030: Optimal Practices for Prioritizing, Hiring, and Relating with ghSMART’s Randy Street

Pete Mockaitis
Randy, thanks so much for being here on the How to Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Randy Street
It’s my pleasure, Pete. Thanks for the invitation.

Pete Mockaitis
It was so funny. As I was looking around at your book and such, I was very impressed with ghSMART and a little bit embarrassed that I hadn’t heard of it before. You’re across the nation, you’ve got a 40-ish consultants with just robust resumes and credentials. Can you tell us a little bit what is ghSMART all about and how’d it come to be?

Randy Street
Sure. ghSMART is a leadership advisory business. We’ve been around for over 20 years, believe it or not. We’re actually very well-known in the private equity world, which is where we got our start, but we’re not very well-known in the corporate world. That really didn’t become a big part of our business until we published our first book Who back in 2008, which is when we really were discovered. We essentially help with the selection and development of senior leaders, starting with CEOs. We help boards through CEO succession. We help CEOs build out their teams. We help during critical strategic moments like M&A or divestitures or just big strategic shifts in the business where you’ve got to get the people right or the who right as we like to say to execute your strategy.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. It’s pretty impressive taking a spin through the website, and will definitely link that in the show notes to this episode. I guess I’m just trying to emphasize there that it’s not just a couple of folks and your ideas for leadership, but rather you’ve done an impressive degree of research in terms of 1,300 hours interviewing many CEOs and 9 million data points. Can you tell us a little bit about the data-driven process behind getting to these insights in the books?

Randy Street
Sure. Our core business actually is assessing senior leaders. What is an assessment? We essentially sit down with a leader and walk through their career story in exhausted detail, a 4-5 hour conversation. It goes all the way back in time to the beginning of their careers and even a little earlier. We pick up in their school years just to get a sense of context, and we walk through their careers to understand all the highs and lows, the accomplishments and failures, the things that they’re proud of, the things that were a disaster that they don’t want to do again. We do that for the purpose of trying to understand is this person a good fit with a particular job or is this a person that perhaps a private equity investor wants to back and so on.

The result of that, if you sort of step back, is we now have this incredible career inventory of at this point over 16,000 senior leaders. Most of them are in business, but we’ve also looked at government leaders, education, hospitals, military, so it’s kind of a broad range. We started realizing, “My gosh, we’re sitting on one of the richest databases of leadership successes and failures in the world. We ought to do something with that.” It’s actually over … We calculated, it’s over 250,000 hours of thinking about and analyzing these leaders in various context. We thought we should do something with that, and that actually is the genesis for the books and a lot of the research that we have done.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m such a dork for data, so I’m really excited to hear a bit of a summary of some of your findings here. You’ve presented those in 2 best-selling books. I’d love to hear just a little bit about what are some of the key insights, takeaways there? The first one was Who and all about good hiring practices, getting talent flowing and asking appropriate interview questions and onboarding. I’ll just let you run with that. What should we know from Who?

Randy Street
Sure. I think the most important piece of Who, the most important concept isyou kind of are who you hire. It’s sort of like that expression you are what you eat. You are who you hire in business, or in any organization. The stronger the people around you, the better off you’re going to be. What’s so strange is that in most other realms, this is pretty obvious. You think of sports for example. You pick your favorite team. The stronger the players and the better they play together, the more powerful the team, the more likely they are to succeed and to win. Yet for some reason in business, we collectively the average hiring leader spends maybe 30 minutes with somebody.

They look at a resume and have a pretty superficial conversation, and then they use their gut to make a pretty rushed decision and then they’re basically flipping the coin. We have found that in fact, the average hiring leader makes a hiring mistake half the time. They literally are flipping a coin, which is insanity. You wouldn’t buy a laptop with that little due diligence, you wouldn’t buy a car with that little due diligence. Yet we’re hiring people on the flip of a coin, and the average cost of a hiring mistake is roughly 15 times that person’s base salary. The cost of getting it wrong is massive, and the value of getting it right is just almost incalculable. Wow, I can’t say that. It’s big.

Yet what do most leaders think about, most managers think about? They think about strategy, they think about execution, they think about process, they think about what’s for dinner tonight. They don’t think about, “Do I have the right people on my team?” That’s the problem that we’re addressing with Who.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good. Here’s this 15x figure. Can you lay out some of the biggest buckets of that?

Randy Street
Sure. About 15 times the base salary, and about 2 times the base salary is just literally the hard costs of hiring the person. It’s recruiting, it’s the base salary because you’re paying them for a period of time, and then their severance cost, there might be some legal cost and so on. That’s about 2x on average. The rest of it is actually opportunity cost and mistakes. It varies by role. If you’re looking at an entry-level job, it tends to be more like 5 times. If you’re looking at a CEO, it could be 100 times or more. I don’t know if you saw the news story of when Yahoo! let their CEO go, I think Meyers let their CEO go a couple years ago and it was like a $100 million severance package.

That’s a big number. You look at any CEO failure and the golden parachute that’s attached to it that those numbers are massive. Even senior leaders you’re looking at 15 times as an average number. It’s just because it’s the business that doesn’t get done, it’s the sale that doesn’t get completed or won, it’s product defects that didn’t get caught. It can be more insidious like the fraud that happened under that person’s watch. All of those examples are examples of poor stewardship, poor leadership by somebody that shouldn’t have been in the role in the first place.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I am overwhelmingly convinced/terrified of the importance of minimizing these hiring mistakes. How do you do it? What are some of the key best practices there?

Randy Street
Yeah. Here’s what’s cool about human behavior. We all think we are unique, and we are. I don’t want to take anything away from that, but what’s interesting is patterns that we establish in our lives tend to stick with us throughout our lives. If you can go back and walk through a person’s career in detail and understand what they accomplished and how they did it and what they were unable to accomplish and why they were unable to accomplish it, you can begin to get a picture for who they really are, what they’re all about, and what kinds of things they’re really good at doing and what kinds of things they’re not good at doing.

When you’re buying a mutual fund, it has that little disclaimer which says, “Past performance is not an indicator of future performance.” When it comes to human behavior, past performance is actually the bets indicator of future performance. If you can get a really robust understanding of what somebody’s past performance looks like, going all the way back to how they performed in school, how they thought about school, how they thought about academics or extracurriculars or athletics, performing arts, just how they approached it all the way through each of their jobs to current day, you can begin to see this pattern of what they’re all about and how they operate.

If you can see that pattern clearly, you’ve got half the equation. The other half of the equation is getting super clear about what you want to hire for. We have a tool that we talk about in the book called the scorecard. It’s different from a job description. It’s not just a list of duties and responsibilities, but it’s actually the specific goals and outcomes that you want the person to accomplish in the job and the competencies and behaviors you want them to show up and to demonstrate in the job. That’s the other half of the equation, is getting super clear about what you’re hiring for.

When you put the 2 together, when you know what you’re hiring for and you sit down with someone long enough to really understand what they’re all about, you can actually drive that 50/50 hiring success rate up to something closer to 90/10. There’s massive value to be created for you and your team and your organization if you can hire with 90% or better success rate rather than a 50/50 success rate.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s great. As you describe it, it sounds like there’s some real hard conversations or decisions, or clarity that has to be driven toward right upfront which you’re not going to arrive at in a half hour. You’re just going to have to do the work to get there. Maybe could you give us an example of what’s something that a particular organization might be hiring for, and how can they tease out within the course of that full history of a candidate whether they’ve got the stuff or not?

Randy Street
Yeah. Let’s do a really simple straightforward example because I think it will illustrate the point well and it’ll be easy for your listeners to understand, and that’s a sales role. Very easy to quantify. Let’s start with the scorecard. Let’s say we’re a small business, maybe 10 million in sales. We’ve got just a handful of sales people. We want to grow the business from 10 million to 20 million over the next 5 years. I’m making all of this up, of course. Let’s say we’re actually hiring for the head of sales just to really make this interesting. The very first thing we want to understand is what’s the mission for the role.

The mission is to grow the business from 10 million to 20 million over the next 5 years. There’s probably some definition you can put around what that looks like in terms of the types of clients you’re going after and segments you’re playing in and all of that. Basically that part does look like a job description. Then we get into the outcomes. What specifically must this person do to accomplish that growth? The first outcome might be repeating that sales growth, which is grow sales from 10 million to 12 million in the first year and successfully onto 20 million over the 5 years. That one just mimics the mission.

The second one might be, since this is a sales leader, it might be build a team of 10 A player sales people by the end of this year. Certainly we’re not just saying job description hire and develop people. We’re actually saying build a team of 10 A player people. Very specific, very clear. Another one might be a customer one such as diversify our current customer base from the current mix, where our top 5 customers make up 80% of our revenue, to a point where at least 20 customers make up 80% of the revenue. These are very specific. They’re metric-driven if they can be. It’s something where in 5 years or 3 years or one year, I can look back and say, “Did this person accomplish these things or not?”

That’s the second piece of the scorecard, the outcomes. The third piece is the specific competencies. This is where you might have job-specific competencies like persuasive, great negotiation skills, empathetic, great listener, and so on. This is a critical one, you want to lay out competencies that matter to your culture. About a third of all hiring mistakes are a result of cultural mismatch, not talent mismatch. You’ve got to get clear about what is your culture. In this case, it’s clearly and entrepreneurial culture. It’s probably a culture where everybody wears multiple hats and has a can-do attitude.

You want to write those things down. Can-do attitude, willingness to pitch in and help where needed, hardworking, entrepreneurial, fun. Those sorts of things because if somebody doesn’t demonstrate those attributes, even if they’re the best sales person or sales leader in the world, they may not fit your culture and they may bounce out as a result. That’s what a scorecard looks like. It has a mission, it has outcomes which are the very specific goals you want to see the person achieve, and then it has competencies which break into job-specific competencies and cultural competencies.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I’ve got a really clear picture of what I want. Then as I am having a conversation with a candidate, I’m trying to see do they have that stuff. I don’t know if there are any kind of magic questions or approaches or best practices to go after while teasing that out?

Randy Street
Yeah. This is where we diverge from the average interview. There’s a lot of research out there that shows that most interviews are unsuccessful at getting at this data. We would agree with that, actually. Most interviews are poorly executed. The problem is, most interviews … First of all, many interviews are a waste of time. People walk in the room and just say, “Hey, tell me about yourself. What are you good at? Oh, I see you like skydiving. I like skydiving. Let’s talk about skydiving for the next half an hour. Oh, you seem like a good person. You’re hired.” That obviously doesn’t work.

The second method, which is a little more structured and sounds more scientific is people will walk in and they’ll say, “Well tell me about a time when you grew sales. What did you do, how’d you do it?” The problem with that … It’s a behavioral interview. The problem with that is you start to lead the witness if you will, you start to direct the candidate. You’re basically saying, “Look, this is what I’m looking for. This is what my scorecard is,” based on the questions you ask. What we have found works. This is what gets you that 90% success rate, is you turn the interview on its side.

Instead of going in with specific questions, you go in with 5 general questions which you ask over and over and over. Basically these are the 5, and you ask these for each job in their career. You get to let’s say, “Pete, I see you worked at Bain & Company. Let’s talk about the time you were at Bain.” Here are the 5 questions. Question 1: what were you hired to do? Basically what was the job? Then you let the candidate talk for 2 minutes and just lay out the essence of the job. Question 2: what accomplishments are you most proud of? Notice how open-ended that is. Not directing them at all.

You could answer that with a whole range of things, but ideally you start to answer it by saying, “Oh, well I was really good at …” Let’s say this is a sales person again. “I was really good at growing the sales for my organization.” Then you might follow it up and go, “Oh, that’s interesting. How did you go about doing that?” They’ll say, “Oh, well I was a manager of the region at the time and so I quickly realized that I needed different people on my team, so I started making some changes to the team. As I started hiring more of the right people, we were able to grow the business,” and so on and so forth.

Suddenly a picture is starting to emerge for what this person has done and how they’ve done it. Repeat that question. What else are you proud of accomplishing? What else, what else, what else? Get 3, 4, 5 examples for that first job. Flip over to the other side and ask, “All right. It sounds like you were really successful in that role. What didn’t go as well? What were the do-overs? What were the mistakes? If you could go back and do it again, what would you do differently?” Notice we’re not saying, “Hey, what were your weaknesses?” Nobody ever answers that question. They just say, “My weakness is I’m impatient-

Pete Mockaitis
I work too hard.

Randy Street
Yeah, I work too hard. Crazy, right? You and I both know that because we probably both answered that way in our past. You’re not looking for weaknesses, you’re looking for things that they would do differently. What did they learn? What were the hard knocks, the adverse situations that they had to overcome? Again, when they answer, ask, “All right, great. What did you do and how did you approach it, and what would you do differently?” That’s a third question. Fourth question is who did you work with? There’s some sub-questions here. Start with their boss. Who was your boss? What was it like working with that person? What will that person tell me when I call him or her up as a reference check?

There’s some magic in those questions. By simply teeing it up, people start to go, “Oh interesting, you’re going to call such and such.” Of course we never do without permission. At this point  in the interview they’re thinking, “All right, you’re going to call them. I better tell you what they’re going to say.” You’d be amazed at how honest people are with how hey describe what their boss will say about them in that reference. If they were a manager, ask them about their team too. Again, this is under question 4 who did you work with. If they were a manager, say, “Well, tell me a little bit about your team. How many people reported to you?

If I could get all those people around the table today, what would they tell me about your management style? What did they like about working with you and about your style? What would they say you could do differently?” You’re just trying to get a feel for how the candidate thinks his or her teams sees them. The last question is why did you leave? Jack Welch’s book Winning says if he could only ask a single question in an interview it would be this one, why did you leave. What you’re looking for here is for people who got pulled out by a bigger or better opportunity.

Maybe they were promoted or maybe they got recruited away by a former boss or someone who knows them. Obviously you’re looking for red flags, which is people who got fired or RIFed. I always love when people say, “Oh, I got RIFed. It was a reduction in force.” You go, “Oh, interesting. You got RIFed. How many people were RIFed?” “2. There were 2 of us that day.” That’s not a RIF, they got fired. You’re looking for people who have positive momentum and a positive trajectory in their career. Those 5 questions, what were you hired to do, what accomplishments are you most proud of, what didn’t go as well, who did you work with, and why did you leave, with all the double-clicking into each of them to understand what they did and how they did it.

If you do that across 4 or 5 jobs, a really clear picture about this person will emerge. I just promise you. It’s uncanny how accurate it is. Now you have the other half of the puzzle.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so cool. I want to do it right now. That’s great.

Randy Street
We train people on this a lot. People will go, “My gosh, this sounds on the one hand really simple,” which it is. There’s only 5 questions. It’s not hard to master that. On the other hand, it’s a little scary because people want to have the security of a really complex interview guide that tells them exactly what to say. We’re saying, “No, just go in and have a conversation. Let these 5 questions be your guide.” Once you do it once, you’ll never go back to doing it the old way. People always giggle and shake a little bit and go, “Gee, I don’t know I don’t know,” but they go do it and sure enough, from our experience they never go back.

First of all it’s just more enjoyable because you’re having a conversation with somebody, and second of all you actually get interesting and useful information that’ll help you make a better decision.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s great. Just looking at your back cover of the book, the bullets there. Can you also share with us what is the number one tactic used to generate a flow of A players to your team?

Randy Street
Referrals. We’ve been looking for the silver bullet on this one forever. We even hoped that some of these technology solutions would actually help. In fact if any of your listeners has a technological solution that works, A I want to know and B I might want to invest. This is an incredibly big problem. How do you find people who are a reasonably good match with your scorecard? The facts are, if you look at resumes … Resumes are just marketing documents. It has all the good stuff and none of the bad stuff, so you don’t really know. The only way you can really get a decent flow of candidates is by getting referrals.

The ninja tactic that we learned, and we learned this years ago … It’s a really simple question that Pat Ryan who is a former CEO of Aon Insurance and founder of Aon. He said here’s the question you ask. When you meet somebody talented, say, “Hey Pete. You’re a talented guy. Who are the most talented people you know that I may want to get to know who might be a good fit for my company?” He literally went around asking everybody. If he was at a party, he’d ask people. If he was at a professional event or a conference, he’d ask people. When I met him, he asked, “Hey, who are the most talented people you know that I might want to consider hiring-

Pete Mockaitis
They’re my employees and you can’t have them.

Randy Street
Except them, exactly. Hands off. Off limits, man. Interestingly, he built out his executive team doing this. He really doesn’t use … He didn’t use recruiters. He used referrals, and he used that question to find the people. We do it here at ghSMART too. It really is effective because talented people know talented people.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Oh, that’s exciting. Okay, so that kind of covers the who in some detail. Over on the PWR score side there’s a couple other dimensions. We’ve got the W in the middle, so the W of PWR. We’ve also got the priorities and the relationships. Can you speak a bit there about what are some mistakes people make in those departments and the bets practice approaches within those departments?

Randy Street
Sure. I’m happy to address the question. Can I actually frame it up first real quickly? It’s probably worth just a quick bit of context. PWR score is actually the result of all of this research we talked about at the beginning of our conversation. For years, people have asked us, “Hey ghSMART, you guys are interviewing leaders all day long everyday. What makes for a successful leader?” We thought, “Well gee, that’s a pretty big question.” That’s a universal question. People have been asking that for thousands of years. What does make for a successful leader? There’s so many theories out there for what makes successful leadership.

We thought, “You know what, we’re sitting on the biggest database in the world of actual detailed data on 16,000 leaders. We ought to have an answer for this if there is an answer to be found.” We partnered up with Steve Kaplan out of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business to analyse this data. What we found was there are in fact 3 factors or drivers of leadership success that have nothing to do with style or personality or charisma or any of that other stuff. Just literally if you ask the question what do great leaders do, they all do these 3 things.

That’s P, W, and R, which spells PWR which is this framework. P, as you noted, is priorities. That’s the first thing they do. Great leaders set priorities. It sounds incredibly simple, but the biggest mistake most people make is they don’t say no. If you don’t say no, how many priorities do you end up with, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Infinite.

Randy Street
Infinite, that’s right. An infinite number of priorities means no priorities. 90% of people who stink at the P stink at it because they just can’t say no. They don’t set priorities. The best of the best will have 3, maybe 5, priorities. They drive everything off of those 3-5 priorities. By the way, only 24% of leaders in our database are great at this. The rest tend to have too many priorities and therefore a lack of focus, and that lack of focus gets worse and worse as you go deeper into the organization. The W is, as you said, that’s the who. Only 14% of leaders in our database are great at hiring A players and developing those A players, which means 86% of people stink at it which again goes back to the first book and why we attacked that first.

That is the biggest problem in really leadership is people just don’t put enough energy into getting the who right. Until they realize the value of getting that right, they’ll never reach their full potential. The last one is R, which stands for relationships. This is not kumbaya. This is how do you set up a team where one plus one equals 5. How do you get the power of the team? It’s great that you got the who right, and you’ve got A players. How do you get the A players to play together in a way that’s coordinated, where they’re challenging one another, where there’s mutual commitment to one another and accountability, where there’s good role modeling, and where you get that magic moment where the team just comes alive and you get way more than what the sum of the individuals would produce on their own?

When you do those 3 things you will be, and hang onto your hat for this one, 20 times more successful than a leader who does none of those 3 things. It’s a massive finding. There’s a huge difference. That’s what drives great leaders as it turns out. We call it a full powered leader. One who sets clear priorities, gets the who right, and sets their team up so that relationships work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I’d like to dig in just a bit into the priorities and the relationships. I guess with priorities, part of the game is just some discipline, saying no. What are some other key strategies or tactics in order to land on your right priorities well?

Randy Street
Right. That’s a key word. Are they the right priorities? It’s great to say no to stuff, but if you’re saying no to the wrong things and yes to the wrong things then you end up doing the wrong things. Having 3 priorities that are actually wrong won’t help you at all. What’s underneath that? You’ve got to do your basic strategy. You’ve got to understand where you’re going. You’ve got to listen to the market. Best practices for that, by the way, doesn’t include just talking to customers and paying attention to competitors, but also just reading veraciously to understand what’s going on in the broader context.

The best leaders on the P are very, very good first and foremost at just spending a lot of time thinking about the big picture, about customers, competitors, what we ourselves are great at doing and how we should show up in the market. That’s at a leadership level as you go deeper into the organization. As an individual, it’s doing the same thing. It’s asking what am I uniquely able to contribute to my organization, what are my strengths, what do I love to do, where am I passionate, and aligning your role around those things. Then having the courage to say no. That’s actually a pretty big deal. Most people actually really struggle with it.

The trick on this one, to say no … This is something I use in my own life. I realized that every time I said yes to something, I was actually saying no to something else-

Pete Mockaitis
Everything else really kind of opportunity cost-

Randy Street
Yeah, right. If I say yes I’m going to help you out with this project, I’ve just said no to what, family time, sleep, exercise, free time, time with friends, a chance to do some other project, to take some other job, whatever, right? The minute I’ve said yes, I have said no to lots of other stuff. When you realize that, you start to realize, “Man, every time I say yes there’s a chance I’m cheating myself. By cheating myself, I might be cheating the world or my organization out of me bringing my best self to work.” It actually forces you, at least it forces me, to sort of hit the pause button and go, “You know what, I’m flattered that you’re interested in me doing whatever it is, but I’d like to think about it.”

I use the time … I’ll sleep on it, and I’ll use the time to count the cost. If I say yes to this, what am I saying no to? Is that trade off a good trade off or not? That gives me courage anyway, and I think others that we’ve coached along the way courage to say, “You know what, I’m not just going to say yes to everything. I’m actually going to think about it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. I like that too. In a way … If you were to say no to me, and I’m glad you said yes to this podcast-

Randy Street
I did think about it, Pete. I had to think about it, like what are we talking here? What am I saying no to?

Pete Mockaitis
Much appreciated again. That makes me respect the person who declined me all the more. It’s like, “Oh, okay. They’re giving it serious consideration.” When they say no, it just makes me want to respect it all the more and still think you’re a great guy instead of some jerk who blew me off.

Randy Street
Yeah. Here’s an example, this may be useful. I’ve got 3 kids, 3 girls who all go to the same school. A couple of years ago, a member of the board called me and said, “Hey, we are about to select a new headmaster. We’re putting together some committees of parents and students and alumni to help our outgoing headmaster and our board to select a new headmaster. Would you like to be part of the committee?” At first I was like yes was on the tip of my tongue, and then I was like, “Well, wait a second. If I say yes to this, what am I saying yes to? I’m going to be sitting in a room with a whole bunch of people, probably following an unstructured process, not really using my strengths and my professional capabilities to help the school.

I shouldn’t say yes to that at all. In fact, what I should do is reframe the conversation.” I said to the gentleman, “You know what, let me tell you a little bit about what I do for a living and how I could actually help you in a far greater way than just being another person sitting on a committee.” I ended up reframing the whole thing. I think, just like you said, he had such respect for it that they ended up involving me in a very different way. I said no to his direct request, but ended up saying yes to a very different request which I framed for him, and was the way I ended up helping the school select a new headmaster.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s even better. It’s better for them, and you probably spent fewer total hours of your life invested in it.

Randy Street
Absolutely, which meant much less frustration for me and I think better value for them. Everybody won in that case. They got an awesome headmaster. I’m so excited. This guy is fantastic.

Pete Mockaitis
Victory.

Randy Street
Victory.

Pete Mockaitis
How about likewise, what are some key thoughts, tactic strategies to get the R, the relationship synergy flowing?

Randy Street
Yeah. This is the trickiest one. Actually, to make the model work we put it together as PWR, but if you double-click on the R there’s actually 2 pieces to it. There’s the personal piece and the interpersonal piece. The personal piece is really how you show up. You’re going to have a hard time building a team around you if you are, and I’m just going to be dramatic here, but you are lazy. You don’t show up, you don’t carry your load, you don’t follow through on your commitments, you are untrustworthy. All of those things will absolutely destroy your ability to pull a team together.

The flip side of course then becomes table stakes. You’ve got to show up, you’ve got to work hard, you’ve got to listen to other people, you’ve got to follow through on your commitments. You’ve got to be a role model, you’ve got to be worth following. All of the leadership theories that focus on who you are and being authentic, all of that is true. What we found was it’s table stakes. Having that doesn’t make you a great leader, not having those things makes you a terrible leader. Having it just gets you a seat at the table. That then brings us to the second piece, which is the interpersonal piece.

How do you then … Assuming you’re a leader worth following, assuming you’re role modeling the right behaviors, what do you do? We found there are a couple of things. One is … It’s super simple, but a lot of people forget to do it. It’s simply getting people coordinated. Literally who’s meeting with whom and what conversations are we having? Are the right discussions happening? A lot of times, company’s strategies change but meetings that have been on the calendar for years stay on the calendar even though they should shake it up and get different people involved. That’s one.

The second one is commitment. This is really about mutual commitment. We have found bringing teams together that are having some dysfunction and talking just about what are our norms as team, how are we going to show up, how are we going to support each other, what are our rules of engagement, actually begins to build commitment amongst the individuals. Then of course teams need to have fun outside of work as well. How are we connecting with each other outside of the formal context? Number one is coordinating, 2 is committing, and then the third piece is challenging. As a leader in particular, how do we challenge people to be more than they think they can be?

I bet you everybody listening to this has had a teacher or a coach, or if they’re lucky a boss or a mentor, who has pushed them and said, “You know what, I think you can do even better than that. I think you can do more.” Sometimes we don’t like to hear that message because it’s uncomfortable and it sort of feels like, “My gosh, you’re asking me to do something I don’t even think I can do.” Great leaders believe in the possibility of their people and of their team, and they draw it out of them. That’s the challenge that I’m talking about here. Those are the 3 tactics, coordinating people, committing them, and challenging them, that we have found helps bring teams together and create that one plus one equals 5 dynamic.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, prefect. Thank you. Well, this is just a ton of fun for me. Exciting stuff. I’m going to be chewing on it, thinking about it, applying it. I know we’re coming into our final minutes here. You tell me, is there anything else you want to make sure you put out there before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Randy Street
No, I think we’ve covered the ground pretty nicely. Sort of a parting thought on the who concept and the PWR score concept is this. I think everybody intuitively understands that leadership is powerful and important. I think where most of us fall down is we don’t quite know how to approach it. What I hope this has done is shownthat there are actually some pretty tactical things that we can all do irrespective of personality or style that will enable us to be full powered leaders. I think the world needs more full powered leaders. Great leaders make all the difference. I think every single person out there has the opportunity to be a great leader. That’s what I would love to see, more great leaders in the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, agreed. Well, thank you. Could you kick us off by sharing perhaps a favorite quote, something that whenever you think about it it kind of inspires you?

Randy Street
Yeah. I came across a quote actually is by an author named Gil Bailie. I found it in a book called Wild At Heart by John Eldredge. The quote is, “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Thank you. How about a favorite study or piece of research?

Randy Street
My favorite research I think of all time is by Frederick Herzberg. It was an article he wrote for the Harvard Business Review in 1968, but it remains a perennial best-seller. It’s called One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?. For me, it resonates as the seminal work on employee motivation. It sort of rings true with my own life. It has face validity, and I have found it to be very useful as a leader to think about this really tricky question of motivation.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite habit or personal practice or yours that’s really been key for your effectiveness?

Randy Street
About 10 years ago, I created a practice calledMAP, Monday Action Plan. Essentially what I realized was if I could get organized on Monday morning, I could probably produce at least 50% more if not 100% more through the course of the week. What I do on Monday is I spend about 1-2 hours first thing in the morning, I don’t look at email, I don’t answer the phone, I don’t have any scheduled meetings or calls, and I basically work through a checklist. That checklist forces me to think about my goals and priorities, to think about my calendar, to think about my time, to think about the who and the relationships on my team, to communicate with those people, and basically to figure out what I need to do this week and over the next 3 weeks.

Every Monday I look at the next 3 weeks. That 1-2 hours makes all the difference for me in terms of my productivity because I know what my marching orders are. I don’t let anything fall through the cracks, whether that’s key communication or key meetings that need to be scheduled or actions that need to be taken.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent, thank you. How about maybe sort of a fan favorites nugget or piece of content of yours, like when you’re sharing it? Whether it’s in the book, maybe there’s a bunch of candle highlights or if it’s at a conference or it gets retweeted a lot. What are some of the things you share that people really seem to nod their heads and resonate with?

Randy Street
2 come to mind on that one. One is I believe thateverybody is an A player at something, and that your job if you’re hiring somebody is to figure out what somebody is an A player at and decide if it matches what you need them to do. In other words, everybody … We’ve all been given gifts and talents. The question is not are you a good person or a bad person or anything like that. It’s what are you great at and does it fit. Everybody’s an A player at something. The second one is just a very simple statement that I believe is true. I think leadership is the ultimate lever for good.

Archimedes, the great Greek mathematician and philosopher and scientist and all, once said something to the effect of, “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and with it I can move the world.” I think leadership is that lever. I think it is the ultimate lever to create good in the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, excellent. Thank you. How about a favorite way for folks to find you? Would you prefer Twitter or LinkedIn or email or your website? Where would you point them to?

Randy Street
I am low-tech Pete. Our website is probably the best way to reach me, ghsmart.com. I also have a personal author website, randyhstreet.com.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, prefect. Maybe a favorite challenge or final call to action for those seeking to be more awesome at their jobs.

Randy Street
Yeah. Number one, be an A player yourself.Figure out what makes you come alive and go do that because the world needs you to do that. Two, hire A players if you’re in the position to hire. Hire A players. Make it your number one priority as a leader. It’s going to make all the difference.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Well Randy, thank you so much. This has been a real treat, and I wish you lots of luck over at ghSMART in all your pursuits.

Randy Street
My pleasure, Pete. Thank you again for the invitation. I’ve enjoyed it.