Loading summary
Transcript25 lines
- [00:00]
Martin Moore
When you start something new, whether it's a business, a project or a podcast, there's always that moment of doubt. Is this the right move? Is it actually going to work? Look, I've been there. And while the uncertainty never fully goes away, having the right systems in place makes a big difference. That's where Shopify comes in. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and it powers 10% of all E commerce in the US. From established brands to people just getting started, it's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com leadership. Go to shopify.com leadership. That's shopify.com leadership. When your team gets just a little bit too comfortable and performance starts to slide, it's most likely your fault. It happens to all of us and it's called leadership drift. In this episode, Em and I give you seven ways to reset your leadership standard and get your team back on track.
- [01:10]
Emma Moore
Welcome to the no Bullshit Leadership podcast. In a world where knowledge has become a commodity, this podcast is designed to give you something more access to the experience of a successful CEO who has already walked the path. So join your host, Martin Moore, who will unlock and bring to life your own leadership experiences and accelerate your journey to leadership excellence.
- [01:32]
Martin Moore
Hey there and welcome to episode 389 of the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. This week's episode, 7 Ways to Reset your leadership standard. In the lead up to our march cohort of leadership beyond the Theory, Em and I are running a free webinar series this week. It's all about how to recognise the telltale signs of declining standards in your team and what you can do about it. In this episode, we're giving you access to day one of the webinar. Absolutely hot off the presses. We had almost 500 people join us live, but we want the thousands of leaders in our no Bullshit Leadership podcast community to have access to it as well. We really hope you love this conversation as much as the live audience did. So let's get into it. Normally, when you go into a new role as a new leader, particularly in a new company, you'll find that there are some things you want to reset and change because people get into bad habits over time, and so you're going to want to address those when you come in as a new leader. And a lot of this is about stamping your mark, about your own expectations. But if you've been in a team for a long time, leading it, you'll find that you just have leadership drift. And this is what we're going to talk about today. Things just go on the slide now. Your team's already telling you whether or not you're a good leader. They're just not using words. But if you're watching and reading the play, you're going to know pretty easily whether you're doing the right thing as a leader and they're doing the right thing as a team. Their messages are just so clear. They are plain as day. So you'll start to see symptoms like missed deadlines. And that's not because the deadlines are overly ambitious. It's because people stop caring about whether or not they hit the deadline. Because near enough is good enough. You'll get complacent attitudes about a whole range of things in the team. And quite often this is also linked to an entitlement mentality. So you'll see that creeping in over time. There's blame and excuses. It's, you know, it's always someone else's problem. It's not our fault. We. We didn't have any control over it. And for anything that goes wrong, this is the standard fare that you're gonna get served back to you. There are lots of broken commitments. I know I said I'd do this, but I did something else instead. You very rarely have people say to you, I know I said I was gonna do this, but I didn't bother or I got distracted or I didn't feel like it. They'll normally say I was doing something else that was more important, which sounds so much more tolerable. And then slow decision making, you know, that sense of urgency just disappears over time. So this is what drift looks like, and it happens in every single team. And this is why my experience tells me that if your team is not going forward and improving all the time, it's not staying where it is. It's actually going backwards. So we're going to talk about that over the next few days. If your team isn't performing at its full potential, the problem is most likely you. I know, but almost everything that goes wrong in a team can be traced back to leadership. Either the failings of leadership, sins of omission, where you don't do the things you're supposed to do, or you're just too loose with how you lead people and they just grow like weeds and things just get out of control. Everything on the upside can be fixed by better leadership. There's no problem I've ever seen in any company that can't be fixed by better leadership, better decision making, stronger accountabilities, better capability and talent. Everything can be fixed with decisions and actions that you take as a leader. So many of you will know me, some of you know me probably better than I'd like you to, but. But for those of you who don't are being exposed to me the first time, I just want to give you a little bit about why you should listen to me. I had a 30 plus year career as a corporate executive here in Australia and I was able to get roles across many functions and many different industries. So I worked as a technology executive, as a cio, head of strategy, a CFO and a head of sales and marketing for big companies and eventually became a CEO of company called CS Energy. And I worked across industries like mining, insurance, rail transportation and of course energy. So if you look at my crowning glory, my time at CS Energy, I had a five year contract there as CEO and that was a place where leadership drift over a lot of years had taken it to a pretty ordinary place. When I turned up there. Of the hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, the earnings before interest and taxes, the ebitda was only $17 million. Five years later, when we posted our final annual report under my leadership, it was $441 million. So that's an earnings compound annual growth rate of 125%. Now I'm not bragging about that. Most of that work was done by other people. What was different was, was the fact that I set a different standard, I created different capability and shifted the culture so that it could become a performance culture instead of an engineering culture because that was what it was when I turned up there. You don't get results like that by not leading people the right way and by allowing standards to be lax. And so I did that over a period of five years. I learned a hell of a lot in the process. And at the end of it, Emma came to me and said, dad, you're destined for more. And so that's when we set up this business. Your CEO mentor. And since we set up in 2018, we've had two and a half thousand alumni go through our leadership program, Leadership beyond the Theory. And these alumni aren't just people who put a title on their LinkedIn profile. They are going from strength to strength. They're getting promotions and bigger jobs and a better career outlook because they're leading for performance. And this is the big difference with what we do. Our podcast, no Leadership. 8 million downloads across 150 countries. And when we published my book in the US in 2021, it went to number two on the wall Street Journal bestseller list. So that's some of the reasons why you should listen to me. But I also want you to know why you should listen to Em. Because she's the CEO of our company and she runs it out of Sydney.
- [08:06]
Emma Moore
Yeah. So, you know, as Marty said, I'm the CEO of your CEO mentor. I'm also Marty's daughter, which means that even though we work together professionally, I still get the odd opportunity to embarrass him with old family photos. Do you like that one, Marty?
- [08:20]
Martin Moore
I can't believe you couldn't find one with less chins. But that's okay.
- [08:24]
Emma Moore
Now it's my job to get everything out of Marty's head and put it into your hands. Everything we teach today comes from the mistakes we've made and not theory that we've read or listened to on podcasts. Although I do know a good leaders podcast if you're looking for one. Now, by the end of this session today, you will know exactly why your team can't outperform your leadership and the invisible ways that leaders are lowering the bar while thinking that they're doing the right thing. Now, fair warning, if you are doing this right today might make you feel a little bit uncomfortable, but that is the cost of raising standards. My friends and I know that you are all up for it.
- [09:02]
Martin Moore
Fantastic. Thanks, Em. So just a little bit of roadmap over the next couple of days. Today's about resetting your standards. Tomorrow we're going to talk about accountability, because this is the number one lever for performance improvement. So we're going to talk about resetting your accountability and the accountability levels and layers in your team. And then finally, on day three, how do you turn this into a system? How do you systematize it so that it is repeatable, it is predictable, it is consistent?
- [09:29]
Emma Moore
Yeah, I'm going to start this one with a. With a bit of a confession. So, about eight months ago, I was busy. Our team was growing really fast, and we had a few key members on leave. The complexity in the company had increased, and the pressure was honestly higher than ever before. And it just gave me less margin for error. So I was on a call with a client, and they were describing their people problems, and I gave them the framework that we teach all the time in leadership beyond the theory. I said, chris, you know this, but I'm going to say it again. Every team member needs absolute clarity on three things. Number one, what Are your expectations of me? Number two, how am I performing against those expectations? And number three, what does my future look like here? And as I said the third one, I had a realization that just made me feel a bit sick in my stomach. I did a quick run through in my head and I realized that my own team probably didn't have that clarity. They were a strong team. I had a lot of trust in them and I would probably describe them as self motivated performers. But subconsciously, somewhere along the way, I probably told myself, you know what, they've got this. I can relax on my leadership with them for a little while while I maintain the speed of the deliverables that I've got to achieve for the business. But look, if I'm being really honest with myself, they weren't performing to their fullest potential. I wasn't challenging them, I wasn't developing them. And leadership just felt harder than it needed to be. Not just for me, but for the people report to me as well. And that is really when I realized that I was suffering from leadership drift. So I essentially got so busy with the work that I just let my team keep doing their thing without maintaining that strong leadership. And while they couldn't name it, everyone could feel it. So I committed to a leadership reset, something that would draw a line in the sand explaining why I was changing and what they could expect from me going forward. Marty, I want you to pop to the next slide because this is the email that I sent to the whole team. It's a by the way, we've got.
- [11:43]
Martin Moore
So by the way, we've got team members on the call here. So you've seen them all nodding furiously. When M said she was in leadership drift, I was, I was trying not to nod him because I'm polite. But yeah, no, Mariana isn't even on camera because she didn't want you to see a nodding.
- [11:56]
Emma Moore
Hopefully people are just focusing on the content, Marty. And you know, so this is, this is a direct cut from the email that I sent to the whole team. And I'm kind of starting in the midd here because there was a lot that had to change in me behind the scenes to be able to get to the point where I could write this email. But we're going to cover that over the coming days. But I just, I just want to show you in real life what my leadership reset looks like to my people. And here's the exact email I sent. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I've highlighted the parts that I think are really important. So the first piece I haven't provided you with the clarity you deserve, that's on me. I realize my people don't have this clarity either. So acknowledging how they might be feeling because you're strong, I relied on that. So I'm explaining why I let it happen. That ends now. I'm drawing a line in the sand. And as you can see, I've written, you know, over the coming weeks, here's what changes, and this is what you can expect from me moving forward. If I really wanted to break out of that plateau and really drive value out of my people, which, you guys know, we talk about that in leadership and beyond the theory all the time. And if I wanted to be able to push the company forward, I needed to take it seriously and change my behavior. So there you go. All the dead cats are out on the table, feeling a little vulnerable. But let's dig into what leadership drift is, Marty, and what to do first once we've got that awareness.
- [13:20]
Martin Moore
Fantastic. Thanks, Em. So the thing about leadership drift is that it's not an event and it's not dramatic, and it's not something you can see easily and say, oh, hang on a minute, there's a bit of drift. It's just so slow and it's insidious and it just creeps up on you. And like I said, if you're not going forward, you're going backwards. Make no mistake about that. So don't expect to see anything that is in your face, because you won't see it. But there's a few signs that you should be looking for. So you've got to be reading the play all the time as a leader, and you've got to be looking at the culture and the way your people are feeling and the way they're performing, not just on a team level, but on an individual by individual basis. And this is why we do one on ones. And so one of the first things you're going to notice when you're in leadership drift is that there's less clarity all around. Like, people think they know what they're doing. You've got your plan, you've got your work program, you've got your KPIs. We'll get on with it. But the thing that I found with doing one on ones religiously, and this is increasingly important for performance turnaround, is that every single conversation you have is an opportunity to clarify and reinforce what you're trying to achieve. Because it's so easy for people to just drop back into their old habits or the way they've done things in the past. So one of the signs is less clarity. Talking of one on ones, you start to skip one on ones, everyone's busy, and you just say to yourself, ah, I had a one on one just a week ago with you. I don't need to do it again. And then you start to lose that momentum and rhythm that you get from your leadership meeting cadence. You start avoiding hard conversations. Once again, you're busy. You don't want to confront people. And the better you know your team and the closer you are to your people and the more familiar you are with them, the more reluctant you're going to be to pull them up and have a hard conversation because you want to be liked. So you've got to have that respect before popularity mentality all the time. Sometimes you stop rewarding performance and start rewarding effort because in the absence of really strong performance, what are you going to look towards the people who are diligently toiling away? You know, if you do what David Brent said in the office, you walk fast with a frown on your face and carry a clipboard, that'll do it. But you start rewarding the wrong things and if there aren't results in performance, then you're talking about completely the wrong focus for your team. You start rescuing instead of developing. So you stop telling people that they need to step up and meet the mark and do the job the way it's supposed to be done. And you just roll your sleeves up and get it done because it's easier than the hard conversation. It's easier than leading them to do the job they're supposed to be doing. And overall you just get decreased effectiveness. Like after five years at CS Energy, I'd say some things that people would have heard me say a million times and they might not have done it overtly, but I could feel them rolling their ey eyes at me and in my head I'm going, guys, if you were doing it, I wouldn't have to keep talking about it. And that's where the frustration creeps in. So you'll see that decreased effectiveness simply because you can't get people to pay attention all the time. And the longer it goes, familiarity breeds contempt. So if any of that sounds familiar, just stick a thumbs up in the chat. It'd be great to see because I think these are extraordinarily common situations that we all face as leaders.
- [16:51]
Emma Moore
Lots of thumbs up happening.
- [16:53]
Martin Moore
That's what I like to see. The chat's blowing up with thumbs up I love it. Which is good.
- [16:57]
Emma Moore
Which is really good because this is this awareness piece. Like this is the first piece of the puzzle of the three days. So it's fantastic.
- [17:04]
Martin Moore
Yeah, yeah, it is. It's incredibly important. So I want you to do a quick self check. When was the last uncomfortable one on one you had? Just think about that. Write it down if you want. You don't have to fess up. This is a one directional seminar. So I feel like I want to ask for volunteers, but I won't. We're short on time today. Who are you protecting? Instead of lifting up, is there someone in your team who's not doing the job but you're overcompensating for them? You're over functioning because it's easier than leading them to the performance bar you want to set. And what results are you tolerating now that really would have pissed you off a year ago.
- [17:51]
Emma Moore
Seriously good reflection points, Marty. I think the thing is that, like, once I saw the leadership drift, the real question became, so how do I actually reset my leadership? And not in a way that felt weak. Like I wasn't admitting to being a terrible leader because I hadn't been terrible. I just simply dropped the standard that I'd held myself to. And I wanted to lift that again, I think as well, because my team was so used to me being quite hands off, I needed to reset without micromanaging, without blowing up trust, or without swinging too far in the other direction. So, Marty, I want you to share with everyone here today what you shared with me. Let's get super practical. Where do we start with a leadership reset?
- [18:37]
Martin Moore
Where do we start with anything? The tone, the pace and the standard. Now there's a story behind this, right? As a CEO, I was out on a Saturday night at a social function and someone asked me, you know, Marty, what, What do you do? And I got in my deepest voice and said, well, I'm chief executive of a major energy company. And you did not. And she. I did. And yeah, she looked at me, said, yeah, yeah, I know that, Marty, but what do you actually do? And that actually struck me quite hard because I started fumbling around for explanations and told her some of the things I'd done in the last few months and some of the challenges we were facing. And just looking at her face, I may as well have been talking Swahili. None of it registered with her. So I went away. And over the next couple of days, I really thought about, well, I'm a CEO. I've got all these super talented Experts reporting to me. I've got teams of great people. What am I actually doing? Like, why am I here? And how do I add value? And it didn't go anywhere near imposter syndrome. However, it did make me think about what my specific role was as the leader of that company. So I define the tone. How do we behave? What do we do? What's acceptable here? Do we challenge each other, or do we just go quietly and have a bitch and a moan around the water cooler? What do we do in terms of the way we treat each other? How do we collaborate? Do we have respect? Can we harness the talents of the people around us? The second thing is pace. As CEO, everything was too slow for me. It felt excruciatingly slow. So I had to find a way to set the pace. Because in case you haven't noticed this already, no one is moving faster than you. It's not going to happen. You're the one that sets the pace. Everyone will want to move slower, and you'll spend a lot of your time trying to increase that pace. And the third thing is the standard. You got to set a higher performance bar, and not everyone's going to like that. And it's hard to do because people will push back all the time and tell you all the reasons that you can't do it. So you've got to be absolutely relentless about setting the tone, the pace, and the standard. So a leadership reset isn't about doing more. It's about being deliberate about the things you do and being very explicit and very open and very targeted with where you're putting your time and energy and the things that you're making important to the team. When we talk about the tone, what you tolerate is what you teach. Now, I did a podcast episode ages ago called the Talented Jerk, and sometimes you've got people who are, you know, they're pretty good performers in their particular field, but they're terrible to work with. No one likes working with them, and they are a cultural cancer for your team. So if you tolerate that type of behavior, you're telling people that that's acceptable. It's not so much what you say when it comes to tone, it's what you don't say. So you've got to set a positive tone first, but you've got to be really, really ruthless about stepping on those cultural behaviors that aren't in line with what you want. How do you reset tone? Here's some practical actions. First of all, you've got to call it out, okay? You've got to call out the fact that you've not been on the ball. And Em's spoken about this. As she was fessing up about her drift earlier, I realized that I've been less deliberate than I should have been about my leadership. Now, this is the one thing that helps because you're taking accountability for the drift. It's easy to look at a team and go, ah, my team's hopeless. But just remember, every single problem that happens in your team, every failure, everything can be traced back to something that you either have done or haven't done as the leader. So the first thing is take accountability, call it out and be open about it. The next thing is state the non negotiables. Okay, so I've been a bit lax here. What is important, what is it that we want to focus on in the coming weeks, months and year to make sure that we get back on track? So you gotta be able to give them real clarity around what good looks like, whether it's behavioral performance. And so the tone is all about, okay, missed deadlines don't get explained away. You don't talk to people like you did in that meeting. There's a whole range of things that you can do that just set up a very clear picture of the sort of team you want. And then, of course, stop rewarding effort. You know, there's. There's so much that said for busy organizations. If you focus on busyness, that's what you'll get. You'll get people running around like chooks with their heads cut off doing stuff that may not matter at all. So whatever you do, don't reward effort. Just remember, what gets measured, gets managed. What gets rewarded, gets done. So you've got to make sure you reward the right things. And I'm not talking about monetary rewards. I'm talking about just being able to say, this is what I'm after. You've done this really, really well. Thank you. Keep going. That's brilliant. You're on the right track. That's a reward. Let's talk about pace. Like I said, everything happened too slowly for me. I couldn't believe it. And so people would come with an estimate and they'd say, okay, we're going to deliver something in a certain timeframe. And I would say, it's too slow. Now, I bet you've probably heard that before from bosses. So the trick is to not be irrational. The trick is to be unreasonable without being irrational. So what can you do? Always challenge that first schedule you get given. You know this yourself. You've created schedules and deadlines and targets for yourself. How do you do it? You work out how long you think it's going to take and then you double it and then you add the number you first thought of, because you want to give yourself a bit of buffer, so that if things get hard or if problems arise, as they always do, you've still got some breathing space. So when someone brings a schedule, I challenge them. I just go, it's too slow. Now they expect me to say that. But what they don't expect is, okay, I understand that with the resources you've got and with the things you know about this problem, this is how long you think it's going to take you. But let's just put that aside for a minute. What if we decided we wanted to do that faster, if we thought it was important enough to invest some more in to make that happen faster, how would we do that? What would we do to increase the speed of this deliverable? And this is just a shooting the breeze sort of conversation. You send them away to do a little bit more analysis and they'll come back with something. And in my experience, 80% of the time, there was a way to increase the speed of a deliverable without spending any more money or committing any more resources. People just hadn't been creative enough in how they thought about it. And that is a massive tool for changing the pace. But of course, having said that, you don't want people just to be cavalier and just go bouncing off walls. You don't confuse speed with recklessness. Right? You've got excellence over perfection. You want to kill the perfectionism that's going to hold you back because that's just slowing you down and it's causing you issues way beyond your point of diminishing returns. But you still want people to be excellent. So you've got this excellence over perfection mentality. And there's some phrases there you can use. We need momentum, so just be ambitious about speed. Faster doesn't mean sloppier. I still want a high standard of work. You want to give your people permission to move faster in an environment where they're not going to be crucified if they don't deliver. But you want them to get that sense of speed and they know where they stand. And you can't do this without removing some of the decision friction. So, in other words, you've got to make it easy for people to get things done if they have to kick decisions up the line all the time. And if you become the Bottleneck for decision making. Then they're going to sit there waiting. They'll sit on their hands when they should be delivering stuff. So the decision should be pushed to the lowest possible point they can be. Now, we've just cut across a couple of the really core concepts from leadership beyond the theory, and we spend, you know, large bunches of time talking about how physically you get this done and change the team culture to make it not just acceptable, but something that people embrace. And then there's the standard. The standard you walk past is the standard you set. So it's not my quote, it's not an original. No one can really trace it back to its original owner. But I just find this to be so true. Every time you walk past something that is below the standards you're expecting, you're saying that standard is okay. People are getting the cue from you that because you're letting it go, I guess it must be all right. So it doesn't matter what you say, doesn't matter what you tell people. The standard is if you don't enforce it, it doesn't exist. The standard is what you allow to happen. It's not what you say should happen. So every day you're setting two standards. You're setting behavioral standards and performance standards. So the behavior is about how people interact, how they communicate, how they conduct themselves in a group meeting, how much they contribute, whether they're allowed to be passive aggressive and, you know, speaking in the shadows and highly political, or whether they're playing with a straight bat and being honest. All of that stuff's behavioral. And then there's performance standards that are all about results. What are we getting? What quality is it? Is it fast enough? Is it actually delivering the value that we expect it to? Because this is all about value, okay? No matter what you say. And value comes in many different forms, but no matter what you say, a leader's job is create the most value possible with the resources you've been given by your organization. That's it. Now, the one thing about behavior is you can't set up rules. So, you know, yes, yes, you might have a code of conduct, yes, you might have a few other things in your company, but this isn't what's going to change your culture. The culture changes based on the way you encourage your team and enforce the interactions in that team. That's what's going to make a difference. But as you get into leadership drift, sometimes you're just going to roll off that little bit. So what you were absolutely adamant about a Year ago, you know, now you might just let it slide because you've got other fish to fry. And that's the thing that's going to stop you from keeping the behavior at a high level. But the minute you give that an inch, someone's going to take a mile. So this is one of those things you've got to be fairly fanatical about. And I also am very mindful of the fact that behavior is a choice. Now if someone doesn't perform, I go, gee, okay, they need a bit of work. I wonder if they have the capability and the intellect to learn how to perform and do this properly. And I want to see them do that. And I'm going to help them do that. Do they need training? What sort of support do they need? Can I coach them a bit more? I'm always looking for a way to improve performance and I'll give people time to make that improvement, to make those leaps. They've got to meet me halfway, but they get a little bit of grace for that. Behaviors are different. Behavior is a choice. So if I've got someone who's behaving badly, I don't muck around. It's a case of, here's the behavior. This is why it's unacceptable. It can't go on. You have to choose to do that differently. If you choose not to, then either you've made a deliberate choice to not behave the way we need to in the culture, or you have so little awareness of your emotional reactions that you're not capable of being a leader. So either way, it's not good for you. Let's do some behavior resets first action. Pick your three behaviorable non negotiables. What are the things that are most important to you? So, for example, one of the things that was super important to me in the corporate world was the behavior of contributing fearlessly. Like, you know, fearless, robust challenge of thoughts and ideas. This is how you unlock value. You can have, I don't know, you can have a Noah's ark of diversity, two of everything in your team. And it makes no difference unless you can harness that, unless you can actually bring out those unique perspectives and experiences and opinions and viewpoints. So one of the things for me was really important is you've got to contribute. If you're on my team, I expect you to contribute. I don't care whether you're an introvert, like, let's learn to do this because we value your opinion. That's why you're on the team. And if you're In a room. You're in a room for a reason, and I want you to be able to contribute that. So that's an example of a reset of a behavior. The second action that you can take is to stop walking past the little things, right? If someone's rude or dismissive in a meeting, don't let that go. Don't just put it down to, oh, you know, Marty can be a real dick when he hasn't had enough sleep or his second coffee. Don't make excuses for Marty, right? Marty's got to be pulled up. Not in public, unless it's really bad, but generally in private, just after the meeting, little arm around the shoulder. Hey, Marty, mate, that's not on. You've got to pull it up, otherwise it will continue. And sometimes people don't even know they've done something because they're not really, really well connected between their physical and their emotional state. And this happens all the time, as I'm sure you're aware. If someone's avoiding contributions, they're staying silent. We've spoken about this. You know, just say to them afterwards, you know, hey, you know, I know you've got some thoughts on this. The group would have really benefited from you putting those on the table and having the discussion. Someone brings an excuse instead of evidence. You know, hey, you may have heard me say, for those of you who know me well, I might just be getting old and grumpy, but every single time I hear an excuse, doesn't matter what's coming out of someone's mouth. The only thing I hear is, the dog ate your homework. That's it. All I can hear, oh, did the dog eat your homework? Did it? There's no excuses. You either do it or you don't do it. Right. The other behavior that I absolutely hate is someone playing fast and loose with the truth, saying something's done when it's not done, telling you that you know they've done something they haven't. You know, telling. Telling you they didn't do something they did do, and you know they did it. So, you know, someone playing fast and loose with the truth is fairly fatal with me over time. So, you know, some of the common phrase you can use, well, hang on, that's. That's not how we speak to people here. Or that answer is just an excuse. Let's try and stick to the facts, please. Or, you know, if you're committed to this team, you've got to contribute when you're in the room. So these are the types of very, very simple sentences you can use. Very practical, very easy, very non confrontational to someone that you can say with a smile on your face and not offend them but still get the message through. Don't try to replace culture with rules. Rules don't work. Culture works. So it's what you talk about, enforce and model as a leader that's going to make a difference. Thanks, Em, over to you.
- [33:54]
Emma Moore
I was like, you probably need to have a drink of water soon.
- [33:57]
Martin Moore
I was talking a glass. I had to sleep, I was going hard.
- [33:59]
Emma Moore
No, no, it was good, it was good. It's very valuable. And for anyone who needs to drop off, feel free to drop off. You'll have access to the replay. Obviously, typical me and Marty, we just try and put too much value into these little short sessions. But yeah, I reckon probably another 5ish minutes will be good. So the next thing that we really want to focus on is resetting the performance standard. You've probably experienced that performance standards are typically where people lie to them. Everyone says that they want high performance, but high performance is hard. It takes energy, discipline and conflict tolerance. And most teams are quite honestly just average teams in average organizations. And the reason for that is pretty simple because the standard has usually been set by the weakest performer. The standard isn't what your best person does, it's what your worst person is allowed to get away with. And I just want to say that again, the standard isn't what your best person does, it's what your worst person is allowed to get away with. So some practical ways that we can reset the performance standard. Start by resetting what good actually looks like. Your very first job is to strip away all the excuses and the vagueness. When you've had that leadership drift, you get a lot more comfortable coming up with justifications for why your people aren't performing. I've said all of these in my head. You know, they're really trying, they're flat out, they mean well, they're just doing their best. But none of that is performance.
- [35:29]
Martin Moore
So dog ate my homework.
- [35:31]
Emma Moore
The dog ate my homework. So you've got to reset by defining outcomes. Again, what does success look like in this role? In measurable terms, what is the minimum acceptable standard? And if you can't describe the bar that you're setting, you absolutely cannot enforce it. Now, the second action here is that you've got to set targets that actually stretch your people. So, you know, you would have heard Marty talk about the Dodson effect. Performance targets should be hard to achieve. They should actually be difficult not unrealistic, obviously, but they need to be a stretch, because people will always be happy to go slower than they could, even your best people. And if your targets are safe, your team is going to optimize for comfort. So the reset move here is set standards worth aspiring to and explain why they're changing. What is the burning platform? Why does this matter now? Why is average no longer acceptable? And I think if people don't understand why, they are absolutely not going to buy in.
- [36:35]
Martin Moore
All right, I just want to finish off talking about scoreboard discipline, because I found this so important, and it didn't really occur to me until I was much later in my career as an executive that this was an absolutely critical piece, that without this, you're really going to struggle to get consistent performance out of your people. And you can get performance in a patchy way. Like, sometimes they'll rise to the occasion, sometimes they won't. And different people are great and different people aren't. But if you want consistent performance excellence, it comes through scoreboard discipline. So get the measures that tell you the facts right. You don't want to. You don't want to be like, you know, Qantas, where the CEO can make, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars while the company's sort of floundering a little bit. That's a mismatch, KPI. So the incentives have got to line up with what performance actually looks like. So make sure that happens. And, you know, if the indicators on the scoreboard say performance is poor and you'll have milestone indicators to let you know whether things are on track, then you shouldn't let someone talk you into the fact that things are okay, you know? So I say things like, okay, I want to see some evidence about that. I know you've told me things are on track, but how would I know for sure? Now, some people might see this as a lack of trust, but the show me, don't tell me is a really important, important thing, that if you've got a close relationship with your people, they will be okay with. Like I say all the time, if your people trust and respect you, there is nothing you can't say to them. And this is one of those. But. But also, you know, when people are spinning me a yarn and I've got a really, really awesome bullshit detector that I developed over the decades, I. I always say, look, I'm really interested in where we are right now. I don't want to hear the story about how our future is going to magically be better. I want to Know how things are now and how we got to where we are and then in that case, what are we going to do to improve? So you need to go down a layer when you send drift. And I released a podcast episode not so long ago just about going through all of the layers and calibrating information that you're getting from your direct reports. Because there is a sanitization effect as information comes up to you. So you can't always trust what you're getting from your direct reports, particularly if you running a business with or a team with three, four, five, six layers. Sometimes you got to get below that just to calibrate the information you're being told and get a sense of where you are. And as soon as you start going down the layers and calibrating, which you should probably do all the time, you'll see if there's any drift and you'll see the disconnects. So we're just going to finish with seven rules of thumb for successful reset. I'm going to do the first four in. First thing for reset is be ambitious. You know, no one gets inspired by weak standards. High standards will make the team materially better as long as they are achievable. Second thing is only set a standard. You'll stand by. There's no point in talking it up and saying, oh, we're going to be different, we're going to do this and we're going to be such a high performing team. And then the first time you get to make a hard decision, you avoid it. It's not going to happen. That's only going to get you branded as a hypocrite. Third thing, no exceptions for individuals. Ah, you know, but Marty's such a nice guy and everyone likes him and he runs the footy tipping comp and he's been here for a long time. He knows where the bodies are buried. No, that's not good enough. You don't make exceptions just because Marty is a nice guy. If you want performance, Marty's got to meet the minimum acceptable standard of performance. That's all there is to it. So this is going to be critical in your reset because if you decide that Marty isn't good enough to be in the new team, it's not the fact that Marty goes that makes a difference. It's the fact that everyone else on the team sees that you're serious about performance and that's what makes the difference. Number four tactic. Communicate relentlessly. You can give a speech that Martin Luther King Jr. Would have been proud of. And still not move the needle because it's only one speech and two hours later, people are just worried about what they're going to have for dinner. So you've got to relentlessly communicate these things over and over and over until you're almost choking on the words because that's what people require. Em over to you.
- [40:47]
Emma Moore
So you got to know the common excuses. You know, we have to pick our battles. It's not that big of a deal. It's just taking longer than expected. Or that's just Rob, those phrases are red flags for drift. Number six, you got to watch the scoreboard because you know measures matter. If the numbers don't move, the standard isn't being met. And finally, you need to demonstrate that you're serious. If there are no consequences, there is no standard. Sometimes you need to make a call. And yes, that includes an up or out mentality for the people who refuse to meet the bar. So look, here's the punchline today. We have absolutely smashed a lot of information in the last 40 minutes. Resetting your standard is not an announcement, it's not an email, it's not a new set of rules. It is the daily discipline of not walking past what you said mattered. And the reason this matters so much in leadership drift is really simple. Because the moment you drift, the bar doesn't stay where it was. It drops every single time. So before we wrap today, I just want to tell you about tomorrow, because this is where everything that we've covered today either works or falls apart. Today you've learned how to identify leadership drift and how to reset your tone, pace and standard. But here's what happens next. You reset the standard, you communicate it clearly, and then, oh yeah, someone doesn't meet it. So maybe they miss a deadline, maybe they deliver subpar work, maybe they push back and they tell you how the new expectations are unreasonable. And in that moment, you have a choice. You can let it slide. You can tell yourself that they're still adjusting, give them more time and avoid the uncomfortable conversation, or you can hold them accountable. And here's what most leaders don't realize. Your ability to hold people accountable is the single biggest predictor of whether you're promotable. And this is why we have a whole module in leadership on the theory, all about accountability. It's not about how nice you are, it's not about how hard you work, and it's not even about how smart you are. It's whether you can drive performance through your people. Because as Marty always says, leadership drives culture and Culture drives performance. And if you can't create a culture of accountability, you will never lead at a higher level. So tomorrow, we're going to show you exactly how to build that culture of accountability without becoming a micromanager or destroying trust. It's called reset your accountability tomorrow. And I am telling you right now that if you only show up to one session this week, make it tomorrow, because accountability is where leadership gets real. Marty, thank you so much for your time this morning. I will see you the same place, same time tomorrow. And thank you so much everyone for, yeah, coming along, getting involved, and we went a little bit over time, but I think you'll agree it was probably very worth it. And hopefully we see you all tomorrow.
- [43:36]
Martin Moore
All right, so that brings us to the end of episode 389. I really hope you enjoyed it. But as I'm sure you know, listening is easy, leading is hard. That's why we created Leadership beyond the Theory, our flagship program that turns insight into action and action into results. This is where we unlock the secrets of elite leadership performance and give you the tools you need to keep your team on the track to high performance. I'm looking forward to next week's episode. What does senior leadership teams actually do until then? I know you'll take every opportunity you can to be a no bullshit leader.