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Jun 08
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577: How to Manage and Engage Remote Teams with Kevin Eikenberry

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Kevin Eikenberry says: "Leadership first, location second."

Kevin Eikenberry discusses the small, but powerful changes leaders must make when managing remote teams.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The foundation of successful remote teams
  2. How to measure your remote team’s productivity
  3. Top tips for facilitating better online communication

About Kevin

Kevin Eikenberry is a world renowned leadership expert, a two-time bestselling author, speaker, consultant, trainer, coach, leader, learner, husband and father. He is the Chief Potential Officer of The Kevin Eikenberry Group, a leadership and learning consulting company that has been helping organizations, teams and individuals reach their potential since 1993.

Kevin also is the creator and content developer of The Remarkable Leadership Learning System, a continual leadership development process focused on developing the 13 competencies of remarkable leaders with virtually delivered content to leaders worldwide. Kevin and his family live in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Resources mentioned in the show:

Kevin Eikenberry Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Kevin, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Kevin Eikenberry
It’s awesome. I’m glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m glad to have you. And one fun thing we learned about you in stalking you is that you have an antique tractor collection.

Kevin Eikenberry
Well, I have an antique tractor collection. The first question people ask is, “Do you mean like real tractors?” Yes, 13 of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Thirteen real full-size tractors?

Kevin Eikenberry
I also have spread around this office, I have toy tractors of different ages as well.

Pete Mockaitis
So, please, how did this come to be? And what is your fascination with them?

Kevin Eikenberry
Well, I grew up on a farm, and my grandpa u sed to say, “You can take the boy off the farm…” which I largely did, “…but you can’t take the farm out of the boy.” I own the farm I grew up on, started the hobby, if you will, 21 years ago. It became a hobby I shared with my father, and then he passed away unexpectedly and I’ve continued it. It’s a way to connect to my kid-hood, to my adulthood. It’s created a bunch of great memories for me. And, like most things in life, it’s not really about the tractor. It’s about the why underneath it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so do these antique tractors work or is it sort of a mixed bag, more for show?

Kevin Eikenberry
It’s a mixed bag. I have some that people that do this would say are parade quality or show quality. I have others that run, I have a couple that aren’t currently running, but I don’t have any that are like torn apart in 3700 pieces, anything like that.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I, one time, went to a tractor pull, and it was a unique event. So, I grew up in Central Illinois so that’s not so outrageously a thing to do.

Kevin Eikenberry
Completely outrageous, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
But it was interesting to me not knowing much about tractors, how much people got into it, like, “Good pull, buddy. Good pull.” But toward the end, it’s like these tractors didn’t even look like they did farm work. They were more like the sports car tractor.

Kevin Eikenberry
Yeah, exactly. Depending on what kind of tractor pull you went to, they weren’t anywhere close to being an actual tractor. So, my collection ranges from 1939 to 1966, is the range of the tractors.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Well, so I don’t have a poor segue but maybe you’ll give me one. We’re talking about long-distance leadership. And I’d love to know, so you put together this book The Long-Distance Leader. What would you say is the most surprising and fascinating discovery you’ve made while researching and putting it together?

Kevin Eikenberry
So, I think, I don’t think it was the biggest thing I learned during it, but I think one of the biggest things that people can take from it, and, of course, now lots of people are living in this world in a forced way, is that the first rule we mentioned in the book is the idea that it’s leadership first, location second. It’s not that everything changes, but lots of little things change. And, as one of my mentors told me a long time ago, Pete, little hinges swing big doors.

And so, there’s a whole lot of little things we got to get better at, nuances we need to take advantage of and pay attention to that will help us be effective in leading a team when we don’t see them every day.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when you say leadership first and location second, do you mean in terms of your priority for how you’re allocating your time, attention, resources, and growth? Or, what is the first and the second that you’re getting at?

Kevin Eikenberry
Yeah, there’s some truth to that. There’s some truth to that we need to remember that we’re leaders and be leading. And we’re only leading, by the way, Pete, if people are choosing to follow us, right? So, that’s the first thing I would say. And so, part of the message is don’t get worried or lost in, “Oh, my gosh, I can’t see them. Are they working?” So, don’t get lost or worried about the location, but we must recognize the location, and because of the fact that we’re not in the same place, we have to be more intentional and work harder.

So, in other words, everything we had to do in leading people when they were down the hall, still needs to happen. May need to have more of it but don’t forget what you already knew, transfer those habits to what you need to change and adjust to do it when people aren’t right down the hall.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, in summary then, what would you say is fundamentally the same and unchanged versus, indeed, unique here in the remote world?

Kevin Eikenberry
We’re leading people. They’re all different. They have unique needs, wants, etc., and so we must work harder to understand those things and understand those people so they will still choose to follow. I believe that our job as a leader is to create a sense of commitment and not just try to create compliance. So, to do that at a distance requires us to b e more intentional, more focused, more diligent, because we have to continue to build those relationships.

Some of the things that happen without us even thinking about it at the coffee pot. Someone pops their head into the office, none of that is going to happen when we’re at a distance, so we’ve got to be more intentional and more focused to make those spontaneous things, serendipitous things, happen when they can’t be that way anymore.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then I’d love to hear your take from lots of experience with working with lots of people. What would you say are the top one to three struggles or surprises or challenges that remote leaders, when they start doing it, go, “Uh-oh,” they’re having a tough time with?

Kevin Eikenberry
They have trouble with figuring out, “How are we going to communicate with each other?” and the frequency of that communication. They have trouble, oftentimes, with trusting their teams, which often manifests itself as micromanagement. And they have a lot of trouble with coaching and holding people accountable often. I would say those are three areas that often show up early.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, then, well, tell us, what are some of the best pra ctices there in terms of addressing each of these?

Kevin Eikenberry
Well, so the first thing, we can’t create clear accountability unless there are clear expectations. And, foundationally, for us as leaders, and I’ll talk to the leaders and to the team members here for a second, okay? So, we need to, as leaders, be setting clear expectations for our folks. Because if they don’t know what’s expected, how can they possibly deliver? And if you’re on the other side, as a team member, out working from home or wherever, and not seeing your boss, your leader, your manager, you need to be making sure that you know what those expectations are.

So, don’t just say, “Well, they haven’t told me.” Instead, say, “I need to understand them so I need to make sure that I’m clear on what they are.” And once we’re working remotely, Pete, the expectations aren’t just about what needs to be done, but also how we’re going to do it, because so many things that sort of just happen, were obvious when we saw each other in the hallways and we could commit in someone’s office, it doesn’t happen anymore, so we’ve got to make sure that expectations are crystal clear in both directions. And if we don’t do that, we can’t get accountability, we can’t really do coaching until we have that set. So, that’s one of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to get your take there in terms of arriving at those crystal clear expectations transmitted and received, are there any key questions or approaches you use to ensure that you land there?

Kevin Eikenberry
Step one, as a leader, make sure you’re clear yourself, which often isn’t the case. So, just because you think you know and you roll your eyes because they’re not delivering, you can’t even make it clear to them yet, so you got to get out of your head and written down. So, when I’m coaching leaders, in fact I have a conversation with one of them tomorrow, the challenge was, “Okay, tell me what you really do expect. Don’t just tell me. Write it down then we can talk about it, because until you’ve written it down, it’s not clear enough. Thoughts are fuzzy, words bring clarity.”

Once you’ve got it written down, then you can share it with the other person. So, you can’t make it clear to them until it’s clear to you, and seldom is it clear enough. You are too vague and too high level usually, or too close to a job description and not close enough to clearly what we want. I’m not talking about creating a situation for micromanagement. What I’m talking about is creating a set of boundaries and lanes so people know where they’re headed, why they’re headed there, and how they can succeed when they arrive.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Lovely. So, you write it down, and then you…

Kevin Eikenberry
Then you have a real conversation, which means don’t just go, “Okay, I wrote all this down. Let me email it to you. Any questions?” Don’t do that, first of all. And don’t just say, “Well, let me read all these to you.” Rather, send them, and say, “Hey, I want us to have a conversation, make sure we’re clear on expectations.” And as we’re having this conversation, a lot of people who are listening to us are now maybe 60, 80, 90 days into working remotely for the first time, or leading remotely for the first time, right?

And so, maybe we got by for a while, the honeymoon is over. It’s still okay to have this conversation now, say, “Hey, listen, Pete, I’ve put together some thoughts. I want to make sure we’re on the same page about expectations, so I’m going to send this to you. I want you to review it. It’s meant to be a draft for us to have a conversation about. Then I’d like for us to meet and talk about it. I want to make sure it makes sense to you, it’s clear. Did I leave anything out? Does it leave any questions for you?” etc.

Then when we get on the phone or perhaps on a video call, then I need to start by saying, “So, Pete, what are your questions? What are your thoughts? What’s missing?” Because as the boss, as the leader, there’s a power differential between you and I, right? So, if I do all the talking first, there’s nothing left for you to say.

Pete Mockaitis
Gotcha.

Kevin Eikenberry
So, if I want a conversation, I have to engage you in it first or early. The more I talk first, the less likely you’re going to say anything even if there’s a high level of trust between us, even if you are pretty self-assured and self-confident because just of the unspoken nature of the power differential between us.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. So, there we go with the communication. Let’s talk about the trust next.

Kevin Eikenberry
So, the trust piece is, well, people will say, “Well, if I don’t see them, I don’t know if they’re working.” Well, you don’t know if they’re working anyway, right? Just because they happen to be in their office, and they happen to be typing away on the keyboard, you don’t know if they’re working unless you’re looking over their shoulder, which I surely hope you weren’t doing before.

People get lost in activity versus accomplishment. What we want is to accomplish things, not to be busy. I don’t care if my team members take a time in the middle of the day to go for a walk. I want the team to know it, in case you’re trying to get a hold of them, but I don’t care when they do their work. I want the work to be done successfully. And, especially now, we may need to allow people to be flexible about how they actually get it done, if they’ve got other issues like teaching school while they’re trying to work.

So, the reality is if we can stay, as a leader, focused on accomplishments and not activity, we can let go of all this garbage about, “Well, I don’t know if they’re working or not.” Does it make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Absolutely. And it’s intriguing because before, the phrase “work from home” often just sort of had scare quotes in it because I’m always working from home so for me I really mean it. But it’s like, “Oh, I’m working from home, wink, wink, wink.” And so, it’s intriguing there because some folks really aren’t doing much with the activities, but it sounds like where you’re going with this is if the accountability is clear and the expectations are clear in terms of the output and achievements, then it’s like, whether they’re working 10 hours or one hour, they’ve accomplished all that they were supposed to accomplish.

Kevin Eikenberry
It really shouldn’t matter. If people can get their work done in two hours, then maybe you’re not giving them enough to do, or that you’re not using them to their potential. That’s a different subject than what we’re talking about right here. Now, if you’ve got someone who’s working remotely and they’re on a call center, they need to be customer-facing, or they can’t be away from their desks, that’s a different thing. But for many of us who are working from home, that doesn’t matter whether you do it at 2:00 p.m. or 2:00 a.m. sort of it doesn’t matter. And as a leader, I should let go of that because what I want is I’m investing in this person to get an output that creates a profitable exchange. And so, as long as that’s happening, that’s what I should be focused on.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I’m with you. And let’s talk about the coaching now.

Kevin Eikenberry
Well, so we kind of went to the coaching first when we talked about expectations. I want to come back to the communication in general. They’re connected, of course, but the communication in general is chances are, once you’re working remotely with folks, you’re going to need to communicate with them more frequently than you were before because you don’t have any of the happenstance, and you probably need to be a little more formal about it, and here’s why.

Like, right now, I’m in our offices, I’m the only one here. I’ve been the only here for 60 some days or however long it’s been now, but when there were a couple of people that were here part of the time, then they could see if I was available, they knew if I had a minute or not. Now, they don’t. They look at my calendar, it looks busy, and so they don’t reach out, not because they don’t want to, maybe not even because they don’t need to. And, in part, in my case, I think it’s because they’re honestly thinking about my time.

However, it ends up a phone call that ends up, “Hey, Kevin, I know you don’t have much time. I’ll make this quick.” And all of the conversations then become very transactional. We get no interaction. We only have transaction. And we, as leaders, got to make sure that doesn’t happen. I’ll get back to how to do that in a second. But what we need to do is schedule those times, and we need to be reaching out to each other, talking about, and this is part of the expectations of how, about how often we’re going to interact and have those one-on-ones. Why? Because, otherwise, they’ll not happen. And more of the times we have to be way more intentional about all this.

And here’s the other part, you got team members who are thinking you don’t trust them. So, we hear all the time, “Well, my boss is just checking up on me.” Well, if we pre-scheduled a rhythm for these conversations then it’s not going to feel like checking up, it’s checking in, because we’ve already decided we’re going to have this conversation. Kevin didn’t call or Zoom you or Slack you because, in this moment, he decided he wanted to figure out what you’re doing. We decided that at 10:00 o’clock on Friday we’re going to chat. Does it make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. That makes sense. And so, then with the coaching portion of that chat, do you coach differently remotely than you do when you’re in person?

Kevin Eikenberry
Well, I would say a couple of things. Number one is whenever possible, use the video cameras because we’ve got more cues from the communication perspective, we have better sense. You and I had that better right now than if we were only on the phone.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right.

Kevin Eikenberry
It’s certainly a lot more than if we were only doing it via typing, right?

Pete Mockaitis
What the audience doesn’t know is that we’re looking at each other.

Kevin Eikenberry
We are looking at each other.

Pete Mockaitis
But that’s not…

Kevin Eikenberry
I’m looking at your bookcase, and you can’t see mine, you can’t see one of the eight in this office because it’s off to the side. But the point is that if we’re going to coach, we need to make it as close to face-to-face as we can, as much as we can. That’s the first thing. The second thing that I would say about the coaching piece is that every time we have a one-on-one, there are opportunities for coaching because coaching isn’t just about, “You’re screwing up and we need to fix it.” Coaching is also about, “You’re doing awesome. And how can we do even awesome-r?” Right?

So, all coaching is, “How do we help people continue to advance in the direction of a desired outcome?” And so, I think that we ought to be, as we create this rhythm, have the opportunity for coaching to not be an event but an ongoing process.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Good deal. Thank you. Well, so you mentioned, you rattled off a number of tools, Zoom, Slack, etc. I’d love it if we could touch that for a moment in terms of you’ve seen a lot of stuff. What do you think are some of the greatest tools available?

Kevin Eikenberry
Well, first of all, it’s always a danger for me to say ones out loud because then people say, “Well, that’s not the one we use.”

Pete Mockaitis
And they’re changing, what people are using.

Kevin Eikenberry
And they’re changing, right? So, we’re writing this new book called The Long-Distance Teammate, we had this long conversation, “Do you use those words?” In the last three months, Zoom has become a verb, right? A lot of people have never heard of it until a few months ago. But I would say this, chances are you already have tools that will work just fine. What you need to do is two things. Learn how to use them beyond the 20% you got, and then use the right tool for the right thing.

So, for example, there’s good times to use email and there’s better times to use your instant messaging tool, be it Slack, or Microsoft Teams, or whatever it is. So, the point is it’s not like, “Well, I think Slack is better than Microsoft Teams.” It doesn’t matter. Pick one. Don’t let there be in-squabbling about, “Well, I like this better than that one.” Pick one, set clear expectations as a team about when we’re going to use which tool for which job, and then use them for the right reasons not because it happens to be the one you like.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, could you maybe give us some category of tool, good use for it, and bad use for it?

Kevin Eikenberry
Email is not for a conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Kevin Eikenberry
All of us have been in the third email in, right? That’s not going well. Someone needs to pick up the phone or do something else, right? At some level, as long as you and your team, or you and your organization, have agreements, that’s the most important thing. Have agreements about how you’re going to use which.

But let’s just take your instant messaging tool versus your email. Now I’m talking about how we do it. If it doesn’t need to be responded to in the next hour or two, email is fine. And we’re not expecting people to automatically respond to an email that quickly. We’re a little more so with Slack than with email in our case, our instant messaging tool that we use.

So, shorter, synchronous, instant message. Longer, really needs to be asynchronous or could be asynchronous, email. That’d be one way to look at it. Another thing is if you’ve got multiple tools that you can use to do video, for example. You’ve got a Zoom thing. Like, in our case, because we work with clients all over the world, we’ve got, like name them, we got them all.

But we, as an organization, say that when we’re communicating with each other, it’s either this one or this one, not all of them. One of these two. And for the most part, if we’re having a two-person conversation, excuse me, it’s Zoom. If we’re having a larger team, it happens to be GoToMeeting. That just happens to be how it’s evolved for us. The most important thing is know how to use your tools, know how to use most of their capabilities, and then get agreement with everybody about how you’re going to use them.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say, you mentioned 20%, like we only know 20% of how to use Zoom or a given tool, what are some sort of features that most people are just leaving on the table? Like, “Did you know you could do this? You can. Maybe start doing that.”

Kevin Eikenberry
Here’s a simple one. If you’re in a meeting room, in a conference room, you’ve got a whiteboard or flipchart and you’re using it, maybe not using it as well as you could but you probably are using it. Pretty much all these tools have that. Are you using it there? Do you know how to use it there? One example. Do you know how to, if you’ve got a Brady Brunch screen with 12 of you, or whatever, and that’s driving you nuts, do you know that you can change it so you only see the active speaker?

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Kevin Eikenberry
There’s two simple examples. We could go a lot further but there’s two simple examples.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, when you mentioned asynchronous communication, there’s email. One of my favorite tools for asynchronous communication, personally, is Loom with a screen-recording videos that are super zippy. Anything else that maybe is not on most people’s radar but should be?

Kevin Eikenberry
I don’t know that I have. I mean, there are some pretty cool tools, or bunch of them. There are some pretty cool tools that allow you to shoot quick videos that you can then include. I will give you one that you may not know. Did you know that you can send someone a video message in LinkedIn?

Pete Mockaitis 
Oh, yes. I do.

Kevin Eikenberry
At least, as far as I know, you can still only do it with your mobile device. You can’t do it from here, but you can send someone a more personal note. So, that’s probably more for networking, or staying connected with other people, or for sales and marketing roles within your team, there’s an example. I’m always open to finding new stuff, but I’m always concerned when people just keep hopping, “Oh, we got to try this. Oh, we got to try this. Oh, we got to try this.”

Let’s see what we’ve got and what works with it before we start looking because, again, a lot of times we’re not using the capabilities of what we’ve already got, and we create some amount of…especially the larger our team or organization, we create a whole lot of new angst and spinning of wheels by introducing new tools before we use the ones we got.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. And so, when it comes to knowing how to use them and using them well, part of the game is to just be aware of the features that are in existence when you click different popups and dialogues and submenu items. And I think, beyond that, there’s also how we conduct ourselves as humans when, say, on a Zoom or video call. Can you lay out some best and worst practices that we should be aware of?

Kevin Eikenberry
Before we got there, I want to say one more thing back to where we just were, and that is the way to learn these tools is two things. Watch other people using them well. And, number two, don’t try to figure them out when you’re live. Go into the tool and practice. This sounds so simple but people don’t do it. You’ve all been in a meeting, “Well, how do you do this?” And someone else is trying to tell someone else how to do it. You could’ve taken 10 minutes ahead of time and already figured it out without the stress and the pressure, and wasting everybody else’s time.

So, to your other question now, how do we behave on a Zoom call? Is that kind of the question?

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, I mean, I think there are some sort of givens that don’t need to be articulated. But, at the same time, there are other stuff that you’ve probably seen hundreds of times that annoys you like crazy. So, spell is out for us, what should we start and stop doing?

Kevin Eikenberry
Well, the first thing is people need to be focused on what they’re doing, and multitasking is a myth, and we shouldn’t be trying to do it. And so, one of the many reasons I love people having their webcams on is it’s harder for them to multitask. I mean, it’s pretty obvious if they’re looking away or doing something else, right? So, on my team, webcams are on, mute is off. In other words, unless you’ve got ambient noise that doesn’t allow it, or in the past, you’re in an airport, you’ve got a barking dog, the reality is I want your mics open, if at all possible.

Why? Because that helps you stay more attentive and stay more connected, and it helps the meeting be more natural. It’s never going to be quite the same. There’s still the hesitations and the interruptions and all that stuff, but we take a lot of that away, people are talking, “Hey, you need to go off of mute,” and we lose all of our momentum and all of our rhythm.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so true.

Kevin Eikenberry
So, set some clear ground rules as a team about how you’re going to do some of those things, first of all. Next thing is put a background behind you. And you can do all those things if you don’t want people to see where you’re at. You can do all sorts of things to change that. But, more importantly, is set yourself up, if at all possible, so you don’t have light behind you so we can see you.

We don’t need to look like you’re in witness protection, you don’t have to have professional lighting, but you just need to orient yourself so that when you look at yourself, can you see your face just like you want to see everybody else’s. So, those are a couple of simple little things.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, what I love about that mute tip so much is that, one, it’s counterintuitive. I think everyone thinks, “Oh, I should mute it so that I’m not annoying everybody.” And, two, it’s sort of like I think people already have some resistance associated with speaking up. And there’s all this research which suggests that just removing a little bit of friction just can go a long way in driving behavior. And so, if you want more people to participate and have more engaging interactive exchange, well, that mute button is providing just one more little bit of friction to make it less comfy.

Kevin Eikenberry
“Oh, I can’t find the mute button,” blah, blah, blah.

Pete Mockaitis
“I have a thought but it’s not that important and I’m going to have to reach for my mouse to unmute it, so I’m just going to hold it back.”

Kevin Eikenberry
Yeah, like when you say it like that it sounds kind of silly, but the reality is it’s friction.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s true, how we work.

Kevin Eikenberry
It’s friction in the system. So, let me give you a tip around this for the leader and as a member of the team, because even if you’re a leader, you’re in a bunch of meetings that aren’t your meetings, right? So, first, as a leader, you need to, if you want people to engage, we said this earlier on a different topic, if you want the team to engage, you’ve got to engage them early. If you don’t engage them early, the longer you do the talking, the less likely they will engage so you’ve got to engage them early.

And the second thing you need to do, as the leader, is facilitate better, which means more directive in terms of asking for input because, again, there is friction and there’s reasons, “Oh, wait, I’m not sure. I think someone else is going to say something.” That friction exists in the room, but when we get on Zoom or in a video conference setting, it’s enhanced. So, I will say, “So, hey, we haven’t heard anything from the marketing department yet,” or, “How about someone on the West Coast or in Pacific Time?” or

I was teaching a two-hour virtual session earlier today, and I had some people that, for some reasons, had to be on mute. And I said, “Hey, James, I’m going to give you a chan ce to get off mute. But before that, Keith, what do you think?” What I want to do is set him up to succeed in sharing something valuable, and ask questions that they have answers to. Like, “What do you think? What’s been your experience?” those kinds of questions will happen, help.

Now, if I’m on the participant side, it’s not my meeting, recognize that chances are the leader wants you to participate, “Oh, that’s true.” Assuming that’s true, then be a little more proactive, be a little more bold. What might feel like you’re jumping out on a limb, probably isn’t. It’s probably actually helping you be more, what I would call, ethically visible. You’re not trying to grandstand. You’re just trying to contribute. And so, don’t be afraid or, to say that in a positive way, I encourage you to be proactive and share your thoughts when you have them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. I like that. So, let’s see, I want to make sure I get some tasty morsels that caught my eye in your book. You said, “Leading successfully requires understanding not just what they’re doing but what people are thinking.” How do we pull that off to get that understanding of what people are thinking?

Kevin Eikenberry
Well, we’ve got to have more conversations. Let me go back to one other thing about the conversations we need to have, especially remotely. let’s say, Pete, you and I are having our weekly one-on-one call. The first thing I need to do is not dive into my list. First thing I need to do is start with a little bit, and maybe one minute, maybe three minutes, it depends on the person and the relationship with that person, I want to start with, “So, how is it going? What’s happening?” And, especially during this whole COVID thing, that’s been a super important point. We need to talk about something besides the work first so that we start to create the sense and continue to nurture the relationship, number one.

And the second thing is I encourage all of my team members, and I encourage all of our clients to do the same, if we know we’re having a weekly one-on-one, or whatever the frequency is, I’m always creating a list of things that I can save for that conversation with you, and I’m asking you to be doing the same. So, everyone in my team calls it the Kevin list. So, I always start with, “So, what’s on your Kevin list?” If I go first, we may not get to theirs. If I’ve got something we got to get to, I make sure we get that done. That’s not a problem. But, really, what I’m after here is to get more of their thinking earlier.

So, if I start finding out what they’re wondering about, what their questions are about, I’m getting a better chance to get inside of what’s going on for them, what their worries, concerns, anxieties are. And by really creating conversation, then I have a chance to ask those questions to learn more and to be more observant about those things as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. And by having this running list, you also reduce all the other options, they’re all bubbled together.

Kevin Eikenberry
That’s a whole episode right there, Pete, about how we manage our time and the productivity around that. There’s no doubt about it. If we both know that we’re meeting on a regular rhythm, and the rhythm for me with my team members isn’t the same for each person based on who they are and the role that they play and the five or six other things. But if we know that, then if something comes up that goes to the top of the list and we need to talk, of course we talk.

But by having that regular rhythm, there’s a lot of things that it doesn’t have to be, “Oh, by the way, I just thought this as I come down the hall,” and we are both interrupted. You were interrupted and so was I, right? Now we just put that down, we’ll get to it, it’s all good. If it’s really urgent, we’ll talk about it. No problem.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. All right. In chapter nine, you have a golden suggestion for working with others. Did we already get it? Or what is it?

Kevin Eikenberry
not do unto others how you want to be done unto. It’s do unto others how they want. So, in other words, always focus on “What would work for them? How can I communicate it in a way that will work for them not what I would want, but what will work best for them?” So, it’s shifting, it’s still thinking about it’s more empathetic, more outwardly-focused approach.

Pete Mockaitis
And how does one get to that understanding? I imagine you have to ask, you have to discuss your preferences and needs and habits, and how things flow well for another.

Kevin Eikenberry
Hopefully, if you’ve been leading a person for a while, working with someone for a while, you’ve started to figure some of that out. If that question that Pete just asked you, “Oh, I’m glad he asked that question,” then it’s probably time for you to step back and be a little more observant, number one. but you can come out and ask, “Hey, I’ve been doing it this way for a while, Pete. Is that working for you? Would there be a better way than that? Hey, when we had that exchange, I didn’t feel like it went super well. It felt maybe I was misinterpreted. Can we talk about it? I want to make sure what I could’ve done differently or better.”

So, we can do all those kinds of things, of course. We should be asking for feedback, Pete, to help others get better. But there are other tools, too, like whether for you and your organizations, it’s Myers-Briggs, or if it’s DISC, that’s what we happen to use. But some sort of a tool or assessment or model that gives us all a sense of where people are in general is helpful. We don’t want to put people in boxes but those kinds of tools can be helpful too.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And then how do you think about politics in the world of remote leadership?

Kevin Eikenberry
Well, people think, sometimes people think about politics as a negative, right, “Well, I don’t want to play office politics,” or they think, “Well, I’m remote, some people are in the office and I‘m not, so I can’t play those games.” So, I don’t think you want to make that such a negative thing. The human condition is that we make decisions based on who we know and what we know about them. So, I think building relationships and trying to keep our conversations in a positive vein, and not getting into all the gossip stuff, of course, is very helpful. But I wouldn’t cast a pall over the word politics. We can be seen, we can be effective, we can be influential without it being scummy. How about that?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you.

Kevin Eikenberry
I don’t think I ever said the word scummy on a podcast before, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
We break ground. We’re innovatives over here. Well, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Kevin Eikenberry
No, you’ve asked great questions.

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

Kevin Eikenberry
James, the book of James, chapter 1 verse 2, “Consider it pure joy, brothers and sisters, because…” now I’m going to paraphrase the rest “…because through trials and challenges, we have the chance to grow in the Church.” So, I think especially now, that when there seems to be challenges around us, if we consider it all joy, to say that there’s good that will come, we must look for it. And even in the challenge is opportunities for us to grow.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you give us a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Kevin Eikenberry
Well, I’ll just mention one that was in The Long-Distance Leader and also will be in The Long-Distance Teammate. Bettina Buchel wrote a piece that talks about richness versus scope in communication. The idea is that the richest communication is the face-to-face, nose-to-nose, across the table conversation, right? But that is not much scope, it’s just two people right now, that’s all there is. Scope is something like a mass email. It has a tremendous amount of scope but not much richness. And so, using the idea of richness versus scope and trying to balance those to help us pick which communication tools might help us is a useful model.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how about a favorite book?

Kevin Eikenberry
Okay. I knew this was coming and it’s an impossible question. I read probably a hundred books a year and so, on one hand, I would say the one I’m reading now, but instead I’ll give you three.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Kevin Eikenberry
And they’re all old, right? The Bible, Think and Grow Rich, and How to Win Friends and Influence People would probably be where I’d go. All of them have had, and continue to have impact on me. They all are examples of timeless principles that we can continue to apply even if context changes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And how about a favorite tool?

Kevin Eikenberry
You know, I knew you were going to ask me that question, and I’m going to say, I’m actually going to say LinkedIn, and maybe because, I’ll say it for two reasons, number one is I’ve been fortunate and blessed to have the chance to work with them and have some LinkedIn Learning products, and so I love it from that perspective. But here’s the thing, of all of the social media channels, at least for what I see. There’s a much higher ratio of useful versus noise. And I think maybe people overlook it a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis
I agree. And how about a favorite habit?

Kevin Eikenberry
Reflect. We have a tremendous amount of opportunities to learn from what we have experienced, both what has gone well and what hasn’t, and most of us don’t take near enough time to reflect, not only on what happened, but what to do with it now that it has happened.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a particular nugget that you have shared that really seems to connect and resonate, and gets quoted back to you often?

Kevin Eikenberry
I think I say this a lot, that there’s a big difference between deciding and doing, and the difference is action.

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

Kevin Eikenberry
Well, they could certainly go to LinkedIn. They can go to KevinEikenberry.com. We’ve got a number of websites related to the various books and all that stuff. But if you can remember how to spell my name, you can find us. I hope you do. I hope you let us know how we can help.

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

Kevin Eikenberry
Yeah. When you were a kid, your parents asked you a question every day, and if you’re a parent, you’ve asked this question of your kids regularly, but when was the last time you asked yourself this question, “What did I learn today?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Kevin, thank you. This has been fun. I wish you lots of luck in all of your long-distance leading.

Kevin Eikenberry
Thank you so much, Pete. It was a pleasure to be with you. Thanks for having me.

May 25
0

573: How to Leverage Your Time by 6000% through Effective Delegation with Bill Truby

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Bill Truby shares the simple trick to getting better results when delegating tasks.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The biggest mistake leaders make when delegating
  2. The most crucial thing you need to delegate
  3. The only four reasons why people fail to follow through

About Bill

Bill brings the background of common-sense learning (being raised on a cattle ranch), a B.A. in Theology, an M.A. in Psychology, the experience of a MFT (Marriage and Family Therapist), and nearly 30 years of business practice to the table.

These multiple perspectives and backgrounds synergize to bring amazingly simple, yet powerful tools to leaders and managers – tools that have been proven over and over for nearly four decades.

Resources mentioned in the show:

Bill Truby Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Bill, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Bill Truby
Well, my pleasure, Pete. I’m thankful to be able to talk with you, and I guess it’s been a while since we’ve began to connect, and now we’re really voice to voice.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am thankful too because I remember I’ve discovered you in my very first batch of guest recruitment. It was in the For Your Improvement book by the Korn Ferry folks. It had a nice bibliography of folks and books and resources associated with each skill I thought I might focus in on. Yours is one. I looked, I liked it, didn’t work out. But four years later, well, here we are. I’m glad that we both stuck with it.

Bill Truby
Well, I embarrassingly apologize, Pete. There was a lot going on in life back then.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me too. And I didn’t really follow up much. it was like every, I don’t know, year, “Hey, Bill. I still want you.

Bill Truby
Well, I am thankful too. And, yeah, it’s the way things are meant to be, I suppose.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so we’ve got a lot of fun to get into when it comes to delegation. But I want to hear just a smidge about… you grew up in a cattle ranch in Texas. And my experience with ranches is limited to the Nickelodeon program “Hey Dude” I watched as a child.

Bill Truby
Oh, you poor soul you.

Pete Mockaitis
So, tell us about this.

Bill Truby
Well, I tell you what, I attribute most of who I am and how I am to my cowboy background. And I didn’t grow up in Texas but I have roots in Texas. If you look at a map of Texas, about two hours north of Abilene, you’ll see a little town called Truby, Texas. And there’s a little book written by the Arizona Historical Society about the Trubys and the Coxes. The Trubys were the cattle ranchers, the Coxes were the sheepherders. And if you know about American history, they were at war, when guns ruled the land.

I mean, it was late 1800s and the Trubys and the Coxes were both bull-headed and they were shooting at each other, and the local sheriff finally rounded up the most offending Trubys and the most offending Coxes and put them in jail. And in those days, you couldn’t convict them till the circuit-riding judge came around, which he finally did.

Well, the judge finally said, because cowboys are loyal, and apparently sheep herders are too, and people were lying for their family of support and their family of choice. So, finally, the judge said, “There’s no getting the truth here. You’re free to shoot it out.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, wow.

Bill Truby
Yup. So, everybody left the courthouse. The book talks about it. And Trubys, apparently, were smarter than they looked because they left, and they went to New Mexico, and that’s where my dad was born, and he was raised on a little ranch there and a sod house. And then he moved to northern California where I was born and raised on a cattle ranch in Humboldt County. And I end this little story by telling you that the Texas Historical Society allows you to adopt a small town. So, I adopted Truby, Texas. I have a town.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, there you go.

Bill Truby
But, apparently, Trubys weren’t worth much because it only cost me 25 bucks to…

Pete Mockaitis
Well, what are your responsibilities if you’ve adopted a town, you’re the father? Like, do you have to pay for things?

Bill Truby
Yeah, I have a certificate. That’s it. That’s it. And there’s 24 people that lived there so they had to split that last dollar, Pete. So, that’s the beginning of my heritage, and a lot of things I learned though, Pete. Hard work. Honesty. Integrity. My word is better than a contract.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Excellent. Well, let’s hear your good word when it comes to effective delegation. it’s a universal skill. We need some more, great wisdom, on how to do it well. you’re one of the guys. So, your book has a compelling bullet that says “Effective delegation can leverage our time by 6,000%.” That’s quite a figure. It’s kind of specific. Where do we get it?

Bill Truby
Well, that book, first of all, was written long ago. And one of our claims to fame long ago was the ability to teach people how to delegate effectively, and always get follow through, or if you didn’t, you were able to fix it with one or two times, and it’s powerful. So, our co-author at the time, I’ve written some other books, but I did a co-author at the time, and he did some research on some of our folks that used the tool and multiplied their time that they used to take to fix delegations that just didn’t work well, and did the old math. I don’t know how he did it, but it was a pretty impressive number, but I know intuitively, and I know empirically that over 40 years of doing this is it just proves this tool. It works. It always works.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I imagine, you know, 6,000%, 60X, I mean, if you’ve got 60 people and you’re delegating well, then that would do it and work out there. So, I want to really dig into a whole lot of the particulars, for what’s the system and how we can utilize it. First off, I think maybe could you frame it up for us? Like, I think we probably all know delegating is handy as opposed to trying to do everything yourself, and yet it seems hard. So, can you share what makes it hard? What’s holding us back? What are some of the mental blocks? Like, why don’t we just do this?

Bill Truby
That is an excellent question, and it’s excellent because it sets the premise. If we don’t delegate, then we have to do it ourselves. The only way that a leader, the only way that a father can leverage his or her effectiveness is by working with people and through people. So, it’s absolutely imperative that we delegate in order to be successful. We are self-limiting by self-doing. If we try to do everything ourselves then we are limited by the capacity that our energy and that our time extends to. That’s it.

So, the only way that you can play a beautiful orchestra is by not playing one instrument but leading and directing the delegation of a variety of instruments who all play the same song.

But your question, “Why don’t we do it?” Well, that’s a multifaceted answer. Some people are just too controlling. They will not let go. Other people are trying to make it perfect and they don’t think anybody else can so it’s a self-esteem issue. There’s a variety of issues, Pete, that cause people to not delegate. But the number one consistent theme that I’ve seen throughout all my years of teaching people to delegate is simply they don’t know how.

They’ll try to duplicate themselves. They’ll try to get people to do things exactly the way they would do it. They try to micromanage. They try to just give them a little, few pieces of information and tell them to go, and they don’t give them all the information. So, our tool has been built to cover every eventuality of delegation, and, thereby, make it successful.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Exciting. Well, so then you got a lot of reps of experience, a lot of clients and students who’ve picked up on this. Could you share with us maybe an inspiring case study of someone who was having some trouble delegating, but then they saw some really cool things happen on the other side just so we can get a taste and feel some inspiration for it?

Bill Truby
Sure. There’s a man named Mike Solano who owns a $14 million hardware billing supply enterprise. He has a rental center, two billing supplies, two hardware stores, etc.

Now, this man worked six to seven days a week, every day spending eight to ten hours a day. He was overwhelmed because he wanted everything to go well, and he was successful. But he was overwhelmed, tired, weary. He was not going to be able to keep up this pace. Now I want to say something right now, Pete, about delegation, and that is delegation is a tool. What you delegate is also very important because you just don’t delegate tasks. You delegate roles. You delegate departments. You delegate businesses.

So, Mike learned this tool. He used it at the core of all of our other processes and teachings and tools that we use to run a business, and this was the core, and now Mike works two to three days a week if he wants to. His delegation process has empowered people. People have a sense of ownership. People have a sense of accomplishment and achievement and they enjoy going to work doing their role, their job, and reaping their results. And he’s allowed them to feel that kind of ownership.

We teach people, we teach leaders, we teach managers that you need to lead accountable people and not hold people accountable. That’s a core concept that we teach always. If you hold people accountable, you’re the one holding the accountability. If you lead accountable people, then they’re the ones holding the accountability. And that’s a whole other subject.

But Mike’s people have learned to be accountable and he doesn’t have to hold them accountable, and this tool is the core of how this process works.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Okay. Well, so then lay it on us. What is this tool, this process? How do we go do it?

Bill Truby
Well, when your listeners go to the delegation flowchart link and download it, they’re going to see what I’m talking about, but it truly is a flowchart, Pete. It starts at the top with what you do and then it flows down the page, and it teaches you what to do at each stage of the delegation process.

And at the very top, there is the point that you need to delegate. Accountability. Notice you’re delegating accountability. You’re not delegating just a task. You’re delegating accountability and you’re including responsibility and authority. Now that’s an important point. Sometimes people try to delegate by giving people a task to do but they don’t give them the authority that’s associated with the responsibility.

And here’s one of the first points. Sometimes the person doesn’t have literal authority. For example, there’s a safety officer in a big company. The safety officer doesn’t hire and fire, but the safety officer is charged with going through the facility and making sure people are doing safe practices and following safe protocols.

So, what happens if Mr. and Mrs. Safety Person says to John or Jane Doe manager, “Hey, you need to stop doing that”? If safety officer doesn’t have authority, that person doesn’t have any teeth in their words. So, how do you give the safety officer authority? You give it to him or her as vicarious authority, no different than air traffic control.

I’m sure you’ve flown a whole lot, Pete. When I listened to the pilots, air traffic control says, “United 73, descend and maintain 10,000.” I have never once heard a pilot say, “You’re not my boss.” And, obviously, they follow the instructions of air traffic control because of two reasons. One, there’s benefit. They’re not going to run into another plane. And, number two, FAA and the United Airline, or Delta Airlines, or whatever company you’re looking at, have given the air traffic controller vicarious authority to give orders to the pilots.

So, what that looks like is John or Jane Doe’s CEO says to the company, “People, Martha or John, this is my safety officer. When he or she is asking you to do something, it’s as if I’m asking you to do it.” So, that’s the first mindset that needs to be delivered in the context of delegation. We’re delegating responsibility and authority.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. So, responsibility, authority, accountability, and so it’s sort of like the whole enchilada. It’s like, “You own it. It’s yours.” And that’s really handy in terms of there’s not a lot of excuses that emerge in that, that’s like, “Well, I just did this because that was what was on the process sheet I was supposed to follow,” as opposed to, “Well, no, you own this sort of domain so, yeah, you’re going to follow the process but you’re also going to kind of exercise some judgment to do what clearly needs to be done to make it work out well.”

Bill Truby
You’re right, Pete. And that’s a very insightful way of putting it. The person who it’s been delegated to feels ownership of that enchilada. But the most important point is that other people know that he or she has that enchilada. If they don’t know, then that person is limited in their ability to carry out the task or the project. So, that’s the first mindset.

Many things that we teach, Pete, have to do with mind shifts. It’s sort of like leading accountable people rather than holding people accountable. That mind shift alone changes a ton of behaviors and beliefs and attitudes. So, that’s the top of the flowchart, delegate accountability, including responsibility and authority.

And at that point, you create what we call a contract of expectations. There’s never an assumption. The person being delegated to never walks away with a question. It’s a two-way communication, and this is where our communication tools come in, but you must create a clear contract of expectations. The core of a contract of expectations, or CoE as we call it, is a, “What? By whom? By When?”

Pete Mockaitis
Who will do what by when?

Bill Truby
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Bill Truby
Included in that is the purpose and context. Because if I just asked you, Pete, “Go do this,” and you say, “Okay, I’ll do it,” and you have no purpose or context, then you cannot be creative in the obstacles that may come your way. If you know the reason, the why, the purpose and the context where it fits in, then you can be a little bit more creative in your work as you encounter the unknown, which is always the case.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so valuable and really worth, I think, underscoring because a lot of times we don’t know the why behind the request, and we just sort of kind of do it. But I think I’ve been on both sides of things in terms of being the doer of the task and not really knowing, it’s like, “Well, I could go either way but I don’t know. Is this in my thing? So, my instructions are I’m just going to make a note and kind of keep on rolling.”

And then, as a leader, when I have been so wise as to share the purpose and context, to be surprised and delighted with people that I’m managing, say, “Hey, I bumped into this and so I did that.” And I think, “Well, that is perfect. Thank you.” It just feels so good, like I don’t have to say anything, and it came back even better than I had imagined it could have from my just process instructions, so this is really cool.

Bill Truby
Purpose and context has many psychological benefits. It increases ownership. It shows respect. It feels like you belong, that you’re included. But, more importantly, if the percussionist in an orchestra doesn’t know the song, all he can do is play the music. And if you don’t play the music in the context of the song, you might play too loud, you might play too soft. Same with a violin, same with a piccolo, same with a French horn. We must understand the purpose and context of the notes that we’re playing in order to make it effective in the long run.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely.

Bill Truby
So, this is the first thing that happens in the delegation process, it’s preventative. So, there’s this clarity of what, by whom, by when. There’s a purpose and context. If it’s a long project, then you clarify when you want reports, and you always ask the person to do it. You don’t tell. This is about leading accountable people.

Pete, if I said, “Pete, go do this or that,” then you’re just a puppet, you’re just a person that’s doing a job. If I say, “Will you do it?” and you say, “Yes,” now we have a contract and you own it. So, when you don’t do it, if you don’t, I don’t say, “Didn’t I tell you?” I keep the accountability where it belongs. I say, “Pete, didn’t we agree?” And where does that put the accountability? Right on you. Okay, so that’s the first step.

So, we build all of this, it takes a few minutes. Obviously, it could take hours depending on if it’s a large project but there’s clarity, there’s absolute clarity, no assumptions ever. Clarity, clarity. Pristine, clear communication and an agreement. Now, when you do that, one of two things happen. If the person follows through, and if you look at the delegation flowchart, you’ll see on the right side of the page there’s a box that says, “Follow through.” And when a person follows through, then the arrow goes down to what we call a continuous improvement celebration.

Obviously, the type of celebration depends on the extent of the delegation. If I asked you to go get lunch for the team, that’s different than solving world hunger. So, the celebration is congruent with the task. And I don’t know if we want to get into all the details of a celebration at this point but just to earmark the four parts, there’s the party factor because everybody wants to have fun. There’s the recognition and appreciation, people need to be recognized and appreciated. There’s the learning what went well, what didn’t go well. What didn’t go well so you can fix it. What did go well so you can repeat it.

Because if something went well and you don’t know why it happened, you’re not good, you’re lucky. And then you transfer that knowledge to other people in the company, or other friends, somebody else who could benefit. So, that’s the right side of the flowchart, follow through, and then the last thing you do is to have some kind of a celebration, which gives closure and recognition and that motivation to want to be delegated to again.

Now, the left side, is when somebody may not follow through. This delegation process always works but what happens when somebody who doesn’t follow through is that you follow this chart and you’ll fix it typically one time. There’s a circle that goes on. So, if there’s no or limited follow through, there are four reasons. You know, Pete, I’ve never heard anybody talk about this, I’ve never heard anybody write about it, I’ve never heard anybody speak about these four concepts. But there’s only four reasons why someone won’t follow through, only four.

And I’m talking about anybody. Your friend, your neighbor, your spouse, your kid, your employee, your employer. Human beings have four reasons why they won’t follow through. A wise delegator will search for the reason in the order that I’ll give them to you right now. The first is, and they all start with lack of. The first is lack of awareness. They weren’t aware.

Now, typically, we’re communicating when we’re delegating, and humans aren’t the greatest at communicating. And so, if it’s lack of awareness, it’s often some glitch that occurred in the communication process, “Oh, I didn’t know you meant that.” We could use the same word success and you could think of different criteria for success than I do. So, the first is lack of awareness. And you never demand, you always ask questions, “So, what was your understanding of the task?” to see if there was awareness.

If there was awareness, the second reason a person won’t follow through, or can’t follow through, is lack of training. They thought they knew how but they didn’t, “So, did you know how to do this?” The third reason is lack of resources. They didn’t have enough time. They didn’t have enough equipment. They didn’t have enough staff. They didn’t have enough money. Something was lacking that wasn’t prevalent or wasn’t known at the beginning of the delegation process. And the only other reason a person won’t follow through is lack of accountability.

So, lack of awareness, number one; lack of training, number two; lack of resources, number three; and lack of accountability, they’re just not doing it.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, let’s define accountability there in this context. So, is it they don’t feel like or what do you mean specifically by accountability here?

Bill Truby
They just didn’t do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Bill Truby
It’s just the outcome wasn’t there, “You didn’t bring lunch.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I guess, well, call me a stickler as a former strategy consultant about when you lay out, hey, there’s four reasons, I get really excited about a mutually-exclusive collectively-exhaustive categorization set because I’m a dork that way. So, lack of accountability, they just didn’t do it. That almost feels like an everything-else bucket, I guess, in a way, you can maybe subdivide that. Like, there are multiple reasons why they just didn’t do it. They didn’t feel like it. They weren’t motivated, and they don’t care. Yeah, can you unpack the lack of accountability a little more?

Bill Truby
Sure, and I love all those big words you used to identify this set. That was awesome.

Bill Truby
Okay. Remember what we delegated at the beginning of time, at the beginning of this delegation process. We delegated accountability. Well, there’s an obvious finishing of that sentence. The accountability to do blank. So, you and I are climbing a mountain, and I delegate you the holding of the rope to belay me as I climb.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Bill Truby
If you do not adhere to that accountability, you just don’t hold the rope, I don’t really care why because at this point, we’re not talking about the why. We’re simply talking about the outcome. Period. So, if you don’t hold the rope, there’s danger. If your hands hurt, if you’re sad, if you sneeze, if you don’t feel like it, those are all beside the point. When you’re out on the football field, and the ball is thrown to you, it doesn’t matter how you feel, your job is to catch the ball. And if you don’t go up to catch the ball, then you have not been accountable to what you’ve agreed to be accountable about.

So, it’s really not a catchall. It’s specifically focused on the task that was delegated. In some ways, I suppose the four reasons are the why, but they’re all about behavior and resources to do the behavior. They’re not diving into the emotional or psychological or relational reasons.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. I guess what I’m driving is, what I love about the first thing is lack of awareness, “Oh, okay. well, we’re going to have a clarifying conversation, we’re going to have some more detail, and we’re, okay, good, good, good. We’re all on the same page. Solved.”

Lack of training. “Oh, I’m so sorry. Well, here’s an instructional, a tutorial, a class, a course, whatever. Okay, now you know. Okay, good to go.” Lack of resources, “Oh, shucks, you’re right. We’ve got to free up some things from your plate or get some more people or budget under your purview, so that’s solved.” But how does one solve a lack of accountability?

Bill Truby
This, again, insightful, Pete. That’s fantastic, because if you’ll look at the chart, you’ll notice that the first three items, awareness, training, and resources, are typically one-time things. Once you find that that’s the case, then you provide the fulfillment of what was missing, awareness, training, or resources. And then you re-negotiate the contract, it goes up, you re-negotiate the contract by saying, “Okay, let’s look at the contract of expectations again, and re-enter your delegating process, your process of doing what I’ve delegated you to, given your new resources, or your new training, or your new awareness.” So, that one is a one-time loop. One-time loop.

Now, the lack of accountability, that one is fixed by using a separate tool. Now, first of all, I want to make sure that we understand that lack of accountability is binary, they either did it or they didn’t. And if they didn’t, they agreed to, so the first thing we do is to ask the question, “Didn’t we agree?” Right now, we’re working with a $440 million 2500-person nonprofit dialysis company. That entire company is using this particular process to fix people who are not performing effectively, who are not being accountable.

And, HR, if you call HR, the first thing HR will say is, “Have you asked them if they agreed to the contract of expectations?” So, we keep the accountability where it belongs. And, quite frankly, that’s respectful. If I take your accountability away, and say, “All right. Now I’m just going to demand this, and I’m going to make you do what I’m wanting you to do,” then you’re a slave, you’re not a fellow human being.

So, how you fix a lack of accountability is through this process. Number one, “Didn’t we agree?” and the person says, “Yes.” Then, secondly, “Then what happened?” We don’t ask why, “Then what happened?” We give a chance for a person to give their reasons. Then, third, “Then let’s re-negotiate the process here. Will you do A, B, and C by X, Y, and Z with J, L, and K outcome?” So, you’re basically revisiting the contract as well, but this time the person is simply agreeing again.

Now, let me get a little more practical. Let’s say that you asked somebody to do something, they didn’t do it, they weren’t accountable, so you ask these questions. Then they don’t do it the second time. Now, it’s your wisdom that has to determine how many times you loop. If it’s very, very important, it may be one or two times. If you’re trying to grow something, somebody, maybe it’s 12 times. But you will never ever, you can never ever, and this is the beauty of this tool, you can never ever, ever say, “Oh, well, that’s Johnny.” Because if we do that, everybody around us knows that we broke the contract and we perpetuated Johnny’s behavior, we’ve allowed it to happen to other people, we destroy our own ability to delegate if we break the contract ourselves.

So, whatever your wisdom says, one time, two times, 12 times, there comes a time when you say, “Didn’t we agree?” “Yes.” “Well, what happened?” “Well, A, B, and C.” “Well, let’s agree this time that if you don’t do it, that…” and then you have to default to your discipline process, “…that you’re going to be getting your first verbal warning.” Let’s say it’s a verbal written writ and termination. So, the person says, “Okay.” So, if the person doesn’t follow through, they know before you do, that they’re not following through so they’re managing their own discipline process. So, they come back, “Didn’t we agree?” “Yes.” “Well, then you remember, too, I’m giving you a verbal warning. Let’s agree that if it doesn’t happen again, you’ll be getting your first written warning.”

So, people either step up or step out. And here’s the good news, Pete. Most people step up. We don’t lose good people. They step up. They just needed boundaries, they needed clarifications, kids need boundaries, our employees need boundaries, friends need boundaries. And when we put a boundary in this tool, a person steps up or steps out. And so, that’s what you do when there’s no or limited follow through, you find the reason, fix it one time with the first three, use wisdom to fix it for the fourth reason, the lack of accountability, and then one or two things happens. The person follows through, which happens most of the time, or the person doesn’t, and they’re terminated from the team, they’re demoted, they’re not allowed to be on the team anymore.

And so, the delegating of the task always works. The person who is in the process of being delegated to sometimes might change if they’re not willing to step up.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is really stretching my brain in some great ways, so thank you. I guess I’m wondering if, let’s say, they do the work but the results are not as grand as you’d hope. I don’t know, maybe in terms of like the quality, like, “Oh, I asked you to write up this document, and the writing is lackluster.” Or maybe it’s a higher-end result, like, “Hey, you were supposed to run this business division and generate $10 million in gross profit this quarter, and you got 8.” So, I guess, in a way, they do the work but they don’t get the results. How do we play that game?

Bill Truby
Well, two things. One, we must look at the delegator first, because you’ve got to be sure and have a clear contract of expectations at the beginning. So, lackluster of a writing material is a bit fuzzy. So, it’s up to the delegator to be clear and precise in communicating what needs to be done. The $10 million is rather clear and precise. So, the first thing, we’ve got to look at the delegator to make sure that the delegator is clear in his or her communication about the contract of expectations.

And then, secondly, part of the contract of expectations at the beginning, I mentioned just briefly in passing, if it’s a longer timeline, you want to get reports. And so, the $8 million at the end of this stretch of time should not be a surprise. The first benchmark, the first waymark, if the person was not on track, there’s a communication that goes on with the delegator and the delegate as to what’s going on. And one of two things happen. Either the goal begins to be adjusted or it is strengthened by some other resources to allow that goal to be reached.

So, the delegator in both cases, the lackluster in the writing or the diminished return on the 8 million versus 10 million, is involved in the process of guiding and helping along the way. But the key thing is the delegator is not doing it. The delegator is leveraging him or herself by delegating to the person who’s trying to play the violin, “Oh, you’re not playing that note quite right. Here are some techniques that you could use. Go practice those and then come back.”

I will tell you this, that through the delegation process, we do find that some people just are not bad people, nor are they unwilling people, but they don’t have the capacity. It’s up to the leader and manager to understand this over time. I didn’t mention this earlier but I have a master’s degree in psychology, and I was a marriage and family therapist in the early ‘80s for a couple years. And I’ve always needed to know the intent of a person not the behavior of the person.

In fact, my dad taught me that on the farm, he said, “Billy, always know why people are doing things. Don’t just look at what they’re doing.” So, I look at the why when a person isn’t following through, and it could be those four reasons, like I said. But we’ve entered into another little dimension here. If a person doesn’t have willingness or capacity, they won’t do it. In fact, they can’t do it. Even relationships. Relationships can only be successful if both parties have willingness and capacity. And I’m not talking just about a married couple. I’m talking about business and customers. Both sides of the equation, both people, have to have willingness and capacity.

So, in our process of delegating, everything might be going well but then we realize, “This person, no matter how great they are, no matter how talented they are, no matter how willing they are, they just don’t have the capacity,” and that’s where we have to adjust who we’re delegating to.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Bill, thank you. Tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Bill Truby
The core concept of everything we teach is to be other-centered. I want to just highlight that. That’s embedded in this. It’s clearly seen in leading accountable people. It’s clearly seen in asking the person to agree. It’s clearly seen even in the disciplining process if a person has lack of accountability. But I believe that the most successful businesses, the most successful leader, the most successful delegator will do so in the context of where the other person is coming from, how to communicate to them.

We’ll communicate to a 12-year old differently than we will a 48-year old. We’ll communicate to a person with a different skillset differently than a person who has a limited skillset. So, the delegation process is a tool. It’s like a shovel but you dig differently in sand than you do in clay. So, we exercise our interaction with the other person using the same tool, we exercise it a little differently based on that other person’s needs and wants. And that’s how we make them successful is that we’re always other-centered in our application of this tool.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Bill Truby
I suppose my favorite quote in all of my life has come from my dad, and I’ve illuminated it earlier. He always said two things, “Billy, always understand why the person is doing what they’re doing. And that understanding breeds empathy, acceptance, and the ability to lead them.” Then he also said, “Billy, if you can’t do anything about it, it doesn’t exist.”

And what that meant, I grew to learn over time, is that I deal with what I can do and I don’t take your stuff. And that gives respect. And that particular quote has caused boundaries that are freeing. It enables me to not have to run to the rescue. It’s like, if it’s not mine, I’ll care but I won’t carry. I’ll love but I won’t take it back from you. So, that’s a roundabout way of saying my dad gave me those two quotes that I live by, and they are very, very meaningful. They’re very deep in my soul.

He said, “Always know the why, and then you’ll understand the person. And if you can’t do anything about it, it doesn’t exist.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And how about a favorite study, or experiment, or bit of research?

Bill Truby
I love the book Thinking Fast and Slow. Daniel Kahneman wrote it, and it tells you what goes on in your brain, very fast when you encounter something, and then what happens after you think about it. And that research has literally changed my life on how I teach, on how I think, on how I do what I do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And, tell me, is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate, and people quote back to you often?

Bill Truby
Well, there isn’t necessarily one, but I will tell you this little story. There was a man in one of the large companies, 8500-person company, that had this Christmas party, and this man went as Bill Truby, though nobody knew he was Bill Truby.

And he was dressed in a tie and shirt and overcoat. And people said, “So, who are you?” This was a dress-up affair masquerade-type thing. He said, “I’m Bill Truby.” And they would say, “What do you mean?” And he’d open up his coat, and in there were 3×5 cards that he called Trubyisms. So, apparently, I say things all the time that people remember and, yeah, I don’t think there’s one, Pete. I think that there’s things.

I make them up. I go to a company and I’ll “efficiefy” them, and then people start using that word, “Okay, we’re going to get efficiefied.” “And I’m here to bring you to a state of efficiefication,” so I don’t think I’m stuck on one.

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

Bill Truby
TrubyAchievements.com. And this delegation flowchart can be found there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Bill, this has been a treat. Thank you for sharing the good word, and good luck in all you delegate.

Bill Truby
Thank you, Pete. I really appreciate you hanging in there for four years so we can meet each other. I do appreciate what you’re doing and I’m glad that I could help support it.

Apr 27
0

566: How to Start Focusing and Stop Firefighting with Mike Michalowicz

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Mike Michalowicz shares how to zero in on the most important issues to fix next.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to identify what you need to fix next.
  2. A crucial question you’re forgetting to ask.
  3. The tremendous energy unleashed by providing context for goals.

About Mike

Mike Michalowicz is the entrepreneur behind three multimillion dollar companies and is the author of Profit First, Clockwork, The Pumpkin Plan, and his newest book, Fix This Next: Make the Vital Change That Will Level Up Your Business. Mike is a former small business columnist for The Wall Street Journal and regularly travels the globe as an entrepreneurial advocate.

Resources mentioned in the show:

Thank you Sponsors!

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Mike Michalowicz Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Mike, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Mike Michalowicz
Pete, it’s my joy to be here. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Well, I’m excited. I’ve really enjoyed your audiobooks, and you’re kind of a goofball which I am too, so I think feel free to cut loose here. It’s interesting. We had another guest, Simon Sinek, who dubs you as a top contender for the patron saint of entrepreneurs, which is high praise.

Mike Michalowicz
Unbelievable. Just unbelievable.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m familiar with some stories of saints, and often they include heroically facing adversity. And one of my favorite stories from you involves a tough night at dinner, and some people coming to your aid. Can you share that with us to frame up what you’re all about?

Mike Michalowicz
Yeah, yeah. So, I started my entrepreneurial journey very early in life right after college and had a couple of early wins under my belt. I sold my first tech company. I was in computer technology. My first tech company was a private equity exit. My second company was a Fortune 500 acquired us, and I’m like, “I am hot shit. I know everything,” which, by the way, seems like to be the impetus or the start of a downfall for many a person when we believe we know all. And I was just full of arrogance and ignorance.

Well, I started a third business that I leave off my CV conveniently as an angel investor, and I sucked at it. I had no idea what I was doing. I thought, “Hey, I’m so smart I know everything about business. As long as I’m here, we’re making money.” I started 10 companies, and within a mere six months, all of them were out of business. I was paying bills for businesses that didn’t even exist anymore and, also, just blew money on just arrogance.

The big house, I got a place in Hawaii for our sabbatical, our family sabbatical. I just blew money on cars and all stuff. And it took me two years, I got a call from my accountant, he says, “Mike, you hit rock bottom. I think you should declare personal bankruptcy,” something actually I didn’t do. I thought I was responsible. But, as a consequence, I had to lose my possessions. We lost our house 30 days later, cars, everything.

I came home the night I heard this from my accountant, and had to face my family because I hadn’t been telling them the truth of the struggles. I really did think, you know, I had a bank account that was dwindling at an exponential rate, somehow, someone would come in and save the day and acquire this mess I had created, but nothing happened. And I came home to my family and told them, “We’re done. We lost it all.” And I was sobbing. I was just devastated. And I had to face my wife, and say, “I’m sorry. We’re losing the house, and we’re losing our cars, and we’re losing our possessions.”

My daughter was nine years old at the time, and she’s sitting there, and I said, “I’m so sorry but I can’t afford for you to go to horseback riding lessons.” That was like 25 bucks for a group session. And she stood up and just ran away. Everyone was crying. And she ran away. I thought she was running away from me. She ran away to her bedroom to grab her piggybank, and she ran back down to me as fast as she could, and she says, “Daddy, since you can’t provide for us, please use my money to support us.” I think I’m getting chills just thinking about it.

I’ve said that story so many times it’s still as devastating. I was so ashamed of who I was, and the arrogance, and the ignorance. And then I forced my daughter, my nine-year old daughter, to save me? Well, that triggered years of struggle for me to reconcile that. I actually went through a depression, I drank, and ultimately discovered that that moment actually has become a source of light, a seedling for me, to realize I didn’t know much about entrepreneurship, that I had to fix these things. And that became a spark for being an author.

I write my business books to solve problems not only for others but for my own problems, my own misunderstandings around business, and simplify the journey and, hopefully, prevent others from experiencing the fallacies and the arrogance and ignorance that I did.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is powerful, and thank you for sharing that again with our audience here.

Mike Michalowicz
My joy.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you are renowned as an author for entrepreneurs and small business owners. And in chatting with your publicity folks, I was like, “Well, I love Mike’s flavor, but we’ve got a little bit of a different audience here, which is more so professionals, kind of in the middle of the hierarchy as opposed to the owners.” But there’s a lot of great sort of tools and frameworks and approaches that are totally applicable in your next opus here, “Fix This Next.” So, can you orient us a little bit in terms of what’s the book about and why is it helpful?

Mike Michalowicz
Yeah. So, what I did is I wanted to figure out, “Is there a common DNA or structure for businesses?” And I’m convinced I found it. And it’s something that we all can use regardless of our title or role. We all have a responsibility for the health of the business because collectively it moves us altogether. So, what I did was I wanted to see if there’s a common DNA.

And I, first, started looking at humanity ourselves – me, you, everyone listening in. If you look at the essence of who we are, we’re identical. If you peel back the stuff we judge, the skin, the height, male, female, and we look at the essence of it, the makeup is basically the same. If I was having a heart attack, the doctor wouldn’t say to me, “Where’s your heart? Do you keep it in your foot? Is it in your ear?” No. The heart is in the same place for all humanity, so they know how to operate on us.

Well, the same is true for business. If we peel back the skin of the business, a manufacturer versus a professional services company, or vice versa, we will find there’s a common structure, that’s what I call the business hierarchy of needs. The business hierarchy of needs, I translated from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which defines human needs.

So, this is a quick session on Maslow. Maslow studied human needs and discovered and argues that all of us have base physiological needs. We need to breathe water, I’m sorry, breathe water. Breathe air, drink water, eat food. And if those needs aren’t being satisfied, then we can’t survive. But once they’re satisfied, we go to the next level which is safety needs. We need protection from the elements or harm. Once that’s satisfied, we move onto the longing, the need for relationships, and so forth. And we keep on climbing up ultimately to self-actualization.

But, if at any time, a base-level need is not satisfied, let’s say you and I are having this conversation, we consider it intellectual conversation, we consider it as part of self-actualization, if I start choking on the food I’m eating, well, all of a sudden, my Maslow hierarchy brings me right down to the physiological need of getting that out of my throat.

Well, our business has a hierarchy of needs too. Real quickly, they are sales, that’s the foundation, that’s the creation of oxygen for business; profit, the creation of stability for an organization, without it a business can’t sustain; order, the creation of efficiency, consistency; then there’s impact, which is the creation of transformation, it’s where we have service to our clients beyond the transaction, beyond the commodity; and the highest level is legacy, the creation of permanence, where there’s no dependency on the people that are running the operation, the company is designed for its continued service, and others can come and go, but the business lives on permanently.

The difference between Maslow’s hierarchy and the business hierarchy, while they’re very similar, is one great distinction. Maslow talked about human needs and how we are biologically, neurologically wired into our needs. If you and I, Pete, are walking down a dark alley, and we get the creeps, like someone is going to kill us, what will we do? We will, hopefully, turn around and walk out. And we should because our senses – sight, smell, touch – those senses are triggering, “There’s danger here.”

But the thing is we, as business professionals, are not neurologically wired into our business. We say we trust our gut. I think this is what we got to do. I can feel it. But, really, we need the empirical data to evaluate exactly what the true needs in our business, focus on that, resolve that, and then move onto the next need, resolve that, and so forth, and continue to progress forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, certainly. And so then, let’s talk about the particulars for how that really can be transformational for folks. I’d love to hear some tales about some professionals, some organizations, who applied some of this rigor to great effect.

Mike Michalowicz
Yeah. So, I’ll share a coffee shop that does this, and the team rallied around it with what’s going on. As we’re recording this, with the economic crisis, COVID, this company is responding. And let’s evaluate the business hierarchy needs just a little bit further. So, the business hierarchy needs, the five levels, the foundational need is sales. Now, again, the sales is the creation of cash. If your product, your service, your company, your division does not have consistent sales, is not bringing oxygen into that division, so we need to address that first.

And you address it to the adequate levels of supporting profit. That’s actually the simplest base question, “Do I have enough sales to support profitability? If I don’t, we have a sales issue. If we do have sales so we have profit, but we’re not profitable, we actually have a profit issue. Do we have enough margin? Are we controlling the debt we have, and so forth?” Once profit is addressed, we ask ourselves, “Is it adequate to support the layer above it, which is order, efficiency?”

Now, one argument I want to make here is that we’re not ignoring efficiency. You have to have some order and efficiencies in our sales process when we’re doing that. You have to have some system for profitability. I’m just saying this one becomes your concentrated effort. You don’t ignore sales when you’re working on order. You continue it but they must work in relation.

When you get to the order level, this is where it becomes our concentration to resolve efficiency. Now, actually, let me start off with this story because I think it’s the best. This is Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi, it’s in the SEC conference. I mean, talking about an organization, thousands and thousands, actually, I think tens of thousands of employees, a massive organization. They implemented the business hierarchy of needs in their own form. They did this before I wrote the book, but they’re far in this process inherently.

And what they noticed back in, I believe, it was the early 2000s, that the school had noticeably less applicants than any of the other SEC schools. So, the first thing we do is, when we have a problem, we ask ourselves, “Where does this reside in this hierarchy?” Well, application is as similar as prospects. They have less prospects, and that’s a sales-level need. So, the company identified, “Okay, we have a need in the sales level, the most foundational level of the business hierarchy.”

Then they asked, “What’s the triggers behind it?” And they went through a process called OMEN. I write about it in the “Fix This Next” book, but OMEN stands for Objective, Measurement, Evaluation frequency, Nurture. It simply means identify what the problem is, measure the process, regularly revisit it, and tweak and change things as we move along, nurture.

They identified this challenge of not getting enough prospects, and they start interviewing prospects of why they aren’t signing up. And they find that the primary reason is the campus ain’t so pretty. One of the biggest determining factors of a student picking a college happens within the first five minutes of visiting a campus. It’s their first impression. And back then, Ole Miss didn’t have such a pretty campus. So, they realized, “We have an issue.”

They then went to their frontline, the people that beautify the campus, the landscape maintenance team, and they said, “We need a more attractive campus. What do we need to do?” Well, interesting, and this happens sometimes in the business hierarchy that needs get interlinked. And the maintenance team said, “Well, we want to do beautification projects. We don’t have enough time.” Now, their campus is a thousand plus acres, that’s a lot of acreage to maintain, and they only have a crew of a certain size, and so Ole Miss was forced upon a decision, “Do we double or triple our team, or do we enable our team to find alternative solutions?”

Well, it wasn’t in their budget to triple the maintenance team so the team had to figure it out. And one thing they noticed is the biggest time-consuming element, now this is an efficiency thing, an order level, one of the challenges at the order level was how long it took to mow or maintain the properties. When they were mowing, the fastest way to mow a property is to go in a straight line. But when they were coming upon trees, they had to navigate around the low-hanging limbs. When they got to a mulch pattern, that was in a square, they had to kind of jostle around that pattern. And when a garbage can was in the grass, they had to kind of go around and get out with the weed whacker.

So, the team said, “If we want to increase efficiency here, cut the limbs off the tree so we can go right under them, 10 feet high,” which, by the way, is a great way to beautify trees, they raised the limbs. They said, “Change the square patterns and angular patterns of mulch always to an oval so we can do sweeping motions right around it and continue on.” They made decisions to increase efficiency which allowed them now to maintain the property in half the time, freeing up the other half of their time to work on beautification of the campus.

Well, fast-forward only a mere few years, Ole Miss became the most beautiful campus. It has the reputation for the most beautiful campus in the SEC conference, perhaps in all of the nation, one of the top-rated campuses on attraction, on its beauty. And you won’t be surprised, they had an exponential increase in their prospects, their applications. So, that’s an example where leadership identified, “We have a problem.” But instead of just saying, “We got to fix the way this place looks,” they looked at the hierarchy, and said, “This is a sales issue. Where do prospects first enter the campus?” That was their first beautification project was near the administration building where students will come in, the students center, and so forth.

They spoke with the frontline, the people that are closest to the problem, and got their direction. And in this case, they killed two birds with one stone. They brought efficiency to their organization at the order level while addressing a sales issue. So, that’s an example of how this business hierarchy of needs is a great way to diagnose and pinpoint what we need to work on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is awesome. And, boy, way back in the day, we interviewed Jeff McManus, who leads up the team.

Mike Michalowicz
Oh, yeah, Jeff is the leader of that team. Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, yeah, he shared some more elements to the story, so that was fun. Well, so then, I imagine then in a business or an organization, you’re going to come up with dozens or hundreds of problems or opportunities, as my favorite reference, that you’d notice that could benefit from some attention. So, if you’re thinking about the hierarchy of needs, how do you determine who wins? I mean, do the sales issues always win because they’re at the base of the needs? Or, how do we kind of navigate and triage that?

Mike Michalowicz
Great question. As opportunities or challenges present themselves, you always address the base level first because if the base is compromised, the entire foundation of the structure is. I set a reference to that coffee shop so let me explain how they did this. This coffee shop was growing, and multiple team members, they built a second location, they then opened a roastery facility where they’re preparing coffee. And what they noticed is they’ve been in business for 13 years, and rapidly growing coffee companies. It’s called Cottonwood Coffee, by the way, in South Dakota.

And the leader of that organization, his name is Jacob, noticed that when he looked at the business hierarchy of needs, that they had some sales issues and prospect attractions and so forth. But, also, said, “We’ve been in business for 13 years. We’re one of the most established providers in this area. We’re beyond sales issues. We’re really about impact and legacy of being of service to our community.” And he tried to continue the focus there but the business kept on kind of getting stalled in its growth. Well, finally, he said, “You know what, maybe it is a sales issue.” And he went back to the community they were serving and how they were serving them. And by getting back to the base, all of a sudden, that opened up sales and it allowed them to build up the rest of the structure.

Picture this like building an actual structure building that has five levels. If you want to build a tall building with a big top and you want to have a huge impact, you can’t have a little needlepoint structure below it. It’ll collapse on that. It won’t be strong enough It’s like a pyramid. You must have a foundation that’s adequate and substantial to support the level above it. And that level must be adequate to support the next. If, at any time, we want to grow up stronger at a higher level, we need to make sure the foundation is appropriate to support it. So, this is not a ladder. You don’t just climb up and aspire to be at the top. You cycle through, constantly strengthening the base and the lower levels to support the higher levels.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I’m hearing that. I guess I’m just imagining an organization in which it’s sort of like, “Okay, we got 60 problems/opportunities. They’re sprinkled across all of these dimensions, and some of them fall into sales.” So, I think it’s a good argument that you got to handle that before to really kind of flourish and have that foundation. I guess I’m thinking, in a way, you know, hey, sales, everything could always be better. So, how do you go about maybe doing the data collection or the benchmarking to say, “Oh, I thought our sales were fine. Oh, but maybe they’re not. I thought our profits were fine. Oh, but maybe they’re not”? Because I think they could always be better. So, what do you think of that?

Mike Michalowicz
Yeah, everything could always be better, but it can only be better in relation. So, the simple question, and there is no specific number I can share, but what I can say is that, “Is the base adequate to support enough and substantial elements to the next level? Is sales strong enough to support our target and goal and profit?” And a lot of this is just communication.

I’m surprised at how many divisions. We have some public companies that implemented the business hierarchy of needs, and these divisions are taking on without consideration of the overall business hierarchy of needs. So, there’s a greater business hierarchy, and then within each division becomes its own little hierarchy so we got to work in relation to that. So, what’s the major corporate goal and need specifically?

Then we look back and we say, “In our division or in our field of responsibility, do I have adequate sales to support the profit expectation for me? And if so, then I actually have a profit issue if profit isn’t there. It’s not a sales issue.” Sadly, I see businesses go, “You know, we just need to sell more. We’re going to sell our way out of this.” It’s the most common thing I see from business leaders, and it’s one of the biggest mistakes because sales do not translate to profit. I see businesses sell unprofitable items. And while their sales dollars go up, the profit margins are getting thinner and thinner, and the business is actually struggling more. So, it’s all in relation.

We need clarity from the next one who we’re connected to, the next leader that we’re working with, and, “What are the proper expectations to drive your needs? What are the sales expectations? What degree of efficiency? How many resources can we use to get this stuff done? And what are the turnaround times?” Those are questions we have to have clarity on. In that way, we’re speaking up the chain all the way to the leader or leaders of our organization to understand the needs and they drive them back down. So, it works in relation and it works through communication.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so then it sounds like there’s expectation setting and communicating that’s going forward.

Mike Michalowicz
Oh, yeah, of course, right? It’s funny, I say of course and yet it doesn’t happen. I’m shocked at how many businesses have arbitrary goals.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s what I’m getting at is the arbitrariness. Like, how do we un-arbitrary them and make them based on something real?

Mike Michalowicz
Yeah. And the similar question is, “Why and how is this serviced?” I worked for a Fortune 500 after they got acquired, and I was blown away by the lack of communication at least around goal-setting. There’s a lot of communication around red tape but there was not a lot of communication around goal-setting. And so, when I was told, “Hey, Mike, your department has to do X.” I said, “Why?” And they’re like, “Because that’s what we told you.” I’m like, “But what’s the reasoning behind it?” And that started an understanding of the importance of how it serves the company in a greater whole.

Now, in context, it actually empowered me in that division. I only worked there for a year before I went back out and started my own business, but then it gave me context of why I need to achieve, what I need to achieve. That’s a very empowering thing, so get the context.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that so much because when you ask why, they’re like, “What?” It’s like, “No one’s ever really asked me that before, Mike. I just got accustomed to telling people what they need to do, and then they try to do it.”

Mike Michalowicz
They just do it. Yeah, it was shocking. And part of it, too, I think was just history, “That’s what we always do. We just pick 10% higher.” “Well, why not pick 50% higher?” “Well, because we never do that.” So, that context. And it isn’t to be challenging in the confrontational sense. It’s we’re challenging in seeking clarity. And just because, in that case, the leader of our department wasn’t telling me that, didn’t mean it was right to ignore that, that I had a responsibility to step up and ask, which made us both better leaders, I think, as a result.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s cool. So, then let’s zoom into the professional who’s somewhere in the middle of things, and they then communicated a target, “We need to reduce the manufacturing waste rate by 10% or the conversion rate of clients needs to be increased by 10%,” it’s like something. And maybe have a good conversation about, “Well, why?” “Oh, I see how that makes sense, interrelates and fits with the other dimensions.” How do you go about making that happen in terms of determining what to fix next within a narrower scope of your responsibilities?

Mike Michalowicz
Yeah, so this is where we present the hierarchy of needs. So, you talked about conversion, you talked about manufacturing, the factor of efficiency.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, so two separate kinds of…

Mike Michalowicz
Two separate things. One was an order level; one was a sales level. So, what we do is we go back to our department leads and say, “Listen, I’ve been given direction in this hierarchy, and there’s two different demands.” The default is we always go to the base. But do we understand, is that a necessity? Because the leader can be giving you arbitrary goals. Do we have adequate sales to, first, drive that efficiency and will have a greater impact on our business? Or do need the sales in place first in order to make the investment in building the efficiency? So, we have to figure out the sequence.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Like, you might be too small to make investing in the super cool technology or robot, but what?

Mike Michalowicz
Oh, my God. I see companies that have so much potential efficiency but so low flow because it becomes actually less efficient. I worked with a major playset manufacturer, one of the bigger ones there, over $100 million in revenue, and what’s so fascinating is they had this massive equipment, and the complexity in setting it up was so time-consuming. Now, they had the demand. Once that system was set, it was just ring out process to process, so the gain was in more volume. But if they just placed one playset through that, the 16 hours of setting up, someone could hand-paint three playsets on their own. It’d be faster, actually, to do hand painting. So, this stuff always works in relation.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great perspective there. Okay. Well, then I’d love to hear, in terms of sort of what’s the alternative, like if we’re not thinking in this way, I guess it’s not arbitrary and you’re not motivated and inspired because you’re not connected to the why. You could misallocate your resources and attention on things that don’t really matter. Could you sort of share with us kind of what does life look like when you’re doing this versus not doing this? And what are some of the best and worst practices to making sure you’re doing this well?

Mike Michalowicz
So, with the business hierarchy of needs and the fix this next process, the first thing we always talk about is what’s called lifestyle congruence. It is the base of motivation, “How does this serve you? If you do something, how does it serve you?” And this is how all humanity is wired. So, there’s more than just the organizational needs. It’s how the organizational needs translate to the service of you? Does it give you an opportunity to climb the corporate ladder? Does it give you actually more time, more free time? What objectives are you serving on your own? So, it’s that interpersonal relationship.

Without the hierarchy of needs, without the understanding, I’ve seen business professionals get into a very much an action-reaction mode, meaning there’s some trigger, a request, a demand, that incessant string of email coming in, and we just put out fire after fire after fire. Something comes in, we react to it, but there’s no contemplation.

So, the business hierarchy of needs, the differentiator is an action, a trigger that happens, but now there’s contemplation between the action-reaction. There’s an intentional pregnant pause to say, “How is this of service to the organization? How is this congruent with what I’m trying to set as my own objectives?” And now we move much more deliberately.

The business hierarchy of needs helps us focus on the next impactful thing to do. Without it, people focus on the next apparent thing, and there’s a constant stream of apparent issues and so it becomes a randomization. Those divisions, those leaders often make a few steps forward, and a few steps back, and a few steps forward. The ones who are deliberately identifying the most impactful thing and act on it are much more effective in moving forward consistently, and growing to their objectives.

Pete Mockaitis
Right on. Well, can you walk us through maybe a couple more examples of there’s someone, and they are…we got a set of responsibilities for a division, and then they are doing some real smart prioritization of fixing the right thing next.

Mike Michalowicz
Yeah, so I was working with a corporation which I want to leave nameless, but since the COVID incident, they’ve lost a massive volume of customers. Actually, the experience, it’s more massive churn. They’re losing customers but they’re gaining. And I may or may not have said to the board of this company, maybe I just gave it away there, I said to the board of this company, and we had an impromptu discussion. The company was working on the impact level.

Now, by all means, you don’t ignore sales. They had sustainable sales and it continues to grow on its own but where the concentrated effort need to be was on impact of being great and great service. All of a sudden, with this shift and this drop in clients, because these clients were not business or a B2B business, and these other clients coming in, now all attention went to sales. The leadership team redirected their focus and said, “How do we cater to this new market? How do we serve these customers that are leaving us almost at a whim because of fear? How do we protect them and retain the core function?” They provided very necessary function for these businesses. Without them, they may go out of business. You need this function. And then, “How do we re-address it?”

So, very quickly on the dime, they saw an issue present itself just when this case broke, or they noticed the metrics, the empirical data of a drop of customers, and all leadership looked there and said, “We will achieve legacy and impact. We have been satisfying that but, for now, we can’t stop building that third and fourth floor of the building. We got to get back in the basement because we have a crack in the foundation,” and leadership went down there, they responded very rapidly as a result. And the story will reveal itself over the next months, perhaps a year or two ahead, but their quick response and deliberate response has put a tourniquet on potential massive loss if they just said, “You know what, we’re going to just continue to focus at this level and not redirect our attention.”

And I think they would’ve been made aware of it because they always looked at the business hierarchy of needs and are asking, “Where do we need our attention now?” They’re responding quicker than if they weren’t considering that hierarchy.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love it if you can give us, are there any sort of shortcuts or really kind of quick questions or indicators or acid tests that might make you say, “Aha! I have a hunch that I need to focus my energies over here.”

Mike Michalowicz
Yes. So, quick indicator is if you’re taking on debt, if you have increasing demand on budgets, and you don’t have increasing sales, so if debt is increasing in excess of sales and profit, that’s a massive indicator that we actually have a profit issue, there’s a margin issue in the organization. One of the shortcut techniques that I love I see companies implementing right now is in repositioning. If an offering, if you are not buying an offering, to try to sell harder, particularly at the macroeconomics that’s occurring now, it’s not usually a right response. We’re using a technique called one step prior.

Here’s what it is. You look at your final offering. I’ll just use the restaurant because probably everyone on this call has experiences with a restaurant. When you go to a restaurant and you sit down, they deliver food to your table. That’s the end product. But if we look one step prior to that, well, what are they doing? They’re carrying the food to you, they’re delivering it. Well, that’s an offering in itself, the delivery of food, and some restaurants are responding that way. What happens one step prior to that? Well, there’s a preparation of food. A restaurant could make that an offering, make it a new product by recording the 10 most popular recipes and deliver that as a new product offering. What happens one step prior to that? Well, there’s the procurement of raw materials, the inventory, the meats and vegetables. Maybe they can sell that.

So, I see organizations reconsidering if they’re to stop in sales, or you some empirical data with a drop off, one option, too, is reconsider the packaging in the first place, and that’s a real simple shortcut to do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. Well, tell me, Mike, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Mike Michalowicz
Yeah. So, the last thing I just want to mention is, well, there’s a resource for you, if I can share that, and there’s a process. So, I’ll do the process first, it’s called OMEN, it stands for Objective, Measurement, Evaluation frequency, and Nurture. Once we identify what to work on, you can use OMEN as a simple structure to measure and ensure the progress, the results you want.

Then there’s a resource that I’m encouraging people to use because it’s totally free and it’s a quick evaluation for your division, your business. It’s at FixThisNext.com. So, if you go to FixThisNext.com, you could go on a free evaluation. You can take a 5-minute, this is a series of questions, to really pinpoint what to work on next. And there’s no download. The results appear on the screen, and you can take action on it. So, it’s a good compass or guidance tool.

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

Mike Michalowicz
Oh, I have it above my desk at home, and I’m going to bring a big one and put it in our hallway here at our office, “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.” In my final assessment of business and life, the most successful people are the ones who are most joyous, it’s the ones who truly are simply themselves, and allow the business to be a platform to be more of themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Mike Michalowicz
Right now, I’m studying quantum physics, and I’m studying this concept of [31:47] but basically that we’re in a box universe. Actually, that’s not even the right term but that all time has happened simultaneously. So, the past, the present, and the future has already all occurred. It’s all available. It’s time slicing effectively, and so it’s a mind wrap. I’ve been studying it intensely and really trying to wrap my head around it, and it’s changing our perspective of life itself.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow! Could you point us to a book, a resource, to get in that?

Mike Michalowicz
Yeah. Well, Stephen Hawking has some good resource around that. “Simple Answers to Big Questions” is a good starting point, and then the BBC has some really great basic teachings in some of these ethereal concepts.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book in general?

Mike Michalowicz
Well, I say current one, it’s appealing to me, it’s called “100 Days of Rejection” by Jia Jiang, I think, is his last name. And it’s just this guy who studied the power of intentionally being rejected. It’s really a cool concept.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Mike Michalowicz
A favorite tool? We use a tool called Voxer here in our office for rapid communication. It’s a really cool way to batch communication and keep a record of communication. I think, particularly, in the virtualization of business that’s really being enforced now, you have to, that we need a new way to have still a semi-tactile experience and engage, and this has superseded voicemail or email. It’s just a better form of communication for us called Voxer.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think my friend Lisa who’s also on the podcast, Lisa Cummings, loves Voxer. And how about a favorite habit, something that helps you be awesome?

Mike Michalowicz
Well, every morning, I exercise. And after that, I do a singing bowl. It’s a bowl that you hit and you can rub a stick on it, and it rings. And I use that for meditation or prayer time. It’s just a great way for me to put thoughts out into our world and universe, and it’s a great way to sense relief too.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you move the bowl and do you say anything or just think or…?

Mike Michalowicz
No. So, a singing bowl, it’s like a bowl, like a cereal bowl made of metal. You tap a stick on it and it makes a chime sound. And then, as you move the stick around, the vibrations continue so the chime actually gets louder and louder, and you can make it softer, and there’s ways to change directions on the chime. And the visualization I use, is it puts out sound waves or vibrations into the world, and so as I have my thoughts, and I put thoughts out for the goodness of humanity, of people, health, I can see it visually going out. So, it’s kind of a cool visualization tool and an audio tool.

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

Mike Michalowicz
You know, one thing that’s been really powerful is “People speak the truth through their wallets, not their words.” And I’ve used that as an asset. It’s measure people by their action, particularly when we’re in a business. Are they willing to spend or not? Because if they’re saying, “We support this. We love it,” and they don’t spend, they don’t support it. They don’t love it.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve lived that a few times.

Mike Michalowicz
Yeah.

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

Mike Michalowicz
So, you can go to FixThisNext.com to do that evaluation. And if you want to learn more about my research of business and business operations, you can go to MikeMichalowicz.com. But here’s the deal, Pete, no one can spell Michalowicz so I have a shortcut. It’s Mike Motorbike, as in the motorcycle, it’s my nickname in high school, so I still own it. So, MikeMotorbike.com. And if you go there, all my research is available for free on blogs and podcasts. I also have my books there. I used to write for the Wall Street Journal, and it’s all for free at MikeMotorbike.com.

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

Mike Michalowicz
Yeah, listen, this is the time to step up. And the world kind of got punched all business leaders in the face right now, and it’s also asking you to turn up the heat because we need the economy to keep going. So, the call to action is really a call to arms. It’s time for us as business professionals to step up, step forward, and start kicking some ass.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Mike, thank you. This has been a lot of fun. I wish you all kinds of luck as you’re fixing things next.

Mike Michalowicz
Exactly. Thank you.

Sep 20
0

492: Making Meetings Work with J. Elise Keith

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

J. Elise Keith says: "Every meeting is an opportunity. Seize it."

J. Elise Keith shares what makes meetings succeed vs. fail.

 

 

You’ll Learn:

  1. Signs of an ineffective meeting
  2. How the best organizations approach meetings
  3. When and how to opt out of a meeting

About J. Elise

Elise Keith is the co-founder of online meeting management platform Lucid Meetings. Known as the ‘Meeting Maven,’ Elise offers unprecedented expertise that inspires audiences, proving that meetings shouldn’t be fewer or shorter—but better and more effective. She is the author of Where the Action Is: The Meetings That Make or Break Your Organization, which contains eye-opening strategies companies can use to structure beneficial meetings, create a healthy workplace culture, and propel overall team momentum.

Resources mentioned in the show:

Thank You, Sponsors!

J. Elise Keith Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Elise, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

J. Elise Keith
I’m glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, I’m excited to dig into this. And I want to get your take, you know, often the first question I ask is an icebreaker of sorts, and you’ve seen a lot of icebreakers, I imagine, in your day. Could you share maybe an all-time favorite or least favorite icebreaker and story that goes with it?

J. Elise Keith
Okay. So, I have two for this one. The kind of icebreaker you should use really depends on the kind of meeting you’re having and what’s going on in your culture. So, there’s all kinds of really good icebreakers that are also really different. But one I like to use when I do, like, say, workshop where I’ve got a group and maybe they know each other or maybe they don’t, but you’ve got to get them loosened up a bit, is, “What was your favorite band or artist in high school?”

Pete Mockaitis
That is fun.

J. Elise Keith
It is fun because you get a chance to get a sense of people’s culture and sort of their inner id when you find…I did this with a group of librarians recently, and to hear the number of them that were, you know, deep hardcore punk funs than old-school hillbilly rock was kind of enlightening.

Pete Mockaitis
That is fun. Well, and what was yours?

J. Elise Keith
You know, I was a big Midnight Oil fan in high school which I grew out of, but at the time it seemed appropriately edgy and world-saving and different enough to be special, yeah. How about you?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know, it’s funny, I didn’t own a lot of CDs, because that’s what we had at the time, but I do remember I think that Blink 182 Dude Ranch was the album I played again and again. And I also went to a number of punk rock shows myself. I remember the band 15 with Jeff Ott was something in vogue with my people and myself. And then, yeah.

J. Elise Keith
See? I mean, like all of a sudden, you know, I like Midnight Oil. My first album was Pour Some Sugar On Me, Def Leppard.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, thank you. Well, I think we’re going to have some extra fun here talking about meetings and so meetings are often such a huge pain point for professionals. So, I’d love it if we could maybe you could start us off by orienting us to kind of the state of meetings today. Like, any hard numbers you have in terms of how much time professional spend in meetings, what proportion of those meetings are effective, how do you even define effective. Kind of where do we stand today?

J. Elise Keith
Yadda, yadda, stats, stats, right? So, in terms of the overall situation with meetings, our most recent and best research shows that there are somewhere north of 65 million meetings per day in the US alone. And a lot of us are not working just in the US, it’s an international economy now so that’s millions and millions and millions of meetings every single day.

Now, it’s a huge number so that’s not necessarily relevant to each of us personally, which brings you to the second question, right, like, “How much time are individuals spending in meetings?” And that’s kind of all over the map depending on where you are in the organization and what0 kind of organization you’re in. It can be somewhere as low as like, say, half an hour or less for some people.

But when you get farther up the chain, when you get into middle management, or C-suite, or VP suites in collaborative organizations, that’s going to be typically somewhere between 60% and 80% of their day they’re going to spend in meetings. It’s a ton of time. It’s a ton of money that we invest in these.

Pete Mockaitis
Right, because every one of those hours has dollars associated with it. All right. So, that’s kind of the time load. And how often are the meetings working? How do we even define working from a numerical perspective?

J. Elise Keith
That’s a really good question, right, because a lot of times the way that, there’s a fair amount of research into whether meetings are effective. And often the way that research is done is people would throw out a survey, lets a Survey Monkey surveys, which are like, “Think of your last five meetings and estimate which percentage of them were effective.” And there you get a number where people who say, “Half of them were effective.”

But when you dig into that research a little bit deeper, you do some actual investigation with the companies and people, talking about the specific meetings they’ve attended, “So, how was your last meeting? Would you rather have that been a giant series of email?” that kind of thing, what you find is that the equation flips. And it turns that folks, by and large, think meetings work a lot better than the alternatives.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s good to know. That’s good news.

J. Elise Keith
The thing about effectiveness is that what is that word even mean, right? And that’s where you get into sort of the more interesting tactics and tools because for a meeting to be effective, you have to be asking yourself, “Well, what is it effective at? Can you use that effectively to do?” And in that case, you’ve got to look at both, “Are the people in the room enjoying it? Do they feel it’s a good use of time? And then, is it producing results for your business?” So, those are the two angles on effectiveness that you can pull together, and then you can start to see, “Okay, now, regardless of what the big stats say, what’s happening in my world here?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Certainly. And so then, I’d love to get your take then, so what do some of the best in class versus worst in class organizations look like with regard to meeting performance on these dimensions?

J. Elise Keith
So, it’s often easier to start with the worst because that’s probably where a lot of people are. Meeting performance isn’t something that most organizations have taken seriously. And so, what they do is they wing it. Essentially, you leave it to each and every manager and project manager and leader and whatnot to figure out how to meet as they think best for what they’re trying to do.

And that kind of approach sort of assumes that, “You know, everybody’s been in a lot of meetings. They ought to know what they’re doing. Let’s get them in a room. Off they go.” So, that’s what most people are doing and it’s deeply, sadly ineffective most of the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And in what ways?

J. Elise Keith
Well, it turns out that meetings are different than conversations, right? And meetings are a skilled activity that you can learn how to run and then design to achieve specific goals. So, there really isn’t any such thing as a generic good meeting. There are really good sales calls, there are really good interviews, there are really good ways to keep a project moving, and each one of those is a different kind of meeting that should be designed to achieve that goal.

So, in the best organizations they do that. They get training for everybody and they design systems. So, they take their meetings and they stop them being habits and they turn them into systems that are designed to achieve the goals that they support.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, now you lay out 16 types of meetings that work and you’ve mentioned a couple there. I guess I’m curious to hear what types of meetings don’t work?

J. Elise Keith
So, the types of meetings that don’t work are the ones that are basically, you know, kitchen soup. Do you ever do that? Do you ever do like a kitchen-sink soup or a casserole where you’ve got a pot and you just kind of throw everything that you own in there before it goes bad, and that’s the soup you’ve got? Which sometimes works great but most of the time it doesn’t.

So, that’s what a lot of folks are doing with their meetings, “I’ve got a time block on Tuesday. We always meet on Tuesday. My whole team shows up and we decide, ‘Hey, what is it we have to talk about today?’”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, there it goes. So, it’s kind of like I’m hearing some telltale signs there. One, it’s recurring and, two, there’s not a plan in advance and, three, there’s multiple people as opposed to like the one-on-one. So, there are some ingredients, I guess, that may have a higher risk perhaps of not working out optimally in the course of having that meeting. So, everything is just sort of like, “All right. Here we all are now. So…” as opposed to a proactive, thoughtful, upfront design of, “What are we hoping to achieve?” and kind of planning from there.

J. Elise Keith
Yeah. So, it’s really about clarity of purpose, right, and what you’re trying to accomplish in the room. And if you walk into the room and you’re not entirely sure what you’re trying to accomplish or why everybody needs to be there, so you’ve invited all of the people because you’re not entirely sure who should be in and who should be out, then you’re likely to waste your time.

And, certainly, even if you do know what you need to accomplish, there are some things that just psychologically we’re not designed to do at the same time. So, let’s take, can we do a couple of examples?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes.

J. Elise Keith
So, the project status update. It’s a meeting most people loathe, right, but it’s designed to make sure that everybody working on the project knows what’s happening, gets an update about anything that’s changed that they need to know about, and has a chance to raise any concerns, like, “Hey, here’s a red flag. We need to work on this.”

But the underlying psychological thing going on there is you’ve all agreed to do something together and you’re going to make sure that you continue to trust each other and execute on that so that you can keep the work going. You’re doing momentum and energy and trust, right?

In a meeting like that, when we have already made promises in the past and we’re showing up to recommit to those promises and show that we’re good for them, it’s not a great moment to say, do something like, “You know what, let’s just go crazy and think of some wild ideas about what we might do now,” right? Or, “Hey, here’s a great problem. Why don’t we explore all of the different kinds of creative out-of-the-box thinking on how we might tackle this problem?”

The whole point of the project status meeting is to say, “Yes, we’ve defined a box and we’re in that box and we’re moving this box down the road.” When you ask people to step out of the box, right in the middle of that, you’re having them break from one mode of interaction to a completely different mode and you get the worst possible ideas ever because everything people raise is safe, right? And you don’t want safe when you’re doing brainstorming. You don’t want safe when you’re doing problem-solving. You want innovative, you want effective, so you got to break those conversations into distinct conversations.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Certainly. So, you’ve got a clear purpose and a design, and that’s what you’re running with, and you’re not kind of mixing and matching in there. Understood. And so, I’m curious, with the project status update meeting, let’s talk with that example, so people often don’t like it. And so, what are some of the other things that they’re going wrong? Sometimes folks are sort of wildly go off script and enter a different phase. And what are some of the things that are going that also can go awry or indicative of, “Hey, this project status meeting is great”?

J. Elise Keith
So, what you’re looking for in terms of signifiers of great are energy, right? You’re looking for energy, you’re looking for some amount of dynamic, and in the case of a status meeting, which is probably one of the worst meetings to be using as our example, but in the case of that meeting, that energy and that dynamic might come from just keeping it really crisp and short and being very, very respectful of everybody’s time.

But in every case, one of the things that keeps these meetings from being particularly successful is that whoever is in charge of that meeting is probably frantic, they’re probably running from one thing to another with very little time to prepare, and they walk into the room believing that it’s their job to make that a fabulous experience, or an effective experience, or an efficient experience, or whatever it is that they believe for everyone else, and they do all the talking, and they set the agenda. And then they basically demand reports from everyone else. Well, that’s deadly.

It’s like you’ve shown up to the soccer match and you’ve got a sense of what it means to win the game so you get your team together and then you run the ball up and down and tell them what you’re doing. You don’t have anybody else participating, you don’t have everybody else bringing something to the field and helping you get that goal together. So, the best meetings are ones where everybody has got a job to do in that room, and they’re team sports. It’s not the leader’s show.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that’s a good thing to talk about right there. So, if there are folks in the meeting who say nothing, does that suggest that perhaps they ought not to be in the meeting?

J. Elise Keith
It either suggests that they shouldn’t be in the room because meetings are not a spectator sport, right? Or, they need some training, they need some education. So, they need education and the person in charge needs education because if you have people who are in that room who should be contributing and they are not, that’s broken. We don’t hire and have people work on our team so that they can absorb oxygen in the space. They’re there to contribute their perspectives and their ideas and the information they have that we don’t that helps us collectively get to a better result.

Pete Mockaitis
And would your view then be if they are just sort of receiving information that we should use a different format to convey the information?

J. Elise Keith
Absolutely. Absolutely. Now, sometimes that’s not practical, right? Like, sometimes you just can’t count on everybody to have done their homework in advance, so there are practices that companies put in place to help with that. Like, there are ways to get around that that are respectful of the fact that people don’t necessarily have time to proactively prepare. And yet you still don’t want to lead to them like they were in kindergarten because that’s disengaging and a little insulting, frankly.

So, one of the really famous ones is Amazon, in their corporate headquarters. They begin all of their meetings with 10 minutes of silent reading where whatever it is that they’re going to discuss, “Is it a proposal or the financial reports, or whatever it is?” it’s distributed in paper and everybody at the table has 10 minutes to read it through right there.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. You know, I really like that maybe because, you’re right, as opposed to people just trying to fake it and not look dumb and sort of say expansive things, it’s like, “No, just do this right now.”

J. Elise Keith
Let’s just do it, yeah. And it’s also kind of a wonderful way to acknowledge that, like, you need people to come prepared but you don’t control their calendar outside of that meeting, right? So, that prep work is part of the work of the meeting, why not just build that time into the meeting itself?

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And especially if it’s 10 minutes, because that’s something that can be handy in the sense of you’ve maybe looked a lot of those bits and pieces over time, and, “Oh, here it is collected,” and you’re kind of up-to-speed or on the same page and we’re moving. I’ve actually had a couple of guests before, they’ll ask me, “So, tell me about your audience.” And I’m thinking, “Okay, this means you didn’t read all the things I sent you.”

J. Elise Keith
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
And I was like, “Well, hey, how about this? Let me send you this link and we can just sort of read that quietly for a moment and I’m going to go sort of get a glass of water, and we’ll reconnect?” So, I try to do that as respectfully as possible.

J. Elise Keith
But it’s maddening, right, because you only have so much time.

J. Elise Keith
So, you asked me earlier about both an icebreaker and then about meeting research, right? Like, the stats behind meetings. But when you dig into meetings and you see that what’s going on there is you’re bringing together a complex group of people to talk about work, which, in and of itself, is probably pretty complex too. So, it’s this really dynamic system of things going on, all kinds of things that can go wrong.

So, one of the reasons the icebreaker is such a great tool and why Amazon’s 10 minutes of silent reading is also a great tool is that the first tip to every successful meeting is to help people transition into the room because we’re all – and this is coming out of like the neuroscience and the social psychology research. We’re all dealing with up to like six different levels of distraction in our brain when we walk into that room.

So, our first job is to clear all of that and there’s a technique called clearing that explicitly does that, but you can do it a whole bunch of different ways, and get everybody focused on whatever is going on in that room and not the email they need to still write, or the fact that their kids might call, or their hungry stomachs, or any of those other things. How do you get people into the room? That is the absolute first tip to any successful meeting. And silent reading is one way to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I love it. So, what are some of the other alternatives and clearing approaches?

J. Elise Keith
Yeah, so clearing approach, and actually several companies use this, is it’s explicit, it is you walk in and everybody takes a moment to say, “Hey, today I’m dealing with this, I’m feeling this way, but I’m ready to put that aside and I’m in.” And everybody else says, “Welcome.”

Pete Mockaitis
In other words, “I’m in.”

J. Elise Keith
Yeah, I’m in. And so, you go around the room and everybody says, “This is what’s going on for me but I’m ready and I’m in.”

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I imagine that could go quickly or not so quickly. Are there some guidelines there?

J. Elise Keith
You know, that’s really up to the team and the culture. So, in some teams they go real fast and they keep it fast and many people pass, right, because their values are about efficiency. In other teams, their values are about community. And this is another tip with meetings. Your meetings are absolutely the best place to design in the values you want to see your culture support and engage, right?

So, at lululemon, they do the clearing, and then they follow the clearing by the vibrations. And that practice is where they go around and they say, “Hey, is there anything you’re hearing that you think we should know about?” And a vibration might be like a rumor that’s going around the office, or something somebody saw in the news, or the weather, or it could be any of these things, whether just like, “Hey, we think the group ought to know about this.” And what they do in their teams is sometimes what comes up in clearing or in the vibrations is a big deal, and that’s what they talk about. And they take the rest of their agenda and they move it to another day.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And that is really handy because I think a lot of times there’s great information that just never has an opportunity to surface, and it’s like, “Oh, someone else launched a competitive yoga pant on Kickstarter that everyone is raving about.” It’s like, “Oh, I had no idea.”

J. Elise Keith
Right. Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
“That’s so cool and we have a moment for you to share that with us because that could change all kinds of things and maybe we wouldn’t have noticed this for another five months until maybe it’s a lot later for us to respond effectively.”

J. Elise Keith
Yeah. Well, it’s a huge deal. Like, I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the research that Amy Edmondson has done into psychological safety. It’s this bit where we feel like we’re in a group that cares enough about us that it’s safe to take risks. We can tell them things that may or may not fit the dominant narrative, right?

And one of the things that she points out when she explains this to people is that, you know, half of the time, people are afraid to speak out not because they have evidence that something bad would happen, right? There are people who are afraid to speak out in environments where “nobody ever gets fired,” right? So, nothing bad would happen to them, but just nobody does it, they’re not really sure.

So, one of the really important things we can do in our meetings is ask, just make time and space to ask the questions about what people are seeing and what ideas they have so that they know that those are welcome.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Well, so I’m digging this. So, we said, hey, once you’re actually in the meeting, first step, transition into the room, could be some silent reading, could be some clearing, asking about the vibrations, what’s going on.
J. Elise Keith
Could be an icebreaker, all the things, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you have a second step?

J. Elise Keith
So, then you need to connect with the goals and the purpose of the meeting, So, purpose is a verb, “We’re here to do this, to make a decision, to have a podcast interview,” whatever our purpose is. And then, at the end, “We’re about to achieve this.” So, those are your desired outcomes, “We’re going to have a decision, a list of next steps, and extra pizza,” whatever those outcomes are.

So, you kind of affirm that upfront and then confirm what your plan is for getting from, “Okay, we’ve gathered for this reason, for this purpose. We’re trying to get out with those outcomes. Here’s the plan for getting between point A to point B.” And most times people express that as an agenda. You don’t necessarily need an agenda but you do need a plan.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And you’re saying earlier that it’s best to perhaps not be the sole person who has that all figured out.

J. Elise Keith
Right. So, as the person in charge, there are multiple roles that you can bring to bear in a meeting. There’s the titular head of whatever that piece of work is, the leader, but you can have other people facilitate. And a facilitator’s job is to design that process part and then be the guardians of that process. You can have people assigned to take notes, you can have people assigned to be the vibes watchers, or the norms enforcers where they’re keeping track of everybody else, all kinds of different ways in which you can get other people involved in making that successful.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, that’s handy. And then what’s the third step?

J. Elise Keith
So, then the final thing you have to do for any meeting to be effective is you have to wrap it up, and that’s five minutes, maybe more, maybe less. At the end of every meeting where you stop and explicitly say, “Okay, let’s make sure we actually know what we did here, what decisions did we make, and what are our actions that we’re going to take away,” Like, who, what, when. “Specifically, this is going to be done by this date by this person.”

And, ideally, you want to do those in writing where everybody can be looking at them and committing that that is, in fact, what they thought the decision was because, way too often, people walk out the room all thinking they made the same decision but five minutes later you’re in another meeting, you’ve completely forgotten, it gets fuzzy. So, you want that in writing and you want to confirm it before you leave.

Pete Mockaitis
So, we’re talking about some form of like projection is present, or we’re visually looking at this wrap-up piece.

J. Elise Keith
Absolutely, yeah. And there are a bunch of ways to do that, there’s a lot of different software platforms you can use that are about taking collaborative notes on meetings in real time. You can do it on a whiteboard. There are a lot of different ways you can do it but you want people to be able to explicitly see that. And by having it be written, not only are you making it easier to get the notes out afterwards, which is a bonus, you’re engaging multiple parts of the brain, right?

We process information differently when we read it versus when we hear it versus when we speak it. So, you put all these things together and, from a geeky perspective, you’re encoding these promises deeper into your team, and that’s critical. And then, the last, last thing I think you should always do before you leave any meeting is to say thank you. Take a moment and express some appreciation.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And so, just say it like with their time for investing themselves, for thinking, for contributing, for not blowing it off. I guess there’s a lot of things in there.

J. Elise Keith
For something fabulous someone did. You can have people thank each other, “I really appreciate Sandy because she brought up that point and I wouldn’t have known about that Kickstarter yoga pants. She has saved our bacon,” right? The appreciation not only show people that you care and respect their time. It’s also a fabulous way to help everybody learn what the group values by being very explicit about what you’re acknowledging.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so in between the second step of connecting with purpose and the third step of the wrap-up, are there some particular practices that ensure that the actual conversations we’re having are effective, that they’re bringing us to where we want to go during the course of the meeting?

J. Elise Keith
Absolutely. There absolutely are. And the challenge is that they’re different depending on the type of meeting you’re in.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Gotcha.

J. Elise Keith
Yeah, which is why when you get into an organization that’s got really, really high meeting performance maturity. Basically, in our research, when we look out across the board, we found a number of practices that organizations establish as they’re putting their system in place from very basic, “We don’t have a system,” to, “We have this system that’s really locked and solid and really helping us drive our business forward.”

And one of those, as you get in there, is that as we’re talking about this, right, there’s the purpose and the outcomes and the different types of meetings and special ways you have to run each one. Well, that’s an awful lot of stuff to learn and have to try and apply in around the rest of what you’re doing. So, what these organizations do is they have standardized ways they do each of the different types of meetings that matter to their business that people are expected to learn, and then iterate and adopt and work with, but they’re not starting from scratch.

So, when you go to Amazon, you don’t just get to just guess how you’re going to start your meeting, right? They have their 10-minute thing. And when you go to an organization that’s practicing open-book management, you don’t guess how you’re going to run your weekly leadership meeting, “It works like this,” and you review the books. So, they have codified practices that shortcut the learning for all of those different things.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you maybe give us an example of a meeting type and some practices that are overlooked but make all the difference in the world when you’re having that meeting type?

J. Elise Keith
I think there are a whole series of meetings, we call that the cadence meetings. They’re the meetings about keeping momentum going on a project or keeping the team together where they can build trust, right? And a lot of the practices that are key in those meetings has to do with who speaks, who’s setting the tone, and how rapidly, how frequently you’re doing it.

So, let’s take a look at one-on-ones for example. So, the traditional approach in many companies is that managers know they better have one-on-ones so they schedule them once a month, maybe once every 90 days, something, because they know they have to, and they have the employees come in, and they say, “Okay, let’s look at your  30-, 60-, 90-day goals,” and the employee sort of reports on what they’re doing and they all check the boxes and off they go.

Well, Cisco just did a big study with 15,000 teams on how to run effective one-on-ones. And what they found was very, very specific and it was this. First of all, you’ve got to flip it. So, the manager doesn’t go in and ask the employee to report to them. Instead, the employee says, “Hey, here are my priorities and here’s where I need your help.” So, the employee is driving the agenda, and they used those two questions, that’s the way they start it.

And the second key thing they found is that it has to be at least every week because, otherwise, they’re talking about work that isn’t related to what they’re actually doing on a detailed basis. And the idea that the manager could possibly care about what you’re working on when they only check in on how they can help every 90 days, nobody buys it. So, once a week, employee-driven, and engagement on those teams goes up pretty dramatically.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. So, that’s striking. So, that’s what Cisco does, and then one-on-ones every week with every direct report, that could really add up.

J. Elise Keith
Well, so that’s where they’re looking at team sizes. So, one of the questions people get asked all the time is, “How big can your team be?” And the boundary of the size of a team that you can lead is your capacity for those touchpoints, like, “How many people can you dedicate time to showing them that you care and helping them out every week?” That’s the number of people that you can lead.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Well, so I guess I’d love to hear then, you talked about norms at one point. What are some of the norms that tend to be helpful across all meeting types?

J. Elise Keith
I think it’s really awesome when a company or an organization finds norms that are meaningful to them and their values, right? So, in some organizations that’s going to be things like every voice is heard, everyone speaks before you speak twice because diversity inclusion and voice is really important to them.

In other organizations, it’s going to be things like, “We start and end on time and the agenda sent out two days in advance,” because efficiency is really their thing. In some groups, something like Chatham House Rules, or Vegas Rules matters a lot, right? Like, what happens in the room stays in the room. My favorite that applies to all meeting types and that I think applies in every organization is a norm around having every meeting be optional.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so nice.

J. Elise Keith
Well, if you think about it, they already are, right? You’re a grownup, you don’t have to go to any meeting. But when you make it explicit, you’re saying that opting out of meetings won’t have “Hey, you’re fired” consequences.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And I actually want to talk about opting out of meetings. I think that it’s a common occurrence that folks, when they are inviting people to a meeting, they don’t want to be rude, and so they want to include folks, and so there’s a miscommunication that happens often. So, someone invites someone to a meeting, and the recipient thinks, “Oh, they expect me there so I’m going to show up,” and then they think, “Why did I even come here?” So, do you have any preferred scripts or verbiage or master ways to diplomatically decline the meeting?

J. Elise Keith
Well, first of all, you need to know that you deserve to have your time respected. So, it is both respectful for you and for the people doing the inviting to speak up when you think that you can’t contribute well to that room because every person sitting in a meeting that isn’t contributing is dragging down the energy and the potential for everyone else there. So, you are doing a service if you opt out of a meeting that you shouldn’t be in.

And the way that we approach that is we just say, “Hey, I actually am working on some other things that day. I don’t have much to contribute here. I’d be happy to send in any information you need in advance and will look forward to seeing the notes afterwards.” And you just opt out.

Pete Mockaitis
There you have it. I’d also want to get your take on what are some of the best means of accomplishing some meeting goals that are not meetings?

J. Elise Keith
Oh. Well, let’s take brainstorming. Brainstorming is something that we often pull a lot of people into a room for, and we say, “Hey, we’re going to come up with a whole bunch of new ideas for next week’s marketing campaign,” or whatever it’s going to be, tends not to be the most effective way to do it. That’s something that is really well-handled asynchronously, which means you post up the question and you ask everybody to contribute their ideas in advance.

And there are a lot of technologies you can use to do that. And, frankly, you can also have a box in the office where people throw in sticky notes. So, brainstorming, getting that first blush of original ideas out, much better handled outside of the meeting most of the time than it is in. Same thing for anything where they’re digesting large pieces of information, so reading reports, coming up with strategies.

One of the tactics we recommend and that we use ourselves quite a lot is we’ll have a meeting to make sure we all understand a problem. We’ll get together and we’ll say, “Okay. Well, what’s going on here? And what are our options?” and start to get our heads around it. And then we’ll schedule a follow-up meeting within a week to talk about what to do about it so that that time in between where we’re processing it has some bake time.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Well, Elise, I’m curious, are there any sort of final thoughts you have with regard to meetings or overlooked master strategies or tactics that could make a world of difference?

J. Elise Keith
You know, I think the real key is to understand that every meeting that you walk into is an opportunity. That’s the place where your culture becomes real, where the team understands what everyone cares about, and the value that you can bring. It’s the place where you get an opportunity to provide and show care for the people around you, and where you get to be a part of making the decisions that make your business or your organization really successful.

So, once you shift to that mindset and you look at meetings as the opportunity that they are, then you can start to be in a place where you can learn about the different types and the skills that make it so that you can take advantage of that opportunity.

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

J. Elise Keith
So, I have two. I’m not a huge fan of favorites and to key to just one thing because there are so many wonderful things out there. But there are a couple that I put together that work for me, and one is, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” which is from Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day.” I love that.

Like, what is your plan for your one wild and precious life? And then when I look at it from a business perspective and from a personal performance perspective, I pair it with another quote, which is, “Discipline is simply remembering what you really want.”

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And how about a favorite book?

J. Elise Keith
My favorite book, holy moly. How about “Time and the Art of Living” by Robert Grudin?

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And a favorite tool?

J. Elise Keith
You know, time blocking and scratch paper.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

J. Elise Keith
A favorite habit, hmm. You know, listening to audiobooks while cooking large batches of food.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And is there a particular nugget you share that you’re known, people quote it back to you and re-tweet it often?

J. Elise Keith
The one that gets re-tweeted the most, beyond the basic stats and things, is that, “You can’t have a meeting of the minds if the minds aren’t in the meeting.”

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

J. Elise Keith
They can visit us on my company’s website which is LucidMeetings.com and on my personal website which is JEliseKeith.com depending on what you’re looking for.

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

J. Elise Keith
You know, we’ve kind of covered it but my challenge to you is this. Every meeting is an opportunity. Seize it. Your challenge is to shed any negative beliefs you’ve got about your meetings and step into those opportunities.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Elise, thank you for this meeting, and I wish you all the best with all you’re doing in meetings.

J. Elise Keith
Hey, thank you so much.

Apr 03
0

421: Why Great Leaders Have No Rules with Kevin Kruse

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Kevin Kruse says: "If we think our boss cares about us as individuals as opposed to cogs in a machine, our engagement goes way up."

Author Kevin Kruse offers wise–yet contrarian–pointers  for leaders.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Arguments for closing your Open Door policy
  2. Why to set guardrails instead of rules
  3. How to be likeable without striving for being liked

About Kevin

Kevin Kruse is Founder+CEO of LEADx, the first and only AI-powered executive coach and leadership success platform built with IBM Watson.

A successful entrepreneur, Kevin has won both “Inc 500” awards for fast growth and “Best Place to Work” awards for employee culture. He was previously the founder or co-founder of several companies with successful exits.

Kevin is also a Forbes contributor and a New York Times bestselling author of nine books including Employee Engagement 2.0, Employee Engagement for Everyone and We: How To Increase Performance and Profit Through Full Engagement.

Kevin’s next book, Great Leaders Have No Rules: Contr arian Leadership Principles to Transform Your Team and Business (Crown Publishing) will launch on April 2, 2019.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Kevin Kruse Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Kevin, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Kevin Kruse
Well, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to be awesome level, but I’m going to do my best and it’s an honor to meet you and finally here live.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thanks Kevin. Yeah, it’s funny, we were talking before I hit the record button, how we see each other’s logos and faces in all kinds of places and here we are talking live at last.

Kevin Kruse
I like that phrase you said. It could be a song, “logos and faces in all kinds of places.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah, it seems like it has to be country with a slow tempo. You do a lot of things at the opposite of a slow tempo in terms of founding companies and having great exits. I want to hear about your company Leadx, and in particular, you have the first and only AI—as in artificial intelligence robot style—powered executive coach. How does that work?

Kevin Kruse
Well, thanks for asking on that. My mission is to spark 100 million leaders in the next ten years. That’s a big number. Certainly I can reach some with a podcast, with a book, with speeches or those kinds of things, writing, but not that many.

When I saw what AI was able to do now, especially in the area of mental health and therapy and coaching, I said well, hey, leadership is about behavior change, changing thoughts and identity to change behaviors, let’s apply it.

For two years we’ve been training IBM Watson in all kinds of topics related to how to be a great boss, how to be a great manager, how to be a great leader. We call our coach Amanda. We released Coach Amanda in November of last year. Basically, you download the app on your Android device or smartphone or you log in and Coach Amanda will teach you about management fundamentals.

But she diagnoses your personality. She knows your personality. She’s teaching you management principles, leadership principles, but tailored to your personality. There’s sort of a new mode we just released. You can ask her questions like, “How do I handle an employee who smells badly?” or “Comes in late?” or “How do I communicate with a Myers Briggs INTJ?” You can ask her all kinds of questions.

Then the new mode, which is really cool, it’s like what a human coach does, is Coach Amanda will help you to pick a developmental goal and a deadline like 12 weeks from now. She’ll help you to create an action plan. Every week she’ll check in with you and she’ll buzz you on your phone or send you an email that says, “Hey Pete, your friendly reminder, your goal is,” I’m just making this up, “become a better public speaker by this date.”

Your next activity is watch some TED talks. Did you do it or not?” If you say you did, then she’s going to ask you to jot some lessons learned from that activity. If you say you didn’t, she’s going to ask you to jot some notes about what got in your way.

Pete Mockaitis
She scolds you.

Kevin Kruse
Yeah. Well, what got in the way of you getting to that.

Pete Mockaitis
Why have you been so naughty?

Kevin Kruse
That’s right. That’s right. Shut the power off on the spaceship if you don’t behave. That goes in a coaching journal. She becomes your accountability partner, who also can give you resources. You’re all about action, things to do at work. She will give you every week a new activity to do at work to get better in your goal area.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so wild. I guess I wonder about these things in terms of just how wide a breadth of questions can I ask because I know like Siri there’s some things she can nail, like “Hey, Siri, wake me up at 6 AM.” She’s all over it. But other questions are a little trickier for Siri. If I were to ask Amanda something like boy, let’s see, “How do I-“ okay, let’s just say, “Amanda, I’m trying to figure out which business initiatives should be my top priority right now.” Could she handle that? What happens?

Kevin Kruse
No, she can’t, is the short question. But you’re raising a really important issue with all these devices and these chat bots. The best chat bots out there, Siri, Alexa, Google Home, they’re at an 85% accuracy level. Out of everything that they get asked in any given day, they can get about 85% of that. That’s where it’s sort of maxed out for now.

Now for Coach Amanda, when we first released her two years ago she could get 11%. Then all the wrong answers, you feed it back in. She gets smarter. She was then at 44%. Right now she’s at about 65%. We think that we’ll get to 85% by the end of the year. You need, in general, about 10,000 unique questions for the bot to then kind of know 85% or better. But the thing is, it’s in a given area.

If we saw that you had asked that question of Coach Amanda, we would say, “Okay, she’s teaching people to be better leaders. Is this a leadership question?” We might say, “Eh, evaluating what business to do isn’t our definition of management leadership and she’s just going to say ‘I don’t know. Would you like to hear what kind of things I know about?’”

We talk about training AI to understand humans, the other half is to train humans how to speak to the AI. I’ve got an Alexa device. I noticed a while ago, a few weeks back, the ring was glowing orange. I didn’t know what that was at the time. I said, “Hey Alexa, why are you glowing orange?” She’s like, “I can’t help you with that.” “What does the orange light mean?” “I can’t help you with that.”

I had to Google it and it said “Oh, that’s when you have a notification from Alexa.” Then I said, “Hey, play me my notifications,” and it told me like, “Oh, UPS is going to deliver a package today.” You think it would know this. If I say, “Alexa, play me my messages. Play me my alerts. Why are you orange? Do I have a package?” She cannot answer any of these very similar things.

Alexa trained me. Now when she’s orange, I say “Play my notifications,” and then I’ll get it. But it took me a couple of days before I got that.

That’s with Coach Amanda, most people just don’t wake up and say, “I’ve got a question about management today,” but if you’re a manager at a company that’s used let’s say the DISC personality survey. It’s kind of a popular personality survey. You know everybody’s done that and you know that your boss is high in D, which is dominance or driver.

You would then know that you could ask Coach Amanda before your next meeting like, “Hey, how do I persuade someone who’s high in D,” and then Coach Amanda would answer it. But you wouldn’t just naturally think of that kind of question on your own. It’s sort of a two-way learning.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. Thank you. My curiosity is satisfied. Now I’m curious about your book, Great Leaders Have No Rules. What’s the big idea here?

Kevin Kruse
Well, the big idea is that most of the conventional wisdom around management is wrong. I’ve now had 30 years of being a serial entrepreneur. I crashed and burned my first company because I had no concept of leadership. Then my next couple of companies, they did okay, but it’s because I had outdated ideas of leadership. Better than no ideas, but they were outdated.

It was only when I really rejected the conventional wisdom, thought about how to make things work better from a management leadership perspective for the modern world, that’s when the last couple of companies have really taken off and done well.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Well, so could you give us an example of an outdated rule or principle or approach to management that is still a common practice that ought to be rejected?

Kevin Kruse
Yeah. Well, let me do the one – it’s the first chapter, which is close your open door policy. Most people – I made that as chapter number one because most people have heard that idea of having an open door policy. Of course, this day and age, Pete, we don’t all have physical doors.

It might be we’re in that open office environment, someone taps us on the shoulder to ask a question or even working alone, but someone messages us on Slack and kind of – it’s some digital form of “Got a minute.” It’s never just a minute.

Now, of course with all these management things, they come from a good place. The idea of the open door policy is it facilitates communication, it’s fast problem solving, it’s a flat organization, everybody can leapfrog each other’s bosses and go right to the top. All sounds good. But in this modern day world, there’s a lot of problems.

First problem, of course, is as the manager who’s’ getting interrupted all day, it’s almost impossible for us to do deep work, to do focused work, to think strategically. But Marshall Goldsmith writes about, it’s also a problem for the person coming through the door for a couple of reasons.

Because if someone’s coming in with unscheduled meetings all day, you’ve got to ask yourself did you hire the wrong person, did you not train them well, or do you have a culture that is not supportive – it’s not a culture of psychological safety. Are they so scared to make a decision, to solve a problem on their own, that they’ve got to run everything by you? Maybe you’ve got a delegation problem or a perfectionism problem. It’s a sign that maybe things aren’t well from their standpoint.

I put a lot of comments from readers in the book. As one person pointed out, they’re like, “I don’t want to talk to my boss if I’m interrupting her and it’s a bad time and she’s stressed out or whatever. I’d rather it be, ‘Hey, let’s schedule 15 minutes or 30 minutes. Here’s the topic, so you know in advance what it’s about.’”

I don’t say close your door completely. The idea is – I say, “Close your door, open your calendar,” meaning set office hours. To each their own. For some people it might be like, “Hey, in the morning if my door’s closed, that’s my deep focused work time. I invite you to focus on your work as well. But in the afternoon if my door is open or not, just tap and come on in because my office hours will be in the afternoon.”

Or maybe it’s, “Hey, Monday and Friday are open door policy days and in the middle of the week it’s all about making stuff. We’re not going to do the open door.” You can figure it out, but the idea is hm, if it’s getting abused, there’s something wrong going on, so how can you set some ground rules and then support your team members in a way where they don’t have to come through as often?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m digging that a lot. When you talked about making stuff versus managing, I think that came from the lean startup world somewhere, the makers’ versus mangers’ schedule. It’s really resonated with me in terms of there are some days where that’s all I need to do is I need to coordinate with a bunch of different people and a bunch of different little things and make sure everyone is equipped, empowered, informed, guided, raring to go and rock and roll.

There are other days where I need to enter deep isolation and creatively give birth to things.

Kevin Kruse
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
And having one-, two-, three-minute interruptions just disrupts everything in terms of I was having a brilliant idea, or it felt brilliant at least, and I was in the throes of writing it up and now where did it go? I don’t even know anymore because I replied to a message along the way.

Kevin Kruse
Yeah, that’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing. You say that you are making some boundaries, if you will, associated with “Hey, these times are open office hours. These times are not so much.” That almost sounds like a rule. You say great leaders have no rules, how are you thinking about the term ‘rule’ here?

Kevin Kruse
Let me say, the time where rules make sense is if it’s a law. Your company has to have a rule that follows the law or if it’s a safety issue. You don’t want people working on railroad tracks wearing headphones or something like that. If you’re really horrible at hiring, if you’ve hired a bunch of knuckleheads, rules might contain them a little bit.

But the problem with rules that aren’t the kind of required rules is that every time I bump into a rule, it takes away the chance for me to make a decision, for me to make a choice. When that happens, it becomes more your company than my company. Rules get in the way of conversation, rules get in the way of contemplation, and they disengage workers.

Pete, I’ll tell you, I stumbled on this 20 years ago. It’s a story I tell in the book, where I had sold my company. I was 30 years old and as part of the deal they acquired my company. I was going to become a partner, vice president, report to the CEO. He gave me a big speech about he’s not my boss. We’re just partners. We’re going to build the dream together. Each one vote. All this stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m inspired.

Kevin Kruse
Inspired and feel good. I’m engaged. It feels like my company. Then 30 days in, I had sent my first expense report in. The check comes back. I happen to notice that it’s short like four dollars. It’s not a lot of money, but I thought maybe I filled it out wrong or something.

I emailed our CFO, “Hey Don, it’s not a big deal, but did I fill out the form wrong?” He says, “No, we don’t reimburse for Post-it notes.” I emailed back, “Why?” He emailed back, “Wasteful expense.”

A buddy of mine, who had come into the company the same way, vice president, partner, all this stuff, he told me that he was shorted three dollars because while he was traveling on business he had ordered a beer with dinner and they don’t reimburse for beer. They said, “Look, you could have ordered a six-dollar milkshake and we would have paid for it, but we won’t pay for a three-dollar beer.”

This became what was known as the Post-it note wars. You could imagine I was feeling so good and then 30 days in when I’m told I’m not allowed – the rule is no purchases of Post-it notes. That’s it. It was like, “Wasteful expense.” Black and white. It’s a rule. How engaged did I feel? Did it feel like my company or their company? Did I feel like a VP or did I feel like someone with no power at all?

Then here’s the funny thing about it though, Pete. The second half of the story is I went and fought with the CEO. He said, “Kevin,” he said, “I had no idea that this was bothering people.” He said, “I don’t care about Post-it notes. All right, that rule is overturned. You win. Everybody can go buy Post-it notes. But,” he said, “Let me explain.” He said, “I don’t care about Post-it notes. I care about being frugal.”

He said “One of our values,” and it was an official company value, “was growth and profits.” It wasn’t the mission to be profitable, but it was like the air you breathe. You need it to go chase your mission.

He said that he used to walk through the office and see that everyone was buying Post-it notes and they were doodling on them while they were on the phone or in a meeting. They were writing phone messages on them when they could have used any other kind of paper.

He shows me this stack of ripped up squares of paper. He said instead of Post-it notes, he uses all the scrap paper from the printer and stuff, rips it twice and now he’s got these squares on his desk that he uses. He says, “It’s a symbol.” He said, “The no Post-it notes is a symbol of frugality. It’s a reminder about the culture and the value of being frugal, that profits matter and we care about it.”

The funny thing is even though he overrode that rule, I never again bought Post-it notes. It’s because now we had a conversation. We had a relationship. I understood, okay, the value of the organization is frugality and profits. The acceptable norm is rip up little pieces of paper and use those. Don’t be wasteful with Post-it notes and other kinds of things.

It totally changed my view on it even though I then had permission to do it. I wanted to support our values. I wanted to represent our values. Now that I realized it was a symbol, I wanted to have little pieces of ripped up paper on my desk, so the team members would realize I’m being frugal. But none of that would have happened if it had just been the rule.

This is where I get in a lot of trouble, Pete. If people already think it’s crazy. I’ve had several companies over the last 30 years. We’ve never had a dress code. We’ve never had a vacation policy. The employee handbook is always a page and a half long of the required legal stuff.

You do get people making mistakes, the people that will travel and order eight beers instead of one. But, to me, that’s a time for some feedback. That’s a coachable moment. Sometimes you’ve got to coach people out of the organization.

But all of the sudden, you’re not having people bump into a rule and then feeling disempowered, disengaged. It’s, “Oh, I did something that’s out of line with the agreed upon principals, the agreed upon values of our family. I get it and I’m going to be more likely then to conform.”

I think this goes in all areas of our life. People have rules in their marriages that I hear about all the time. I don’t think we should have rules in marriage. Again, I’m saying a rule is like that black and white thing that’s been imposed on you rather than something you’ve thought about and are deciding to do based on values.

I don’t think we should have rules for our teenagers. Me and my sisters had curfews growing up and it was a disaster. It wrecked the family dynamic. I’ve got three teenagers. I’ve never had a curfew. I might just be lucky. They’re model kids and everything.

But it’s not that I’ve ignored the issue of what time you’re coming home, but instead of saying, “The rule is 11 PM,” and at 11:02 we’re now shouting at each other and they’re grounded, it’s more like, “Hey, when are you going to come home tonight?” They say, “Well, I’ve got this really big party and it’s kind of far away.”

I said, “Well, you know I love you so much. I am not going to be able to sleep until you’re home and I have to get up early to take your brother to his basketball game, so what time are we thinking?” It’s a whole other thing that builds relationships, builds culture, and increases compliance.

People can get around rules really easy, but if they’re bought in, they’re less likely to abuse it. Then whether they get home at 10:55 or 11:05, who cares?

Pete Mockaitis
That is interesting because right now it’s sort of like your teenager’s on your side. It’s like he is helping you and the family by getting home on time as opposed to – and maybe even a little early.

Kevin Kruse
Yes, right.

Pete Mockaitis
He’s helping you out even more because you’re able to get some sleep extra versus when it’s just a rule, it’s like, “Well, I’m going to try and get every last second out of it because I can and I don’t feel engaged or bought in or like I’m on the team.” That’s very intriguing how you say rules disengage workers because it deprives them of an opportunity to make a decision, to have some free agency.

It was so interesting as you were talking about the Post-it note story and I heard that, “Hey, frugality is a value here.” I guess my thought is when it comes to values is like, well, the value I find much more empoweringly resonant is that we have rock star employees and we give them the very best tools they need to do their work with excellence.

So by golly, Kevin, you get the most fantastic Post-it notes that you can conceive of if they make you feel 2% more creative, engaged, empowered, supported. I want you to have the world’s finest Post-it notes. That’s kind of what gets me more fired up in terms of value, but-

Kevin Kruse
You and I think alike. Right. Because a discussion, a really important one around value.

Pete Mockaitis
But at the same time, when you see that what it means, it’s like, “Oh, okay,” and you can support that, especially I suppose at a higher level of VP. You’re like, “Well, yeah, profit is important and yeah, waste is not cool, so I can get excited about that.”

Kevin Kruse
Not to go too deep just on that one chapter of having no rules, but here’s the thing. Instead of rules, think of guardrails because I’m sure if there’s any chief financial officers out there, they’re like, “Oh, everyone’s going to be wasting on their travel budget,” or whatever. Well, fine, but instead of having a rule that people are going to bump into and circumvent or do stupid things to try to comply with the rule, give guardrails.

It’s like, “Hey, when you’re traveling 100 bucks-ish a night on a hotel is going to be normal and fine. If you’re in a major city, that might be 200. If you’re in the Midwest in a rural town, maybe 60. But spend the money like it’s your own and I just gave you some milestones for not staying at the Ritz Carlton kind of a thing.” Guardrails are okay.

It’s like, okay, I’ve still got some of that – I like what you said – like some free agency, some decision making, some choice. Do I stay at this hotel or that hotel?

Because otherwise the other thing is people will do the wrong thing to stay in the rule. They’ll say, “Well, I can’t stay at the hotel that’s right next to the client office because it’s 10 dollars too much over the rule, so I’ll stay farther away to save the 10 dollars, but now I’ll spend 100 dollars on a rental car.”  They just ended up wasting the expense to stay inside your hotel rule.

Pete Mockaitis
And the time. It’s like if I’ve got to truck it out another 20 – 30 minutes each way-

Kevin Kruse
No matter what that rule is, that’s the thing. They can circumvent it on purpose or just do more harm by trying to stay in it. That’s why they’re so imperfect.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Yeah, that’s nice. Replacing the rules with guardrails and a value. It’s so funny, I guess no one ever told me when I was an employee to spend the money like it was my own because I was super frugal. They would have benefited. But I was like, “Well, hey, I would never pay for a 280 dollar a night hotel if it were my money, but apparently none of you mind, so I’m going to do that.”

Kevin Kruse
That’s exactly right. As soon as you tell people they have a whatever it is, 50 dollar a day meal budget when they travel, all the expense reports come back at 49 dollars and 79 cents. Everybody is spending up to the rule because they think “Well, that’s like free money. That’s fine. Let’s get that second beer or let’s get the appetizer.” If you just say, “Hey, here’s kind of the normal spending patterns. Please spend our money as if it were your own,” you’ll save money that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Kevin Kruse
Absolutely. And move faster. I had Gary on my team just the other day. We’re doing software development. He’s like, “Hey, listen, I need like a backup Android phone to test the-“ I’m like, “Gary, just go buy it.” He’s like, “But I don’t know which phone to buy.” I’m like, “Spend the money as if it’s your own,” and boom conversation’s done. He’s empowered and we’re all good.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, awesome. Well, hey, while we’re on that note, so instead of issuing rules, you have a guiding principal there, spend the money as if it’s your own. That’s just a great sentence that can offer a lot of clarity and empowerment. You’ve got some more?

Kevin Kruse
I don’t know if I’ve got them as pithy as that. But the thing on the rules is kind of overreaching. That’s a big one, but that’s just one example of the many different kind of accepted management things. Here’s the rulebook. Here’s the employee handbook and all that. We talked about open door. It’s time to close the open door.

Another one that is resonating with a lot of people is this idea of being likeable but not liked. Now people don’t view that as normal management wisdom, but often we have this need as especially the younger managers, this was my big fault early on, is that we have this kind of need to be liked and so we’re the poplar boss, the nice boss, people like us.

It’s okay to like to be liked. It’s nice. It feels good to be liked. But if you have that need, that is going to get in the way of you making tough decisions, making tough decisions quickly, giving people feedback that they need to grow and prosper.

If I need Pete to like me and I’m your boss, it’s going to slow me down from giving you the hard feedback that will make you better. The reality is, Pete, you probably don’t need me as a friend; you need me as a leader. You need me as a coach.

This is one of those things where – and it’s the more current wisdom is like, “Hey, flat organizations and we’re all equal,” and all that kind of stuff. I used to tell people that. I would say, “Oh, I’m not your boss. I just have a different role on the team.” That sounds nice. Well, until I’ve got to either lay people off, give them tough feedback, promote someone out of the three people that are qualified. Well, now they know that I’m not just a friend and all the rest.

That’s just sort of another one that’s been resonating with people is don’t be a jerk. You want to be likeable. But don’t necessarily be liked. You want to not be attached to the outcome of whether you’re actually liked or not.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I think that’s great. If you need to be liked, I think it’s great to make sure you’ve got some people outside of work who like you.

Kevin Kruse
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
You’ve got that need being fulfilled successfully and you can do what you need to do inside there. Then when you say being likeable, you’re just sort of talking about just general friendly and respectful ways of being or do you have any particulars there?

Kevin Kruse
Well, yeah. It definitely starts with that. There’s no need to, again – I think I’ve got another chapter that talks about lead with love. The old school wisdom would be purposefully put up barriers between you and your team members. You don’t eat lunch with them. You don’t socialize with them. You don’t talk about your personal life because you must remain objective and you must remain fair. You don’t want your emotions interfering.

Well, that’s too much in the wrong direction. One of the biggest ways that people will feel engaged at work, so engagement is just how we feel – how committed we are to our organization and its goals. 70% of this engagement, how we feel about work, comes from who our boss is. Now if we think our boss cares about us as individuals as opposed to cogs in a machine, our engagement goes way up.

It’s okay to get close to your people. It’s okay for me to ask about your weekend, to know the names of your children and what they’re up to, to know that you’re training for a marathon or something, even to know when you’re struggling at home or you’ve got a parent who’s ill. You don’t want to put up these artificial barriers.

It can be down to these little things, where you’re walking through the hallway of your organization, are you going to keep your head up, make eye contact with everybody, smile and say good morning or are you going to keep your eyes down and hope nobody stops you because you really don’t care. You just want to get back to your desk and get some work done. It’s like be likeable, be sociable, don’t put up these artificial barriers.

Remember when I say lead with love, you don’t have to like someone to love them. That sounds a little weird and it’s weird to talk about loving your team members in this whole Me Too era. I’m not talking about inappropriate love or anything like that. I’m talking about this greater love and compassion for fellow man and woman. It’s about this higher level. The Greeks had a word for it called agape love. It’s like this universal love that you see in all of the major religions.

If I am going to serve my team members, if I’m going to lead my team members, even if I don’t like somebody, I can still hope for the best. I can still care about them. I can still realize if I had lived their life, maybe I would be just like them. That’s where it gets into it. Don’t be a jerk is a good starting point. Then actually connect and care with your people is how you really activate that.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m right with you there. Loving in terms of willing the good of the other as opposed to liking just like, “I enjoy your presence and want to hang out more because it’s fun.”

Kevin Kruse
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
Nice distinction there. I’d love to get your take when you talked about the manager leader walking around and holding their head up, I want to get your input on and a couple of guests have cited this Harvard Business Review study about how the majority of managers are uncomfortable talking with their colleagues for any reason. I just think that is so striking. What’s your take on what’s behind this?

Kevin Kruse
Well, I’m not familiar with that particular study, but similar ones I have come across. There’s a couple of things that are going on. Pete, just recently, last year or two with this AI coach that we’ve been working on, we’ve been going deep into personality theory. Personality is the number one driver of behavior and we’re talking about leadership behaviors.

The interesting thing is, especially in large organizations, managers are supposed to be focusing on results, business results, but also relationships. How do you attract and retain great talent? But that relationship part generally falls to the side. People are profits. People chase the profits. These managers get promoted for getting things done – things, tasks. The more task focused they are, the more they get promoted.

Once you get up to a certain level, you’re really good at the productivity stuff, at tasks, you’re not so good at the people stuff. I think that it doesn’t help when the traditional wisdom is that that is okay. That it’s like hey, don’t get close to your people. That’s where I think people start to get uncomfortable.

This day and age, we know that, again, trust drives engagement. What drives trust? Authenticity. If Pete comes out and says, “Hey, you know what team? Here’s what I’m really good at. Here’s where I’m not really good at. I’m going to tell you when I’ve got the answer. Ask me anything. If I don’t know, I’ll just tell you I don’t know and I’m going to go find out. By the way, here’s the three things I did wrong last year.”

Well, when we hear that from Pete, all of the sudden it’s like, “Oh wow, Pete’s like a relatable person and he’s not going to lie to us. He’s not lying to us. If I mess up, I can go to him and let him know. If I want to try something, it’s not like, ‘Oh, this experiment goes wrong and I’ve derailed my career.’ It’s ‘Oh, we were innovative. It didn’t work out. Now we’re going to try something else.’”

The old school was not taught – I had mentors tell me when I was in my 20s, “Kevin, leadership is acting. Kevin, wear your leadership mask when you arrive in the office.” People would talk about that. Thankfully I think that’s changing, but when you’ve been drilled into that and you’re task focused anyway, you’re not going to be too comfortable talking to people at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful. Thank you. Well, Kevin, tell me, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Kevin Kruse
No, again, you can hear in my voice and I can hear it in yours, Pete, I geek out on leadership. This is a leadership book, but to me, leadership is a superpower because leadership just means influence. When you learn to lead yourself, influence yourself, you can get to health, wealth, happiness. When you learn to lead, influence, your marriage, your children, you have a great family life. When you learn to lead, to influence at work, your career takes off.

That’s why I’m so geeked out about it. Thanks for the opportunity to really have some fun with some of these concepts.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh sure thing. Absolutely. Good times. Now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Kevin Kruse
Well I like “Life is about making an impact, not an income.”

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. How about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Kevin Kruse
I don’t know if it’s a favorite, but one that stood out from one of my earlier books was this study they did at Princeton showing that taking notes by hand is far superior than writing them on a laptop keyboard or a smartphone. It’s called The Pen is Mightier than the Keyboard. That’s the name of that study.

It’s because when we can type, then we tend to just be an automatic recorder of the word of the sounds without processing it. When we have to write them, we have to think about what we’re hearing, quickly analyze it, shorten it, put it down and then it anchors it in our memory.

Pete Mockaitis
That makes a lot of sense. I always prefer to use typing for notes just because I can type so much faster than I can write with a pen, but that’s kind of the idea is because you can write slower, you must do some prioritization.

Kevin Kruse
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
And capture fewer words. That process is powerful. Okay. Thank you. That’s helpful. It’s all connecting for me over here. How about a favorite book?

Kevin Kruse
I’m a huge reader. I probably read more than 50 books a year. A classic favorite is Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. It’s a great one. Well, since you’re reading so much, let’s ask. How about a favorite book or two released in the last five years?

Kevin Kruse
Yeah, Daring Greatly from Brene Brown really gets – again, you don’t think of it as a classic business or leadership book, but that helped me to understand issues related to self-worth, external validation, which gets you then to be more authentic. Very practical book from Kim Scott is Radical Candor on how to give feedback. Zero to One is an entrepreneur book about startups and positioning. Peter Thiel. Those are more recent ones.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Thank you. How about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Kevin Kruse
Yeah, I don’t have anything novel or unique. I’m a live for my calendar guy. I just use Google Calendar. Again, I like writing notes by hand. Sometimes I will then transfer them into Evernote. I use a Moleskine notebook or some kind of paper notebook. It’s just classic tools.

Pete Mockaitis
Now I’ve got to ask, when you are taking notes by hand and then get them into Evernote, are you just taking a photo or using a scanner? How do you make that happen smoothly?

Kevin Kruse
Yeah. They have, of course, tools now, including notebooks, where you write in the notebook and it automatically goes into Evernote. Then there’s ones where it’s special paper, you write on it, and then it scans and it does the OCR into Evernote. I don’t do anything that fancy.

What I tend to do is I write notes through – I fill up these books fast. A lot of it is not worthy of sending to Evernote. But if something is worthy of sending to Evernote, I’ll just snap it on my phone, upload it as a photo to Evernote and then I’ll just write a couple of words that I know will match if I’m looking to do a search. That’s just sort of a poor man’s version of getting it into Evernote.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh sure. Yeah. How about a favorite habit, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Kevin Kruse
It’s great you ask everybody this question. This starts before I get to work, but every morning I start – I’m a big believer in having an attitude of gratitude. I always just try to think of three things that I’m grateful for. Every morning I try to think of something different. Just changes my mindset in an abundance mindset. It destresses me. Maximizes my world view going into work.

Then at work the first thing I do, highly recommend it, is I just consciously think of what is my most important task for the day at hand and I’ll scrawl it on top of my printed calendar for the day, again, by hand just to kind of anchor it there.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks?

Kevin Kruse
Well, the one that is the most controversial is – I wrote a book called 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management and one of the things I found – it wasn’t my idea. I interviewed 300 highly successful people, self-made billionaires, millionaires. None of them used a to-do list. They only worked from their calendar.

The phrase is ‘schedule it, don’t list it.’ If you really want to do something, pause and think what day, what time and for how long are you going to do it. If you’re not willing to do that, then maybe you shouldn’t plan to do it. That changed my world. That was a couple years ago. I don’t use a to-do list anymore.

Every day I get ten emails telling me I’m a stupid, crazy jerk for telling people that. I get ten emails from people who say I’ve changed their life because they learned it.

Pete Mockaitis
Fascinating. If folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Kevin Kruse
The book Great Leaders Have No Rules available on Amazon.com, all bookstores, wherever they want to buy that. If they want to get free trial and check out Leadx with Coach Amanda, that’s at Leadx.org, O-R-G.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Kevin Kruse
Well, in the theme of the book, I would say challenge the rules. Even if you believe you should have rules, challenge them. Make sure you are asking the team members that you’re working with, the higher-ups, quote/unquote, “What is behind this rule?” Again, once I asked about the Post-it note rule, my view of it changed.

I would invite you to do the same thing outside of work. Even if you say, “Kevin’s crazy. My teenagers need a curfew.” Okay, but ask your kids why do they think that curfew’s in place, why is it the time that it is, how do they feel about it. At the very least, even if you keep the curfew, you will have strengthened that relationship and strengthened their commitment to compliance.

Pete Mockaitis
Kevin, this has been a blast. Thanks so much for sharing the good word. Good luck with your book and all your adventures.

Kevin Kruse
Thanks Pete and thanks for you doing your work and spreading the word out there too. You’re helping a lot of people.