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- [00:00]
Ryan Deiss
It's one of the things that we do in the scalable operating system that we walk our clients through. It culminates in what we call a clarity day. And the clarity day is where you're supposed to get clear on what are. What's your three year target? So what are your goals?
- [00:17]
Roland Frazier
What. What are your.
- [00:17]
Ryan Deiss
What's your company purpose? What are your core values? What are your strategic anchors? And one of the things that we'll say is, yeah, if you can do one of these team building, bonding exercises, you know, this is a great time to do it. We don't really care which one you do, though. We provide a list of ones that you could do. All the stuff from the table group definitely are on that. Are on that list for just that reason. It provides that vocabulary. And so now the next time somebody's kind of a jerk and they totally throw down your idea, they're not being a jerk, they're just being hyperlogical.
- [00:53]
Roland Frazier
Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Business Lunch with your host, Ryan Deiss, and me, Roland Frazier. Wonderful to see you all here again, even though we can't actually see you. But, Ryan, I can see you. How are you today?
- [01:05]
Ryan Deiss
I'm doing really great. I can feel their presence, and I think that's what matters.
- [01:10]
Roland Frazier
Yeah, I get it too. Even though they're not actually there as we record this. So.
- [01:15]
Ryan Deiss
No, but the vibe is there, the aura is there. And I think that that's what matters the most.
- [01:21]
Roland Frazier
I like it. I like it.
- [01:22]
Ryan Deiss
Yeah. How about you? What's new with you? You do anything fun?
- [01:26]
Roland Frazier
It has been a nonstop. We did our big event, followed by a trip to Las Vegas for a potential sale, followed by facilitation of A5 dysfunctions of A team thing, followed by a challenge, followed by a trip to London. It's been kind of crazy.
- [01:45]
Ryan Deiss
Can you talk about the. You can't talk about the potential sale thing yet, can you?
- [01:49]
Roland Frazier
I can't yet. No, not yet.
- [01:52]
Ryan Deiss
I mean, because that'll be fun. Because it's a potential IPO deal.
- [01:56]
Roland Frazier
So I think that's part of the not being able to talk about it. We're about 12 months away from that thing.
- [02:03]
Ryan Deiss
Do they frown upon talking about public offerings before they've technically gone public? Is that something that they frown upon at the sec?
- [02:12]
Roland Frazier
They can potentially. But to me, it's best to say nothing and not risk any getting anybody mad at me in any way.
- [02:21]
Ryan Deiss
Yeah, that's probably a good call. That is probably a very, very good call. And then what was the other thing so you facilitated. I don't think of you as necessarily being, and I don't mean this like as an insult, it's just, it's a neutral statement. I don't think of you as necessarily going in and facilitating like a team building, camaraderie kind of thing. So you went in and facilitated Patrick Lencioni, who I love the book the Five Dysfunctions of a Team. So you went in there and just. And facilitated this for one of, One of the portfolio companies.
- [02:53]
Roland Frazier
Yeah, it was. They, they just, you know, and I didn't really think about it till they asked but. And gave the reasons. But I have. If you think about it, we've facilitated together, I don't know, hundreds of meetings and masterminds. And then I've done installations of operating systems and things like that for portfolio companies. And they were just like, we'd, you know, we'd like you to do it. You kind of have, you know, more experience than anybody else and you're good at it. So would you do. It was like, sure. So I bought the, I bought the book again, re. Listened to it, the audio, three or four times. There's a, there's a field guide, I think, to. To it or something like that. That's another book that was the audio book, which I listened to a couple times. And then I bought the facilitators manual online from Amazon, which is a physical notebook, and went through that. And we took the assessments and a personality test that Myers Briggs has called the 16 personality types. And it was actually really great. I had a lot of fun doing it and the whole team, we all got a lot out of it because everybody participated very well. So it was, it was actually really cool. It's not something I would want to do like for a living, but to do it for a portfolio company, I think it could be very, very helpful. And, you know, it's fun for me because I always learn, love learning new things. Have you ever done anything like that?
- [04:17]
Ryan Deiss
Yeah, well, I think we do those. Yeah. And people always ask, like, which which one do you think is the best? And we've done just about all of them at different times. And I think that they're all, I think they're all really good. And I almost don't think it matters that much which one you do. I think the key is just as a leadership team, you're talking about stuff, you know, it's just so important just to be there together, talking about each other in personalities and what all these things do is they give you a vocabulary and they give you a safe place to essentially call each other out about things, to call yourself out about things. And I just think that's really, really good for teams. So that's cool. So for those. So you would recommend it for those leadership teams who are maybe looking for kind of, they're going to go and do an offsite. You'd check out the five dysfunctions of a team.
- [05:09]
Roland Frazier
I would, yeah. And the way that I used it was I. We did the personality tests. So our CFO actually did a cool, a cool adaptation of that where the 16 personality test puts you into one of 16 categories. And then I forget how many different things that it, you know, it showed you. Let's say it was 10. Then it would basically say like, you know, you're a feeling person or a logical person. And what he did was the thing basically has a center point and then says on the scale of feeling to logic, you're 90, you know, as far away from the center as 90 towards feeling or as far away from the center on the opposite side as 90 on logic. And so what the CFO did was he said, let's take our results and he printed them out for everybody. And then we went into a room where he had like put football field, like things with a thing in the middle. And then 10, 20, 30, 40, you know, like the yard lines and each person on the team stood on where they were so you could see like, you know, one logic person is here and the feeling people are way down there. And it's like, you know, so how do we communicate with each other? Knowing that it was kind of cool to have it be a real time player, live version of that data coming to life. I thought that was really cool.
- [06:37]
Ryan Deiss
Yeah, it's one of the things that we do in the scalable operating system that we walk our clients through. It culminates in what we call a clarity day. And the clarity day is where you're supposed to get clear on what's your three year target. So what are your goals, what's your company purpose, what are your core values, what are your strategic anchors? And one of the things that we'll say is, yeah, if you can do one of these team building bonding exercises, you know, this is a great time to do it. We don't really care which one you do though. We provide a list of ones that you could do. All the stuff from the table group definitely are on that. Are on that list for just that reason. It provides that vocabulary. And so now the next time somebody's kind of a jerk, and they totally throw down your idea. They're not being a jerk. They're just being hyperlogical. And the next time that other person, you know, just. Even though you're showing it to them in black and white and they still just won't agree to it, they're not, you know, being a wimp about it. They're just maybe, you know, feeling it out a little bit more than you are. And so, yeah, I think that stuff is great.
- [07:40]
Roland Frazier
The other thing that I liked was I used the assessment. So everybody can take an online assessment, and then you can get the data of how many people felt like, for example, that trust was an issue. And if, like, let's say there were nine people in this group, let's say that there were. There were a couple where seven people were on, like, you know, this thing is an issue in our company. And so we talked about, you know, hey, seven of us said, independently, this is an issue. Let's talk through these big things and see how we can resolve them. And then the other one that was entertaining was that it does the difference spread. So, like, one of the things was in communication style, and the thing, the statement was, it's acceptable to raise your voice during a difficult discussion. I think that was it. And we had nine people. Three people said, never absolutely unacceptable. Three people said, tolerable. And three people said, yeah, that's fine. It was like, okay. So we got like, very, very, we need to talk about this. So it was then coming to agreement on those things where we were, you know, several people thought one way and several another, because obviously, like, so three of us are always going to be saying, no problem, and three of us are going to be going, I can't believe they're doing that. That's unacceptable. So let's, let's agree on the communication style. I forget what they called it. It was like conflict norming, I think, is what they called it. But I thought that was really, really helpful. So what we mostly did, I didn't really follow the full book as much because it's designed to do half day, full day or two day. And I had like an hour and a half. I did end up. I did end up getting, I think about four hours, but really just going through and having conversations around those things. And then we tackled three really, really tough issues that we were having in the company to test our ability to apply the five disciplines and the things that we talked about in the norming. And it was actually really super productive. We got a good plan of action. On all of those things. And two of them, only a week later have already been resolved, which is kind of cool.
- [10:12]
Ryan Deiss
When do you think it's appropriate for companies to start doing that kind of stuff? Because just for context, this company is doing. Can you kind of in general, what their revenue is in team size, right at 100 million.
- [10:24]
Roland Frazier
And it's been around for. The company's been around, I think, for 12 years. This team has been together for a little over a year. And I want to say that, that Leon, Connie said you should have the team together for six months. So, so when would be. If you have an executive team of between three and 12 people that's been together for six months, I guess would be a way to say it. What are your thoughts on that?
- [10:54]
Ryan Deiss
I've just seen teams do this kind of stuff too early. Like, you know, they're doing like a half a million dollars in revenue and it's, it's, you know, a founder and a couple co founders and they're doing a lot of this stuff. And you know, I do believe that it is possible to do this kind of work too early. When really in the early days, your focus does just need to be on growth. It needs to be on sales and that's. That is where it needs to be. And then I've seen teams do it way too late and believe that this stuff doesn't matter. And there's a time in the early days when it's basically entrepreneurial arts and crafts time. And if you do it, it's a waste of time. And then there's a time when if you don't do it, you're going to have some really, really, really big issues. It's like, you know, if you have unresolved issues in any relationship and you don't provide a framework and a safe place to talk about it, you probably.
- [11:45]
Roland Frazier
Know this because I know, you know, a lot of the like software startup type things. But what I would. I agree with you. I think that this would be, you've got a team and, and it's been together for six months and it's truly like people that have defined lanes. Like you've got. Not that, you know, yeah, we're just showing up. Whatever needs to be done, we're going to do. We're all wearing all the hats. But I think if you've got a finance person and a marketing person and a HR person and a, you know, fulfillment and a product and, you know, then, okay, you have a team. You actually have a team.
- [12:19]
Ryan Deiss
Yeah. When you have a True leadership team.
- [12:21]
Roland Frazier
But the other thing that I found and see if this rings a bell, I really liked it. I wanted to send it to you to maybe talk about was some startup Silicon Valley type group put together 50 questions to ask a potential co founder. And I thought it was really good because it helped people get aligned. It was really more for the software world. So there's questions about, you know, are we going to go to a hackathon? You know, okay, not that one, but. But I thought it would adapt really well to anybody because it's, it's the questions that I used to ask people as an attorney when two people would come in the office and say, we want to do a partnership and say, okay, we need to know all these things, but way deeper. So, you know, less legal and more, you know, what do you want? What's your vision for the company? What you know, how do you see our role? What you know, what do you like that?
- [13:14]
Ryan Deiss
Do you want to have kids?
- [13:16]
Roland Frazier
Do you want to read your coach debt? Yeah. And so I thought that treating it.
- [13:22]
Ryan Deiss
Like the relationship that it is.
- [13:24]
Roland Frazier
Yeah. Have you seen that or heard anything about it?
- [13:28]
Ryan Deiss
Yeah. The 50 questions to ask your co founder, I have seen and I stumbled across it as well out there. We'll have to track it down and add it to the show notes. So I do think that it's really.
- [13:37]
Roland Frazier
Really good and I think that there's that for getting together and maybe even in the beginning when the team is coming together, it would be good to go through that up until the point that you have a team, at which time I think you do the five dysfunctions or something like that. And there's going to be good things that come out of getting people on the same page with that 50 question thing.
- [14:05]
Ryan Deiss
Yeah, we, I will say we have, we have done these exercises when we had a brand new member of, of a leadership team and it just turned out that because we do quarterly planning, that that's the cadence, that we do it. And we don't do one of these every single quarter, that's a bit much. But we try to do one every two or three quarters so that we're definitely getting one in, you know, every year and very often twice a year. And it just so happened we had planned to do one and we had a new, you know, in this case, I believe it was a head of product that was coming on. And so the timing was such that I think he had only been with us for like two weeks. We're doing a quarterly planning meeting. Totally appropriate for him to be there. And so we went through this exercise and it was great. It was really great. And he just got indoctrinated. Indoctrinated the company. He now knew everybody. It was really, really, really good. And so I do think that when you talked about the six month rule, I think that that's good, a good rule for teams overall that I wouldn't rush to do this if you're, if the team as a whole hasn't been working together for very long. But I wouldn't say to somebody, if they're new to the team, like prevent them from participating, don't prevent them from participating. That's just one like nuance that I wanted to make sure that we threw in. Don't be like, well you haven't been here for six months so we're not going to let you participate. Like because I think it's such a great way to bring somebody into the fold.
- [15:31]
Roland Frazier
Yeah, I agree and I think that's a really good point that they want the team, let's call it the core team. Like if you had just said let's hire a CFO and a COO and a CMO and put them all in a room that's not been a team even though the company's been around.
- [15:51]
Ryan Deiss
Right.
- [15:51]
Roland Frazier
So if it's, if it's one new member, probably no big deal. If it's more than that, it's big enough deal. I guess it depends on how big the team is. But I'd say that you want some time to work together to see where. Because the five dysfunctions thing says conflict is a good thing. Which I've had that book for, I don't know, since it came out probably and never got through it, but all the way. But the, the idea of conflict being a good thing is, is something that I think runs counter to the way a lot of us were taught that you're better off to listen. You're supposed particularly old school business when I was coming up through B school was, you know, consensus. We're trying to form a consensus and this is consensus is death. Consensus kills because it's. Everybody's basically creating what they call artificial harmony. And artificial harmony is not good. Conflict is good. Disrespectful, unproductive conflict is not good. But conflict so that everyone feels heard and everything gets discussed and considered is good. And then the other, the only thing I would counter that with, and then I'd love to get your feedback is I also don't want to argue every single point. Every time I have A discussion. It's like, so there needs to be some respect my lane, but feel heard balance that I'm not exactly sure how to describe. Maybe you have ideas on that, but the last thing I want to do is have an eight hour meeting because we have to talk about everybody's feelings about every single thing. And maybe that's wrong, but at the same time it doesn't seem terribly efficient.
- [17:32]
Ryan Deiss
Yeah, I mean there definitely needs to be a place for, okay, we've talked about it and the CEO needs to be the one that renders a verdict, you know, and that's. We're done talking about it. We got to move on. And that is a big part of Patrick Lencioni's model is at some point the CEO, the leader, needs to step in and lead. And what leadership often is is being the person who makes the decision, being the chief decisionator. And so I think that's important. One other thing that I was going to say because we did this one time and made a horrible mistake. So I talked about having the new person who was on the leadership team and that was great. One other time we invited somebody who was not on the leadership team, but we really wanted their input in the, in the particular planning meeting. So they were, they were not on the leadership team, but we really needed their input. So we invited them to the planning meeting and we reworked the schedule. I don't remember why. I think we were actually bringing in an outside facilitator and maybe the timing was messed up and so they came in the morning instead of the afternoon, whatever. But it just so happened that this person was there while this bonding team building exercise took place and they weren't in a leadership meeting. And man, oh man, it was a train wreck. It was an absolute disaster because not only did everybody, while they were in the room feel like they couldn't really share because somebody who's on the leadership team who wasn't on the leadership team was there as soon as we're done. This person was walking around peacocking, you know, sauntering into everybody's office as though they were now on the leadership team. And it just created a really, really, really bad, you know, it created a really bad kind of cultural. I don't just stank. I don't know another way to say it, you know, within the office that took a while to get rid of it. So you do want to be very, very thoughtful about who is in that room and the tendency is going to be to include everybody, but you really do want to make sure that it should only be folks who are on that leadership team. If you're the CEO, if you're the founder, you know, your, your direct reports and that that is going to mean that there's some folks who are not, who are not there. And that's okay. This is one of those places where if in doubt, don't have them there. Not if in doubt, include them. Just ask me how I know.
- [20:04]
Roland Frazier
Do you, do you think that it is like, is that a bright line, only direct reports to see to the CEO? Or is there another, like, are there people who might not be that direct report that would be good to have in there?
- [20:20]
Ryan Deiss
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't, yeah, that's. That it's not that I don't think it's that clear. I mean they need to clearly be on whatever that leadership team is, the people who are making the decision. And so it's going to depend largely on the, on the company structure. Maybe it's C Suite, maybe it's svp, maybe it's vp, maybe it's all the directors heads of, you know, I don't.
- [20:41]
Roland Frazier
Know, capped it at 12. I think he said don't have more than 12 people, it's just too hard. Which 12 would be a lot because even nine was, I'd say like maybe you could go one more. But I don't know if 11 or 12 even would be, would be as workable.
- [20:57]
Ryan Deiss
That's a massive, I mean that would be a really, really big leadership team. I think, you know, at its peak Amazon had like 20 something. But that's Amazon.
- [21:07]
Roland Frazier
Yeah.
- [21:07]
Ryan Deiss
So, you know, and you think about Amazon being a bunch of different companies within the company that probably could have all had their own, you know, respective off sites. So yeah, you know, if Amazon had 20, you probably shouldn't have 20 because you're probably not Amazon.
- [21:24]
Roland Frazier
Yeah, that makes sense. Interesting. Well, you know what, we ended up kind of talking about this, so I think we make this an episode. Is there anything else that you think goes with this conversation?
- [21:38]
Ryan Deiss
What I will say is, as we have moved to a more remote first world with a lot of companies, I know we have and I know a lot of businesses have the importance of getting everybody together to plan on a regular basis and to connect and to break bread together and to do these kinds of things, even if you think they're a little bit cheesy. And I kind of do, and I'm not talking about like trust falls and you know, stuff like that necessarily, but giving the people on your leadership team because they are people. Giving them the opportunity to connect as human beings, I think is just so incredibly important, especially if you're remote, but also if you're not, if you're all under one roof. I know with this particular company, by and large, everybody's under one roof, but they typically still don't get the opportunity to connect as people. It is just so incredibly important, especially as companies scale. Just to pause and if you're saying, oh, but we don't have time to take a day or a half day to do an off site, the fact that you don't have time, the excuse, is probably the reason you probably need to get everybody off site, have that reset, have that fast and get it done.
- [22:57]
Roland Frazier
It's funny because in those, and I've gone through a lot of these with different companies in the meetings where it's a weekly meeting and it's okay, give us a business win, give us a personal win. I struggle on business wins easy because I'm working on things, there's always something happening. But in my personal life, there are things that I feel would be not wise to share because I might have a different lifestyle than, you know, other people. I might have different compensation level. I might do different things that would then sound, you know, like braggy or, you know, or just create, you know, discontent of some type. And so then I'm reaching for personal wins. And then it's things that I don't think anybody would have. Like, I don't consider it a personal win that I learned to play a jazz song. I've been trying to learn how to play or, you know, something like that. I find it really hard on a weekly basis to do that. So we actually, in that company, we talked a little bit about that meeting. And I'm going to loop this back to what you were talking about. And we decided to rotate a book once a month and a couple of other things. So we're only doing the, the personal win thing once a month because everybody, like, everybody's personal win that has kids is my kids played and they won this game against, you know, this team. And I know nobody cares about that, but that's my personal win. And you guys already know that My kids play that and you know that they're on the team and that they're going to play every single week, 10 times. And so I can't possibly be interesting to you, but knowing it the first time is interesting. And so in the dysfunctions thing they have you say, was it where you were born and then how many siblings you have. And then what was your biggest challenge growing up? Not deep seated therapy requiring challenges, but just, you know, what thing did you find was hard? And the purpose of that is to get people to know each other so that you don't have the. I forget what you'll probably remember. It's something attribution where you basically tend to attribute to other people that good things happen to them because they're lucky and good things happen to you because you have good character. And so to get past that, it's to get you to know the other members on the team on a more personal level because then you won't do that attribution thing to them and you'll treat them more as equal human beings. So I do like it for that purpose. But, man, there's only so much sharing that I feel is that truly productive of what's going on in your personal life? I'd love to get your take on it.
- [26:07]
Ryan Deiss
I agree. I mean, we changed it to just tell me something good that happened last week. Just tell me something good. And it could be business or personal. Just tell me something good. Because it's more about opening with positivity. And that's why I do. I would much rather, as opposed to throwing out something kind of trite and meaningless once a week, get everybody together once a quarter and break bread together. Like get together and do some real life together. Because what, what the real goal is, what you're really wanting to do is to create enough trust to do enough people y stuff together that you do see these other folks as real life human beings. Because all we're trying to do is to create enough trust that we're establishing benefit of the doubt.
- [26:53]
Roland Frazier
Yeah.
- [26:54]
Ryan Deiss
Because that, what happens in teams is if something goes wrong and I don't fully trust this other person, I'm gonna ascribe malicious intent just when they didn't mean it at all like something happened. And I'm gonna tell the worst possible version of the story. I'm gonna tell a narrative that is like, they're out to get me and they're trying to screw me and all this other stuff.
- [27:15]
Roland Frazier
With accounting and all, giving the benefit.
- [27:17]
Ryan Deiss
Of the doubt is choosing to tell the best possible version of the story. And that only happens if we see these people as people. And that's what just getting together and doing these kind of exercises does.
- [27:30]
Roland Frazier
Yeah, yeah. Just not too frequently, please. But yeah, the example that was like with the accountant is, well, the accountant's asking for all these receipts and stuff because they don't trust Us, it's like, no, actually, I was at a company before where it wasn't tracked, and then there was an audit and then we lost deductions on stuff and, you know, things got kind of out of control because we weren't watching it close enough. So I'm just doing it for the company to be that way. Or maybe it's that there was something in the childhood with, you know, you always had to keep track of everything, you know, like, you never know. So it's. I like the Miguel Ruiz's four agreements where it's. You always give people the benefit of the doubt and you are exceptional at that, I think. Like, just assume. Assume the best until you're proven that it's not, and you will have a happier life and better relationships. I like that a lot.
- [28:24]
Ryan Deiss
I've never. I've never been upset that I gave somebody the benefit of the doubt for too long. I have regularly been upset and embarrassed, humiliated, felt like a complete prick for not giving the benefit of the doubt and for a second assuming that somebody meant me harm and for going after him. So, yeah, I've had to learn that lesson the hard way, for sure. But long story short, get your people together, get them the same room, personality tests, whatever it is, get it done.
- [28:55]
Roland Frazier
Yeah, it was great, great experience and definitely highly recommend it. Highly recommend. The five dysfunctions. If you haven't done that, are there other ones that you like a lot as we sign off that you.
- [29:05]
Ryan Deiss
I mean, strengths finder is really good. That's another one that you can talk about. Patrick Lencioni has. Has a number of them. Five dysfunctions is good. Ideal team player is another one that I think is good to go through. You know, Richard is the one that goes through all these things and knows all of them, has facilitated half a billion of them, so he would know them all better. Better than I would, but. But yeah, there's a ton of them out there.
- [29:32]
Roland Frazier
What we haven't done that we should, is we should get Richard on here and grill him about operational things sometime soon.
- [29:39]
Ryan Deiss
We should. We should. He's like. He's like the third partner that we, you know, keep hidden away and, like, feed him through a slot. And he definitely exists, but we don't ever let him out in the open. We should do that from time to time.
- [29:49]
Roland Frazier
He's like Ruprecht in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. If you've seen that and if you haven't, you should watch it because you will absolutely say, yes, that is him.
- [29:58]
Ryan Deiss
It's a deep cut Yeah, I like it.
- [30:00]
Roland Frazier
All right, with that, we will sign off. Thank you, Ryan. It was a wonderful talk. And thank you guys all for listening to us. If you like this, please share it with somebody and we'll see you next time on Business Lunch.
- [30:25]
C
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