Marco Bartolome

Pete Mockaitis
Bill, welcome!

Bill Flynn
Thanks, Pete. Glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat about your latest, The Hero Trap. Could you kick us off with a particularly surprising or extra fascinating discovery you made while putting this all together?

Bill Flynn
Well, what I found out is that when you get promoted to run a team or run an organization or division, department, whatever it may be, everything that had got you there, all of the successes, rewards, recognitions for being the decision-maker, the hero, the person who won the deal, came in at the last minute and saved something, whatever it might have been, work against you when you are now leading a team.

Being the hero is not your job when you run the team. It is to make the team the hero. And it is a sort of insidious situation because you’ve got decades probably, at least 10, if not 20 or 30 years, of reinforcement from when you’re young, in school, wherever.

And then if you actually get to a point where you say, “Hey, you know, this isn’t working for me. My life has been taken over. The hours and time that I have to spend doing this because I have to be the one who has the answer.”

You know, you can’t eat dinner, you can’t go home, and you decide that that’s not working for you, and you begin to pull back and let the team do more stuff, their first reaction will very likely be discomfort. They don’t want you to pull back because they have been acculturated, if you will, into this particular way of thinking where when something bad happens, you’re the one who comes in and fixes it.

So they sort of help you solve that as opposed to having the responsibility to do it themselves. That’s what I’ve learned.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s well said. And I think that just the hero verbiage, really, I think grounds this whole thing in sort of the emotional stakes of what it feels like as opposed to very theoretical discussion, like, “Oh, as you enter a leadership role, you’ll need to begin delegating what you used to do.”

It’s like, “Okay, yeah, I’ve heard that before.” But when you crystallize it in this hero language, that really brings it home. Could you share some key stories that illustrate this?

Bill Flynn
Yeah, so I sort of experienced this myself, not that I was necessarily the hero in this story, but I came in and replaced the hero. I was brought in a number of years ago to help a founder sell his company, and he brought me in as his sort of head of sales and sort of the guy with the gray hairs, if you will.

And through that process, I helped him do that about a year or so after I started, he sold the company. But during that process, his co-founder, who was the person who wrote most of the code of the software that we were using, this was an email hosting company, was running marketing.

And he ran marketing like an engineer. And he did a Scrum in the morning and he gathered his four or five people, and sort of told them, “Okay, let’s do this today.” And then at the end of the day, they sort of debriefed. And he did that day after day after day.

And when I took over, I said, “I’m not going to do that,” for two reasons. One is that just wasn’t the way I did things. I’m more closer to a builder and an architect in my vernacular than I am the hero or the controller.

And, two, I didn’t have the skills to do that. I didn’t know how to write copy. I didn’t know how to do page search or a SEO at the level that needed to be done, so I couldn’t tell them what to do. But I could say, “Hey, look, you know, what do you think marketing’s job is in this company?”

And we had a discussion about that, and we came away with, “Marketing’s job is to help make sales easier.” So I said, “So all the things that we do, that’s our job is to make the process of actually turning someone into a customer a lot easier.”

“And you all have roles to do to contribute to that, and let’s discuss what that looks like, how we would measure, how well we do there, what are the areas of marketing that we want to make sure we’re excellent at in terms of cost and throughput and volume, etc.”

And I said, “Then go do your jobs, and then figure it out, and let me know when you need me to help sort of come in.” And I didn’t just sort of let him go. I certainly was involved in the process, but I was more sort of eyes-on hands-off type of thing. And when I first said this, you should have seen the faces in the room.

They hated me. I think the word is correct. And I was told later by them because, eventually, they came to appreciate what I did. I was told honestly, “You know, we just hated you because, you know, what are you doing? You sort of basically upended our entire existence at that time, and asked us to do something that we weren’t asked to do.”

But as time went on, and I supported them, they were very good at what they did, they knew what they were doing, there were certain things that I could do to help, but so they sort of ran marketing without me.

And what’s really nice about this story is one of them became my client years later in what I do now. And we’re still, we have a 20- some odd year friendship from that. And two of the other women that were in the organization used me as their reference for the next job. So for the next 10 years, I was the person they asked to be their reference for the next job.

So If you can get through that knothole of difficulty and despair, if you will, it usually turns out pretty well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, boy, that speaks to a lot of things all at once, and I’m really digging it. Because, well, one, the fact that they hated you suggests that what they were doing before was working for them reasonably well, I would speculate, right?

It’s funny, if what they had before was terrible, and you came in with those fundamental, you know, big-picture first principle questions, “What’s marketing’s job here?” they might say, “Oh, finally, we can throw off the yoke of all of the silly junk we’ve been dealing with.”

I’m thinking about the book The Goal, about manufacturing. It’s like, “What are we trying to do here?” “Well, we’re trying to make some money, and the manufacturing supports that by, you know, efficiently, cost effectively, reliably, turning stuff through the manufacturing lines. So that’s kind of what we’re doing here.”

And so they had all these, you know, silly metrics that were just bogging things down and nonsense. So they were doing something that was working for them well enough, such that when you disrupted it, it was not welcome.

Bill Flynn
Yes. exactly. And what’s interesting is, and they began to see it as we added, we started to add velocity to marketing. because when you have to wait until it goes up through the top, that slows everything down, and he or she may not have all the answers. or if even the fact that you have to do that, slows everything down.

I gave them guidelines and guardrails, and I gave them direction at the high level, and I gave them safety. You know, I said, “Look, you’re not going to get everything right. You may make a mistake every now and again, but that’s okay because what we’re doing here together is new, and we want to grow this part of the organization, which means you’re going to make mistakes.”

“So what we’ll do is we’ll just work together and we’ll correct them, and next time we won’t make those mistakes.” And, again, they didn’t believe me. They thought I was setting them up for failure. I think that’s what made the difference for them. They saw that they could do things faster. And the metrics actually got better.

We increased the average order size because we did marketing to help sales, but we also had a website and we did online sales. So marketing was basically also a sales engine. That average order size went up. The cost per acquisition went down. So all the things that you really look for at a high level worked really well.

So they were competent and reasonable people, and they saw that. And once they saw those metrics going, it actually gave them energy and motivation to want to do even more. So I think that’s what you see when you go from good enough to approaching great.

Pete Mockaitis
And what I also dig, when we think about just the title there, The Hero Trap, you can feel like a trap for you in terms of, “Oh, my gosh, the sheer hours required of me to do all of these things is, it feels like a trap, like a prison.”

And also, it’s a bit of a trap in terms of, as you think about what universe of career possibilities might exist for you, you might say, “Well, I don’t know much about marketing, so I have no business leading a marketing team.”

But it seems like, “Au contraire, if we utilize some of these principles, you could be an effective leader of all kinds of teams in which your subject matter knowledge is somewhat limited.”

Bill Flynn
Exactly. And interesting enough, so I used to be a Vistage speaker, and for those of you who don’t know, Vistage is a sort of peer-to-peer advisory organization, have been around for 60, 70, 80 years. And it’s mostly CEOs and leadership teams. It has a whole bunch of capabilities. And I would speak to CEOs, so I’ve spoken to hundreds, if not thousands of CEOs.

And I would do this exercise with them where I would have them fill out a three-by-five card for that particular role. And we’d put CEO or founder or whatever on the front. And on the back, at the top, it says, “Why do I get paid?” And it’s, “What are the key things, what are the key outcomes that this role, regardless whether I’m in it or someone else, gets paid?”

And I had people who ran, you know, pet stores and ball bearing companies, and software organizations, high-end technology, in the same room. And after I had them fill out the card, I would have each of them turn to each other, and they would read their card to each other, and they would help each other, you know, sort of helping them with the process.

And then after all this was done, I said, “So what was the thing that you noticed when you did this?” And, invariably, more than half the time, I would hear from people that say, “Well, you know, I run a pet store, and he’s the ball-bearing CEO, and our cards are remarkably similar because the key outcomes for that level of the company are basically the same.”

So I think, in some cases, you absolutely have to have some knowledge, some skill, minimum amount. There’s a credibility issue, of course, and competency issue, a minimum competency. But you don’t necessarily have to know everything to the nth degree. But you do know how to attract and build and develop teams. And that is a universal skill.

And as far as I know, Pete, and I’d love to hear from your take. I mean, I went to school. I have a business degree. I have a degree in marketing. I was never taught how to run a team. I wasn’t taught anything about teams, right? I was taught things very specific, very discrete things about skills and knowledge, but not about something that really matters to me.

It may be the most important thing on the people side of the business because teams get most of the work done. It’s rare that one individual is responsible for a large portion of the success of a company. So I think your comment is well made.

And if we can help people understand that being a great teammate is how you can be awesome at your job, not just being just great at the thing that you have been asked to do, but also be part of a great team, then you will be able to go very far, whether you want to go up an organization or wide or somewhere else. I think that’s a really important skill to have.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m loving you already dropped a few of these very foundational questions, which I think are really illuminating. Can you give us some more of these favorite questions in your toolkit that really help organize and clarify what we’re up to?

Bill Flynn
Yeah, so one of the things, I work with individuals that lead teams. So I typically work with CEOs and then the leadership team, but I also work with people below that. And I’m a go-to person sometimes for these folks.

And when they come to me and they say, you know, “Here’s the situation. I’m trying to figure it out,” my first question almost always is, “Let’s assume that whatever you’ve done here is completed. How would you describe that as an ideal outcome? What would that particular thing look like?”

“And so give me details. Don’t just give me a word or two, but let’s walk through what that is. Because it’s a lot easier to go backwards from there than it is to go forwards from where you are.” So that would be something that I definitely work with, be it an individual contributor or a team leader or a CEO. It doesn’t matter. To me, that’s a vital question.

And that is also a question that goes across all sorts of parts of the company. For instance, if your job is to run a particular meeting, that should be the first thing you ask yourself, “What is the ideal outcome of this particular meeting? How would I describe a very successful version of this meeting?”

And then you say, “Okay, if that’s what I’m really trying to do, who are the people in the organization, regardless of title or whatever, that I must have in this meeting to give me the best possible chance of achieving that outcome?” Then you put together the agenda.

We hardly do those first two things. We just invite anybody. We don’t really know the end. If you do those two things, your meetings will go much faster, they’ll have much better throughput. The people in the meeting will be a lot happier because they actually have context and they understand what they’re trying to accomplish, why they’re there.

So those would be a couple of things, or one thing that I think can stretch across a couple of different areas.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Okay, so the ideal outcome and then going backwards, and then the subsequent questions. What are some others?

Bill Flynn
As a contributor to an organization, one thing that I learned, and I remember from your notes, I’m a big fan of Pareto, the 80/20 model. And this quote that I can’t find, so I guess it’s mine, but I’m sure I stole it from somebody, is “Few things truly matter, either in business or in life, but those that do, matter tremendously.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Bill Flynn
And your job as a parent or as a team leader or a team participant, whatever it may be, if you could figure out what those few things are, and it’s typically no more than five, and most likely somewhere between two and three, and you spend the bulk of your time and energy making those things optimal, that is the best time you could ever spend as an employee, as a leader, whatever it may be.

It’s easily said, more easily said than done, but once you figure that out, the world becomes a lot easier to navigate and to view, in my opinion.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I think that’s so true. And I have found, like I love the book, The 80/20 Rule, or Essentialism, or The ONE Thing. And it’s funny, so these are books about, you know, productivity, effectiveness, getting more stuff done.

And I find that if I’m stressed, I actually pause to read or reflect on some of these ideas. It’s very liberating. It increases peace and it reduces stress because it’s, like, “I don’t actually have to deal with everything. I’ve got to deal with these, you know, two, three, four things. And they make all the difference there.”

I’ve taught on the 80/20 principle and, like, these things are not just a little bit more important or impactful. They’re 16 times as impactful. Let’s walk through the math, and it’s huge. So could you maybe give us a few examples of a domain, and the two or three things that matter a whole lot in that domain?

Bill Flynn
So, I used to run sales. And when I first started running sales, I wasn’t very good at running sales and I, again, sort of said, “Okay, what does selling mean? And how do I know when there’s a great salesperson?” And I looked at all the great salespeople I had worked with, and they were all different. Yet, one would say that they were successful.

So I said to my team, “I only have two rules as your leader of sales.” I said, “Of course, you need to know your product, you need to know what we do, all that kind of stuff, all the basic stuff.” I said, “But I don’t care how you reach your number. We can argue whether your number is fair or not, and I’m happy to do that. But once we sort of set your number for the month or the quarter or the year, whatever it is, my two rules are be honest and be responsible.”

“And, you know, honest was, I don’t want you to knowingly say something that is disingenuous or incorrect in order to win a deal. And then responsible is responsible to there are three constituencies that you need to be responsible to. You need to be responsible to the organization, you need to be responsible to the client, and you need to be responsible to yourself.”

“So if you are able to do those two things, again, if you want to make a thousand calls to get your number, or you want to make ten calls because you do deep research, whatever, or somewhere in between, if you want to focus more on your personality and relationships versus technique, I don’t care, as long as you’re honest and responsible. And we, as a team, we’re going to work together to make that happen.”

Pete Mockaitis
And how do you define responsible in this context?

Bill Flynn
Responsible, again, for those three things is you need to be responsible to the organization so that you know you’re not just closing a deal to get a check. You’re representing an organization. In many cases, you are the organization to those people, so you have to remember that. So the things that you do and say are reflective of everyone else behind you.

The second is you need to be responsible to the client. They’re going to be clients that want to buy from you. But if you do a good job of qualifying them and doing needs analysis, we may not be the right fit. And I would rather have you walk away from a deal that isn’t the right fit because, eventually, that client is going to be unhappy.

And if you do that a few times, you’re going to be dealing with those unhappy customers, which will take time away from you getting new customers who are happy. So you need to be responsible to them. And then, of course, to yourself, right? You want to make sure that the future version of you is very proud of the current version of you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so responsible in the sense of you are owning their concerns and acting in their best interest. It’s, like, that’s yours. And you feel it, as opposed to that’s someone else’s issue. They’re going to have to deal with satisfying them somehow.

Bill Flynn
Right, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, very good. Well, so now, zooming out a bit, you’ve got a framework – a controller, builder, architect. Can you walk us through that a little bit?

Bill Flynn
Sure. So what I found is that, either myself or other people that I’ve worked with and/or researched, because of this hero trap, the success paradox, we have usually a default identity. Most people, especially if they’re founder-led, you know, they’re a founder of a company, default to the hero, the controller model, because they were the ones who had the answer, they had to do the research, they had to do all the work, because that’s what got them there.

Eventually, the company grew and got successful, hopefully, and that became more and more of an issue for them. But also, what does happen, and I’ve seen happen, is when pressure hits, that’s their default regardless of the size of the company.

So if financial pressure hits or some other type of pressure hits, they’re going to default to getting in there and solving the problem, as opposed to stepping back and saying, “Okay, how do I help my organization do this?” So that’s the issue that I found in general.

And I was saying, “Well, is that the best way to do things?” And I came up with this framework which says you actually have the option of three different identities. The controller, which by the way, Pete, is okay. It’s not a bad identity. Sometimes you need to jump in and do the work and make the decision, etc.

But if you just stop there, that’s where we get back to you don’t get to go home at night. You know, the nights get longer and you get a call at 3:00 o’clock in the morning because something was broken in Japan, and you have to fix it or whatever. But you can’t just stop there. You have to be moving towards architect.

And the next step is builder, and the last is architect. So if I were to synthesize this, controller is, “I do.” The builder is, “I teach how I do.” And then the architect is, “I build systems so I’m not necessary to do either of those two things.”

So if you are the hero and, let’s say, I’m sure in your situation, you’ve probably come in and you’ve had to, like, fix something. Maybe there was an angry client or some system broke, and you had to come in and just make it happen because there was urgency to it or whatever.

Your next step is to say, “Okay, let me teach my team how I did that. Let them understand how I think through these kinds of problems.” You probably have an innate heuristic or whatever it is, you know, some sort of rubric that you use to walk you through a process.

And if you teach that to them, the next time that particular thing comes up, then they will know how to say, “Hey, this is what Pete would do.” And if you’ve read Turn the Ship Around, this is sort of what David Marquet was talking about in his example when he took over the submarine that he didn’t know how to run.

So he basically told people, “I need you to tell me what you intend to do, and I will just sort of say go ahead, because I don’t know how the ship works, but I will teach you how I think. I’ll teach you how. I need to keep us safe. Here are the things that I need to do.” So when they’re doing that intent model, they’re using his thinking to do that.

Now that works for a long distance, but when you really are in a situation where you want to fire yourself from the day-to-day as much as possible, you need to build systems so those people can take that knowledge of yours and use their own brains, be it individual or team, to look at things that you haven’t prepared them for.

So, for instance, you might have taught them a particular way of thinking, but the next thing that comes up is there’s a slight deviation from it, and it doesn’t look and smell exactly like what you just told them. So what will happen if you don’t teach them the systems, then they have to come back to and you have to sort of solve that one a little bit differently.

But if you put the systems in place and you create this architect model where you’re building people who think for themselves and can leverage the system, they won’t even come to you at all, or they’ll come to you and say, “Hey, this came up. It looked a lot like the thing you taught us a year ago, but this was the change. We’re going to do this because this is how we looked it through. Are you okay with that?” And you’re like, “Go ahead, give it a go.”

That’s very different than, “Hey, the problem came up and we don’t know how to solve it. Can you help us fix it, or fix it for us?” So those are the three models: controller, builder, architect.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can you give us a real-world example of a domain in which we’re approaching it as though we are a controller versus builder versus architect?

Bill Flynn
Sure. And I can use an example from one of my clients. I had a client for many years that grew tremendously quickly, over many years, grew 40%, 50%, 60% a year and continued that pace. And then things started to slow down. And the leader couldn’t figure it out.

And what he would do is he would insert himself into the process. So he may have said, “I want to hire these people, and I want to be the one who makes the final decision, or this is what I want us to do to fix that particular thing.” He would literally put himself into that person’s role who reported to him, head of sales, head of marketing, whatever it may be, and just did their job for them, because, again, that pressure hit.

I have had other leaders who have taken what I’ve said and done the opposite, where one of my favorite sayings, which I already said, is, “Your job as a leader of team or teams of teams is to fire yourself from the day-to-day as much as possible, because your job eventually is to look out to the future of the business, or the team, not down into running it.”

And one of the folks that I worked with took that to heart and just sort of stepped away from his team, and they felt abandoned because he hadn’t set up the structure for them to be independent. He didn’t give them the guidelines and the guardrails that I mentioned earlier. He didn’t give them the direction. And they were very much struggling and were unhappy with his process.

So we had to work together and have him sort of step in and say, “Okay, you know, where are they disappointed? What are they looking for?” And he started to step back in and started to put the scaffolding in place so he could step back a little bit more than he did before. So those are a couple of examples that I’ve seen directly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you have made a point that, when you’re delegating, it’s not just about delegating tasks, but delegating authority. Can you share the distinction and some examples?

Bill Flynn
Yeah, so this happens a lot, and I bet your listeners have either, unfortunately, did it inadvertently or had it done to them is, you know, you’re delegated a particular thing, and then you go ahead and act on it, do your best, and then the leader comes in and either undermines you completely, and just says, “You know, we’re doing it this way. We’re not doing that way. I didn’t really like that.”

Or, you know, challenges you in front of the group in such a way that your authority to that particular delegation was minimized, if not eliminated. Another example that I like to give is, let’s say you’re given the ability to run a meeting, right?

So the leader says, “Hey, I want you to run today’s meeting.” And you finished the meeting, and it went okay. And the leader, as they’re leaving the room, says, let’s say I was the one leading the meeting and you were my boss, Pete.

As you’re leaving, you say, “Hey, Bill, can you follow me back to my office as I have some feedback I want to give you on this meeting?” And then I’m following you back to the office, and as I’m walking behind you, I’m catastrophizing. And I’m thinking, one, you know, “What happened? Am I in trouble? What is everyone else who was left behind in the room thinking about me? Where is my status within the organization because you just sort of threw this out there?”

So by the time we get to your office, and you sit behind your desk, which is a status symbol, and a protection of you, right, because you’re physically behind something, and I’m sitting in a chair, completely exposed, so my lizard brain is on fire, and my heart is beating.

I’m probably sweating a little bit. Maybe my vision has narrowed. And no matter what comes out of your mouth next, I’m probably not going to remember it because my brain is already saying, “Run like hell. Get out of the room. This is an existential event.”

Because our brain isn’t very good at distinguishing between a social threat and a physical threat, so all the parts of our brain light up are the same. So what you could’ve done differently to, hopefully, get the same outcome was you could’ve waited till everyone left, sat down next to me, and said, “Hey, Bill, how do you think that meeting went?”

And if I’m not delusional, I’m going to say, “You know, I think part of it went pretty well, and some of it, some of the parts I was a little comfortable with.” And you say, “You know what? I agree. Let’s do this. Put some time on my calendar this week, and I want you and I to get together.”

“And I want you to bring two or three things that you thought went really well in the meeting that we can maybe brainstorm and even improve and make them better. And I want you to bring one or two things that you didn’t think went very well, and I’ll do the same thing, and we’re going to work together every week until you and I agree that this is the best possible version of this meeting.”

Both were trying to get the same outcome, but the way it was done was a difference of authority, if you will.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Yeah. It was like we’re collaborative team partners achieving an outcome together as opposed to, “I’m the boss and you got to shape up.”

Bill Flynn
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell us, any other tweaks or pro tips you recommend, like shifts that make a world of difference?

Bill Flynn
So from what I can understand, most of the listeners that you have are, they may or may not be running teams. They’re probably an individual contributor. There’s probably not CEOs at all.

Pete Mockaitis
There might be, like, 40 of them out there. Howdy CEOs, we appreciate you.

Bill Flynn
What you want to do is the best way to make yourself promotable in most organizations is thinking about how you can be the best possible teammate to the group, right?

What value do you bring to the organization and to the team? And then how does that fit with all the other folks on the team? And how do you make sure you work together and make sure that you understand that they’re all bringing their own perspective, they’re bringing their own experience, and that will make your contribution even better?

Unless, of course, the person that hired everyone hired exactly the same person, just five of them, then that’s difficult. But most don’t. We’re at least going to bring our different experience to it. When you become a better teammate, you’re seen differently by people on your team and by others.

And if that’s what you want, if you’d like to run a team, etc., you can. This is exactly how I acted. I eventually became the general manager of a division of a company. I’ve not been a CEO myself. And I was one of those unusual people. I was usually the number one and number two sales rep in most of the organizations I was at.

And, usually, the mistake is to promote that person and they run the team. In my case, I guess I was a little bit different because I came at it differently. And I always thought about myself not as the best salesperson, but one of the other salespeople here. And I still can learn from everyone else, right?

There are so many steps in a sales process from awareness and interest generation, qualification, needs analysis, closing, negotiation. There are all sorts of skills that, you know, I could get better at. And I acted that way. So when I was promoted, it was not a surprise.

And it was not something that most people had an issue with as well, because they saw me that way as I developed myself through that particular organization and my career. That would be something that I would definitely tell the 33-year-old on average individual contributors.

That if you’re looking to do that, whether you’re looking to lead a team or not, but just be recognized as someone who’s valuable. To me, that would be something I would highly recommend that you think about is, “Am I being the best possible teammate today? Am I working hard not only to be a great individual contributor, but making my other teammates look great as well?”

Pete Mockaitis
And I think that’s so essential to proactively prompt yourself, interrupt yourself, get that in the groove, because, otherwise, it’s so easy to just get sucked into the endless to-do list and hustling to achieve the thing.

I found that it really does take a moment of stopping, pausing, considering. It’s like, “Oh, you know what? Hmm, this person over there, that just happened for them. And so they’re probably feeling this or needing that. And so, well, hey, I can offer something there.”

I just recently had an experience. It’s like, “Oh, man, someone got some bad news. Oh, I should probably give them a call. They might like that.” And then I heard from a third party, it’s like that meant the world to them. It totally picked them up.

And it’d be very easy to say, “Oh, shucks, I’m behind. I got to hustle up and get out the door.” But, yeah, I think that’s a great tip is to proactively ask yourself that question because, otherwise, it won’t bubble up and you’ll overlook many little opportunities that can make a big impact.

Bill Flynn
Exactly. And I think what you’re saying is the word little is important. You know, if you did this, it probably took 30 seconds to a minute to just say, “Hey, you know, I was thinking about you. I heard about this, and I can’t imagine how you’re feeling. I’m here if you want to chat, whatever it might be.”

And most of the time they’re not going to take you up on it, but they’re going to remember that you did that. And if you just do that, you will be putting credits in the bank, and then there will be a time where you’ll need something.

And if you do that well enough, my suspicion is you won’t even need to ask someone. They’ll just do it, because they’re going to say, “You know what?” Just like in the military, they say, “Why would you do that? Why would you put your life on the line for this other person?”

And the answer is always, “Because he or she would do it for me.” And if you can have that sort of esprit de corps in an organization, the velocity and the production and the satisfaction and fulfillment of that group of people will be off the charts.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Bill, tell me, any final top tips you want to make sure to put out there before we hear about your favorite things?

Bill Flynn
When you hear that little voice in your head, especially, again, if you’re highly competent, you’re probably the top person in the group for certain things, if you find yourself saying to yourself, “It’s faster if I just do it myself,” that is a bit of a yellow, if not a red flag, that will probably work against you eventually. In the short term, it will not.

And this is the insidious nature of it, right? You will be celebrated. You will get an endorphin rush, a dopamine rush. It’ll feel great. And what also is interesting is if you start to do it the other way, because what you’re doing feels, it’s not only self-rewarding and egocentric, but it also feels like caring, so it’s hard to sort of walk away from that.

But if you hear those words, right, “Faster if I just do it.” That should be something that ticks in your brain and says, “You know, maybe I’m trying to be the hero a little bit too much here,” and stop yourself, and say, “Okay, am I the person who absolutely has to do this?”

First is, “Am I actually the right person to do this? Do I have the expertise, skills, knowledge, abilities, etc.?” And if you’re not and you’re just trying to sort of look better than someone else, then that’s a whole other problem.

But if you are, you know, it’s also you want to say many hands make a lighter load, or something like that, right? It has other benefits as well. So that would be my sort of last tip that I would say, if that little voice in your head says that. Listen to it and think of an alternative.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Bill Flynn
This is probably for the future version of the people who are listening to your podcast. I have come to believe very strongly that great leaders create organizations that don’t need great leaders.

Your job is to create a situation when you’re no longer in that position, that when you leave, either to be moved up in the organization or out of the organization, or wherever else, that the person that takes over from you, there is little or no disruption from when you leave to when they take over.

So if you can create that environment, then I think that’s what we should applaud as a great leader, as opposed to, again, the hero that came in and saved the thing. And I think a really good example which would have surprised me, is Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, right?

When Tim Cook took over, the world said, “Oh, my God, Apple is going to fall apart.” It did not. It grew at a record pace outside of it. And, again, Tim Cook, completely different kind of leader than Steve Jobs, but to his credit, Steve Jobs set up that environment.

I think, in an interview once, he said, he was asked what his greatest accomplishment was. And he didn’t say a product. And this is a product guy, right? He loved products. He loved making things. He said, “Apple University.”

He said, “I created an environment that will build great Apple folks. And whether they’re here or somewhere else, we’re teaching them all the things that we know.” He said, “That will be my greatest legacy.” And even though it’s sort of behind the scenes, I think he’s right. And Tim Cook is a good example, and we’ll see how this next leader does as well.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you share a favorite study, or experiment, or bit of research?

Bill Flynn
So the research that I cite often is the stuff that Marcus Buckingham did, and I think he talked to, I think, it was a thousand different people in 19 different countries. And he asked them, “How many of you are on a team?” And it was 80 something percent.

And then he said, “How many of you are on more than one team?” And 60 some odd percent of those people said they were on more than one team. And then, “How many are you are on more than that?” And there was another 50% or so.

So the research shows that teams are the most important human component of any organization, of almost any organization. And being a great teammate and running a great team is probably the most important thing.

And he’s not the only one. Amy Edmondson has done similar research. There have been some other folks who’ve done similar research as well, that teams are really the thing that drive most success of companies, etc.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that seems to really connect and resonate with folks, they quote it back to you often?

Bill Flynn
“Your job is not to run the company. It is to create the future of the company.”

And, again, back to neuroscience, we cannot focus on two things at the same time. We context-switch. And I said, “If you’re indispensable, if you have a long line out your door, you’re not going to be able to look out and have time to do that.”

“So your job as you move up in the company and, especially to running teams, always be thinking, ‘How can I be doing less? How can I fire myself from the day-to-day so I can spend more time creating the future either of the organization or the department or the division or the team?’”

So you’re making sure that you’re spending the best part of your time is making the whole better than just the individual.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Bill Flynn
My website is probably the best place to go. My books are on there. You can download my latest book for free, and The Hero Trap will also be on there if you want to pre-order it. There’s all sorts of other resources and things I have on there. And that’s called www.CatalystGrowthAdvisors.com.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Bill Flynn
Yeah. Fight the feeling to become indispensable. So keep that in the back of your mind.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Bill, thank you.

Bill Flynn
Thank you, Pete. Appreciate it.