that you want it to, to go. He says, do you want to know the best way to not win this year? It's to do what you did last year. And it's so simple. Except so often we keep repeating the exact same habits, routines, people we hang out with from one year to the other. And so if everything changes is the mantra we know to be true, then we've got to make sure that we change alongside it. Because the only thing that we know will kill us for certain is in a world in which everything is evolving, if we stand still, what are we actually doing? We're atrophying there, actually. I mean, physics tells us this. There is no such thing as stasis. You work, you cannot stand still. Even right now, if I wasn't moving, I would be breathing. Blood would be pumping, atoms in my body would be moving around. There is no such thing as standing still. So if you are not moving, you are actually doing what you're atrophying, you're starting to die. And I remember that a lot in business. That's why you have to set bigger goals every single year. Because if you don't, if you think, hey, let's just keep the business exactly like this, well, what do we know? I don't know. Inflation increased by anywhere from 3 to 10%. More competitors come on board, so they come at us. Maybe our product is old, and so the product needs a little bit of judging up because it's not as relevant anymore. Maybe AI has crept in in some way. So if we aren't evolving, we are dying. And if you do the same things la this year that you did last year, you're not going to make it. And I think that's a hard truth. Okay, let's do a few stats here to show you that I think I'm right. And we'll see if the data backs us up. So Harvard psychology professor Dr. Richard Hackman actually found that when a team was called a family, it reduces constructive conflict and challenge and lowers the profits of the business. He also found that often it increases employee disengagement, which is problematic because Gallup already says that 70% of employees are disengaged in the workplace, largely due to what. Why Are they disengaged? Do they not make enough money? Do they not like their boss? Do you know what the two main reasons are? There's not enough challenge or accountability in what they do. It's actually just that they're like, we're all these little monkeys that we're like, we want the banana when we touch the red, you know, button, feed us when we touch the green one. And we're not supposed to, don't feed us. We want to know that our work matters. We want to know we're going to get compensated when we do the right thing. And we want to know that somebody's watching one way or another. Otherwise why are we here every single day with you guys at work when we could be with our family? And I think that's why in the trust factor study, Meister and Green actually saw that too much safety in the workplace actually breeds complacency and inhibits performance. So when you give too much trust, when you don't push what happens? It actually means that you don't perform as well. Which I think we know this to be true. But it's always helpful when the data backs it up. Okay, my last little pitch to you guys on the data portion of this is, look at this. So Kinsey did a study that said if you have low performing people on your team and you do not measure productivity of the team overall, what happens? Well, top quartile teams with no low performers on them, they achieve 50% more profitability and 30% more productivity. So when you don't have underperformers on your team, no shock, kind of. But when you actually have accountability with those top performers, you make 50% more money and you're 30% more productive. So holding your team accountable makes you more money. I think that makes perfect sense. Another thing that I want to talk about is this, this idea of attrition. So a lot of times people will say, well, do companies have a lot of people that rotate through them? And that could be a bad thing. And they're right, that could be a bad thing. But it's actually not always a bad thing. Let me explain this. So we see in a bunch of data from Forbes and Harvard that companies with strong performance driven culture actually have higher rates of employee turnover. So more people le. But it often represents people finding the right place for them. So this self selection, AKA hey, this actually isn't a right fit for me at this company because I want to do X or I want to do Y or I don't work this hard Actually allows you to continuously right. Size the team as opposed to have bloat. I mean, have you guys seen the government lately? Right. We've got billions of dollars cut from the government in one week. How does that happen? There's zero accountability in that place. Guess what else? Government employees are the least satisfied with their job. They also are the likely to get fired and yet they are spending all of our taxpayer dollars. Why? Because there's no accountability and there's no performance basis for being in the government. In fact, and I would know because my husband worked in the government for a long time. A lot of times there's not even hierarchical structures. So you don't even have a direct boss. You don't have KPIs key performance indicators. You don't have a specific thing that you have to hit, otherwise you might get fired. And that, it turns out, is really bad for teams. Obviously bad for us as taxpayers and bad for us as individuals. Even though it might sound nice to not get micromanaged all the time. Okay, one other thought here. I found this fascinating Forbes study that actually shows that companies that embrace a performance driven culture and quote, unquote, tough love attract higher performing talent and grow at a faster rate than those that focus on retention at all costs. So you would actually make more money, probably be happier, have a better and more profitable team if you gave constructive feedback, if you held people accountable, and even if you had higher turnover. Fascinating. One of the other keys to teamwork that I've been thinking about a lot lately is I think personality hires got a really bad rap. So if you're a personality hire out there, I actually think you got a really big place. There are a lot of reasons why you need a team that is completely different. Let's take the Lakers for instance. If you go back to Kobe Bryant, he was supposedly really hard to work with. I mean, rest in peace, but he knew how excellent he was. He was pretty intense on his teammates. He always wanted the ball. He always wanted to take his own shots. He and Shaq got into it all the time. Shaq was a little bit more respectful of hierarchy. Kobe could give a fuck. And so they had two totally different personalities. So what did that mean? It actually meant that Phil Jackson have to had to have other members of the team who could massage the situation. They weren't as good as Kobe, they weren't as big as Shaq. But they went in there with one purpose, which was to make the team cohese together, to bring it together like glue. And so I think Sometimes we have to ask ourselves, who is the glue on the team? Is there somebody cracking jokes? Is there somebody who at the end of a terrible meeting is kind of saying, okay, well, this is awful. We got to close this, you know, we'll all hate each other tomorrow. Is there somebody kind of bringing levity to what you do every single day? And if not, that might be your next hire. Let's talk about you. One of the fascinating parts about performance is that we know through multiple studies that if you believe in yourself, you have a higher likelihood to succeed. And if others believe in you, you have an even higher likelihood to succeed. In fact, we know that people's perception of us is so important to us that it can even raise our IQ when we have students who are labeled as being special but actually report no higher IQ than another placebo group, just the label means that those students increase their IQ points by four points over the course of a year. So what does this mean? Even if you aren't the winner on the team right now, even if you don't have a winning team, how can you believe that you can get there? I think that entrepreneurship is this mixture of unbelievable irrational self belief and not quitting. In fact, I want to read you guys something. This was in my diary the other day and I'm going to read it to you. Okay. I was writing this on a moment where I was recalling back what it was like early on in being an entrepreneur and how hard it is. And I wrote this. The most brutal and quiet battle you'll ever have to wage is to create the life you want. It's not just the doing it. It's keeping the irrational self belief that you can believing even when all proof says you won't and you have no success to show for it. You'll have sleepless nights and even to your partner, you won't be able to fully explain. No one else gets the weight of not being able to pay bills or secretly worrying you're completely incapable. People say imposter syndrome isn't real. Wrong. I've never met a successful person who wasn't hanging onto the edge of discomfort. But if you can keep this battle alive, keep believing in you despite all of that, you will achieve maybe even more than you set out. That is the truth of the battle of life. I hope this was useful for you this week. This is a solo pod from my heart to your heart. Something that I'm struggling with that I hope you struggle a little bit less. I wish somebody had shared these lessons with me. The goods, the bads, the uglies. That's what we do on the Big Deal Pod. I'm Cody Sanchez, and if you haven't subscribed, please do. If you haven't shared with a buddy to tell them you think that they're a winner, please do. That's the only way the podcast grows.