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Mar 11
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943: Crushing the 9 Barriers to Taking Action with David Nurse

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David Nurse reveals how to identify and overcome the roadblocks preventing you from taking action.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to bridge the gap between knowing and doing
  2. The nine reasons why we don’t take action
  3. The force that’s more powerful than motivation 

About David

A former professional basketball player, David Nurse is today a mindset coach who has trained over 175 NBA athletes including seven-time All Star Joe Johnson, “Linsanity’s” own Jeremy Lin, NBA champ Brook Lopez, Domas Sabonis, Norm Powell, Keegan Murray, and Top 10 player/All Star Shai Alexander. As a coach, David also took the Brooklyn Nets from 28th in three-point shooting percentage to 2nd overall in the NBA in just one season.  

David is also the author of the best-selling books Pivot & Go, Breakthrough, and the 2023 release, Do It: The Life-Changing Power of Taking Action. He was named by Real Leaders as one of the Top 50 Motivational Speakers in the World, and his podcast, The David Nurse Show, is one of the fastest-growing podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. David resides in Marina del Rey, California, with his wife Taylor Kalupa. 

Resources Mentioned

David Nurse Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

David, welcome!

David Nurse

Pete, it’s an honor to be here, man.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m so excited to dig into your wisdom. But first, I’d love it if you could kick us off with a super riveting tale of your adventures with folks in the NBA.

David Nurse

All right, here it is. 2018, it’s the summer, it is NBA pre-draft. So, NBA pre-draft is before the players are superstars, they have to go through the draft process. Some players get the benefit of having great hype and potential and not having to do NBA pre-draft, but there was a kid who walked through the Santa Monica gym doors, his name was Shai Alexander. Shai Alexander from Kentucky, no one really thought he was going to be this top player, like he would have a good career and people thought maybe, you know, middle of the first-round draft pick.

Now, with pre-draft, I always like to crush the players on the very first workout. You got to test them, “How much do they have? Are they able to go through this grueling process of working out for team after team? Do they have that insatiable drive?” The insatiable drive, I slow down to say that term because I think that is the factor that nobody looks at for NBA players to determine their greatness. I’ll tell you more on that afterwards.

So, Shai walks in and I put him through this workout. It’s like two and a half hours and he’s soaked in sweat. It’s grueling. It’s difficult, and most of the time, at the end of the workout, the players, they kind of, you know, just lay down on the court, or they go to the locker room. The last thing they want to do is more drills. But Shai comes up to me after that workout, he says, “Coach, when are we going tonight?” And I knew from that moment Shai Alexander was built different. I knew he had insatiable drive. The desire to continue to improve even when somebody’s not making you.

The desire to improve even when it’s not on social media. Nobody knows about the workout. It’s the unseen hours put in. Shai Alexander had that. We went every morning, every night, throughout pre-draft. Now, currently, four or five or whatever years it is later, Shai is on pace to be the MVP of the entire NBA. He is arguably one of the top three players in the entire NBA. This coming from a guy who did not have the hype, he did not have many people who knows who he is, he’s also created this incredible brand, he’s like the fashion guy of the NBA with millions and millions of followers.

The point being is, if you have a desire for greatness, you have to have that insatiable drive. You can’t become great at something without this internal fire burning inside of you, and I can tell within the first five minutes of working out with an NBA player if they have it or if they don’t have it.

Pete Mockaitis

Intriguing. Intriguing. Okay, so he said, “Coach, when are we going tonight?” was the indicator to you that it’s there. But it sounds like it may be even beforehand, you witnessed what’s happening within the minutes of the workout. So, can you paint a picture for us for what does a “having it” workout look like like versus a “not having it?”

David Nurse

Well, there’s also a term that I’ve developed over working out with NBA players and training them for 12 plus years, it’s what I call the 17-second rule. It’s mental dictatorship, basically. So, this goes back, and then I’ll bring it back here, of training players for 12 years, I would bring a stopwatch with me because I was interested. I always thought at first that every NBA player loved training, they loved practice, but that’s far from the truth.

So ,when they did not want to work out that day, I would press the stopwatch to see how long it took them to be able to get past that moment of, “Oh, I don’t want to do this,” and then they’d be okay, and on average, it was 17 seconds, meaning by the time I said, “Start the workout,” and I could tell they weren’t feeling it, they did their first few drills, they did their first few shots, then they were okay. They got past that initial sticking point, and that’s huge for people. Like, think about it, most people won’t go work out because they don’t want to start. Most people won’t do something because the start is hard.

After you start, after you do the first couple of reps in the gym, it’s easy. Your body gets in the flow. Your mind gets in the flow. After you make the first few cold calls, if you’re a salesperson having to make cold calls, the first suck. They’re not easy, but after that, you get in the rhythm. So, coming back to the workout with Shai is like I had my stopwatch ready, but there was no need for that. He had the desire. You could see it just in his body language, in the way that he attacked the workouts, the way that he was present, the way that he was asking questions.

And the workout, I mean, I don’t remember exactly what the workout was, but it’s every difficult drill, like defensive slides, all these different conditioning drills, shooting when you’re tired, physical body contact. I used to have this big BOSU ball, if you can imagine doing ab workout in the gym and the guys would have to drive to the hoop, and I would just level them with that ball to see if they could take the contact and finish. All types of physical, mental, the most challenging drills that I could do. And when I knew that a player was able to embrace those, and want more of those, and not shy away from those, then I knew it was different.

And then it goes on to their competition against NBA current players. So, this is going on past the workout when you can tell, like, “Okay, this guy, does he have the killer instinct?” because that’s another one of the attributes that I don’t think you can really teach somebody. I’ve tried to teach it for years in all different fields. You either have the killer instinct or you don’t. You can probably increase it a little bit, but killer instinct meaning, “Do you want this so bad that you will give anything for it?”

So, when Shai was in workouts with the NBA, the current NBA players, like NBA All-Stars and Superstars, a lot of times young players will kind of shy away, like, “I’m not there yet. These guys are the authority. I better just play my role.” Not Shai. He was trying to win every single drill. He was going for their throats. He didn’t care if they’d been a nine-time NBA All-Star. He was going at them. That’s the killer instinct. So, there’s two aspects. You can help somebody develop them but you can’t give somebody these if they don’t have them, and that’s the insatiable drive and the killer instinct.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Understood. Well, so you’ve put a number of this wisdom in your book, Do It, or, “Don’t Quit,” depending on how you read the cover. Very clever, David. So, when I read “Do It,” I can’t help but think of Shia LaBeouf’s video in which he’s screaming, “Do it!” So, is that what you had in mind as you were assembling this work?

David Nurse

Yes, I wrote the whole book based on Shia LaBeouf and his…No, actually, I did not know that about that until you told me about it. But I will take any type of marketing that comes to it. Anytime somebody says “Do it,” or “Don’t quit,” you now think of the book. I’m planting that seed in everybody’s mind.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, we will link in the show notes to Shia LaBeouf’s screaming, “Do it!” repeatedly in front of a green screen, very meme-able, and you’ll think of this book.

David Nurse

I love it. But the reason that I chose that title, I mean, I’ve got to give credit to my wife who is the creative genius in our family, for sure. She’s an actor, a producer, has done a lot of big work, and I always look to her for creative advice. But the reason it’s “Do It” and “Don’t Quit,” if you look at the cover of it, people are motivated in different ways. You’re either motivated by you want the positivity, you want to see what the gains can be, or you’re motivated by the resistance of failure. That’s the “Don’t Quit.”

If somebody say, “Hey, you got to do this. You can’t quit.” That will motivate somebody. Or, “Hey, go do it. You can achieve this.” So, it’s either the positive or the negative side. People are motivated by different things. So, if you read it, you see it in the way that you read it.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, is it fair to say that the difference between taking the action and not taking the action makes all the difference in terms of other results? Is that kind of your main thesis here?

Pete Mockaitis

Absolutely. I think it’s the biggest misnomer today in society, is there’s so many people that are just taking up so much knowledge. There’s content, content, content, YouTube, podcasts, going to Masterminds, events, and you soak in all this knowledge, but the huge disconnect is the difference between knowing and doing. So many people will know and know the right thing to do, but very few will actually do it because this bridge between knowing and doing, there’s a valley. And in that valley, there’s roadblocks, there’s resistance, there’s the unknown, the uncertain, and ultimately everything is based on the fear of the results.

So, “If I take this chance, if I actually take action on this, what will happen? I don’t know. That’s uncertain.” And true taking action, confidently taking action, is taking the step without knowing where it’s going to land. It’s having the faith that if you do take action, something positive will come from it, but most people hold themselves back based on the nine different archetypes that I outline in the book. And what I mean by an archetype is, “Which type of action-taker are you? What holds you back from taking action?” Everything is rooted in fear. That’s literally why people don’t take action. They are afraid.

And the different reasons, some of those reasons are what I call the allodaxophobic, and that simply means fear of other people’s opinions, “Do you not take action because you are worried what other people will think of you?” Fear of the being burnt by the past, meaning, “Do you not take action in the present because something of your past did not go the way that you wanted it to, so you are taking that past example, bringing it into your present?” There’s a thing called traumatic age regression. That means somebody had something happened in their past, they have not addressed it, they have not forgiven that situation, and it holds them back from actually taking action in the present. Seventy percent of Americans have this traumatic age regression.

So, like, hey, you got dumped by somebody you thought was going to be your spouse. You’re not going to put your heart on the line again because you got burnt in the past. That’s a very common one. And there’s many more. There are seven more archetypes that I outlined. And the point of this is you read through, and you see which ones you align with. It tells you what’s actually neurologically going on in your brain of why this is happening, these are real things. And what is going on in your heart or the feeling of it so you’re able to see, “Okay. Well, yeah, you know, what I suffer from perfectionism. That is what’s holding me back. I think it has to be perfect,” or, “I underestimate myself,” “My parents never did anything great,” “I come from this small town. Like, why should I have something?” And you align with these.

Now, the great thing is, on the other half of it, you’re able to see a tool for, “All right, if this is what I struggle with, if this is what’s holding me back from where I am today to where I want to be tomorrow,” that ultimately is the mission everybody is on, whether you know it or not, you are where you are today currently, that’s obvious, and there’s somewhere you want to get tomorrow. In between that is this radical strategic action. So, you read through it, you understand, “Okay, this is what I struggle with, this is how I get over it,” and there’s also a story from some historical figure that you probably haven’t even heard of honestly.

When I first read Malcolm Gladstone, everybody probably knows Malcolm Gladwell, I was really intrigued with the way he told stories of historical figures, you’re like, “Where did you find this story? Who the heck is this person?” I did something similar where I found somebody who struggled with this exact fear archetype, each one of the nine, and I told their story leading up to the point where they had this decision to make, the decision, “Do I go for it even though the odds are stacked against me? Or do I just go with the flow, and do what everybody else is doing, and don’t change the world?”

They obviously make the decision to go against any of the easy route, and they end up changing the world and I show how that is done. Like, for example, a guy named Lewis Latimer, probably haven’t heard of him. Lewis Latimer was the person who pushed forward Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone and Thomas Edison’s invention of the incandescent light bulb. Without him, he was the guy who made this happen. It was an incredible race. It’s a fascinating story. They should make a movie about the race for the incandescent light bulb, and Lewis Latimer was the one who pushed it forward for Thomas Edison.

But he also had been burnt many times in the past. So, he was the action archetype of the burnt. He thought about it. He debated it. He talked with his wife about it. He almost did not take on this challenge. But he did, Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, because of Louis Latimer.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, so let’s talk about the nine archetypes here. You say all of them, they’ve got a fear of results, and it sounds like there’s a different kind of a result that each is fearing. So, the allodoxaphobic is fearing others negative judgments; the burnt-in-the-past person is fearing, “Oh, this bad thing that occurred last time I did something like this is going to happen again, and it’s going to hurt and suck all over again, just like when I was dumped or whatever.” So, could you unpack for us the other seven types and what it is they’re fearing?

David Nurse

Yeah, the inopportune. So, the inopportune is you just think it’s not the right time, you thought, “You know, I’m just too young for this,” or, “Ah, I’m just too old to start this.” It’s never the right time and it will never be the right time. So, there is no right time to take action, you’re not too old, you’re not too young. And a great way to take this away from your mentality is just do a Google search of people over the age of 50 who have done something great, and it’s an incredible list, or people under the age of 20 who have done something great, so you can align with either side that you’re on.

The blamer is another one where you’re blaming somebody for your situation. You’re blaming your parents. You’re blaming where you were born. You’re blaming God. You’re blaming somebody. It’s so easy to blame and it’s not very often that someone’s going to come back at you, and say, “You know what, that’s actually wrong.” It’s like in the court of law, there’s always a cross-examination. In the game of blaming, there’s not a cross-examination, you’re just pointing the finger at somebody else.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that’s a good point. Folks will rarely just interrupt you to tell you that you’re wrong.

David Nurse

Yeah, they won’t.

Pete Mockaitis

Like, “I can’t do this because my dad never believed in me and dah, dah, dah.” It’s like, because people you’re talking to have little to gain and much to lose by saying, “No, actually, you’re full of malarkey, sir. And this has nothing to do with your father.” It’s like, “Whoa, dude, who are you?” as opposed to the reaction will very rarely be like, “You know what, thank you. That is a wakeup call that I really needed, and you were a bright light of truth for me.” Probably not going to be received that way if you were to speak up.

David Nurse

No, it really isn’t. I mean, you can blame and people are going to let you off the hook. Unless you have a group, and I say this, like, seek wisdom from the wise. Have people in your life that you know that you can come to with something and they’ll give you the honest truth. That doesn’t mean it’s your mom or your dad. They’re going seek your safety. They’re not going seek your best interest.

So, have people in your life that you can say, “Hey what do you think of this?” and they’ll say, “You know what? That’s terrible, that sucks. You shouldn’t do that,” or, “That’s great.” Seek wisdom from the wise. Don’t just seek wisdom from anybody that’s going to agree with you, or be your yes-man, or feel your remorse in your blaming situation.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, now with the inopportune and the blamer, the inopportune says, “It’s not the right time,” the blamer blames parents or God or someone. So, what is it that they fear? They fear that there’s just no way this is going to happen for them because of these circumstances?

David Nurse

Yeah, their fear is there’s no way it’s going to happen for them because it’s almost, too, that they’re afraid of success. Have you’ve been around those people that they just blame themselves into a way that if they find success, they’re going to work their way out of it? It’s almost that they’re scared of this success. They’re scared of, “Well, what happens if something does good happen to me?” And they fall into this rut of constant blaming. Or they just really don’t want to put in the work, and it’s easier to blame than it is to actually go through the process.

Pete Mockaitis

And, David, tell us about this fear of success. I mean, why would we fear success? Success is a good thing we want, isn’t it?

David Nurse

It is until you get it, and then a lot of people don’t know how to deal with it. That’s why so many people crash and burn when they do taste success because they don’t know how to appreciate it, and they don’t know how to live with it. Like, an example that I give is one of my close friends is Jeremy Lin, and he went through this time called “Linsanity.” And this was when he was almost cut from the NBA, and he got put into the game, and he just blew up.

He took off. He had an amazing game and he was going on game winners, and 30-point games, and this incredible streak, and he was the number one trending thing in the world. He was on top of the NBA world for weeks and weeks and weeks, and he’d never had that success. He never tasted that, and when he got there, he didn’t necessarily live in the appreciation for that moment. He was living in the what-ifs,
“What if I can’t keep this up? What will people think of me?”

So, when people reach success, who aren’t ready for it, that’s what they think of. They’re like, “Okay, well, what if this goes away?” They think worst-case scenario thoughts and the “what ifs” that ends up eating them alive, and they normally self-sabotage.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Understood. Well, let’s hit the rest of the archetypes.

David Nurse

So, the fifth one is the test believer. And the test believer, it sounds kind of ironic saying the test believer when this kind of looks like an Enneagram type of test that we’re going through, but far too often, people will see, “Oh, it’s there,” they read their zodiac or their Myers-Briggs or even their Enneagram, and they label themselves with that’s who they are. That’s how they have to act because that’s what the test says.

Similar to the example that I give is, “Are you an extrovert? Are you an introvert?” So, people will say, “No, I’m introverted so I can’t go talk to anybody.” But introvert doesn’t have anything to do with, “Are you able to go talk with people in communication?” It has everything to do with how you recharge. So, it’s an excuse people make that they’re not able to connect with others because they say they’re introverted, and that’s just a label somebody has given themselves and they live into.

So, if there’s a label that you’re giving yourself, whether it’s a test believer, or it’s you label yourself according to your profession, you think you are what you do, that’s where you need to eliminate that from because that will never fulfill you. It will ultimately fail you. So, that’s the fifth one.

Pete Mockaitis

How about the perfectionist?

David Nurse

So, the perfectionist, I think a lot of high performers, this is the one that they struggle with that holds them back. I think they have to have everything perfect before they even start, but you can never achieve anything great unless you actually start. And people will hold themselves back, they think, “Well, I can’t put this out there into the world if it isn’t perfect,” and, really, it will never be perfect. It’s always a work in progress, anything that you do. Perfectionism also goes hand in hand with the term procrastination, which has been actually something that people have said, “Oh, I’m more creative when I procrastinate. I can think better if the buzzer is coming up.”

Well, actually, there’s been many studies done, and there was a study done on thousands of people in Canada, that they found that 90% of people that procrastinate are much more stressed and anxious than those who don’t. So, yeah, maybe you’ll produce a better-quality product at the buzzer but you’ll also live a life of increased stress and anxiety, which I don’t think anybody wants to do. So, the perfectionist just comes down to the mindset of “Ready, fire, aim,” where it’s never going to be perfect. You put it out there and then you continue to.

Refine and define it, and that’s like anything with life. It’s never going to be perfect. You just got to start, and it’ll continue to work its way there. But it holds a lot of people back, especially high performers.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And then the scarcest.

David Nurse

Yeah, so the scarcest is this mindset of you’ve got to hold on to whatever you have. It’s there’s a 100% of the pie. If you’re looking at a pie with a 100%, you got to take your little slice and you got to hold on to it. This was the whole mentality of hoarding, or people in 2020, they went to the grocery store to get toilet paper and just hold on to it because there’s never going to be any more.

It’s the same thing when they think of opportunities, why people will just hold on to what they have and not give anything else to anybody else because they live in this mindset of there’s a scarcity amount when, in reality, there’s an abundant amount. So that pie that you were taking, that little slice of, and holding on for dear life, like it’s only yours, think about a pie that’s a double-decker pie, or you put a la mode ice cream on top. Like that is why these burger chains, In-N-Out and McDonald’s, and why they’re all together next to each other. It’s not because they’re competing against each other necessarily, but they’re actually competing with each other.

If someone knows, “Hey, this is the area of town to go for a burger,” they’re going to get more traffic there. So, my concept here is what I’ve seen worked so many times, is not the competition directly against somebody else. It’s competition with, “Can you get other people within your industry, in your market, to be on the same team you compete with, and you end up completing with each other?” So, completion through competition leads to more abundance than it will actually the scarcity mindset.

It’s the same thing with if you have the scarcity mindset with money. Usually, if you’re just trying to hold, hold, hold, hold, hold, that’s the best way to never actually earn any or gain any revenue or long-term money by just holding on to it and hoarding it.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And then the distracted and the underestimator.

David Nurse

Yeah, so the distracted is, this is the one I struggle with the most. And when I say distracted, I don’t necessarily mean it’s distracted by notifications, or your phone, or your tablet. But more so the distracted for this is distracted from, “What is your great? Like, what is the thing that you are on a mission to do?” That is your vision. That’s “great.”

Now there are so many shiny objects that are going come along the way, these opportunities, there’s all these goods that can take you away from your great. That’s what the distracted is. And I feel this a lot, like, I get blessed with many, many opportunities, like, “Hey, do you want to do this business?” “Hey, do you want to go to this mastermind?” “Hey, you got to be here.”

It’s almost like the FOMO that sets in. And if you continue to take these opportunities that you off the path of the mission that you’re on, you’re never going to eventually get to that mission because it’s not the enemy of great is bad. That’s pretty obvious. The enemy of great is good, and that’s the distracted that keeps you away from what you were called to do.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And the underestimator?

David Nurse

And the underestimator is simply the mindset of you’re either a person who views life as a why-me person, or “Why do I deserve this? Why little old me? I don’t deserve anything great.” Or, you’re of the mindset of, “Why not me?” Somebody’s got to do it. Somebody has to be the top in their field. They have to be the best at what you want to do. Someone’s got to do it. Why not you? And it’s simply looking at any kind of decision or anything that comes upon in your life of which way do you view it?

Do you underestimate yourself? Do you already count yourself out? Do you self-sabotage before it even happens because you view yourself as a why-me person? Or do you view yourself as, “Well, somebody’s got to do it, why not me?” And there’s a lot of things that can go into being an underestimator, but ultimately it comes to that and there’s only two camps of people. You’re either in “Why me?” or “Why not me?”

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, so now, David, as I think through this lineup, I’m trying to categorize myself. And my situation is I just don’t feel like doing a thing. So, let’s just say watching the calories and the weight. I think I have successfully gained and lost 10 pounds, maybe five or six times. And so, I know what it takes, and I think, “Okay, the name of the game is tracking those calories and eating less food. That’s what does the trick.” And so, I think, “Okay, that’s what I can do. That’ll make it happen, I think, but I don’t want to.” That sounds unpleasant and annoying to do that, and it’s more comfortable and enjoyable to not do that. Where do we plug this one?

David Nurse

Yeah. So, the question I would ask you is, “Why do you want to lose weight? Why do you want to lose the 10 pounds, or get in better shape? What is the end result of that?” So, you say that you do, but why do you want that?

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m a bit more energetic, a bit more confident. I like the way I look in the mirror. I could enjoy not stepping on the scale and not being labeled overweight, according to the body mass index, which makes me kind of feel like a loser. I am overweight by two pounds, David, because of the body mass index said so, and I don’t like underperforming in anything.

David Nurse

Yeah. Well, there you go. I mean, there’s two things right there that you just said in that sentence, which could go into the allodoxaphobic, fear of other people’s opinions. It doesn’t actually have to mean just people. It could mean the society norms and what they have placed upon it, and also the perfectionist, where you don’t want to underperform in anything. So, there’s two that can work together in that one.

But I also would say there’s three different levels to it as well. There is the motivation, which will show you the “there,” which is the motivation is there to lose weight, get in great shape. There’s also the discipline, so that’s the second level of it. The discipline will get you there, and you’ve got there. You’ve said it before, you’ve got there before. So, you have the discipline.

Now, the third level to this is devotion. So, devotion means, “Who are you devoted to? What are you devoted to?” That’s the next level of it. Like, “Are you doing this for a bigger purpose?” If you’re only doing this for yourself and the aesthetics of it, it’s probably going to waver. But if you’re saying, “Hey, I am going to get in great shape and stay in great shape for an amazing example for my kids,” or, “Because I have to be the healthiest and most energetic, I can possibly be at my job.” It’s the devotion that’s the long-term.

Motivation is a spark. Discipline is an up-and-down kind of riding the waves but devotion is the long-term. And once you make that commitment to devotion and you understand why you’re holding yourself back, “Is it, okay, this is the society says this, or I need to be perfect in this, or maybe I’m blaming something in the past of, well, I did it before but this happened?” And you work your way through that.

Now, you decide, “All right, I’m devoted to it,” and you make that devotion, you make that declaration of devotion, it’s almost signing a contract with yourself, and you’ve got a much better chance. I’m not saying it’s not going to still waver but you’ve got a much better chance.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, that’s interesting. So, it seems like what’s going on there for me is more, like, “I don’t actually care all that much about this outcome.” It’s like, “Whether the body mass index says I’m three pounds overweight, or I’ve got three more pounds to go before I hit the threshold, I don’t actually care that much about what the BMI has to say about me.”

David Nurse

That’s good, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

And so, when push comes to shove, it’s like, “Well, I could track all my calories but I don’t feel like it so I won’t.” And it sounds like that that, too, can be an acceptable choice. It’s like, “Go pick something that’s more worth your time and effort.”

David Nurse

It’s exactly it. You can’t be devoted to everything. If that’s not the thing, like it’s the difference between if you see a bodybuilder, who is literally tracking every single macro, and weighing on the scale, like, to me, that looks miserable. It sounds like that sounds miserable to you as well. So, that’s not your choice of devotion. You can’t be devoted to everything.

You pick and choose what’s the most important things to you, and you’re choosing lifestyle, life rhythm, over being an incredibly crazy person out to eat where you can only eat broccoli and chicken breast, let’s say. Yeah, you’re not that interested in being a bodybuilder, and I don’t think you’re performing on stage at the World’s Strongest Man competitions coming up.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m insulted but…

David Nurse

Maybe. Maybe.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, thank you. Well, now maybe could you share with us a story of someone who went through this process, in a professional work type of context, in terms of they weren’t doing it, they were quitting, and then they had some insight, like, “Aha, what’s going on? This is the category I fit into,” and what unfolded?

David Nurse

Yeah, totally. So, I’ve been working with a CEO for the past year, and when I started working with him, he’s at a massive company, runs an amazing Fortune 500 company, and he was going through a very difficult time, and just feeling really down, personally in his life and in the business, so we had to figure out, like, “Okay, why? Like, what is the cause of this? You grew this amazing business. Now, what is happening?”

So, we realized that there were certain people that had been hired and they looked like all-stars, they came from other great companies, and they brought the business down. They weren’t on the same mission as he was. It was more for, okay, how much money can they make, but they didn’t really care about the end result product. So, he found this out and now has become blaming-the-past situation that he couldn’t get past. So, it’s very hard especially for someone that successful when you get hit with this, when you have a major roadblock in your career and your life.

So, really, we just had to forgive this situation, had to address it and had to say, “Well, you know, what did we learn from this?” So, one of the most important things from the blaming situation is not just go over it and pass through it, but it’s, “What did we learn from this situation?” So, we really went in depth on this, and the takeaways, the positives that came from very incredibly big losses and negatives that could have driven somebody to just quit or give up altogether. So, worked through the blaming situation to find out, “Okay, now I need to figure out the right team that I have.” So, that was one of them.

But it was also a part of underestimation, too, where there had been repeated history of these types of failures, if you want to call them, and just come over the fact that these don’t have to happen, like, “People aren’t always going to fail. You don’t have to underestimate you or your team.” He built this amazing company despite having these types of action archetypes holding him back from living the life he’d want to live.

And when I say that in terms of the underestimating, it was also the underestimating of giving himself permission to enjoy the journey. That’s a really important one for high performers, or any driven person, giving yourself permission to enjoy the journey. Even if the journey is a struggle moment, if it’s difficult, if you’re going through a fire, you can still enjoy the journey of it because it’s never going to be easy. God never said, “Hey, you’re just going to have this easy life.” No, it’s going to be difficult, but it’s going to be worth it.

So, having that underestimator, working through the underestimator, individually, personally, in his own life, and also the blamer, the things that had happened to the company in the past, to be able to move through it, knowing that there was going to be, you know, it’d be difficult to work through that, but they’d eventually get through it, and now he’s thriving, the company is doing amazing, stock prices are up.

So, it was a, yeah, working through those two archetypes, and I’ll continually go back through all of these with them to make sure, “Are you good here? Or, is this one coming in?” because it can change. It’s very actionable. That’s the example that I give it’s an actionable version of kind of like the Enneagram.

Pete Mockaitis

All right, thank you. Well, David, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

David Nurse

Just check out the book. I think it’s helped a lot of people. It’s a fun read and it can really show you, “Do you have any roadblocks?” I always go back through it because there’s different things that will come up in my daily life and I’m able to identify it, the self-awareness, and then work through it. So, I would just encourage you to check out the book for no other reason than, honestly, it will help you. If it doesn’t, please reach out to me and tell me it’s the worst thing ever and I’ll get you your refund.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, now can you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

David Nurse

“What would you do with your life if there is no way that you could fail?”

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And could you share a favorite study, or experiment, or bit of research?

David Nurse

I’ve got another book coming out in, I don’t know exactly when it’s going to come out, but it’s a very immersive study that I’ve started into now on the focus and flow, putting those together, and how you can find the deepest flow state, and tap into it more regularly and for a longer time. So, now that’s becoming my next study and research project.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite book?

David Nurse

Essentialism, Greg McKeown, has been one of my favorites; The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, John Mark Comer, it’s a great one; The Energy Bus by a good friend of mine, John Gordon; any of my other books that I wrote, of course, are at the top of the list. Those are some of the best.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

David Nurse

I use the power of the “I am” statement. So, I start my morning off with coffee because I love coffee, prayer time. I’m reading something from the Bible or a devotional, and spending my first time in the morning, the first few minutes in the morning with God, but then I write down “I am” statements.

And I think these have been really powerful for me because the doubt comes in the morning a lot, “Can you make it through the day? Can you do what you want to do? Is it really going to happen?” And when I write down “I am” and then I fill in the blank with what I’m voting for in that day, it gives me a lot of confidence, it gives me a lot of boosts, a lot of self-belief.

It eliminates these self-talk negative thoughts, which they say there’s 50,000 self-talk thoughts daily, and 80% of those are negative. So, I’m eliminating those from the start. So, I’ll simply say, “I am courageous,” “I am brave,“ ”I am going for this dream,” and it’s a vote for myself in the morning. So, that’s one of my favorite tools that I use, have been using for years.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, and a favorite habit?

David Nurse

A favorite habit of mine also is, in that morning routine when I’m writing, I write, “How can I pour into my wife? How can I fill my wife’s love tank, Taylor’s love tank?” So, I write in there, when I’m doing this morning journaling, of one thing a day that I’m going to do to fill my wife’s love tank.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

David Nurse

Website, DavidNurse.com has everything on there. Podcast is right there too. I have daily confidence boosts that I put out five-minute episodes daily on the David Nurse Show. Social media, DavidNurseNBA, or come out to Los Angeles and, you know, we can kick it and eat some great food.

Pete Mockaitis

Yum. And a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

David Nurse

I would say, “Just what is that thing that’s been on your heart that you want, that you’ve wanted to do, that you keep putting off, you keep finding an excuse for why not to do it?” Just do it. Take that first step. The first step is so powerful. The momentum of one step forward daily, I mean, think about this. I’m not a math major, but the one math equation that I do know is 1 to the power of 365 is 1, but 1.01, 1% more, one step forward, to the power of 365 is 37.8. That’s how powerful just taking one step forward a day is. Sometimes it’ll feel like you’re dancing on clouds with that step. Sometimes it’ll feel like you’re trudging through mud, but just keep taking that step forward.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. David, thank you. I wish you much luck and fun with all the things you’re doing.

David Nurse

Thanks, Pete. Appreciate it, man.

Mar 07
0

942: How to Reach Better Team Decisions with Less Drama with Janice Fraser

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Janice Fraser reveals her secrets to team decision-making with less drama.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to get to the root of any argument
  2. How to know if your decision is good enough 
  3. Why a low consensus isn’t a bad thing 

About Janice

Janice Fraser has coached teams and delivered workshops to organizations around the world, including startups, governments, non-profits, mom-and-pop shops, venture firms, and top business schools.

She built a storied career as a Silicon Valley startup founder, product manager, and confidante for entrepreneurs and enterprise executives alike. Her hobbies include healing generational trauma, challenging the patriarchy, and icing migraines.

Janice and her co-author husband Jason split their time between San Francisco and Minneapolis, where they live with a derpy dog, a bitter cat, and a very tall college student.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Janice Fraser Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Janice, welcome.

Janice Fraser

Thank you so much for having me. I’m so glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, me too. I’m excited to be chatting about Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama. And I’d love it if you could kick us off with a tale of a time you were enmeshed in a whole lot of drama.

Janice Fraser

Oh, boy. Well, you know, honestly, life will throw drama at you no matter what. I mean, we’ve all just lived through a whole bunch of drama, whether it was the pandemic or, you know, what have you.

So, you know, I’ve been through, let’s say, 3 economic meltdowns in my professional life. So we had going way back, we had 2000 when the dot com bust. I live in San Francisco, so the dot com bust ruined everything. And then, you know, 2008 was another time of total, like, right? Everyone thought the sky was falling, and it was.

I was raising money for a startup company that year. And I’ll tell you, I had no idea how I was ever going to hold my head up again because let’s see.  Get heavy for a minute, in February, my father died.

And then in May, my brother died, same year. And then 3 months later, the economic meltdown happened. And here I have this team of people who have come to help me build this company, and there was not gonna be any money. And I had to lay them all off and close the company.

I handed back a check to one of my investors. It was a really hard time.  And, you know, I was just crushed, and I thought I would never recover. I thought that this is it. Like, my career’s over.

You know, I was, what, 30 something, 35, and my career felt like it was over. And you know what? You put one foot in front of the other. And, you know, you cry in your beer to your friends and you keep going. And I, as an independently employed person, right, as a startup founder, I got a couple consulting gigs, and I connected with some friends, and I made some phone calls, and I reached out.

And it took a lot of courage to stand up. And then I started another company. It was the best one I ever did. And I sold it to a bigger company. And, you know, careers were made and life was happy again.

But, you know, when I say, like, less drama, the world has so much complexity to it. I want us all to be able to be as effective as we possibly can be, not in a, like, hustle culture kind of, you gotta work yourself to the bone kind of way. But, like, I just think it should be easier to get more done because you never know what’s going to happen, and there’s enough drama coming from the outside we don’t have to make our own. So, the idea of Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama is about just letting the easy things be easy, helping us to move with flow so that we have more resilience when the unexpected comes down the pipeline.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, that sounds like some great outcomes we would all love to have. Can you tell us any particularly surprising means by which this is done?

Janice Fraser

So, I think that the surprise for a lot of people is how simple it all seems. I’m often taken, my attention is grabbed by methods that feel easy to use, easy to repeat, easy to adapt and pick up, but then they’re kind of under the surface, they’re hard to practice. It’s kind of like if you think about meditation. Well, what is meditation? So, we all do yoga or whatever, and you think, “I’m just going to sit and be quiet for a minute,” and that’s easy but meditation is actually hard because you’re doing it mindfully.

So, here’s an example, point A, point B. From the first job we have, we’re taught about goal-setting, “You have to set a goal. If you don’t set a goal, you’re not going to get where you want to go.”

I absolutely believe that, and we have lots of ways to do goal-setting but no one has ever mentioned or taught, at least not for me, that you have to start with understanding where you are right now, and no one has given me a framework or a tool for understanding, “Here’s where we are right now,” so that we can all reach that goal together. So, in business, you hear a lot of words like alignment, or buy-in, and “How do we get buy-in for something?” and all of that is about we want to get someplace together, so we want to reach that goal together.

But let’s say my team, half of my team is Denver, half of them is in Miami, and I need to get everybody to Albuquerque. Well, I live in San Francisco. If I give them driving directions from San Francisco to Albuquerque, my Denver and my Miami people aren’t going to get there. We’re not in the same place, so even though we know our goal, Albuquerque, we have to start by knowing where are we together, what is our starting place.

And so, I’ve developed and adapted some techniques for defining point A and getting alignment around point A, “Where are we starting from?” It goes like this. Situation, complication, then question, and answer. So, the situation, “We all need to get to Albuquerque.” Complication, “We’re in different cities starting out.” Question, “How do we get there?” Okay, now we can tell the answer.

So, situation, complication, question, answer, I did not develop that. That was developed by this wonderful woman in the ‘60s, her name is Barbara Minto. I think she’s an unsung hero. She was in the first graduating class of women coming out of the Harvard Business School, so she was in the first graduating class of women, and she went on to work at McKinsey Consulting, and really defined how they do strategy communications. And it’s called the Minto Pyramid Method.

So, situation, complication, “What is true right now? And what makes this moment complicated such that it’s a work to achieve our goal, our point B?” So, point-A-point-B thinking can help you have better meetings, it can help you with your project planning, it can help you manage your career, it has helped me be a better whatever, parent, partner, human.

So, point-A-point-B thinking, super, super simple and straightforward but you avoid so much drama if you just take a moment and say, “Are we all driving from Denver to Albuquerque?” “No, some of us are in Miami.”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, we talked about driving from different locations to Albuquerque. Could you share with us how this situation, complication, key question, answer stuff can unfold in a real-life situation and be useful for folks?

Janice Fraser

Sure. Well, there’s an example that I like to use because it’s so relatable. I started a company with seven founders. This is going back 20 years. And we started that company at a time when our service offering was in great demand, it was a services company. We have more inbound interests than we could possibly handle. And I was the CEO and lead salesperson of this company, and I was just drowning.

Our close rates were really high, and others were involved in sales meetings here or there, but for the most part, I was kind of running the process. And I went to the partners and I was like, “I need to buy a printer,” $300, we were an all-virtual company, so they didn’t really see that I was drowning, but we’re all a virtual company. And I said, “I just need $300 to buy a printer. Are we all cool with that?”

And I’ll tell you, we argued for 10 minutes for six months why I want to buy a stupid $300-printer. It was excruciatingly painful.

Pete Mockaitis

Ten minutes for six months, like 10 minutes a meeting?

Janice Fraser

Ten minutes at our partner meeting every Tuesday because it was on the agenda. So, here I am like clawing my eyes out, like, “Ah, just let me buy a printer.” And, honestly, if I had to do it over, I would’ve just bought the printer.

Pete Mockaitis

And you’re the CEO with seven partners.

Janice Fraser

Yeah, but we were equal partners, and it was a CEO role and I didn’t get to wave my magic wand. Anyway, the problem there was that I had framed it up so the situation was I did not define the situation for my partners very well. I asked the wrong question, and I asked the wrong question because I hadn’t teed up, “What is the situation? What is the complication?”

The situation is lots of inbound interests. The complication is I was having trouble keeping it all straight, and juggling all of the big piece parts. The question that I should’ve asked is, that I should’ve brought to my partners is, “How can we support this level of sales without burnout forever? I have a suggestion. The suggestion is blah, blah, blah.” Suggestion is, “Other people should be participating.” Suggestion is, “I want a printer,” suggestion is whatever.

And so, the framing of the question led to the wrong debate. That’s it.

Pete Mockaitis

So, framing the question, just like, “Just let me buy a printer.”

Janice Fraser

“Can I buy a printer?” Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

Just like you want one.

Janice Fraser

“Janice wants a printer because she’s a prima donna.” Right. Like, whatever the story was that they were telling themselves in their head, rather than, “How can we make our sales operation more sustainable?” And probably there were two or three other things that could’ve been done to make it a more sustainable operation.

Pete Mockaitis

So, this is so fascinating to me. What sorts of objections does one hear to, “I want $300 to buy a printer”?

Janice Fraser

So we were a consultant company, so it was a low-margin business, and this is me, I’m with my business person’s hat analyzing why people were doing what they were doing, which is always easier in hindsight than in the moment. And, literally, like one person was highly motivated by wanting to be a paperless company, absolutely from a kind of philosophical standpoint, they were just simply opposed to printers, whatever.

Another person literally said the words, “One-seventh of that money is mine.” Yeah, right?

Pete Mockaitis

“You can have one-seventh of the printer when we’re done with it.”

Janice Fraser

“One-seventh of $300 is not going to make or break you.” But people are motivated by different things. Some people thought that we just shouldn’t need it, “We didn’t have an office because we were an all-virtual company, and we’re going to put a printer in one person’s office? That doesn’t make any sense.” Again, these were dumb things. Like, I said, none of these makes any sense in retrospect.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, it is dumb, and yet I think it is richly instructive for us to dig into this in incredible detail, which might sound odd. But it’s like, in all of our organizations, there’s dumb stuff that’s going on.

Janice Fraser

Yes, and it’s so human. It’s just so human. Everyone’s point of view here was legitimate to them.

Pete Mockaitis

And so, thusly, if you’ll indulge me to go in tremendous detail about this printer discussion, I think it can be illustrative for us all. So, your opening was just, “Hey, I want a printer,” as opposed to sharing how that could be an enabler. If you could give us an example of that, “Hey, this will enable the sales and such”? Can you spell that pathway for how having that printer will enable the sales team to be more effective?

Janice Fraser

Sure. So, the sales team, remember, so this is, at this point, was an eight-person company. We had employee number one. So, it’s seven co-founders, so equal partners in a partnership, and one employee, and no professional salespeople, like I was the sales lead, and we had a couple of other partners of those seven were participating in sales operations based on me setting up meetings, inviting them to the meetings.

And so, we had all these inbound interests, and I was spending as much time on our losses as our wins. And you can imagine, I’ve got, let’s say, four to six customers at any one time running through the sales process, with four to six participants on the customer side. So, now you’re at 24 to 40 people, humans, that I’m keeping track of in my mind, that I’m interacting with.

Now, I’ve got 40 people living in my head, as many as, living in my head all the time on a rotating revolving door basis. How do we keep that straight? And so, for me, what I wanted was to have kind of a stack of folders, physical folders, where my most important, most recent notes were on top. And so, for me, I would, like, be on a sales call, and I would type, type, type, type, type. At the time, I was doing this myself.

And I would summarize that stuff, and I would want to print that out so that the most relevant information was always at the ready so that if I needed it, I could context-switch simply through physical manipulation of stacks of paper.

Pete Mockaitis

Understood.

Janice Fraser

So, that’s what I wanted.

Pete Mockaitis

So, you just got to print notes, “So, I could stick them in folders and move them around. That’s what I want.”

Janice Fraser

Like, I just needed a way to keep my brain straight. I was, like, my brain was coming out of my ears.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s right. Okay. But you didn’t offer that kind of context or path. It was just sort of like, “Hey, I want a printer. Can I just get a printer?”

Janice Fraser

Yeah, I didn’t.

Pete Mockaitis

And you probably didn’t think it was going to be that hard, “I need a printer. Can we just do that? Okay. Oh, we can’t. Oh, really? Oh.”

Janice Fraser

Exactly. I thought it was a trivial ask.

Pete Mockaitis

So, you had to bring the big guns in terms of laying out the pathway. So, then did you ever get that printer, Janice?

Janice Fraser

I did. I did eventually get the printer. And like I said, if I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t have asked permission. I’d just go buy the printer.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, totally, “The receipt is in the reimbursements. Are we going to fight about it now? Well, I got the printer.”

Janice Fraser

Yup, live and learn. Live and learn. Live and learn.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Lovely. Well, I think that is instructive in terms of if we frame up the situation, complication, key question, and answer in a way that is resonant for the different stakeholders and the different things that they value and care about, that’s really cool, and then that’s a compelling story, like, “If I have this printer, we are going to significantly increase the revenue that can come through this because I am, in some ways, a bottleneck as the single sales professional in the midst of overwhelming demand.”

So, there we have it. All right. Well, that is just one of many tools that you share in your book. Can you lay out a couple more with us? You say you’ve got one tool to rule them all. It’s a two-by-two. What’s this one?

Janice Fraser

This is another one that if you’ve done any work time in consulting companies, you’ll recognize it. We call it the two-by-two. It goes by many names, and it is, I think of it as a virtual or physical sorting grid. And the way that I prefer to use it is, at a blank wall, I literally stand at a wall, and I take blue painter’s tape, and I make a big plus sign. So, there are four quadrants, and the way that I organize it is a little different than kind of you may have heard of before.

I choose two different criteria, one for each axis. And on the vertical axis, it’s whatever the criteria it’s an obvious yes-no, “Is it important? Is it not important?” Like, if it’s not important, I don’t want to think about it. So, find whatever my criteria that’s a yes-no, I put that top to bottom, yes on top. And then, on the horizontal axis, I think of, “What is the criteria that is a yes-maybe?” And I put the yes on the side, on the right side, and the maybe on the left.

And if you construct your two-by-two sorting grid this way, you can take whatever your ideas, your options, you can plot them into these four quadrants based on, “From one perspective, this is an absolute yes. But from another perspective, that, I’m not sure.” So, I think an easy-hard. So, let’s say you’re building software. You have 20 product features that you know would be great additions, or you think would be great additions, that everyone has requested.

So, a product manager has the job of prioritizing, “Which ones are we going to build and not build?” Well, from one perspective, it’s easy to do but from another perspective, it’s not that important. It doesn’t help the user or the business at all. So, you’ve got easy but unimportant. Well, that’s going to fall down to this one quadrant, this bottom right quadrant. And even if it falls in the bottom right quadrant, this is the stuff I call seductive distractions.

From one perspective, it is, “Yes, it’s easy to do.” From another perspective, it’s a, “No, it’s not important. Why would you bother?” You’d be shocked to know how many unimportant things end up in a product backlog and waste your time, waste your developer’s. And so, these are the things that cause people to argue.

Imagine that you’re in a product prioritization meeting, and you don’t have a tool like the two-by-two that makes this very obvious that there’s a no. You could easily get into a 30-, 50-minute discussion, argument, debate about whether or not to include this feature, “Well, it’d be easier to do, we should just throw it in there.” But you shouldn’t do it because it’s not important.

And so, what a tool like this does is it puts the real depth of conversation on, “What are the decision criteria that we agree to?” So, rather than having the real conversation be, “Should we build this feature?” That’s the wrong question. The right question is, “How should we choose which features to build?” Well, it’s only, “Build the ones that are important.” Okay, that sounds like a no-brainer, “Okay, let’s build the ones that are important.”

So, now if you’re using this two-by-two diagram, this sorting grid, is what I call it, then you’re only going to have a debate about the ones that are an obvious yes from one perspective, but a maybe from another perspective so you eliminate 75% of the discussion required because it’s just so obvious the right thing to do.

Pete Mockaitis

Intriguing. So, what’s distinctive about this is one of the axes is pretty much binary, and so it in terms of like, “That’s it. Almost no user cares about this feature. Ergo, it’s not important so we just don’t even need to, or put our little heads about it for a minute, or not even a minute.” So, you can get right into it. Now, can you share with us some other contexts where this can be illuminating?

Janice Fraser

So, we use this in pretty much every aspect of life, and I’m not kidding.

Pete Mockaitis

“What should I eat for lunch? Is it delicious and nutritious?”

Janice Fraser

“Is it delicious? Do I have the materials? Can I make it?” We’ve done two-by-twos for everything. Everything from kind of disruptive strategy at very, very large companies. Or, actually, I did this with the Navy Seals training command. 

So, I taught this, I led a workshop where I could not actually physically see any of the two-by-twos that they were creating. I simply coached them through the steps and answered their questions as they went because it was a highly secure environment. So, it can apply to any situation where there are many choices, and you have to be able to reveal which choices makes sense, and which ones do not.

And so, in the preparation for one of these kinds of high-stakes facilitations, I worked with my clients to figure out, “What is the body of ideation that we want to do? What is the range of ideas that we want to generate, or thoughts that we want to elicit from our participants?” And then, “What are the choice criteria that will help us to know which ones are the correct ideas to move forward with and which ones we ought to let go of?”

And, usually, I can find a way to layer in three or four different criteria. So, it could be importance, easy-hard, urgency, what have you. And so, if we want to go from a wide range of ideas represented down to, let’s say, four or five things that we intend to do that we’re actually going to do, in one hour I can get 20 people to generate 200 ideas and come down to six using this two-by-two method.

And the way that you do it is you say, “All right, I’d like everyone to come up with 10 ideas, one idea per Post-It note. And in 10 minutes, you’ve got 200 ideas, and then you spend the next 50 minutes reducing that from 200, to 100, to 50, and we do that using the two-by-two.

Pete Mockaitis

All right, that’s cool. And I think it’s nice because you really put a spotlight on, “What are the criteria that we’re using here?” And if that is left beneath the surface, poor criteria can rule the day, “It’s easy. It’s fun. I’m really just interested in this kind of project. This seems cool.” And so, it’s like, “All right. Well, that’s notable but what’s the goal here? Is the goal just for you to enjoy yourself? Or is the goal more of an economic profits-minded kind of a thing?”

And so then, you can recognize whether it seems cool and fun and easy and interesting is a valid criterion that we should utilize here, or if we should say, “Oh, I guess we actually have to be disciplined grownups and put our personal preferences to the side on this particular context.”

Janice Fraser

Well, so much friction and wastes results from people arguing over something that they’re not actually explicitly saying.

So, we end up with this proxy that the friction and the waste and slowness often is the result of a proxy argument. You’re arguing over something on the surface but, really, there’s something underneath that that’s more of the issue. And if you could just have that conversation, you could resolve it. So, for instance, you could say, one of the yes-no axis is, “Does it cost more than $100 or not? Like, if it costs more than $100 that’s an obvious no because we’re broke.” You see.

So, instead of arguing over the thing that’s the proxy, you can have a meaningful conversation to align on the things that really matter.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s super. And I’m curious, do you have any favorite words, or phrases, or means of going deeper there? Because if folks aren’t surfacing their real concern, they may very feel kind of sensitive about it. How do you recommend we go there?

Janice Fraser

So, I think a lot about, “What are the prompts?” When we ask a question that inspires people to come up with new thinking, that’s what I call a prompt. I actually think a lot about prompts. I craft them very deliberately because I want to elicit information from the people that I’m collaborating with. So, putting this back in a work context, what we’re talking about here is collaboration to make progress.

And when I write the prompt, I’m thinking about, “What is the underlying question?” again, we’re back at point A, “What’s the underlying question that will help us orient honestly in the present moment?” And that’s why I ask questions like, “How will we know, how might we recognize the right thing to do? Like, what are the things that matter most in making this selection?”

And I value those conversations, and sometimes it can feel, to people who aren’t familiar in working with me, it can feel a little bit slow at first, but then the wrap-up happens so easily that we make up for all that time. So, if we spend 10 minutes having a conversation about, “What are the decision criteria? How will we recognize something that is the right answer?” we’re going to get our heads on straight together and that’s going to make it easier for us to recognize the right path forward, the right thing to do.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Okay. Well, so you mentioned this waste. In your book, you highlight two pernicious kinds of wastes. It sounds like we hit one. What’s the other?

Janice Fraser

Yeah, okay. So, when it comes to decision-making, there are really two big ways that we waste. There’s the kind that happens before the decision is made, and the kind of happens after the decision is made. So, there’s before a decision is made, we end up with these slow decisions, and it sounds like, “Oh, they’re never going to make a decision. We’ve been talking about this forever. Six months, we’re talking about a freaking printer. Are you kidding me?”

So, when a decision is taking a really long time, it’s often because we’ve set the wrong kind of standard, and it’s like, “Is this the right thing to do? Is this the best decision? Do we all agree?” Those three sentiments all set this very, very high standard for the quality of decision and the amount of support that the decision has. And what that leads to is deliberation. So, that’s how you get extensive talking.

So, with the printer example that we talked about earlier, it was, “Do we all agree this is the right thing to do? Is it really necessary for seven people to have complete agreement, and that is unequivocably the right thing to do?” “No, no, this does not rise to that level of importance.” Compared to like, “Do we all agree it’s the right thing to do to pull the plug on grandma?” Like, “Okay, now, we should probably all have consensus, and we should all know that it’s right, unequivocably.” So, that’s the first kind of way, is setting the wrong standards for the quality and alignment of our decision.

After a decision is made, the other kind of waste is the waste that happens if a decision is like a snap decision that’s made by fiat or that’s made by gut instinct. Have you ever been on a call and on a Zoom meeting, and you’re watching all 25 talking, all 25 heads, and a decision is made, and you could just see the looks on their face. They’re going to go back to their desks and do whatever they want because they don’t agree with whatever, but nobody is going to say anything.

So, if a decision is made in too-cavalier a fashion without sufficient attention being paid to building support and depth of understanding, then what you end up with is decisions that are reversed, or they’re reversed and nobody talks about it so now there’s chaos. And what happens there is that you erode trust and belief in the quality and nature of the decisions that get made in your organization.

And so, that breeds resentment, and lack of trust, and a lot of churns, and people doing things in conflict with one another because person A doesn’t believe in it, so they’re going to go off and do their own thing, person B is going to do the same thing but without talking to person A about it, so you end up with this entropy chaos-type of situation.

So, what we want instead is to think about decisions, like as, “What could a middle ground be?” And I ask two questions. One, “Can we all live with it?” because if no, if you can’t live with it, that’s important to know. If your lawyer is like, “I cannot live with that. That exposes us to too much risks.” That’s super important information. So, “Can we all live with it?” is a really helpful thing to ask.

And, “Does it move us toward our point B? Does it obviously help us make progress?” because if a decision is something that everyone can live with, that obviously makes progress, it’s probably a good-enough decision.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s nice in terms of good enough as opposed to…

Janice Fraser

Right or best.

Pete Mockaitis

…striving internally for optimal, universal acclaim by consensus may be a fool’s errand in certain contexts.

Janice Fraser

Right. I just can’t, I can’t even. It really drives me nuts when people are, like, debating, as if continuing to talk will actually give us new insight. Sometimes we need to just stop talking and move forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I like that. There’s a time and a place where we want to raise the bar. I think about my conversation with Greg McKeown here in terms of essentialism, in terms of if you’re clearing out your closet, “Might this ever be useful someday?” is a very low bar, and you’ll not get rid of very much stuff. Just everything might be useful someday. Versus a Marie Kondo question, “Does this spark joy?” Okay, now there’s a very high bar. Not a lot of things are going to go there.

And so, here, we’re sort of playing it in reverse. It’s like there’s a time when we want to have a very high bar for this decision, and the consensus, and everyone jazzed about it, and then there’s a time where we should have a lower bar, and there’s a little bit of an art of leadership there in terms of making that determination for where this falls along the continuum.

Janice Fraser

And you mentioned the spark of excitement, and one of the things that keeps us in a really boring middle ground is not being willing to take risks. And sometimes, I think, when we start to see organizations shifting how they frame up decisions, and, “Do we all agree this is the right decision to make?” like, if we all agree it’s the right decision, we’re never going to take any risks.

I made a highly controversial decision at one point in my career. Again, I was a leader of a company, just a small company, but it was tiny but mighty. And we made a product, and we ended up selling it to Google within a year of developing the product. It was such a cool outcome. And shortly after the transaction was closed, and we returned a nice big check to all of the shareholders in the company, everyone was excited, one of the shareholders was very upset, and said that it was the worst decision the company had ever made. The worst decision the company had ever made because it put us at such risk.

And it really landed with me because I was feeling so proud of what we had accomplished, and I was so pleased with the decision-making acumen of the board of directors that allowed us to take that decision, even though one of the shareholders was so risk-averse. Because if we all have to agree that something is unequivocably the right thing to do, we’ll never do anything bold.

So, I’m still really proud of that product, and that set of decisions, and that way of bringing something new to market, and helping everyone make good-enough decisions that kept the company safe enough that we could take a calculated risk.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Janice, that’s really a beautiful perspective that you have as you reflect on this because I think myself, and others with some people-pleasing tendencies, might look back on that, and sort of wonder, “Oh, I don’t know, is that person right? And did we make the wrong call after all?” Whereas, you said, “I love the fact that we went after this, and one person was really upset. That’s really cool of us.” So, I love that perspective.

Janice Fraser

And, honestly, like he took home a cheque for like $400,000.

Pete Mockaitis

There you go.

Janice Fraser

Like, “Dude, it’s fine.” I’m not happy that he was upset. I’m happy that we were able to have a vision and move forward even without consensus. So, there was some research done about the best venture capital investment decision-making. And what turned out to be true was high conviction, low consensus led to the best outcomes in venture funds.

So, that means that, at the partner table, all the people that are sitting around, debating whether or not we should invest in XYZ company, what you needed to really have good outcomes was somebody had to see outrageous potential, outrageously positive potential. And even though everyone couldn’t see it, if somebody saw that there was outrageously possible potential, then there was a capacity, like that potential could be realized.

So, high conviction but low consensus means that it took a leap of faith to believe in it. And I look at the challenges that we have as a planet right now, whether it is war in multiple places, or economic uncertainty, high inflation, climate change, political divisiveness, these are really big challenges. This generation, I think a lot about, my son is 22, my daughter is 35. So, she’s peak Millennial, he’s peak Gen Z, and I think about these young professionals that are coming into the workplace, and we need them to be bold. We need them to help us through some really difficult challenges.

And so, I want us to embrace high conviction, low consensus opportunities to explore big leaps forward in our culture, in our world.

Pete Mockaitis

It’s intriguing that low consensus is advantageous, like, that is better than high conviction, high consensus. Can you unpack this pathway for me a little bit more? Is it that it’s because of VC funds, and VC funds tend to prosper when they have a few bets that pay off massively as opposed to the majority of their bets do pretty well?

Janice Fraser

They don’t tend to. They only prosper.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, like that’s the way of the VC fund, as opposed to a mortgage lender. It’s a different risk gain.

Janice Fraser

So, I’m going to say it’s not just the way of VC funds. It is the way of anything innovative, actual innovation, all innovation across. And this is something that I spend a lot of time looking at. The numbers are in, the math works. If you’re trying to disrupt the status quo, then you will be taking risks, and a small number of those risks will pay very high returns. And I don’t just mean financially. I mean, in whatever.

A lot of the organizations that I work with are, like I worked with the Air Force, like they’re not necessarily profit-making contexts. It’s about creating disruptive results. And the thing about disruption, and I mean this in a sort of business school sense of disruption, like there’s a guy, Clayton Christensen, who developed disruption theory.

The thing about it is that is a fundamentally optimistic act. Our innovators, whether they’re economic innovators, political innovators, they are imagining a world that is different and somehow better. And that imagination, we need to have ways and methods for harvesting the insight and imagination of people who imagine better, and who are willing to wrestle with the status quo in order to make improvements in the world.

Pete Mockaitis

And so, I guess, in a way, low consensus is, in a way, an indication of the innovativeness of the thing. Because if everyone says, “Yeah, that’s a great idea. Everybody, all loves it.” Well, odds are, if everyone feels that way, it’s probably already done, or it is so obvious that it is not disruptive.

Janice Fraser

Well, if it’s so obvious and it is disruptive, there’s some reason that it’s not been done, and so, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I guess I’m just thinking for listeners, like a takeaway is, “Hey, everyone thinks this is a terrible idea but I’m really gung-ho about it, and Janice said that’s exactly what I want.” Is that the takeaway? Or how should we view high conviction, low consensus?

Janice Fraser

No. So, it’s not “I want.” It’s “What if this were true, how good would it be?” So, the framing, again, it’s, “What is the framing? If this were true, how good would it be? And then, what would we need to learn in order to find out whether it’s true, whether it’s possible?” And that’s where you get things like, there are terms like MVP, where it’s the smallest thing you can do to test out the critical path idea, that kind of thing.

So, it’s not “I believe in this, therefore, I’m going to shove it down everybody’s throat.” It’s, “I believe in this. What’s the smallest thing we can do to figure out whether it’s right?” So, it comes with a degree of humility, that high conviction, conviction doesn’t mean blind faith. Conviction means, “I’ve seen some indicators that there’s real potential here. Not everybody sees it yet, but I do.”

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Janice Fraser

So, there’s actually a quote from my book that I sit with a lot and I pay a lot of attention to, and it goes something like this, “We no longer believe in work-life balance. It’s all just life. And what we want is to make it a life filled with confidence, security, love, and meaning.”

And it’s not because I believe in hustle culture, and I think that you should have no boundaries between work and the rest of your life. It’s actually kind of the opposite. It’s more that I want life to infect your work. Who we are at work, what happens to us at work, the pains and joys that we experience at work, the kinds of decisions we make at work, they alter who we are as people.

And if we can be really attentive and mindful to being ourselves wherever we go, we will end up building a life that is so much more fulfilling and satisfying. And if we have a planet filled with people who have fulfilling satisfying lives, I believe we’re going to make better decisions on that global geopolitical kind of scale.

So, I think that that is the thought that I would want to leave people with, is that you’re allowed to have a life filled with confidence, patience, security, love, meaning. These things really do matter, and they matter at work as much as at home.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Janice Fraser

Well, my favorite tool that helps me be awesome at my job is Google, Google Docs, the Google Suite. I have a long, long, long list of tools, and the one that I could not live without is G Suite. And I’m surprised by how few people notice how powerful it is. You could do everything on G Suite.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite habit?

Janice Fraser

When I get up in the morning, I sit for one hour and do something I love.

Pete Mockaitis

For example?

Janice Fraser

Usually, it’s I drink coffee and I read a book, and I pet my cat in a favorite chair with the curtains open and the sun shining in, but I spend one hour every morning doing something I love, sometimes it’s social media, let’s be honest.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear them quote it back to you often?

Janice Fraser

Yup, figure out the truth. Figure out what’s true and make it a good thing.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Janice Fraser

JaniceFraser.com. J-A-N-I-C-E-F-R-A-S-E-R.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?

Janice Fraser

Well, the call to action is I would love it if you would take a look at the book. If it looks interesting to you, give it a try. I read the audiobook, so if you want to hear me talking in your ear, that’s the best way to do it.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Janice, this has been fun. Thank you. I wish you much speed and little drama.

Janice Fraser

Thank you so much, Pete.

Mar 04
0

941: The Best Way to Hire Top Talent with Mike Michalowicz

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Mike Michalowicz reveals a surprising strategy for finding and retaining top talent.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The more effective alternative to job interviews 
  2. The key signs someone is perfect for your team 
  3. The three drivers of commitment and engagement 

About Mike

Mike Michalowicz founded and sold two multi-million dollar businesses by his 35th birthday. He is the bestselling author of Profit First, The Pumpkin Plan, Clockwork, and Fix This Next. He has built two additional multimillion-dollar companies and has become one of the world’s most popular speakers on small business topics. Fabled author, Simon Sinek deemed Mike Michalowicz “…one of the top contenders for the patron saint of entrepreneurs.” 

Resources Mentioned

Mike Michalowicz Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Mike, welcome back.

Mike Michalowicz

Dude, it’s awesome to be back. Thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, it’s awesome to be chatting. I have enjoyed so many of your books over the years, and I’m excited to hear about your latest All In: How Great Leaders Build Unstoppable Teams. Lay it on us, I know you go deep with your research. So, tell us the tale of how you came to understand the problem and the solutions that you’ve put forward in your book All In.

Mike Michalowicz

So, basically, what I do in my research, I say, “What’s the desired outcome we have in a circumstance?” So, in this case, it was recruiting high-performing employees, people that are super engaged, great people for our company. Then what’s the actual outcome? And most businesses have horrible outcome.

When we have a desired outcome, and the actual outcome is far off, I look in the middle, which is the method we follow, I call the DMO, desire method outcome. And the method we’re using is interviews. So, this is not a shocker but the solution is. It’s no surprise that most people we interview don’t work out for the long term or aren’t high performers. The percentage, which shows about 5% of people we hire are rock star employees for long term in our company.

But what I found is the solution kind of blew my mind. So, I said, “Well, is there any example of any organization that doesn’t use interviews or use a different method, and has a high percentage rate?” Well, sure enough, there’s an industry, it won’t be a surprise in a moment, but they’re over half a trillion dollars in revenue, that does not run a single interview, they only do performance-based and what they call workshops or camps, and the output is like 95% extremely high performers.

So, here’s the industry. Sports. And that’s not the surprise now, it’s like, “Well, of course.” If I’m a football team, I won’t go, “Hey, why don’t you come for an interview? Where is the green light?”

Pete Mockaitis

Actually, throwing balls, catching balls, running with balls?

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, you get on the field and do. But there’s two forms of interviews. There’s one where I’m considering a candidate and I want to see your functional skills, but there’s an even greater level, and this is the big opportunity for all of us. There is what’s called potential assessments, and it’s not done in the interview process. It’s through an education process.

So, I’ll give a personal example because I didn’t really appreciate experiences. I played Lacrosse in high school, and, admittedly, I was not such a good athlete but, whatever, I played. I went to Hobart Lacrosse campus, which is in the northeast where kind of where I lived, and this is like the preeminent school in this area, there’s 300 kids there. And while we were practicing over this week’s period, certain students were tapped on the shoulder, brought to another field, and invited to play more advanced skills, whatever.

The people who had potential in the beginning were quickly vetted out to perform on more competitive fields and try new skills. By the end of the camp, I think two or three students were invited to play for Hobart, this elite team. I was not one of them. But here’s what’s cool. I played Lacross in college, and it’s in the big part because of what I learned at Hobart. The lesson is this, that we, as employers, can put on camps, an educational event, where everyone gets elevated and used also as an observational medium to cherry-pick the best candidates.

Now, the last thing I want to share, because I get so excited about this. This is happening in the real business world, just not enough. And for the folks listening, I bet you no one’s doing workshops right now, but I’ll tell you a major company who is, it’s Home Depot. And the next time you hear they’re doing a Build a Birdhouse workshop, that is a recruiting platform, and this is how it works.

You see this ad, Build a Birdhouse, Bring a Kid, whatever, and you go down there, and you have experience. They’re there to educate you, you’re having fun, you get ingratiated at the store, it’s cool, we build a birdhouse. They have an employee there that’s observing participation, and if you’re the parent who is learning quickly, helping other parents, asking good questions, really enthusiastic about it, they will tap you on the shoulder, and say, “You’re the exact candidate we’re looking to work in Home Depot. Have you ever considered us?”

So, here’s the lesson. Don’t setup an interview platform, saying, “We’re interviewing people to build birdhouses.” Simply say, “If you’re curious, you can learn,” because the best candidates are curious. The other thing that’s interesting is it’s a recruiting platform that doesn’t follow where the standard fair is going. Everyone is going to the platform DuJour, or Indeed, or whatever it is nowadays. We go there, and everyone keeps going after the same 2% of unemployed people and a few people that are looking for a job right now.

But in an education format, I can go to my competition. I can go to anyone, and say, “Are you looking to get better at what you currently do?” Because, at the end of the day, top performers are always looking to learn. They’re learners. So, put on a learning environment, now people come, they learn the skills that you are looking to hire for, or they have the prerequisite skills and you’re giving them new education, and now you can observe and cherry-pick the people you want. I mentioned in the book, we were testing this other company, and, sure enough, we had a bookkeeping agency that, to a great effect, they preschool, the last organization is using this now.

Pete Mockaitis

Mike, I love so much of what you’re saying here because, well, I actually own a podcast production company, and that’s how we do hiring, is we just put people through sort of a gauntlet. They’re from all over the world, so it’s hard to get them together physically but we’ll just have a series of things, it’s like, “Okay, show me what you can do here and here,” in terms of one of my favorites is “Tell me what’s wrong with this sentence and write a better one. What’s wrong with this sentence, and write a better one? Summarize this podcast episode, etc.”

And so, then when we get together, it’s like, “Holy schmokes, you really sure know how to write very well. Go figure. And I guess you have to in order to pass this gauntlet of assessments.” And then this is also connecting in that I have coached many, many candidates through what I call case interviews for consulting jobs in which they have to solve real-time, live, a business case in front of the interviewer, like, “Hey, our client is this business, their profits are down, what do we do?” and they have to do this all dance of asking clarifying questions, and doing and putting forth a structure, and doing some calculations, ultimately generating a solution.

And, go figure, the folks they hire at the consulting firms tend to work out and not leave early. But I think the coolest experience of this was with, have you heard of the Fossey Foundation?

Mike Michalowicz

I have not.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, this is a nonprofit and, on their website, they identify and recruit and train individuals with extraordinary leadership potential, and Fossey scholars get full tuition leadership scholarships from their colleges and universities. And so, the idea is they want diverse students in colleges, and their students’ brilliance may not show up on the ACT/SAT GPAs. And so, I volunteered several times. It’s so fascinating.

Mike Michalowicz

That’s cool.

Pete Mockaitis

So, we observe high school students as they engage in these activities and we’re all just watching and writing down who’s impressing us with the leadership things they’re doing and who is not.

Mike Michalowicz

I love it.

Pete Mockaitis

And then when all the students leave, we talk about them. And so, that’s like one way that this talent is surfaced, and it’s like a camper workshop for “How do we find great high school talent that should be going to college who isn’t showing up on the ACT/SAT GPA?”

Mike Michalowicz

And you used that term students, which is perfect. So, when you talked about the gauntlet, that’s what’s called a skill assessment. The challenge of the gauntlet is these are people who are already applying for a job so they know they’re in a test environment, and it is a powerful tool. It’s kind of, like, I’m looking for a football player throw-catch-run, but there’s also camps, and that comes prior to this. This is for students, so this is people that they don’t know they’re being vetted, and that’s not even the primary intention, it’s to educate.

So, I can run a workshop, saying, “Learn to be a podcast editor,” or whatever it may be, and now I can invite in my competition, I can invite all these people, and they learn the experience. A couple keys to running a great workshop. Charge for it because people who are curious will pay, and it is educational. Give a certificate of accomplishment. Now they have a piece of paper, or digital paper, that they can use, if you decide not to employ them, maybe you can benefit them with another employer, but in the process always observe.

And that last example, as we said, they are students. So, they’re going through an education and learning, but we’re cherry-picking. The analogy I use, I put this in the book, is pretend you and I, Pete, we want to start a rock band, and we want just like trashing guitarist, and we’re like, “You know, let’s pick a guy from the ‘80s, let’s pretend Eddie Van Halen is still alive. We want Eddie Van Halen.” Now, how do you find Eddie Van Halen without knowing who he’s going to be?

We already know Eddie Van Halen is a qualified person, and if we called him, he would reject us, he’d laugh. The A players are gainfully employed, they’re making Goku box, and they’ll say no. But if we could have Eddie Van Halen when he is 12, that’s when he discovered guitar, I bet you we could’ve secured him. So, the big question, of course, is “How do you know Eddie is going to be Eddie Van Halen?” Well, you do a workshop. We could put on a guitar shop. If we need a future guitarist, we need a great guitarist. Let’s put him in a workshop.

I actually play a guitar but I don’t play it well. We need somebody that’s really a trasher, maybe you do, but we’ll bring in someone from the outside, and say, “We’re going to pay you for a five-day workshop, or one day, or one hour online, whatever it is,” then we reach out to all 12-year-olds, and say, and their parents, “A hundred dollars, learn to play a trashing guitar.” Then we look for the indicators of potential.

It’s always in three stages. Curiosity is the first stage, “Oh, I will do this or not.” So, people vet themselves out right there. Second stage is desire, it’s like, “Oh, I really like this.” Eddie couldn’t put the guitar down. He’s asking tons of questions. That’s what Home Depot was looking for, the parents that help other parents, ask questions about building birdhouses. The final stage is thirst. Thirst is, “I can’t stop.” It’s almost an addictive level. The job of the instructor is to provide an education so everyone comes out better.

Then, or additionally, observe for desire and thirst. When you find those people, that’s when you pull Eddie aside, and say, “Hey, by the way, we happen to be starting a band. Thanks for joining our class as a student here. Do you want to join a band? Do you ever think about that?” That 12-year-old Eddie may have said, “Yeah.” And we don’t know he’s going to necessarily be the Eddie he became, but those desire and thirst are the strongest indicators that he has that potential to become that guy.

Pete Mockaitis

And in the setting of the workshop, I can see curiosity, what are some of the telltale signs, “Ooh, there’s some desire. Ooh, there are some thirst”?

Mike Michalowicz
So, usually, if there’s homework assignments, they actually do the homework. Another part is lots of questions. So, curiosity will come after questions, but desire is also indicative of questions. It’s the person who’s raising their hand the most. The second one is attendance. So, you’ll see if someone is really into it will often arrive early, stay late. They’ll usually be distraction-free. That’s actually the biggest indicator.

When people try to multitask, it means they’re not engaged with the task at hand, so they’re trying to do other things. So, you can see someone online, or wherever, if they turn their cameras off, those are awesome indicators. In a workshop, someone is checking their phone regularly. Well, when someone gets immersed in it, it becomes this tunnel vision. So, we’re looking for the tunnel vision effect.

Thirst may not present itself right away. It may come later on but thirst is an inability to quit. It’s the person that stays for an extra five hours. It’s the professor that says, “Oh, my God, I wish this person will go home now,” or the instructor will go home. That person who can’t quit it has thirst, so we look for those elements.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s so phenomenal. And this reminds me, I was doing a workshop for a pharmaceutical company, just a series of workshops, what you said about the homework was striking. And I thought, “I need to encourage these folks to do the exercises outside of our workshops.” And so, I thought, “Okay, we got gift cards,” I thought a little bit of accountability, a leader board might embarrass them, like, “Hey, your boss and everyone is going to see that you’re not doing the exercises,” and that didn’t really motivate very many people.

Mike Michalowicz

Unbelievable, huh?

Pete Mockaitis

I was surprised, like, “I’d be so self-conscious about my name being at the bottom of the leader board.”

Mike Michalowicz

I know.

Pete Mockaitis

But, sure enough, there were two people who were smoking it, like, with great consistency, getting it done. And so, we stayed in touch, and they might be listening to this show. Hello, guys. And it was so funny, they said, “Hey, you know what’s really interesting, Pete? The two of us were the ones who got promotions, and we were also the ones who scored highest on doing all of the homework.”

Mike Michalowicz

No surprise.

Pete Mockaitis

And I was like, “Yes, that is interesting.”

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, very interesting.

Pete Mockaitis

Because they had the desire, it’s like, “Ooh, I really want to develop these professional skills,” and they went after it, and then they signed up for my email list and other stuff afterwards because they were just into learning these skills, and it so happened that those skills are the ones they needed to flourish in their careers, which is why that was the subject of the workshops in the first place. And so, that’s really telling. If I can give, set a stage to create an opportunity whereby people can distinguish themselves by choosing to proactively do the thing or not, that’s supremely telling. I love it.

Mike Michalowicz

I remember I was doing a presentation last week in front of 200 folks, and these are all business owners. And I said, “Who in the room here is an A player?” And I said, “Please don’t be bashful. This is an opportunity to brag, if you feel that’s appropriate.” And every hand went up. And they defined A player, drive and all the stuff. And then at the same group, I said, “Keep your hand up. I’m curious, what percentage of the population is A players?” And they’re like, “Five percent, 2%.” The most gracious was 10%.

I said, “Okay, we have 100% of the people who are A players, yet, at the same time, saying 10% of the population is A players.” So, this is some bizarre statistical phenomenon happening. There’s some warp in the universe right now, or something is not right. And what I believe is not right is everybody is an A player in the right circumstances. These people, and we all see the best, we all have the potential to see the best in ourselves, some people don’t, but we do have the potential to see the best in ourselves but we have to be put in the right environment.

Eddie Van Halen is probably a pretty crappy, or was a pretty crappy bookkeeper. And so, we’d say, “He sucks.” Yeah, but you give him a guitar. The thing is my little business, I got 20 people here, I have maybe one more role available in the next year. Of all the people in this planet, there’s a small percentage they will be a match for that. But what I had to realize as a leader, as an employer, everyone coming in is an A player. The question is, “Are they an A player for my needs?” And it does change the perspective.

When we think most people aren’t a fit, it’s all about just, “Oh, everyone sucks.” When we think everyone is great, then we start saying, “Well, what will be an indicator of their greatness in compliance with what I need or in alignment with what I need?” It just changes the vision a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis

It is, yes. And it feels more kind and hopeful.

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, totally. And I think it’s the truth. Pick any person, in the right role, they can crush it. And I’m not saying everyone is going to be great nine to five. Maybe some dude, all he does is sleep all day. Maybe he can test mattresses. Like, you got to figure it out.

Pete Mockaitis

“Dude, get in a sleep clinic.”

Mike Michalowicz

He’s a sleep clinic tester.

Pete Mockaitis

“You’ll be giving so much data for the scientists.”

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, or maybe he watches training videos to see if he can stay awake to any training videos. And if he does, he’s a great tester.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, Mike, you’re so fun. I love these perspectives. Okay. Well, that’s such a huge takeaway right there, is creating these workshops or camps. I’d love it if we could get a few more examples for how this can be turned into reality. So, Home Depot, build a birdhouse, sports camps, we talked about the Fossey Foundation. What else?

Mike Michalowicz

So, we worked with a preschool, and this preschool is what’s called site directors. This is a multi-location preschool and they need teachers that can review the performance to ensure all standards are being achieved in their multiple locations. And the prerequisite is you need to be a teacher already. And so, you can get people with advanced skills by having prerequisites.

So, what we did is we reached out to all the competition. And this is the beautiful thing, the competition will send people. We said, “We’re putting on an educational event,” it’s always educational, “We’re going to charge $150 or whatever it was, for a one-day training on site directors services and how you’d manage it. The prerequisite is you must be a teacher for five years, blah, blah, blah.” Our competition sent teachers, so now, at our location, all the competitors’ teachers there, and we teach in this process, we start observing who shows desire and thirst.

By the end, everyone has a certificate, they had accomplished the prerequisite skills or the tests, whatever, but we also identified three of those teachers, we said, “Well, gosh, you’re perfect to be a site director. We happen to be hiring,” but they’re also ethical, we said, “Hey, listen, you have a current employer. If they have a site director opportunity, it is clearly your talent. We invite you to talk with them and consider that, but if there’s not an opportunity and this is something you want to pursue, we’d love to have a conversation with you.” We got our best two site directors that way.

There was another case where a company of bookkeepers, they’re based out of the US, the founder, her name is Tuesday, she is originally from Kenya, an African country. I think it was Kenya. And she teamed up with the University of Nairobi, and said, “I’ll give you a bookkeeping course, all remote.” Actually, she even prerecorded the videos. She had an adjunct professor, she taught bookkeeping. They didn’t offer this course before at this particular university. I think it was a dozen students who went through it.

By the end, the onsite director, she gave them direction, saying, “As an adjunct professor, give me feedback on who’s doing the homework, who’s engaged the most, and I want to talk to those people, and I’ll start doing one-on-one coaching.” So, they did additive education, and she started coaching them individually, and she vetted down about three people that she hired. They’re her best performing employees. But the beauty of that story is the remaining nine people all got jobs as bookkeepers at other companies.

Now, here’s the last thing I want to share, this kind of feels overwhelming. I got to put on a course, I had to do a webinar. Even if it’s an hour, I don’t have the skills. Here’s the ultimate shortcut. Whatever position you need to hire for, find the workshop, the course, the education, the class that’s teaching it, and go as a student to observe the other students. That’s the shortcut. Just go and watch the others, seek desire and thirst, talk to them, and say, “Hey, I’m looking to hire, not deal.”

Pete Mockaitis

This is beautiful. All right, workshops is huge. Well, keep it going, Mike. What are some other pro tips on building these unstoppable teams? And I want to hear, generally speaking, interviews aren’t the method between desire and outcome that we’re after. Workshops are a cool alternative means of selecting folks. What are some other things you suggest that are not interviews?

Mike Michalowicz

So, the most common other thing I heard, and this was also mind-blowing to me, is the desire was, “I want my employees to act like owners.” The method was if you achieve certain goals, you’ll get rewarded. And the outcome is most employees see their job as just a job and don’t function as owners. They don’t put in that extra effort because they don’t have a desire.

What I found is a concept that was buried away in the 1970s-1980s called psychological ownership which is ignored by leaders, but, my gosh, it’s the tool that makes any of us, leader, owner, or not, to feel like owners. What it’s called is psychological ownership. So, there’s two types of ownerships. There’s legal ownership and psychological.

Legal ownership is just a contract of sorts but it doesn’t give you the feeling. Psychological always does, and we need to amplify it. The best example is I own stock in Ford, a hundred shares. I recently drove by a Ford factory, and I was just driving by, I didn’t look at it and say, “Oh, my God, I own three of those bricks on that building.” I just drove by, and I go, “Oh, there’s Ford. Where’s my money?” which is entitlement even though I have legal ownership.

Now here’s the irony, I also own a Ford pickup truck, and I feel that I own it but I actually don’t. The bank owns it, I’m making installments but I feel like I own it. So, the question is, “Why do I feel that way?” Because I treat it with such care. The reason is three elements. First of all, I have the ability to personalize it. I can program the radio stations the way I want. I can put bumper stickers on the back. When you can personalize something, you feel a sense of authority over it, and it becomes part of you. It’s an expression of identity.

The second part is I have control, authority, meaning I can park it where I want to park it, I drive whenever I want to drive it, all those elements. And the last part is I have intimate knowledge, I know all the bells and whistles. I went through the whole manual. I know what every button does. So, the more intimately we know something, the more we can personalize and put authority or control into it, the more we sense ownership.

So, as employees in an organization, within the confines of their job, where can they assert control? Part of it is idea generation. When someone comes up with their own idea, they feel control. Say, “Hey, here’s where we want to move our company, here’s your capacity in it, what do you think you could do or want to do to help us move the business forward?” So, now you’re asserting control, “How can you make this more your own? How can it be an expression of yourself?”

One thing we do when we have an SOP or standard in our own company now, I used to have the person that does it, currently teach it, and everyone follows a script, no control, no authority. Now, we do is we have a script, we give it to the new person, and say, “Learn from this. And then how can you enhance it and create the new training video because it’s going to be your standard?” The irony is the best student in every room is the teacher. So, they’re teaching, which means they’re learning, but also because it’s an expression of themselves, they have more ownership in the role.

Pete Mockaitis

I want to put you on the spot with, like, this really tricky example. Like, let’s say, “Hey, there is a standardized process by which this needs to be done for the sake of compliance or for the law.”

Mike Michalowicz

Right. Right. So, you can’t change the coding or anything.

Pete Mockaitis

So, there’s a few things that are kind of immovable. But could you give us some cool examples of how, even within such environments, folks manage to feel a lot of that cool personalization, control, and intimate knowledge?

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, so a quick simple personalization tip, trick, is to change the name of something, maybe not publicly but internally. So, if there’s some kind of compliance document, I can call it Kelsey’s compliance, and right there, with the assigned names, you have a sense of authority, and really personalization over it so you can give it unique names and lingo. It’s a real simple technique.

Intimate knowledge, I would exploit that. So, I’d say, listeners, “Rules and regulations, we had to follow it to the tee. I want you to be the master at this. So, research it, study. Can you find loopholes, which is an opportunity?” When you find a loophole, it’s a technique of personalization, it’s like, “Oh, there’s a little button here that no one knows about that I can get through.” So, explore it. But even if they don’t find “loopholes” the fact they know the protocol better than anyone else, they’re building intimate knowledge.

Control and authority. There may be protocols they have to follow but can they control the submission times? You can say, “Hey, when is the optimum time to get this in? Does it always have to be Monday at 10:15 a.m.? Or, can we work with a schedule that suits you?” That’s giving them a sense of control so you can assert it. Again, what we’re looking for is for them to say, “This is my responsibility. This is my job,” and that means they’re sensing that authority.

I will give one word of warning though. There is a risk here of fiefdoms. And what a fiefdom is it’s where a person has so much knowledge that they start blockading other people from access. That’s dangerous. So, we want to move to a higher level of psychological ownership which is called collective psychological ownership.

What we do here is you have multiple parties involved, you make teams around it, so if there’s something, a risk of a fiefdom being built, invite multiple people to work in concert, in that way you prevent those walls from being built.

Pete Mockaitis

And it’s funny how into things we can get in terms of if you feel like you’ve got your own little touch on it. In terms of like if I am getting into my own audio editing, which I do from time to time, here and there, even though I’ve got great supportive teams, I love to do certain things which are just sort of my little style. It’s like I’d like to do a gentle downward expansion to attenuate the intensity of a breath sound as opposed to a harsh noise gate that have layers of rich complex gradations of silence. It’s like, “Okay, that’s so dorky but I own it. I am invested in this.”

Mike Michalowicz
Amazing.

Pete Mockaitis

And it’s funny, if someone were to take that away, in terms of, like, “No, Pete, that’s not how we do it here. Actually, you’ve got to comply with the situation where we use XYZ software,” I wouldn’t like that.

Mike Michalowicz

Totally, right, because when someone asserts control or authority on you, we start building resistance. I was saying, when forced to comply, we seek to defy.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, Mike.

Mike Michalowicz

The classic study, and this works from poise, but the classic is with rental cars because we’ve all experienced this. The next time you go to Herts or wherever, you go through a protocol of compliance requirements. First, you got to fill out a hundred forms for an hour. Secondly, if you don’t return with a full tank of gas, we’re going to penalize you by charging $10 a gallon for us to fill it because it’s so hard. Secondly, no scratches, no dents. Third, must be clean. Fourth, good luck passing the DMZ zone where there’s going to be flashing lights, spikes coming up, and some dude coming out with a gun asking for your ID, all that compliance.

So, when forced to comply, we seek to defy. What do we do the second we pull out? We do donuts in the parking lot, or we fly into the light and skid in sideways, or we punch it when it turns green. We definitely drive it more aggressively. Rental cars get beat up on compared to our own car, where we’re, “Hey, this is my car. We’re going to take care of it.” No one washes their rental car before returning, but we wash our own car. Why is that? When forced to comply, we seek to defy.

And this is one of the things that great leaders realize. Most leaders focus on compliance, achievement, and so employees are seeking for elbow room to get back at the boss. Great leaders embrace the internal human and allow them to take charge. Yes, there’s rules and confines. You can’t let people just go wild. We have to work as a team collectively. You can’t have a football team where you say, “Everyone just run any way you want.” We have to serve the plays.

But if we can give them self-expression, they can expand.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, then as we speak, there’s a world of work, there’s these back-to-office mandates. Tell us, as we think about personalization and control, what’s your hot take on these?

Mike Michalowicz
Is that in the best interest of employees? Sometimes you have to require something that actually serves people, and you’ll get resistance, a.k.a. if you ever had children, that’s the world of raising children. My kids, “You have to take a shower at our house after a week.” There are some minimum requirements. These stink bombs walk around, and it’s really in their best interest.

Some employers are doing this because we’re losing the socialization at home. Everything is going virtual. And we’re losing that tactile experience. So, the employers that are requiring come back to the office to promote socialization are building connectivity among people.

It’s funny, they used to wonder that the water cooler, that business got done there, good ideas. No, business didn’t get done there. Connection happened there. People talk about their kids. When we have connection, we understand each other from a tactile level, we have trust. So, it’ll actually rebuild trust. But employers that are mandating it because they want to track time, or trying to assert authority, “I got to make sure you’re producing, so come on in.” That’s not going to work. People are going to, when forced to comply, they will seek to defy. That definitely won’t work.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, it sounds like what you’re saying is there are certain rules, guidelines, times, places, contexts where it is good, right, proper, and necessary for there to be some, “Hey, we’ve all got to be here” stuff going on, but if it’s from a perspective of authoritative, “I’ve got to watch you,” we’re in for bad news.

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, if there’s a kind of a nourished, flourishing, comply to fly. So, if you are nourishing people, have demanded to come back because you’re going to nourish the team, “Go team,” and it’s really in the best interest of people, they will flourish, that’s a great move. If you’re doing to force compliance, measurement, control, authority over, you’re going to get that resistance, and it’s not going to work long term.

Pete Mockaitis

Awesome. Well, Mike, tell us, anything else we really should know before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Mike Michalowicz

So, one last thing, it’s about safety. Leaders have to build a safe environment. Now, I’m not just talking only about physical safety. But ironically, this is a concern with many companies, including mine, and I didn’t even know. We’re a knowledge-based business, we’re writing books and speaking engagements, and other stuff like courses and classes. So, how can I have a safe environment?

Well, we ran a survey, and my colleagues said, “You know the back alley that goes to the cars…” we have a parking lot behind the building, “…is dark at night, and it’s kind of creepy going out into the pitch-black walkway.” I’m like, “Oh, my gosh.” So, starting at 3:00 o’clock in the afternoon, the sun sets in the winter by 5:30, people get nervous about going home, I’m like, “This is crazy.” We just put lights up, string lights, it’s always bright.

And now my colleagues are like, “Oh, I can see what’s going on. I feel safe.” So, we got physical safety, but the bigger thing is relational safety. Do people feel comfortable expressing themselves as they are? Because if they can’t show up as they naturally are, they’re going to start faking it, and now you get a depleted version of that person.

The leaders got to express themselves naturally. Lead with humanness. Show the warts. I’m not saying have a cry fest and talk about how miserable you are. What I’m saying is you can share your struggles. Be integral about your own experiences in life and talk about the wins and the losses, and you’re going to encourage your team to do the same, which actually builds connectivity.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Well, Mike, could you share with us now a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, this is attributed to Oscar Wilde, “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.”

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Mike Michalowicz

My favorite research is, oh, there’s a book that came out called The 3.3 Rule by a guy named John Briggs. And what he did was he researched out productivity and found that people can work up to three hours max without needing recoveries, safe recovery, and you need 0.3, which is 30% recovery time. So, if you work three hours, you’re going to need 90 minutes of recovery time, if that works right, and so forth, 3.3.

Pete Mockaitis

Three times 180 minutes.

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, I mean it’s not 90 minutes, but you know what I’m saying. It’s maybe 48 minutes. So, yeah, 30% of the time used is needed to recover. So, if I worked for one hour, it’s going to be 18 minutes or whatever that works out to be of recovery and so forth.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Mike Michalowicz

I just finished reading 10x Is Easier Than 2x by Dan Sullivan. Really opened my mind to perspective.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite habit?

Mike Michalowicz

My favorite habit is sauna, I do it with my wife. And I’m going to try to convince her to do it again tonight. I will tell you this, when you’re in a hot box, it is so hot you can’t have your phone in there, which is great. And the only thing you can do is talk, and it’s hard to think. So, when someone is talking, you’ve got to listen deeply. It’s like the best connection device ever.

Pete Mockaitis

And is there a key nugget you share that folks retweet and they quote back to you often?

Mike Michalowicz

Yes. What I say often is that the number one job of an entrepreneur is not to do the job. It’s to be a creator of jobs. So, I get that retweeted often.

Pete Mockaitis

And, Mike, if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where shall we point them?

Mike Michalowicz
MikeMotorbike.com because, similar to your last name, no one can spell Michalowicz. MikeMotorbike rhymes with motorcycle. Everything is there. I got book downloads. I used to write for the Wall Street Journal, you can get those articles, plus I have a podcast archive there.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, your clients want you to be profitable. And this isn’t just a final thought, but when you look at your clients, are you proud of your surviving check by check, to say, “I’m barely making it. I’m struggling,” or, “I’m very profitable”? I’ll give you context. Say you had an emergency, and you go, “I got rushed to the hospital. I have a heart attack,” or something. Doctor one comes down, and says, “I’m making no money. I need clients. I need patients. Let’s get this done quickly.” Or, doctor two says, “I’m very profitable and wealthy because this is all I do and I’m exceptional at it. I have all the time in the world to do this with you and do it right.”

Who do you choose? Option two. When your life is on the line, you want to be catered to. When your life is being altered or served in some capacity by us, we want to be catered to. Your clients want to be your number one customer. They want your undivided attention. And if you aren’t profitable, you can’t do that, so they want you to be profitable. You should be profitable.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Mike, thank you. This is a treat. I wish you many, many fine colleagues who are all in.

Mike Michalowicz

Thanks, brother. It’s been a joy.

Feb 29
0

940: How to Find the Best Job for You that Actually Exists with Lauren McGoodwin

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Lauren McGoodwin challenges the notion of the “dream job” and makes the case for pursuing the “good-enough” job.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why the dream job actually doesn’t exist 
  2. The true drivers of happiness at work 
  3. Why to become invaluable–not indispensable 

About Lauren

Lauren founded Career Contessa in 2013 after experiencing a gap in career development resources for women who might be job searching, soul searching, leading and managing, or trying to find new ways to advance within their careers. With women accounting for more than 50% of the workforce and the workforce being less defined than ever before, it seemed crazy (and outdated) that a resource for us didn’t exist.

Fast-forward to today, Career Contessa is now the largest online career site built inclusively for women. Lauren is also author of Power Moves: How Women Can Pivot, Reboot, and Build a Career of Purpose (2020), co-host of The Career Contessa podcast, and an educator/speaker on a variety of career topics. 

Formerly, Lauren was a University Recruiter for Hulu focused on hiring, employer branding, and program management. Lauren has a Bachelors in Education from the University of Oregon and a Masters in Communication Management from the University of Southern California where she wrote her thesis on millennials and career resources. 

When not Contessa-ing, you can find Lauren spending time with her family in Redondo Beach, CA where she lives with her husband and daughter. 

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, sponsors!

Lauren McGoodwin Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Lauren, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Lauren McGoodwin

Hi, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I am super excited to dig into your wisdom. And could you start us off by sharing, so you’ve been in this Career Contessa game for a while, great brand.

Lauren McGoodwin
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis

And it even existed before How to be Awesome at Your Job, so kudos on a long run here. Can you share with us a particularly surprising or counterintuitive piece of career advice that you’ve come to learn and adopt and share during your reign as the Career Contessa?

Lauren McGoodwin

Yeah, absolutely. We’ve been around for 10 years, I’ve talked to a lot of successful, very fulfilled people. I think the biggest thing, the biggest misconception I’m sort of very much on brand for that millennial woman who was striving for perfect, was that the dream job does not exist, it’s a myth. It’s a myth that kind of keeps you perpetually stuck. So, that’s probably the biggest one from talking, and basically having the job that I do, which is finding out “What does make a successful career? People who are fulfilled, how do they do it?”

And that’s a big one, I think, because it starts to sort of managing your expectations and actually not expecting to have this dream job that checks every box in your life. It’s similar to trying to find a perfect partner, right? But with jobs, for some reason, we believe not only do dream jobs exist but that, “I should have one. And if I don’t have one, something about me is missing and wrong, and I’ve messed up,” and turn yourself into this personal DIY project to fix that part of your life.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, that’s good. That’s good. So, the implications of that then is if we’re not in a dream job, that’s okay, nobody is because they don’t exist. That’s your view on the world?

Lauren McGoodwin

Yeah, it is my view on the working world, that there is no such thing as a dream job. And you’ll see it makes a really good saying as a meme on Instagram and TikTok and whatnot of the dream job exists and hustle harder to get that dream job, and a job should check all these multiple boxes but what I find is that, really, what the dream job is made up of is this elusive kind of lifestyle piece of a job, where it doesn’t include hellish commutes or return-to-office mandates that you don’t agree with, it doesn’t include manipulative coworkers or bad bosses who actually don’t know how to manage.

And so, you’re sort of looking for this thing that doesn’t exist, and so your expectations are consistently misaligned with reality. That is equivalent, for me, of someone who has a very fixed mindset versus having a growth mindset, someone who can say, “Hey, my ability to learn and adapt is more important than, okay, my ability to be perfect at this presentation.”

So, I think what happens is dream job isn’t just like your job title and your company. It’s really inclusive more of like a lifestyle, and a mindset, and these realities that, one, don’t exist, as COVID, I think, is such a good reminder of, like, things can change quickly, and being able to be adaptable, and be able to lean into uncertainty, is really kind of the stuff that makes you more invaluable at work versus the person who’s like, “I found the perfect job title, and it looks really good on LinkedIn, and I’m able to share these…” I call it, like, glitter and glue moments, “All these glitter moments in my career but the glue is what holds the career together.”

And so, that’s why I’m actually a big advocate for people who always say, “Well, if I’m not looking for a dream job, what am I looking for?” And I will advocate for a good-enough job. A good-enough is really practical, it’s not perfect, and that’s the problem. But dream jobs is you’re stuck there.

One of the things that people will ask me “If I’m not looking for a dream job, what should I be striving for?” which this is unique for each person, but this is why I’m a huge advocate for the good-enough job. The good-enough job is practical. It’s not perfect. It’s not having you strive for that perfectionist tendency that can keep you stuck. And so, the good-enough job, again, it’s practical. It allows you to still have a life outside of work. It doesn’t ask that work check every box of your life and fulfill every part of you.

And I think COVID was a good reminder of that for people, and I worry that now, in 2024, we’re starting to forget about that and try to go back to those tendencies. So, I would just say, to answer kind of the very first question, the piece of advice I have learned the most that kind of counteracts, actually, building a fulfilling career is trying to go after that dream job.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, so that’s a cool distinction there, a dream job versus a good-enough job, and I like what you had to say with regard to partners in terms of, like, no human being is perfect, and no job is perfect. And so, I would say, I think that my dear bride is a good wife, and she’s not perfect, and I’m not perfect. So, help us orient to things a little bit in terms of good-enough.

Lauren, lay it on us, four levels of job, if I may.

One, unacceptable, you should probably get out of there as soon as you can. Two, good enough, yeah, you should probably hold on to this. All right. Three, about as good as actually exists in real life, so hold on with all your might. And, four, just unrealistic, like, that probably doesn’t exist for anybody, so disabuse yourself from that notion readily. So, I put you on the spot there, Lauren. Give us four levels of job, starting with a rung that’s, “Yeah, I should probably get out of here.”

Lauren McGoodwin
Yeah. So, an example of this is like the person who has their “dream job,” they’re a lawyer, they worked their whole life for this, this is the thing they wanted to do, they’ve got that corner office, but they’re miserable. They’re working nonstop. Maybe they’re paid well but it doesn’t matter because they have no life, they have no friends, they’re not able to have any hobby.

And so, it’s that mix of, like, “But this is what I thought I wanted so I need to continue it.” They’re burnt out, they’re all the negative things. That’s sort of what I would think is the rung of like, “But this was supposed to be my dream job. I worked so hard to get this.” It just never, never goes away.

So, then the good-enough job, again, it’s practical but it’s not perfect. Maybe it’s something that you’re really good, you’re not particularly, like, dying over passion for whatever industry, you work in manufacturing, but you’re really good at your job, and it gives you work-life balance that works for you. Maybe for you that means, “I want a really high salary, and I’m willing to sacrifice having to go into an office and commute every day.” That works for the chapter you’re in right now.

Like, stages of your life are similar to stages of your career. I talked to someone the other day, who she got a new job, and she’s been working at a startup, but she has kids now, and the startup has a lot of it can feel a little unpredictable about what’s going to happen, so she’s like, “I really like that but I kind of made a little bit of a career pivot, and I wanted to go to a bigger company because I was looking for something that was more stable, offered me remote role, was an increase in pay because a lot of times startups will give equity.”

And so, again, that is a good-enough job for her. She’s like, “I like this thing well enough, I don’t have to be a die-hard for it, but also it’s not asking more from me than what I think is reasonable given the exchange of money,” the exchange of the paycheck part for her. That can be a good-enough job. Then you have the person who maybe go even like a step further, where they have this deep passion of being able to reclaim their life from work.

And so, they have a job that allows them to have more PTO, or maybe they do, like I talked to someone the other day, she’s a teacher and she’s doing like a job-share with somebody else. So, for her, that’s a good-enough situation. She doesn’t want to totally leave the workplace but she wants to reimagine how it works for her.

So, there’s all these variations of what the good-enough job can be for you. The teacher is deeply passionate about what she’s working on. She’s just struggling with how to make that work with her life, so a job-share works. Then you have the other person who’s like, “I’m not deeply passionate about it but I’m good at it and I’m paid well for it, and so that works.”

And then the top, or the first rung I said is the person who’s like, “I thought I was passionate about this. This is a dream job, it looks good on paper, I’m working for the right company, I’ve reached all these achievements, and it’s not working for me. And now I have this piece of me where I feel like I failed or, somehow, I have this expectation hangover of this isn’t what I expected to be, on top of the fact that I’m burnt out and all these other things.”

So, I think there’s obviously a lot of variations, careers are super personal, but I think what it comes down to is managing those expectations, understanding that the dream job, this concept of a dream job is more about the lifestyle that goes with it. And so, restudying those expectations and then going out, and kind of I always tell people, like when I was a recruiter, “You don’t get everything.” It’s like, the realtor will ask, “What are the top three most important things to you? Neighborhood? Number of bedrooms?”

I think that’s also important to do in your career, and I think it starts with aligning with your values. So, thinking about, “What do you really value personally? And then, how can you translate your top values into the career that you have?” Those are just all good starting places. There’s obviously a lot of intricacies to this but when you are trying to make the shift from dream job to good-enough job, I think that’s a really good starting place.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, I dig it. So, we’ve got a picture of the lowest level of job, bad, and then a picture of good enough. Could you also paint a picture for us for the highest levels, like about as good as it gets in the real world, as well as this is just impossible and unrealistic in the world of reality?

Lauren McGoodwin

Like, this job doesn’t actually exist, but if we could make it exist, this is what it would look like?

Pete Mockaitis

Kind of like a fantasy dream job people have that is harmful because they are comparing it to an unrealistic thing?

Lauren McGoodwin
I think that’s a little bit like lazy girl job, which is this TikTok phenomenon that went off, where it’s like you basically don’t have to do anything, and you don’t have to be involved or engaged in any way, but you’re paid really well. I think of that as almost like this true fantasy. Like, one, it is an exchange for you creating impact and value for the company, the exchanges they’re going to pay you. So, you’re not going to be able to actually gives you or never asks you to take a call that’s inconvenient. The realities of life are sort of that is going to happen.

So, to paint that picture, I almost think the comparison is this lazy-girl job thing that people were talking about. I’m not saying that it doesn’t exist but, for me, I look at a “lazy-girl job” which I hate because you wouldn’t hear a lazy-boy job, but, anyway, that’s a whole other topic. But, for me, it’s like I actually have had a job before. My very first job, I was an admin assistant. My only job was to basically wait for the phone to ring.

Now, I wasn’t well-paid, and I had to show up to an office so I wasn’t able to just do what I want all day long, but, for me, I was, as a human being, part of our wellbeing is we want to be engaged, we want to create something, we want to use our brains. And, for me, that was really mind-numbing work, but if we wanted to paint this picture of this “lazy-girl job” or this ultimate job that really doesn’t ask you to do anything, I think people think that would be fulfilling, but I don’t think it would.

I think us, as human beings, we want to move forward, we want to make an impact, and you wouldn’t get that in that situation, but I could see that being this, like, ultimate dream job for somebody.

Pete Mockaitis

Lauren, I love that so much, that notion of a dream scenario would be that you don’t have to do much but you get tons of money. And what’s interesting is, I think, we can see that in real life in terms of if you’ve been on vacation for a while, it’s like you’re actually kind of bored, “And I want to get to it and start being able, contributing somewhere,” there’s that.

And if you look at folks who, I don’t think you can even call them jobs but they have some sort of a subsidized living situation, like a trust fund or some kinds of funds are just flowing into their life without effort, and often these folks are as susceptible or more so, I think the data show, to depression and other kinds of challenges because there’s something that’s not quite being met there.

So, I think that’s a great thing to call out, that you might imagine this thing exists but it kind of doesn’t from a job perspective. And even if you were subsidized magically, that often has its own perils with regard to mental health and fulfillment. So, give us that level that’s maybe just below that in terms of, “This is about as good as it really gets in terms of, I wouldn’t call it a dream job because it doesn’t exist, but this is as close to optimal as one might hope for in this life.”

Well, now can you paint a picture for, if we’ve got four levels, like terrible job, good-enough job, then as good as is realistically optimally possible in real-life job, and then the fake dream job. I think we covered levels one, two, and four. But paint a picture for number three, the best realistically optimal job we might have in life.

Lauren McGoodwin

I think going back to the example of my friend, she was working in one type of marketing, and she’s transitioning to a different type of marketing. She was working for more of a startup-type company that had a little unpredictability with it, she’s going to go to a manufacturing company. So, on the surface, working for a big brand name, way cooler. The type of marketing she was doing? Flashy, cool, really, again, kind of that glitter and glue metaphor, it’s using that, fits into the glitter side.

But she is moving over to manufacturing, definitely not as flashy and cool, doesn’t look as good as a big brand name on LinkedIn, and she’s going to be doing kind of a more traditional marketing route. Now, for someone who’s looking at this, they’re like, “Wait, she’s going from this really cool job to this really boring job.”

But that, for her, she maybe sees this shift from being like, “I had my dream job and it hasn’t necessarily been a ‘dream.’ I’m really ready to go to a good-enough job, a job that I can close my laptop at 5:00 p.m. because I do have young kids, and I want to be able to spend time with them. I get flexibility. I have remote work status with this one. Instead of getting equity, I’m getting a higher paycheck.”

So, again, thinking about “What are my top priorities? And I’m going to get them at this place. Even though it might not be the ‘dream’ on paper to somebody, for me it’s a good-enough job. It doesn’t ask me to give up my life in exchange for the job.” And that is something that I think is really important. A good-enough job is going to take you out of that tunnel vision you have or that fixed mindset that you have.

It’s maybe going to take the pressure off you that you’re feeling right now. Maybe it’s going to give you clarity because you’re not going to see your workplace as your dream, so maybe you’ll be able to recognize when there’s toxicity happening in a workplace more often, things like that. And so, for me, when I hear someone who saying, “You know, I’m kind of leaving the cool, flashy thing. I’m going to go over here but I’m being paid more. It seems like I’m going to have really good work-life balance. So far, from the people I’ve interviewed with, I really like them.”

It’s like they have this surprise factor, where they’re like, “But I should like this big, cool company, checking the box for me.” And I think that is the dream job versus good-enough job kind of conundrum, is sort of this mindset of, like, “I should want this thing. This thing should kind fulfill me, and why doesn’t it?” And so, I’m really proud of people who can make the shift over to “those good-enough jobs” for them.

And it’s not easy to make those decisions and determine, “What are my values? What are my top priorities? Now I have to find a company that fits.” I’m making this sound like it just landed onto their lap but I think it does take some internal work of getting over these preconceived misconceptions of what you should want.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s really cool. And this conversation about dream jobs is making me think about, I guess, there’s been a recent trend of big personalities on YouTube quitting YouTube, which is funny because I understand that the data reveal that young people now, more than they want to be teachers or firefighters, they want to be YouTubers. So, that’s the job, I guess, everyone wants. They think it’s the coolest. Not an astronaut but a YouTuber.

And so, folks who are YouTubers, who are collecting over half a million dollars of income for creatively making videos, are like, “I can’t take this anymore,” which is fascinating in terms of a picture of the dream job doesn’t exist. And if you dig deeper, you sort of learn that, “Oh, well, behind the surface of just making cool videos, they got to manage a team, and brand deals, and books, and accounting, and everyone wants a piece of them.”

Lauren McGoodwin

And the comments, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

It’s like, the reality is, “Huh, it’s not just a creative wonderland of nonstop adulation for me being me, but there’s a ton of responsibilities that are sufficient to overwhelm a portion of these people who have what appears to be an ultimate dream job.”

Lauren McGoodwin

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s tough, I’m sure. It’s very hard for them to walk away from that because it’s that feeling of, like, “You’re not just going to get this back if you change your mind,” meaning, like, the person who worked all the way to become the partner of a law firm, and I’m only using that as an example because I feel we hear a lot about lawyers who are, like, “It wasn’t what I thought it’s going to be.”

But anybody who kind of gets in that golden handcuff rut sort of thing in their career, it’s very hard to walk away from that. And that’s why I think it’s important to kind of share the message early on about good-enough job versus dream jobs. Careers are long and windy, and you take U-turns and left turns and right turns, and up and down. It’s not this linear career path.

And the more we can kind of, I think, spread this education about what a career is, or what a career path looks like, I mean, I came from the generation very much of, like, this ladder and the lean in, just lean in to saying yes to things. That just hasn’t been the reality I’ve experienced, and I think many of the women I’ve talked to and interviewed, or experts that I’ve interviewed, that hasn’t been their experience.

And same with our audience at Career Contessa, it’s like your best skillset to building a fulfilling career is a person who is being proactive in the driver’s seat of their career versus the reactive to whatever is coming your way. And then, again, also studying this mindset of, like, “I’m part of that world, too,” just thinking about your values, determining kind of your purpose, thinking about, again, I have this phrase about how to be invaluable at work.

And people are always asking because they’re like, “Oh, I thought you want to be indispensable.” And I always say, “Look, but if you’re indispensable to a role, how can you grow because they can’t afford to lose you?” So, that’s a different mentality when you’re indispensable, the company is saying you’re primed for overwork because they can’t afford to lose you versus the mentality of, “We don’t want to lose you,” so you’re primed for more valuable work, for example.

So, again, these are just like this is the lessons that I think is kind of one can learn early on. It’s actually very helpful throughout your career. A lot of us, to your point about the YouTuber that many of us learn at mid-life or later on, and so that’s why I’m here to spread this information

Pete Mockaitis

That’s lovely. Well, I do want to hear more about your unique vantage point. So, with the Career Contessa podcast and YouTube channel and speaking, you have a fun vantage point. And I know when I dork out and look into all my analytics and things, and emails from listeners and see, “Okay, what’s really the hot stuff in terms of what people really want to know, and what kind of content advice, wisdom, is resonantly transformational for them?”

So, Lauren, if I could put you on the spot to share with us maybe three super nuggets that you’ve collected from your time podcasting and engaging with so many folks, what have been some of your favorite discoveries?

Lauren McGoodwin

I interviewed a woman once on what actually drives happiness at work, and I still love this conversation, and they were relationships, purpose, and autonomy. And I really loved that because I feel like happiness at work sometimes feel like this very elusive thing, and I guess in a way it is, but I thought that was a really fun conversation. Sometimes you have conversations where you learn something, and you’re like, “Wow, that’s certainly a puzzle piece to the career puzzle.”

I think another big piece for me is the difference between, like I said, being invaluable at work versus being indispensable. I really fit this millennial woman stereotype of the, like, work hard until they recognize your work. I very much learned through my own experiences, but also through our audience and talking to people, it’s really important to advocate for yourself.

There are good ways to advocate, bragging, however you want to call it. Some people don’t like it. They’re like, instead of advocating, think of it as self-expression. However you need to see this, it is very important that you are able to talk about your wins, and your accomplishments, and your achievements. So, those have been some big wins for me.

The other thing, I think, that’s been kind of eye-opening in terms of stuff I’d learned is, like, it’s interesting that you can outperform someone and not necessarily be better than them, and I think that’s a hard reality. And part of that comes down to they might be better at telling their story, they’re better at managing that, I guess, “playing the game.” And I think that sometimes, again, like a hard reality to come to terms with, but I also think it’s very true.

And so, again, self-advocating, learning how to tell your story, making sure that you’re aligned with the right stakeholders and getting in front of them, that’s really important. And, also, that confidence is not something you’re born with. It’s built by taking action. So, nothing is going to just come to you. You have to have the confidence and the willingness to try something in order to start getting traction.

So, if I could drop it into three nuggets of wisdom, those are like some three big takeaways I’ve had in the last year of talking. I have the best job because, through the podcast, YouTube channel, what we do at the side, our whole job is basically trying to find out, “How can you build a healthy fulfilling and successful career?” It is not a perfect black and white formula that fits in a box for everybody. But there are certain trends that I hear over and over again, and those are a few of them.

Pete Mockaitis

Cool. Well, could you tell us a cool story of someone that you’ve worked with who saw a real cool transformation in terms of they had one perspective, and then they learned some things, changed some things, and saw a fantastic result on the other side of things?

Lauren McGoodwin

Well, I have a couple. I have a friend who recently was working for a thing company, and their whole career was, like, the Googles, the LinkedIns, the Amazons, the Facebook, very much like you look at her career path, you’d be like, “You’ve got one very linear career path at a certain type of company,” was part of the layoffs that happened, has been searching for a job, and was kind of only searching one way for a job, which was, essentially, using her network, referrals, applying, things like that, introductions to hire, relying on her network.

For a whole year, she’s been looking for a job. She’s incredibly talented. And one of the things that I thought was really interesting is she recently hit the Easy Apply button on LinkedIn to a job that had been reposted a couple of times, had less than 50 people apply for it, it was a very different industry than she had been in before but a similar job, like job function, and ended up going for two interviews, got a job offer, meaning the process was like weeks’ long versus multi-months long.

And I was talking to her, and she was like, “I’m almost afraid to take this because it’s the complete opposite of anything I’ve ever done, and it flips all the logic I’ve thought of on its head.” And so, it was almost like she was uncomfortable with this unknown for herself, of like, “Shouldn’t I just keep sticking with what I’m doing even if it’s not working? Eventually it will work.” And she ultimately decided she’s going to take this new job, couldn’t be happier. It very much fits the description of this “good-enough job.”

She goes into the office once a month. They really value her experience in a certain industry. She was feeling very discouraged from the job search before. And I feel this breathes new life into her, and watching her just have this new motivation. And I thought that was really interesting because so many of us sometimes do have this fear of the unknown, or the fear or doing something different. And there were a couple of takeaways from it.

One, there’s no right way to job search. So, if you’re job searching right now, try a lot of different strategies. Yes, tap your network. Yes, try to get referrals. Also hit Easy Apply to the jobs that you think are really interesting to you, or the companies where you’re like, “I like the company well enough. I need to learn more about them.”

So, I love that story. I love the fact that it reminds you that find a target company, network, absolutely. This job market, absolutely has taught me that there are no rules so you have to try a little bit of everything and test out, and see what strategy works best for you. But ultimately, I think, also, going in with if you can manage your expectations to not be too fixed mindset on it has to go a certain way, if you take some those, I think it’s a really freeing thing as well.

Pete Mockaitis

Cool. Thank you. Well, now I’m curious, anything else you really make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Lauren McGoodwin

Well, my book is called Power Moves so if you’re interested in exploring more of these topics related to the dream job and going after the good-enough job, Power Moves is really a framework on how to build a career that is based in a proactive approach versus a reactive approach. And then, of course, my podcast is called Career Contessa. I’ve really made it easy, and that’s where I get to talk to people who share what drives happiness at work. And I love being able to have those interesting conversations. So, if you’re interested in podcast advice, or career advice, check out Career Contessa as well.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Lauren McGoodwin

My favorite quote that I learned from someone the other day is, “This or something better.” And I think that is an incredible quote especially for 2024 with this economic climate, this tough job market, it’s “This or something better.” So, remind yourself of that when you feel like, “I’m not making any progress. I’ve got a rejection.” And I always try to remind people, if they don’t look at your resume, they’re not rejecting you. My point being they look at your resume for seven seconds, or not at all, having a fresh mindset of, “That’s not necessarily a rejection that way,” but it’s, “This or something better.”

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Lauren McGoodwin

I’m loving people who are doing research on remote work or distributed work. So, there’s a lot of CEOs out there who want to call everyone back to the office because of productivity, collaboration. And what these people who do this research are finding is, like, absolutely not necessary to be in office to collaborate, to be productive. And they’re actually doing a lot of research on what does drive those things.

Pete Mockaitis

Awesome. And a favorite book?

Lauren McGoodwin

A favorite book, Atomic Habits. I love that book. I quote it a lot. That and Essentialism I think they were like books I’ve read at the right time of my life to help me kind of get organized and focus, and gave me that fresh perspective that was really important.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite tool, something you use to help you be awesome at your job?

Lauren McGoodwin

Loom video recordings where, basically, you’re able to audio record yourself, or you can be on video, and then a screenshare. So, I’ll use it for trainings. It’s great for asynchronous work where you want to be able to send feedback to someone on something. So, on our team, we’re a fully remote company, so I will use Loom to send feedback on, “Hey, I read this article. Here’s something I would change. I’m going to edit here, edit there.” Sometimes we’ll use it for resume reviews for clients, too. So, I love Loom absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite habit?

Lauren McGoodwin

Favorite habit, probably a to-do list. Definitely a to-do list. And I’m not fancy. I use pen and paper but that’s probably one of my favorite habits. I also am really big on 10,000 steps a day, so I just got a walking pad, and I have a standing desk, so that’s a big part of my personality is I’m a very 10,000 steps a day.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lauren McGoodwin

Certainly, just the dream job myth, I think, is something that people are starting to know me by, is that they’ll say, “I know you don’t believe in dream jobs, but I’m looking for a dream job,” or something like that. Or, “I know you don’t believe in dream jobs, but then what do I find instead?” So, I would say the dream job myth is definitely something I’m quoted back and used on myself a lot.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lauren McGoodwin

Everything is on the Career Contessa website, so CareerContessa.com. Podcast is called Career Contessa, and the book is Power Moves. And then you can connect with me on LinkedIn, I’m Lauren McGoodwin on LinkedIn, and I post tips daily on there, and I would love to connect with you.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lauren McGoodwin

My final action, I think, going back to one of the nuggets of things I’ve learned is “How can you advocate for yourself this week? Or, how can you make your accomplishments or achievements known this week?” Does that mean you can send a quick email to your boss, of, “Here’s a quick recap of what I’ve been working on”? Can you mention yourself in that Slack channel, like, “Here’s my win for the week”? What can you do to make sure that you are advocating and letting your wins be known?

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Lauren, thank you and good luck.

Lauren McGoodwin

Thank you.

Feb 26
0

939: How to Waste Less Time on Meetings…and Spend More Time on Strategy with Rich Horwath

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Rich Horwath reveals how to cut through the busywork and make more time for strategy.

You’ll Learn:

  1. What being “strategic” really means
  2. The critical questions that determine what truly matters
  3. Why most meetings are useless—and how to fix them 

About Rich

Rich Horwath is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of eight books on strategic thinking and has been rated the #1 keynote speaker on strategy at national conferences, including the Society for Human Resource Management Strategy Conference.

He has appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX TV to provide commentary on the strategic aspects of current events and his work has appeared in publications including Fast Company, Forbes, and the Harvard Business Review.

A former Chief Strategy Officer and professor of strategy, Rich has created more than 700 resources to help leaders at all levels maximize their strategic potential. He designed the Strategic Quotient (SQ) Assessment, a validated tool to measure how effectively a person thinks, plans, and acts strategically. Rich created the Strategic Fitness System as an online platform for leaders to practice the skills to effectively navigate all areas of their business, including strategy, leadership, organization, and communication.

Resources Mentioned

Rich Horwath Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Rich, welcome.

 

Rich Horwath

Pete, thanks. Great to be with you today.

 

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom that you put forth in your book Strategic, but first I need to hear a little bit about you and the Second City improv club in Chicago. I did a little bit of training there myself. Tell us the tale and how that relates to you and strategy.

 

Rich Horwath

Well, strategy, for many people, can be quite boring, and realizing that early on, I said, “Well, how can we differentiate ourselves? We know strategy is important to have differentiation.” So, I said, “One way to potentially not be as boring is to do some improv training.” So, I joined Second City because I lived in the old town area at the time so it was very close, and spent a year there training, doing weekly classes, and it was a great opportunity to really push myself outside of my comfort zone.

Anyone who can tell you that’s heard me sing, singing is not a strength of mine, and some of the improvisation required making up songs as we went. So, being able to put yourself out there and do something completely terrible, and make it through mentally and emotionally, was a good way to build some mental fortitude.

 

Pete Mockaitis

I like that a lot. I remember I did an intensive over, I guess, five-ish days, just before Thanksgiving, and I remember I came back from it, I said, “Oh, this is fun. I think it really loosened me up.” And my friends said, “Pete, I don’t think you needed to be any looser.” But, nonetheless, I got looser and I appreciated the impact.

 

Rich Horwath

I love it. I love it.

 

Pete Mockaitis

Well, tell us, you’ve been talking about coaching, studying, consulting, strategy stuff for a couple decades, any particularly surprising or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about this stuff as you’ve delved into it?

 

Rich Horwath

Well, one of the things that’s a little counterintuitive is we hear the mantra “fail fast” a lot, and it’s come out of Silicon Valley, and a lot of people apply it across the board, “Fail fast. Try something. Fail.” And my experience, Pete, has been that that’s not really a great recipe for leaders to follow, especially ones that are in more established industries.

Because, yes, in a startup environment in Silicon Valley, a tech company, you’re going try things, see if they work because you’re really pioneering new markets. But if you’re in a more experienced industry with maturity, the ability to succeed, to think, and to plan is something, I think, it’s going to be more important to people’s long-term career success.

So, that’s one thing that would be a bit counterintuitive is, I’d like to say, let’s replace fail fast with think first and then succeed. So, that would be one thing I’d mention off the top of my head.

 

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, I like that a lot in terms, yeah, fail fast has a time and a place in terms of, “Okay, don’t spin your wheels forever. Sometimes the best way to learn is just by trying it out, see what happens.” But other times, the cost of failure is pretty significant, and the benefit of getting it right the first, or second, or third time, instead of failing dozens of times, is massive. So, I’m right with there. I love my 80/20 Rule, my the-one-thing kind of stuff. It’s a beautiful thing.

For those who are not yet converts into strategy is awesome, can you share with us what’s sort of at stake or the benefits for professionals who master this stuff versus kind of limp along, doing okay with the whole strategy thing?

 

Rich Horwath

Well, when we think about the average person out there, and their ability to be led, to be a follower, to have set direction for them, one of the things that we see from a research standpoint is that 22% of people in the workforce, and this is a study of 30 million workers by Gallup, found that only 22% said, “Hey, our senior leadership has set great strategic direction.”

And so, one of the things we want to think about is if you’re in an organization that doesn’t have good strategic direction, all of a sudden, you’ve got people spending time on this thing, time on this thing, they’re spreading their resources too thin in lots of different areas, and it’s not all gelling together. So, being able to be strategic, to set direction for your business, whether you’re the CEO, whether you’re a first line manager, whether you’re an individual contributor, is going to be really important because strategy isn’t just what’s written in the PowerPoint deck.

It’s how each and every one of us spend our time, day in and day out. That’s the real strategy because strategy is about resource allocation. And the most important resource is time. So, all of us out there are strategists. The key is to have an understanding of what that means, and then really understand, “Are we putting our time into the priorities that are really going to drive value for our company and for our customers?”

 

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And I think that most of us think that we probably do an okay job of this, “Sure, I got a to-do list, and I think about what might be most important, and I put an asterisk or a box around that item on my to-do list.” So, is that adequate? Or just what sort of benefits might I unlock if I were operating at a Jedi-level of being awesomely strategic?

 

Rich Horwath

Well, Pete, I’m going to borrow one of the phrases you’ve used because I really like it. You call yourself pathologically curious.

 

Rich Horwath

And I think when we consider the ability to be strategic, a lot of involves that level of curiosity, that explorer’s mindset, that we’re trying to discover new ways, new solutions, new approaches to bring value to people. Because what happens is, too often, if we’re just following a to-do list, and we’re on that activity treadmill, then we can lose sight of, “Are we really providing new and differentiated value to the people that we’re serving, either internally or externally as well?”

And so, I think being strategic is, “How are we accumulating or generating insights?” and I define an insight as a learning that leads to new value. So, the best leaders, the best managers are the ones that are continually accumulating these insights, these new learnings that are helping them bring value to their company.

 

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I like insights. Maybe, Rich, can you make it all the more real for us by sharing a cool story of a professional who upgraded their strategic game and saw some cool benefits from it?

 

Rich Horwath

So, I was working with a mid-level manager at a medical device company, and this is about 10 years ago, and we were in a session, and we were doing some brainstorming using a tool called a value-mining matrix, which, in simple terms, is looking at customers and needs, and trying to determine, “How can we bring new value to meet some new needs that people have?”

And this company was in the cardiovascular space, so the heart space. And, typically, when they had these brainstorming sessions, all the ideas were in the heart space, but this one leader said, “You know, I was in an operating room not too long ago with one of my customers, and one of the main problems, the challenges that the surgeons and the nurses had was really being able to get rid of a lot of different materials, liquids, things that were no longer usable in the operating room right after the surgery, and they didn’t really have a good, clear, clean way to do that.”

And so, she said, “Maybe we should think about some type of disposal service for general surgery.” And it was interesting, Pete, because people in the session were kind of rolling their eyes, and looking around, and somebody even said, “You know, we don’t do that. That’s not what we do.” But she said, “Well, we need to think. We’ve heard the term outside the box, but we need to think about what are other ways that we can solve challenges that our customers have?”

And so, they wound up doing a pilot program in coming up with a prototype service to work in general surgery to remove the different types of waste materials, and it was successful at a regional hospital. They rolled it out across the State, and then they rolled it out nationally, and a couple of years later, that was a hundred-million-dollar piece of their business, which was a fairly significant part of the company.

So, again, it was this idea of not just being locked into doing the same things and the same ways we always do them, which tends to be our operational effectiveness, but strategy is really about, “How can we pick a different path that’s going to help us be successful?”

 

Pete Mockaitis

All right. I love that. Well, it’s so funny, when you said that idea, it seems so perfect because, yeah, that’s probably how it would land, like, “Aargh, this is annoying. Let’s get back on track. This meeting is already too long. We don’t really do that.” But then I’m thinking from my perspective, “Man, if you solve a problem that surgeons are having, there’s probably a lot of money there.”

 

Rich Horwath

Exactly.

 

Pete Mockaitis

And, sure enough, there was. And money not just for the company but, I imagine, for that clever professional, as well as people on their teams, some promotions and raises are probably dolled out along the path of making that happen.

 

Rich Horwath

Yeah, absolutely, there were. And, again, what it did was it forced everyone in the organization to rethink what their sandbox was. And, again, it typically was the heart space, and they said, “We need to look at other ways that we can take our capabilities, our skill sets, and our knowledge, and apply them across all the needs that surgeons might have.” So, you’re right, there was a big seismic shift in the way people were thinking about the business.

 

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, in your book Strategic, it sounds like is that kind of like the main point you’re bringing there, it’s like, “If you take the time to get these insights, great things happen”? Or, how would you articulate the main message or the big idea here?

 

Rich Horwath

Yeah, I think that’s a great way to capture it. The reality is if we think about physical fitness, so if we think about running, jogging, lifting some weights, doing Pilates, if we do any of those things once a year, one day out of the year, we’re probably not going to be very physically fit. If we played the guitar once a year, we’re probably not going to be a great guitar player.

But when it comes to strategy, and planning, and thinking strategically, a lot of people do it a couple days out of the year, in November or creating their plan, and then it goes away for about 11 and a half months. So, a lot of people treat strategy like a birthday where it happens once a year, there’s a lot of signage and funfair, and then it goes away.

So, the premise of the book, to your point, is really about, “How do you take the importance of generating insights on a yearly basis, and make that everyone’s daily job? How do we create that accountability for learnings that lead to new value?” because that’s the way that you really take knowledge workers and create a true learning organization, versus people doing their own things in silos, which happens quite a bit.

 

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. I like that notion, the fitness, strategic fitness once a year, once a quarter isn’t going to cut the mustard on the body, nor will it with your strategic skills. Well, Rich, could you give us a quick overview of you lay out four disciplines of strategic fitness? What are those?

 

Rich Horwath

So, there’s strategy, leadership, organization, and communication. And so, in my work over the last 20 years, I found that the executives that are truly successful in the long run, they’re good in all of those areas. They’re not just one or the other. For instance, Forbes magazine found two years ago that the most CEOs that were fired in the Fortune 500 were fired because of emotional intelligence issues, not financial performance.

So, just being good at strategy, as a leader, is not good enough if you’re not good with people, if you’re not a true leader, if you don’t create purpose for other people. So, one of the keys is you’ve got to be well-rounded in the fat that you have to be a good communicator, you’ve got to be able to set the structure for the organization and the processes, you have to be a leader, meaning you have to be able to set direction and serve others to achieve goals, and then you’ve got to be able to set strategy, meaning, “We’ve got to allocate our resources in order to get where we want to go.”

 

Pete Mockaitis

Well, now that is a fascinating little tidbit you shared there, and I didn’t think we’d talked much about emotional intelligence in a conversation about strategy but let’s go ahead and do it. 

 

Rich Horwath

Well, when we think about emotional intelligence, there’s two main areas. There’s self-awareness and then there’s the situation awareness. And the situation awareness is really about your interaction and relationships with other people, and that’s the one that seems to trip up most of the CEOs, is it relates to their teams, as well as the board of directors.

So, oftentimes, they’re surprising the board of directors with news about different things. From a culture perspective, they’re not creating the integrity of having a culture where they’re talking and doing things that match up. So, oftentimes, they say, “Well, honesty is one of our key values,” and, all of a sudden, they’re asking their people to do things that may not be quite honest as far as customer reporting, customer sales and things like that.

So, to your point, they don’t tend to be the big scandalous things, but a lot of it is just their awareness of how they’re interacting with other people. And are they doing it in a way that’s empathetic, meaning they’re putting themselves in other person’s shoes to understand, “How does this person want to be treated? What do they need to know? And am I being transparent with the things that they would want to know?”

 

Pete Mockaitis

That’s beautiful. And not to dehumanize this at all, but it is actually quite strategic, in my experience, to have a wide network of good relationships that you can work with again and again and again. I’m just thinking about John, this guy I’ve collaborated with from time to time on some big audio projects, and I was like, “Ooh, I’ve got a short deadline.” And so, I was like, “Oh, I’ll call up John. Oh, he has some availability. Well, that’s great news.”

And so, it’s like if I had been a jerk in previous times I had big audio projects with short deadlines, and yelling at John to do more faster, well, then you wouldn’t have that resource available. And so, it is with all sorts of things, strategically thinking, it’s, like, we have our strengths, our gifts, what we can do way more efficiently than others, and to the extent that you are filling in your gaps with other people over a lifelong network of collaboration, that is just a huge enabler of strategic goodness.

 

Rich Horwath

And, Pete, what you just said there is such a good point, you said the word lifelong. And I think that’s a great reminder for everybody out there because, too often, we look at relationships as transactional and short term, instead of lifelong, like you talk about. And if we think about that relationship from a lifelong perspective, one of the things I encourage people to do at all levels is to pick the top ten people that you work with on a regular basis, and then map out, “What are the intentional things that you want to do to develop that relationship even further or deeper over the next year?”

And so, that’s one thing I’ve seen people do to be successful, whether it’s with your board of directors, colleagues to your point, other people that you work with outside your company, but pick 10, 15, 20 people, and just jot down a couple bullet points for this year, “What do you want to do to build or develop that relationship to another level?”

 

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, I love that. Well, so now you highlight a number of time traps that impede our ability to be strategic and effective. Can you share what are some of those? And how do we deal with them effectively?

 

Rich Horwath

So, when we look at being strategic, time, the ability to marshal, to use your time effectively is so critical. So, there’s a few things that trip people up when it comes to time. One of them being just not carving time out to think. Sometimes we’re on that activity treadmill, we’re going and going and going, but we don’t really stop to think about, “What are we doing? How are we doing it? Why are we doing it? And are there ways to do it differently or better?”

And the best executives I’ve worked with are the ones that really carve out some times, 30 minutes, 60 minutes a week to step back and think about changes that they would like to make and the ways that they’re using their time. The other really interesting learning I’ve had in studying CEOs is a lot of the good ones batch their time.

So, instead of bouncing from one thing this minute to another thing this minute, to email, to a report, to a one-on-one meeting, to a staff meeting, they really batch their time in chunks of two, to three, to four hours. So, they might say, “Well, I’m going to do all of my one-on-one direct report meetings on Monday from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.”

And the big benefit of that, Pete, is they reduce the number of mental transitions that they have to make during the day. Because if you have 70 or 80 different mental transitions during the day, that’s what causes burnout, that’s what causes people to be really tired at the end of the day. But if you group all of your one-on-ones for three to four hours, then you do 45 minutes of email, and then you do a couple reports, now you’ve got three or four transitions versus 60 transitions.

 

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, I think that makes all the difference because it takes a while to get into the groove of a thing, and then I think the time in which you’re not in that groove, there’s friction. And so, yeah, less time in the friction zone would probably result in less burnout, more energetic goodness, so that’s awesome. Now, I need to hear about the particulars for the how-to’s of strategic thinking, like the key questions you ask, how you identify what really, really, really is important and worthwhile versus not so important and worthwhile. How do you go about thinking through and approaching these?

 

Rich Horwath

Yeah, so, in general, I think we could start with three A’s. There’s a three A strategic framework, which is acumen, allocation, and action. So, acumen is, “What’s the insight? What’s my learning here?” So, one thing I’d recommend is try for a week, every interaction that you have, if it’s a one-on-one meeting, your daily staff meeting or huddle, a report that you’re doing, after you have that interaction, sit down for just a minute or two, and ask yourself, “What did I learn in that session? What was the key takeaway for me?”

Because what we see, Pete, in the last couple of years is we’re stacking meetings on top of each other, especially if we’re in a hybrid or remote format and we’re doing a lot of things on video. We tend to stack those meetings and we go from one to the other, and we don’t really take the time to identify, “What are the action steps out of this interaction? What were my learnings? And what would I do differently with that next interaction with these same people?” I also recommend this idea of scoring your interactions, especially meetings.

So, as you go throughout your week, one thing I have executives I work with do is I have them use a scale of one to three. So, one was low value in the interaction, two is mid-value, and three was high value. And what’s interesting then is that if you categorize those results at the end of the week, so you say, “My operating meeting, my IT meeting, my HR meeting,” if you rate all of those throughout the week, if some of them are coming as a one, a one and a half, or a two, then you need to ask yourself, “Is that a meeting that we should keep doing? And if so, how do we improve the value of that meeting?” for yourself, for the other people involved with it.

So, that first A, acumen, is really about thinking, “How do we create more value in what we’re doing every interaction?”

 

Pete Mockaitis

And if I may, when it comes to scoring the value of the interaction, how do we think about measuring value and making that assessment? And what are typical sorts of improvements that you’ve seen upgrade the value?

 

Rich Horwath

So, the main thing I would say is you have to have your goals clearly identified, not just your goals, but you have to understand the goals of the other people, the other groups that you’re meeting with. Too often, people go in with their own agenda to these interactions, and they’re not really empathetic as to what the other person is trying to achieve as well. So, to me, the first step in understanding or ascertaining value is, “How well did that interaction help us progress toward our goals, not just my goal, not just your goal, but our goals collectively?”

Once we understand what the goals are, then we need to ask ourselves, “Did we have the right questions and preparation going into that interaction?” I’m a big believer that if you have a one-on-one meeting, a group meeting, you’ve got to have preparation.

Forty-eight, 72 hours beforehand, send out one or two key questions, and have people think about that. So, when you get into that meeting, that conversation, it can start at a much more accelerated pace because people are really ready to engage. So, I would say those are a couple of the key things that can turn up the volume on value.

 

Pete Mockaitis

And I suppose as you go through this exercise regularly, you might discover fairly quickly, “Oh, actually, the goals that we’re pursuing in these meetings aren’t actually worth pursuing at all.”

 

Rich Horwath

Great insight. Yup, exactly.

 

Pete Mockaitis

“Let’s skip the meeting and it’s all good.”

 

Rich Horwath

And that’s a good point, Pete. I would recommend folks out there to think about taking a meeting audit. So, jot down on a piece of paper, on a Word doc, what are all of the meetings that you currently attend, and think about what’s the goal, or what’s the purpose of those meetings. And a lot of times, when people do an audit or an inventory of their meetings, to your point, Pete, there are some of them, they say, “You know, this is not adding any value. I’ve done this meeting for three years and it’s the same old conversation.” And it could be better served if somebody just sent out an email, or, even these days, did a quick one- or two-minute video overview of the topic and information that they wanted to share.

 

Pete Mockaitis

I like that a lot. I am a huge proponent of Loom. I guess there are many software pieces that do this kind of thing. But, oh, yeah, that screen recording, so quick and easy and simple. Don’t have to coordinate everyone’s calendar, and it’s just like, “Here’s what you need to know. Here’s the process. Here’s the software and the documents and the things that we’re doing, or an update on what I’ve discovered, and what I might recommend we look at next,” and then that’s that.

 

Rich Horwath
Yeah, absolutely. There’s a lot of software and things to do that. And, again, I think the key point, and you touched on it as well, is we just need to think about, “How are we using our time in ways that are getting us to our goals?” because, too often, time is driven by activity for activity’s sake alone.

 

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Let’s hear about allocation.

 

Rich Horwath

So, allocation then, that second A, is really about, “How are you using your resources, your time, your energy, your mindset, your talent, and any budget that you have to achieve the goals that you have?” And, again, the key for allocation, and you know this as well as anybody, great strategy is as much about what we choose not to do as it is about what we choose to do.

So, the best managers, the best leaders I’ve seen are really crystal clear for themselves and their team on, “Here are the areas and things that we’re not going to spend our time on. So, we’re not going to generate these reports. We’re not going to work with these types of customers. We’re not going to fulfill these types of requests because they’re not the sweet spots where we can bring the most value.” So, a lot of allocation is, yes, you have to have a to-do list but, as we’ve heard before, you want to have that not to-do list as well so people are really clear and not wasting time.

 

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I love the not to-do list. And I remember I was having a chat years ago with a friend. We were talking… totally different context; we were talking about dating. He’s like, “You got to get really clear on your must-haves and you-can’t-stands.” I was like, “Okay, I guess that makes sense.” And, also, I said, “I think it also is really helpful to get clear on your doesn’t-matters.” And he’s like, “Why? Why did you say that?” I was like, “Because I think it’s easy to get sidetracked.” Like, “Ooh, that’s impressive that he’s rich.” It’s like, “Oh, but actually that doesn’t matter because of…” well, whatever reason. He’s like, “Financially, it’s all good over here.”

Because it’s easy to get sucked into something that’s attractive and interesting, romantically or from a business career professional perspective, because it just sort of triggers something in you, like, “Ooh, that’s really cool and nifty fresh opportunity.” Like, “Oh, we got to do AI because everyone is doing AI, and AI is the thing to do, right?” It’s like, “Okay. Well, maybe, but that’s actually not at all a good reason to go do AI because it’s hot and everyone else is doing it.”

Maybe it’s like, “Oh, there is an opportunity here to do substantial savings. Maybe,” or maybe it’s not. So, I like that notion a lot, getting clear on the not to do. And while we’re talking allocation, I got to hear your take on the 80/20 Rule. Is it real, Rich?

 

Rich Horwath

Absolutely. I believe it’s real, both from a business and a personal perspective. When you think about the organizations that have really been successful, and obviously the ones that come to mind, the Apples, the Googles, the Nordstroms, the Metas, what you find is that they’ve really driven tremendous value through one or two things that they’ve done for the most part.

And then once they’ve gotten 5, 10, 15, 20 years in, they start to add other things. But really, my experience working with leaders is that if you can identify that 20% of things that’s going to drive 80% of the value, that’s going to be a great ticket to being as effective as possible. And I do recommend everybody out there, at least once a quarter, jot down how you’re spending your time in 30-minute increments throughout the week. Add those things up at the end of the week, and I’d even recommend graph it out.

So, on the X-axis, put the different categories where you spend your time, on the Y-axis the hours, and map that out, draw that out. And what you’ll find is there’s going to be a couple things that take up the majority of your time. The question is, “Do those things actually matter to your goals and priorities?” And if they don’t, then we need to make some changes. So, that’s my perspective, Pete. What’s been your observations on the 80/20?

 

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, it really has been, and there are times when I have actually made a spreadsheet of, “What is the expected profit generated per hour of Pete required of all these different initiatives?” And just as the 80/20 Rule would predict, the vital few activities, those 20% of things that drive 80% of the value, can, indeed, be 16 times as impactful as the trivial many activities. And it’s just so eye-opening.

I think if there’s a whiff of procrastination in my psyche, and there is often, just having that kind of clarity is so powerful. It’s like, “Okay, Pete, this is 16 times as important as the other thing. So, don’t even think about investing your time in that other thing.” And it’s just pretty wild. So, I’d love to hear from your perspective, working with clients, what are some common themes of activities that are often in that vital few top 20% zone that are truly often 16 times as impactful as the other stuff?

 

Rich Horwath

Well, I would say the number one thing is spending time with customers, so it may be your customers internally. So, if you’re an HR leader, it might be spending time with the person who’s doing compensation, the ones who’s doing incentive, the ones who’s doing DEI stuff. So, to me, spending time with the people that you’re serving, either internally or externally, that, I think, is where most of the leaders I’ve talked to are really getting a ton of value.

One of the things I throw out there that I’d say a lot of leaders get caught up in, that doesn’t bring a lot of value, is presentations, whether it’s presentations internally, presentations to the board. I’m seeing leaders spend an inordinate amount of time coming up with these presentations when, in fact, I think what most people are really hungry for is a real dialogue, not just a presentation, “I’m going to talk to you for 30 minutes, and then I’ll give you two minutes at the end to ask a couple questions.”

People want interaction, they want dialogue. So, that would be one, I would say, trap to avoid is getting caught up in the real fancy presentations as opposed to creating real dialogue with folks.

 

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And the action?

 

Rich Horwath

So, the action, that third A, is really about, “How are you prioritizing what’s important versus the stuff that’s urgent?” And I think you brought up the 80/20 and some of the ways that you use it, I think that’s a great tool to help people act in a way that’s going to really drive value for them and for the people that they’re serving, if you can take the time to identify what those few activities are that are driving the majority of value. And then, like you said, a good leader helps people avoid the noise, the things that are out there but aren’t really relevant.

So, I think, as a good leader from an action standpoint, you’re almost putting earmuffs on people to say, “Look, here’s what we’re focused on. Don’t let all these other things that are uncontrollable in the environment, or things like AI, distract us from really what the task at hand is.” So, it’s really just that ability to prioritize the important versus the urgent.

 

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Now, before we hear about some of your favorite things, I’d love it, Rich, if you could lay on us any other quick tips, tricks, questions, shortcuts for zeroing in on super high value stuff fast?

 

Rich Horwath

Yeah. Well, one thing, Pete, we’re all involved in meetings, and meetings take up a lot of time. And the recent study shows that about 70% of executives feel that meetings are inefficient and ineffective. And so, one of the things I’d recommend is this meeting framework. So, think about three things. Think about your intent, your decisions, and your insights.

So, intent is, if you’re meeting with people, even if it’s one person, “What’s the intent? What’s the purpose?” and formulate that in an agenda. The second piece is decisions. If you’re just meeting to talk, and you don’t have decisions where you’re moving things forward, you’re potentially wasting time. So, think about what’s the decision there. And then that third one is insights. Take time at the end of interactions to really think about, “What’s the learning? What’s the new action plan based on that interaction?”

So, I would say that’s an important one around meetings, it’s just that idea of intent, decisions, and insights. That’s a key one. And then, I guess, the other piece I’d mention, too, is just that we’re in a lot of conversations day in and day out, so we really want to make sure that we’re in conversations that are exploratory, but then also think about a funnel, we’re at the end of the conversation, we’re getting to the bottom of the funnel.

A lot of conversations I’ve been a part of and see, we’re at the top of the funnel the entire meeting and that’s where we end, but we don’t get down to the end of the funnel to the neck of the funnel, to say, “Okay, so what based on this conversation? What’s next?”

 

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, now, Rich, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

 

Rich Horwath

A quote from Proverbs, it’s “Iron sharpens iron, so man sharpens his fellow man.” I think we can learn something from everybody out there if we’re just open enough to do that.

 

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

 

Rich Horwath

The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin. 

 

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite tool?

 

Rich Horwath

Mindjet. So, it’s a mind-mapping software, very simple in nature, very inexpensive, but, to me, it’s the best way to think through an article, a project, even your to-do list for the day.

 

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be awesome at your job?

 

Rich Horwath

I start with a mental workout each morning. So, not jumping jacks, or pushups, or burpees, or anything, but I do a mental workout where I actually take some of the things that Olympic athletes use, like visualization, affirmation statements, performance statements, and I tailor that for my business. So, I visualize the meetings that I have coming up, how I’d like to be in those meeting, I think about a couple key performance statements, like, ask good questions, be a good listener, be an active listener, things like that. So, I try to do that each morning to kind of frame my mental attitude for the day.

 

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

 

Rich Horwath

New growth comes from new thinking

 

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

 

Rich Horwath

A lot of free resources, about a hundred different free resources at StrategySkills.com, articles, white papers, infographics, videos, podcasts. So, StrategySkills.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?

 

Rich Horwath

Yeah, I would say that the one thing to keep in mind is, “How are you bringing new value to people?” It’s easy to say, “This is my job. This is my activity. This is what I do.” But then, let’s take that one step further and think about, “How am I providing, creating, delivering value for people today?” If we put ourselves in that value mindset, we’re always going to be relevant to the folks that we’re working with.

 

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Rich, thank you. This is fun. I wish you many good strategic decisions.

 

Rich Horwath

Pete, thanks so much. It was great to be with you today.