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Jun 01
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303: Inspiring Teams through Purpose with Fred Kofman

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Fred Kofman says: "The way to integrate a team is not by payments, not by rewards and punishments, but inspiring them."

Fred Kofman shares how to unlock the power of purpose to strengthen your team and drive better performance.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The first hurdle to working in a group
  2. How to find the inspiration in your work
  3. How to solve the problem of disinformation

About Fred

Fred Kofman is a Leadership Advisor at Google and former vice president of executive development and leadership philosopher at LinkedIn, where he worked with the top CEO’s and executives around the world. Born in Argentina, Kofman came to the United States as a graduate student, where he earned his PhD in advanced economic theory at U.C. Berkeley. He taught management accounting and finance at MIT for six years before forming his own consulting company, Axialent, and teaching leadership workshops for corporations such as General Motors, Chrysler, Shell, Microsoft, and Citibank. At its height, his company had 150 people and created and taught programs to more than 15,000 executives. Sheryl Sandberg writes about him in her book Lean In, claiming Kofman “will transform the way you live and work.”

 

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Fred Kofman Interview Transcript

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

Fred Kofman
My pleasure, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so curious to hear, so you had a nice run there as the Vice President of Executive Development at LinkedIn. You just recently made a switch. What are you up to now and what’s the story?

Fred Kofman
Well, I’m now an advisor for Leadership Development at Google. Well, the story is I would say a transition, but along the same line.

I’d been with LinkedIn for five years. They are – I feel that they are all my brothers and sisters. It was an amazing opportunity that Jeff, the CEO, gave me to work with all of them. But after five years I think I worked with almost every executive in the company, so my mission was fulfilled.

I had shared what I can do and what I can help people learn and I felt that the value of my contribution was going to start diminishing quickly because it would be mostly repeats or tweaks, whereas there were a lot of other organizations that could use that and I wanted to offer my gift more broadly.

I agreed with the people in LinkedIn that I would be out in the market and combine the work I did with them with some work I would do for other companies. Then when I went out, some people from Google asked me if I could consider doing a more extended engagement with them, a project that would be more absorbing.

I thought it was a fantastic opportunity, so I just accepted and I’m here. I’m beginning this project of Leadership Development or advising them in the area of leadership development.

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool. I’ve been enjoying digging into your book a little bit, The Meaning Revolution. Could you give us how do you conceptualize it in terms of what’s the big idea behind the book and why is it important now?

Fred Kofman
There’s a fundamental problem that every person that is trying to work with a team has to solve. It starts with a couple, just two people or a family, a small team and is the same problem that an organization with hundreds of thousands of people will have.

That’s to try to combine or integrate the need to have each person be accountable, to do what they’re supposed to and also the need to have each person cooperate for the achievement of the common goal.
This seems obvious. You want a group of people that work together. Every company wants the same thing. We want people to work together and each person doing what they’re supposed to do.

But there’s a hidden problem with this. There’s some incompatibility between these two imperatives. That is that if you evaluate people based on their what’s called OKRs or KPIs, which are the key results or key performance indicators, people are going to focus on their own individual jobs.

Pete Mockaitis
Indeed.

Fred Kofman
And they won’t really collaborate with others and they will even build silos to make sure other people don’t prevent them from doing what they need to do.

Today we live in an illusion where people think they are getting paid or that they’re hired to do what they call their jobs, but they’re all wrong. Every person is wrong when they say, “My job is accounting,” or “My job is sales,” or “My job is engineering.” I think everybody’s job is to help the company succeed, just like every player’s job is to help the team win.

But a defensive player will think that his or her job is to stop goals and the offensive player will say my job is to score. That’s not wrong, but it’s not true either. The job is to help the team win.

You normally do your job as a defensive player by stopping the other team from scoring, but in some instances, under some conditions, it would be better for the team if you left your position and you went forward and tried to score. For example, if you’re losing one – zero with five minutes to go.

It’s a typical strategy that teams will send the defensive players to the offense to try to tie the game. But if a person thinks, “Oh, no, no, my job is just to defend,” they will not want to go forward.

The same thing happens in a company. If you feel that your job is to reduce costs, you are going to be less interested in satisfying the customer because it could be expensive to satisfy the customer, even though the best thing for the company to achieve its mission would be to pay attention to the customer.

Or if you’re in customer retention – I tell this story in the book about somebody that was trying to sign off on Comcast and saying, “I don’t want your service.” It went viral because that was a crazy conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Fred Kofman
It lasted like ten minutes with the customer service

Pete Mockaitis
Cancel the account. Yeah, I remember that.

Fred Kofman
Exactly. That costed Comcast tens of millions of dollars in brand loss – in brand, I would say, distraction.

This was a stupid tradeoff that a person made because they think or they have a performance indicator that is how many people cancel the service during your time, when you’re on the phone.

The less people that cancel their service, the better your performance, so of course you’re going to try to convince everybody not to and you will even try anything to the point that you’re going to upset the customers and then create a brand disaster for Comcast.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Then that’s making a lot of sense in terms of your job is broader than your job description, whether it’s to prevent customers from leaving or what not. Then at the same time, given that there are perhaps thousands of things that an organization needs to do in order to succeed and you’ve got to have some degree of division of labor and responsibility.

How do you think about that appropriate balance between folks sort of executing on their key performance indicators versus doing whatever is necessary to help the organization win?

Fred Kofman
Yeah. That is what the book is about. I’ll give you a hint; it’s not a balance. It’s a relationship of subordination. The primary goal is to achieve the mission. That is the super-ordinating imperative. That’s why you’re here.

If you’re a soccer team, you’re there to win the game. You’re not there to say, “Well, how do we balance winning the game with having more shots or having less goals scored against.” It really doesn’t matter. It’s better to win seven – six than to lose one – zero. You say, “They only scored one goal against us,” yeah, but you lost. It’s not really balance; it’s a subordination.

But it’s very difficult to try to incentivize this subordination because the moment you tell people, “We’re all here to win,” and you can’t observe what people do directly or even if you observe, know if people are doing the right thing or not, because many times it requires judgment or discretion.

When you give people a collective incentive and you say, “We all win together or we all lose together,” you become vulnerable to predators and parasites, people that will come and prey upon the system because they are –

For example, if you pay an average sales commission, like the whole everybody sells and then you pool the money and you pay every salesperson the same, well, all the people that are below average would love your company and they will come and work for you and all the people that are above average are going to leave because they are going to be brought down by the average.

In a sense, average pay drives the best ones away, if I can do a little verse, and makes the worst ones stay. That’s a very unfortunate result in economics that if you want to encourage individual excellence, you have to evaluate people by their own individual performance. But if you evaluate people through their individual performance, you’re discouraging them from contributing to the team objective.

That is in mathematical terms an insolvable dilemma. If you just take self-interested agents and you try to create an organization, you can’t. It just doesn’t work. There’s no clever incentive system that will solve this problem.

The book is about understanding why that’s the case, but then seeing how do you manage this problem better. What can you do?

Very, I would say, surprisingly for me in an ironic sense, the solution of the most material, the hardest problem is soft. I would say the solution to the economic problem is really spiritual because the way you have to integrate a team is not by payments, not by rewards and punishments, but by inspiring them. That’s where leadership or what I call transcendent leadership comes into play.

You have to give people the opportunity to participate in a project that they feel passionate about. They’re not doing it just because you pay them, but they’re doing it because it makes sense, because it fulfills a deep longing they have in their lives. It is done in a way that is ethical and makes them proud. It also gives them the chance to connect with other people who they just crave to be in community with.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that sounds like a great place to be. Could you maybe help us go from a bit of a point A to point B sort of given what is currently the case in many workplaces? What are some of the very first steps to bring it into that spiritually robust, purpose-filled great place?

Fred Kofman
Yeah. Okay, let’s just say that some of your listeners are entrepreneurs or leaders in existing companies. The first step is to find the deeper meaning of what the company does.

Let’s imagine that I’m a doctor and I go home and I have a seven-year-old daughter that asks me, “Daddy, what do you do?” I say, “I make money.” Well, that’s not very inspiring. She goes, “Oh, well, good.” If she asks me why is that important, “Oh, because I can buy nice things for you.” She’d understand that and that’s okay. We have a nice house or we can eat tasty food and so on. But it’s not very uplifting.

If I dig deeper, what do I do “Well, I cure the sick,” or “I use medicine to make people well, to help them reestablish their health.” But if I go deeper, it’s like, “Well, when people are at risk and they have illnesses or they feel terrible or they are hurt, I help them first survive, and then come back to health,” and so on and so forth.

If I describe that as my job, as my profession, well, I feel uplifted. I feel happy and my daughter will be happy too. She will be proud to tell other kids at school what her daddy does.

I know it sounds a little perhaps simplistic, but if you are running an organization in the market, the people that are buying your product or service are finding some way in which that product or service makes their lives better. It makes them sufficiently better that they are willing to part with their hard-earned cash to acquire your product or service.

Don’t focus, as Peter Drucker, said, don’t focus on the drill because people don’t really want drills. Focus on the hole. What people want is holes. That’s why they buy drills, to make them. The question would be what is the human need, the human aspiration that your product or service is helping people to address and take care of.

You need to know that and you need to feel that in your bones, like deep inside that you’re super proud of what you do. If you’re not proud, like if you’re not on fire, you’re not going to be able to light up the people that you want to inspire. You need to feel it inside and then be able to communicate and invite people who join you in that project.

Don’t invite people to work and say “Okay, come and put your effort and I’m going to pay you.” Of course, that’s the economic deal, but the economic deal will only get you average performance.

Pete Mockaitis
This is really reminding me, Fred, of a fun chat I had. I think I was freshly hired at Bain & Company. I was chatting my fellow consultants in between some training stuff. Somehow it just sort of came up, it was like, “Hey do we do good as strategy consultants?” For me, it was kind of like, the answer was of course or else why would you have ever taken this job.

Then I went on I guess what was a rant associated with, “Well, what we do is we make companies more valuable which is extremely important because folks who are saving for retirement or for college education need for the stocks in their portfolio to appreciate and we help make that possible so that their dreams can come true.

Non-profits and foundations within their endowments have their investments placed in a basket of equities that individually we are helping make. And the leverage of us doing it is so huge in terms of being 23 years old and not having a lot of experience yet and trusted to tackle things that are going to liberate millions and billions of dollars of economic value that …”

So I went on this whole rant and the others were kind of like, “Whoa, I just thought this would be a good place so I could get into Harvard Business School or something.” I was surprised. I guess for me, I call it naïve or what, but I would just sort of assume, “But, of course, you would only choose a job that had deep purpose for you or else you would have chosen a different job.”

But different people, I quickly learned, operate from different starting points in their career decision making.

Fred Kofman
Absolutely. Yet, if you allow me, Pete, to challenge you a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Please.

Fred Kofman
I think you missed the most important part of your job when you described the benefits. I agree with every one you listed, but for me at the top of the list, not for me, economically, at the top of the list, the reason why these companies are going to become more valuable is because they will serve their customers.

The real value in the economy is not the mission of giving jobs to people or money to the investors. The real value in an economy, the one that propels humanity forward, is the competition to give value to the customers. That’s what good consultants help companies do. That’s what the mission of every company needs to be.

If not, we become a bureaucracy. But, “Oh look, we’re doing so much good because we’re hiring all these families.” Okay, that’s like 1% of the good you are doing. Don’t forget the 99% because the real good you’re doing is that people are buying your product because they find it useful in their lives.

You have no idea how much value you’re adding because as I say, if I use an Apple computer, it would cost me maybe 1,000 dollars to buy, but I would have been willing to pay 5,000 dollars. Even if Apple makes a profit of 2 or 300 hundred dollars, I made a surplus value or a consumer profit of 4,000.

Now, nobody knows that because there’s no place where I say I’m willing to pay 5,000. That’s something only I know how much value this computer is going to give me or how much would I be willing to pay for it.

I find it a little problematic today when people talk about social enterprises or “We’re doing good,” or we hire whatever people you’re hiring and say, “Well, so many families eat because of us.” Yes, that’s true, but that’s so small compared to the wealth that you’re creating in terms of life richness, not necessarily measured by money.

But we at Google today is the Input/Output conference for developers and just looking at all the developments in artificial intelligence and the assistant and all that, there’s thousands of people here that are just day and night thinking non-stop, “How can we make people’s lives better?”

There was a clip of a lady that had a difficult handicap. I’m guessing something similar to what Steven Hawking’s had. The kind of life that she was able to live because of the products that were created, it’s infinite. There’s no money in the world that would pay for that or she would not be willing to pay to access the level of quality of life that she’s able to achieve through some of these new technologies.

I want to be very emphatic. I emphasize this in the book, particularly in the last part, that there’s no system that we know that creates social cooperation and the growth and development of humanity like a market system, where everybody opts in because they think they’re getting a good deal or opts out otherwise.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that. It does connect and resonate and it’s easy to get kind of lost in the weeds a bit. As we discussed this, it kind of reminds me of the book, The Goal, in a manufacturing context in thinking about you had all these performance indicators about manufacturing, but it’s really just about making an efficient product such that it can be sold profitably and then that is enriching the individual end-user who are engaging it.

I’d love it, Fred, if you could tackle, maybe just bring to life a little bit some industries that might be kind of tricky in terms of finding that fulfillment and purpose. I guess some of them could just be controversial in terms of weapons or – well, I could name all kinds of controversial issues, like weapons, tobacco, alcohol, certain insurance drugs, insurance products, hedge funds.

Could you give us a few examples of how “No, no, if you’re working here is actually awesome in this way.” Or maybe you say, “Yeah, maybe work somewhere else.” What do you think about some of the trickier ones?

Fred Kofman
Well, let’s with weapons. What would be the need that a person buying a weapon can satisfy?

Let’s just say an honorable need. I’m not talking about a criminal buying a gun to murder people or to rob them. I’m talking about good people because if you’re going to be inspired, you have to believe that your mission is conducive to some higher good. If you can’t come up with anything, then you shouldn’t work in that industry.

I’ve never worked with gun manufacturers, but I’ve heard the arguments, so I’m sure you have heard them too. What would be the argument for a noble goal that weapons could pursue?

Pete Mockaitis
It’s interesting, when I said weapons, I was originally thinking of tanks and jets and nukes for nations. But I guess on the personal-

Fred Kofman
Okay, that works too. That works. What would be the reason to – let’s just say you’re working for McDonnell Douglas and you’re a leader and you want to inspire some young people to come work there.

Pete Mockaitis
I would suppose you would say, “We are keeping our servicemen and women safer with these offerings. We can rest easier in our homes, in our nation, knowing that we can resist the threat of a foreign power who would seek to kill and enslave us and we don’t have to worry about that much on a day-by-day basis because we have brave people equipped with these useful tools.”

Fred Kofman
I would work for you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Fred Kofman
That’s inspiring. Again, I’m not claiming that this is true and that there are no weapons manufacturers that are evil. There are weapon manufacturers that work for the other guys too and they create the possibility of aggression or dominance or all these horrible things.

But at best, it’s possible to work for a certain kind of military-grade weapon manufacturer or even a gun manufacturer and say, “Yeah, it’s about protection. It’s about maintaining the quality of life, of sleeping well because I am aware that any thug can come and abuse you.” That’s inspiring.

Again, it’s not the weapon, but what is it that the weapon allows a human being to do that will allow this person to take care  of important human concerns in an ethical way, meaning without aggressing or without hurting other people in a violent manner.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. Now that that is well-established in terms of your view or purpose in terms of how folks are enriched by the existence of your product and service.

If you zoom into sort of the day-in/day-out of work life, how can we stay connected to that and let the meaning really serve to be energizing and empowering day after day. I’d particularly like to hear that from a vantage point of maybe not an executive or a founder, but perhaps a manager who only has a few direct reports.

Fred Kofman
Yeah, well, let’s start at the bottom, not even a manager with individual contributor. There’s a great story that I found and I use it in the book that refers to President Kennedy’s visit to NASA. I think it was 1962.

He went to NASA and was touring the facility and there was a custodian that was mopping the floors. Just being gracious, the President stopped and said hello and asked him, “So what’s your job here?” He said, “I’m helping to put a man on the moon, Mr. President.”

That is culture. That is a culture that clarifies every day what are we here to do. He was certainly mopping the floors, but that’s not the way he felt about it. Just like it’s different to put brick over brick than to build a cathedral. If you keep the cathedral or the man on the moon in mind, then everything you do takes a different meaning.

This is true, there’s lots of studies. I quote several of them in my book about hospitals for example, and you’ll see the custodians in the hospitals finding a lot of meaning in helping people regain their health and cleaning their rooms and even chatting with them and bringing some joy on the nurses too.

You say, “Oh, some of these are menial tasks. They have to change the sheets.” Yeah, but in the process of changing the sheets, they’re making contact with another human being. They are participating in their life. They are giving them hope when they feel down, when they’re distressed.

It’s profoundly meaningful. It’s almost like a saintly thing to do. You’re going and touching with love and compassion people who are suffering. That’s an amazing opportunity that you only get if you work in a hospital.

I know we may consider some of these things like, “Oh, it doesn’t really matter. You’re just washing clothes in a hospital or making rooms in a hotel.” You say, “Those things are just worthless, meaningless tasks,” but the truth is there are people who do find a lot of meaning in that, but it’s not about the task. It’s always about the goal, the human concern that is being taken care of through the task.

If you’re a manager, then your job is first to remember that and second to remind other people in your team what are you really doing, maintain this awareness day in and day out and everything we do is for that. Everything we do is to fulfill our mission, the service that we’re proud to provide to the community or humanity in general.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. I’m with you there. Then you also mentioned a few problems that crop up within the organization in terms of things being disorganized with disinformation or disillusion. Do you have a couple actionable steps you recommend for hitting these pieces?

Fred Kofman
Yes. You may have a clear mission and everybody could be aligned to the mission, but different people see different parts of the organization and have different opinions about what would be the best way to accomplish the mission. I call this touching the elephant.

There’s a great story of a king bringing five blind men and putting them next to an elephant and telling them to describe the shape of the elephant. They start arguing. One of them says, “The elephant is like a column,” touching the leg. The other one says, “Oh no, it’s like a wall,” touching the side. The other one said, “No, no, it’s like a snake,” touching the trunk and so on and so forth.

The king at the end says to them, “Well, you’re all right and you’re all wrong. You’re all right because the part you are touching is really like you describe, but you’re all wrong because you are … extrapolating the part you touch and using it to elicit or to infer what’s the shape of the elephant as a whole.”

Many times in organizations we do that. People are close to some part of the organization and they think that the whole organization is an extrapolation of the part they perceive. The ones that see the organization are so far away, it would be like seeing the elephant from a mile away, that you can see the whole thing, but you don’t have any granularity and you don’t have the details that are required to make intelligent decisions.

I call this disinformation. Different people have different information and nobody knows the whole picture with the level of granularity that’s required to make intelligent decisions. How do you solve this?

Well, if people are aligned on the mission and they know how to share information in a non-arrogant way, I call it humility, then they can come together and each person can say what they see, and what they infer, and what they experience in their immediate environment.

Then the other people can integrate that and create the pool of common information out of which they can make an intelligent decision together, what would be the best way to proceed to accomplish our mission. But that requires kind of gathering the intelligence of everybody and creating this collective consciousness, this group awareness that encompasses the information that everybody’s bringing.

That is surprisingly difficult to do. After I wrote the book I was having some interactions with General Stanley McChrystal who wrote the book Team of Teams. It’s surprising how in the military and particularly having to fight guerrilla warfare that is very decentralized, they were dealing with exactly the same problem in spades.

One of the biggest managerial revolutions that McChrystal triggered in the US military was the creation of the Special Operations Command, the Joint Special Operations Command as a learning adaptive network, as a group of people who were operating in a decentralized manner, but were creating this shared consciousness to have all their resources available to make intelligent decisions to win the war, not win each particular battle, but to achieve the mission.

Pete Mockaitis
Very nice. Thank you. Well, tell me, Fred, anything else you really want to make sure to cover before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Fred Kofman
I’d say that one of the consequences of this revolution from money to meaning is that you can’t do it as an addition to your personality. You can’t say, “Well, I’m who I am and then I’m going to do this.” The inspiration to use meaning as a galvanizing force, that inspiration requires you to be in a certain form, not just to do things. But who you are really creates the drive for people to follow you.

You have to earn your moral authority from your life. You can’t use formal authority to do this or monetary authority or economic power. You are trying to elicit the internal commitment from people so that they give you what you have no way to extract.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a nice turn of phrase. ‘They give what you have no way to extract.’ Thank you. Now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Fred Kofman
Well, this is a quote from Mother Theresa that says, “Not everybody can do great things, but everybody can do small things with great love.” I find that very inspiring that this being a moral hero is not about having super powers; it’s about doing day-to-day things with great integrity, with great care, with great compassion. But it’s something I’d like to … in my life.

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

Fred Kofman
Well, I’ll tell you a shocking study if it’s favorite, but it’s the fact that the level of engagement worldwide is about 12 – 13%, so meaning almost 90% of the people hate their jobs. That’s incredible that so much suffering is happening because we don’t know how to work together and in way that uplifts human beings.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. How about a favorite book?

Fred Kofman
I’d say from Ludwig von Mises, Human Action. It’s not an easy book to read, but it’s a treatise in economics that changed my life.

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

Fred Kofman
Gmail. Google search and Gmail. I think they’re incredible service opportunities. They’re so well designed.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite habit, a personal practice of yours?

Fred Kofman
I won’t turn on my phone until I finish meditating, doing my yoga exercises, and going to the gym.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. How about a particular nugget, a piece that you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks and has them quoting it back to you?

Fred Kofman
The distinction between a victim of circumstance or being a player and responding to whatever life gives you.

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

Fred Kofman
The best way would be to look at my profile on LinkedIn. I put hundreds of short videos and papers there. They’re publically available. There’s also a website called Conscious.LinkedIn.com. There’s also the book on Amazon or my previous book, Conscious Business.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, perfect. Is there a final call to action or challenge that you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Fred Kofman
Yeah, find something that inspires you then live in that space. Don’t waste your life doing something that doesn’t have that juice.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Fred, thank you so much for taking the time to share this wisdom and expertise. It’s powerful stuff and I just wish you tons of luck and all the meaning that you’re bringing to folks.

Fred Kofman
Thank you, Pete. It was a pleasure talking to you.

Feb 07
0

259: How the Best Teams Operate with Adrian Gostick

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Adrian Gostick says: "Customer experience will never exceed the employee experience."

Adrian Gostick talks about what the best teams today are doing differently.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The differing forces that motivate each generation
  2. How to encourage your leaders to initiate regular career discussions
  3. The best ways to disagree without causing offense

About Adrian 

Adrian Gostick is a global workplace expert and thought leader in the fields of corporate culture, teamwork, and engagement. He is founder of the training company The Culture Works and author of the #1 New York Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestsellers All In and The Carrot Principle. His books have been translated into 30 languages and have sold 1.5 million copies around the world.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Adrian Gostick Interview Transcript

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

Adrian Gostick
Well, thanks Pete. Thanks for your interest in our work.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. Well, I’m quite interested, and it seems like you are too, and you apply it in multiple contexts, when it comes to studying teams and great performance, as well as in the context of being a high school soccer coach. So, I’m curious what inspires you to volunteer this way and keep volunteering this way.

Adrian Gostick
Well, it’s something I’ve done for several years. I started when my son was the high school goalkeeper and I got involved, and it’s just great to see young people need that connection to team. It’s one thing we’ve noticed in our research too, is that especially Millennials, Gen Z coming up into the workplace, really sparked great teams. And unfortunately so many of us as managers, maybe we’re not as good at creating those great teams. So it’s kind of fun to try some of our philosophies out on the soccer pitch.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m intrigued. Any stories of sort of leadership, team management sparking goodness coming to life with the high schools?

Adrian Gostick
It’s funny – I think in life we learn more from our mistakes than we do anything positive that we do, unfortunately. And when I first started I was assisting the head coach, and I don’t think you realize the importance of these concepts of motivation. It was more about the Xs and the Os, and he was very good at that. But slowly over the years we’ve helped him understand that you’re going to get a lot more out of these young men when you begin to understand their drivers – what motivates each of them individually, and quit worrying so much about the Xs and Os and worry about each individual – what drives them, what motivates them. And now he’s got a team that for the first time ever was in the state finals last year. And he’s got a team of young men who walk through fire for him, but it didn’t come until he began worrying about the soft side of leading people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. So then, I understand as I’m flipping through here, that is much of the good stuff inside your upcoming book The Best Team Wins. Tell us what’s sort of the main idea within this book, and why it is important here and now.

Adrian Gostick
Chester Elton – my co-author – and I, we do a lot of work with large organizations – American Express is one of our clients, California Pizza Kitchen. We’ve got some really fun clients that many people have heard of over the years. But what we try and do as we work with the CEOs and the leaders of these teams, is to realize sort of what their worries are. So, for example about five years ago we were hearing a lot on culture, and we were lucky enough to become one of the first to write a big book on culture and how you build a great culture. It was called All In, with Simon & Schuster.
And then over the last few years we’ve been hearing so much about teams. I know we’ve heard about teams for a long time, but things are changing, and there are challenges facing teams today – working cross-functionally, with Millennials coming into the workplace, with the increased speed of change – that a lot of the CEOs and senior leaders we were working were saying, “Really, teamwork has changed so much in the last few years, there’s really no guide to help me and help our organization understand how to navigate the waters of teamwork today.” And so, that really was the impetus to write The Best Team Wins, was how do we face the challenges of leading a team in 2018?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s go into it then. So you’ve actually laid out five disciplines of team leaders. Could you maybe orient us a little bit with a preview to start and hear what are those disciplines?

Adrian Gostick
Now again, we’ve got about 850,000 people in our database that we’re looking at, so we’ve got a plus or minus here at a fraction of a percentage that help us understand really what the best teams today are doing differently. Now, The Best Team Wins isn’t a Bible of everything that you ever need to do to build a team; there are still some really solid fundamentals out there but there’s been lots written on those.
So what this is about is what’s different about the best team leaders today, and as you mentioned, Pete, five disciplines emerged that we saw in the best teams, that they had the highest performance, the highest engagement levels. The first was that managers really did understand there were differences in the generations that they were managing, and they learned that they had to manage, say, Millennials different than Boomers, different than Gen X. So we talked about that, but it was very data-driven, and we’ll talk about that in a moment, I’m sure.
The second idea was that while we do worry about the generational differences, the best leaders are managing to the one, especially helping people drive their career development. That’s one of the biggest differentiators today, is helping me as an employee grow and learn and develop.
The third was that they’re much faster. Great team leaders really speed productivity – they get new people and teams up to speed a lot faster than their peers.
The fourth idea was that these great teams that we studied really were challenging everything. They had amazing debate within their organizations, and almost we call it “discord”, where they were really challenging each other and ideas.
And the final thing we found was that great teams had a focus on the customer that was laser. Now, there’s probably not a team in America or wherever you’re listening, who doesn’t believe that we’re customer-focused, but these teams truly were. Every decision, every debate revolved around what really would be the benefit to the customer. So, at a high-level those are the five disciplines we found in the research.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yes, thank you for that preview there. And I would like to dig into each of these a touch. So, yeah, let’s talk first about these generational differences. And thank you for being data-driven – that’s what we love here. So, I’m a Millennial, I guess just barely, although most Millennials don’t like to be called Millennials. And that median listener – their age, according to my last survey… Maybe I need to get 850,000 data points, that’s awesome – is also in the Millennial age zone. So tell us – what are the “for real” differences amongst generations, versus sort of the “hype myth” differences between the generations?

Adrian Gostick
That’s a really good point, because a lot of people start tuning out once you start talking about entire generations. It’s a little like saying, “Everybody in Costa Rica does this” or, “Every left-hander is this way.” Of course, that’s just ridiculous. But what we can find in the data are there are some big changes happening in the workforce that we need to be aware of as leaders.
So for instance, autonomy has long been heralded as one of the biggest drivers of human behavior. Dan Pink wrote a book called Drive where he said autonomy was the most important factor driving engagement and motivation for people. Well, what we find is actually that’s true if you’re a Boomer, it’s true if you’re a Gen X, but it actually is not true for the vast majority of Millennials. Most Millennials coming into the workplace – 80% in our data – really want to be coached and managed, and part of a productive team.
They value teamwork a lot more than my generation – Gen X did. We much more valued the cowboy – being able to do things autonomously and independently. Well, this is a new generation. It really does value working in a team, they found that they’re more productive that way, better things are accomplished that way. Well, that’s a big overall finding that as leaders we should at least be aware of, and it may change how we manage. Another thing that came out of the data…

Pete Mockaitis
If I could jump on that in a little bit more detail, please. That’s intriguing. So yes, I too have heard autonomy is the thing we all want. And so then, maybe I just want to get clear on definitions a bit. So, I think of autonomy as sort of the ability to do your work the way you want to and with the time horizon more or less that you want to, in the location that you want to. But how are you defining and viewing autonomy in your investigations?

Adrian Gostick
That’s a great question. And one of the things we’re finding is that of course, nobody likes to be micro-managed, do they? What we really think about with autonomy as we study this, is that if I am driven by autonomy, I typically prefer to be my own boss and I like to have a degree of freedom … I typically prefer working alone more than working in a team. I’m giving you the definitions in our survey of people. I typically feel I get more done when I work more independently.
Now, as I mentioned though, almost nobody likes to be micro-managed. What we’re looking at with autonomy are people who like to work more independently. What we look at though and what we’re finding is indeed, out of the 23 human motivators we found autonomy ranks 4th highest for Boomers, it ranks 22nd out of 23 for Millennials.
So that’s a huge data shift. Now that’s something we need to look at that says whether it’s because of where I am in my career, or because of the generation that I grew up in, where teams were more important – something is happening here, where people prefer now to work more collaboratively. And so as a manager, whether I’m managing Millennials or anybody coming into the workforce, I’ve got to find ways to help people work together more effectively, if that’s making some sense.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you, yes. And so, I suppose there is a natural tension. I guess as I’m thinking about myself, it’s like I want my autonomy, but I also want to collaborate. But in a given hour of work, it’s somewhat binary, in the sense that, of course none of us like to be micro-managed or be in crazy, pointless, time-wasting meetings. But I think you’re right – it’s like you’re either doing your thing your way or you are having a back-and-forth and doing something in, I don’t know, kind of like a compromise, or a jointly agreed-upon way, as opposed to any way you care to roll.

Adrian Gostick
Exactly. And by the way, nobody of course is one-dimensional, just as you say. Actually autonomy is one of my strongest drivers. As a Gen Xer, that is really one of my strongest drivers. I love to work more independently, but other times… Yesterday I went down to work with our little 12-person team, and it was invigorating and it was wonderful. And today I’m working alone in my office. You’re right – we’re all a mixed bag, but again, we’re talking about trends right now and what we can do with them.
One of the other trends we found, which was fascinating, is that Millennial-age people, especially those in their 20s right now, are about three times more likely to be driven by external drivers like recognition than older workers. And yet, where do most organizations spend their time recognizing people? It’s people who’ve typically been there a little longer, who achieve big things for the organization. Where, who needs the recognition? People who are newer in the organization, those who may be a little bit more even insecure about their role. Recognition helps them understand really what they’re accomplishing and how valued they are to the organization.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, recognition here – we’re talking about kind of public. Is that fair to say? In terms of, “Hey everyone, we’re presenting the Rockstars of the Year awards. So come up on stage and we’ll clap for you as we say something cool you did this year that was meaningful for us.”

Adrian Gostick
Yeah. And really, when we look at recognition though – those are nice, but that’s once a year and maybe it’s once every five years. Those really don’t drive that individual performance. What we’re finding with recognition, especially with younger employees – that it’s it’s got to happen frequently, it’s got to be specific though. It can’t just be, “Boy, Pete, you sure do good work.” No, no. It’s, “Pete, I listened to your podcast last week. Insightful questions…” You can see already, I know what you’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m motivated, Adrian. You’ve got me motivated.

Adrian Gostick
Yeah. So what we’re finding is recognition has to be much more frequent, specific and timely than it’s ever been, as we sort of think about managing a new generation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So that’s a top tip there for the Millennials. Anything that you would say in terms of a top driver for the other generations?

Adrian Gostick
Well, one of the things we find, and again this kind of leads us into our next idea of, while we’re being sort of generic here, what we do find is there are certain things that happen as we age. One is that we become a lot more interested in ideas like variety in our work. The worst thing you can do if you’ve got somebody who’s in their 50s working for you, the worst thing typically you can do is make their job rote – just the same thing day after day. We become much more interested in variety as we age, much more interested in ideas like developing others, leaving a legacy, creativity becomes actually even more important as we age, to challenge ourselves.
What we also found is that there are some things that are really quite similar though, in our DNA, no matter what age we are. We all want to make an impact. Or I shouldn’t say “all”, but really the vast majority of us have “impact” as a top driver. Another is learning. And what was fascinating to us is that it didn’t matter if somebody was in their 20s or 70s – learning typically fell as a top driver for the vast majority of people. So a couple of really interesting findings – we’re more similar than we may think, and there are also some interesting little differences we found.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And so you were getting at, rather than going into broad groups of people, manage to the one, in terms of the particular drivers for an individual. And so, I’d love to get your take on, how do you elicit some of those drivers and then play to them effectively?

Adrian Gostick
Yeah, that’s a great question because I may be sounding like I’m talking out of both sides of my face, because I’m saying in one way you’ve got to understand generations, and that does help us understand from a mass perspective who’s working for us. But really the best leaders that we’ve studied over the last three or four years as we’ve been writing this book, really do get to know their individuals too.
And in the book we have a lot of ideas about how you figure out the specific drivers of your people, but this all leads to an idea we call “job sculpting”, where really you’re going to sit down with each of your people, and many of the great organizations we’ve been studying, they do this as often as monthly with their people, and they have career development discussions every single month with their people: “Where are you going? Are you having the right training, the right opportunities, the right challenges to get you where you want to go in your career, even if you may leave us one day?”
What we’re finding is organizations that worry about their people’s careers are cutting turnover dramatically, and they’re increasing engagement levels. And this is something that’s well within the control of every manager. I might not be able to give you a huge raise at the end of the year, I certainly can’t impact probably your bonus structure too much, or your benefits, but what I can do is meet with you and talk about your career and how I can help you with that, as a manager.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So the sculpting then is kind of like, “Okay, now that I know that you’re interested in analytics, I’m going to be on the lookout for some analyticky pieces of work that are coming up and try to get that flowing your way.” Is that what you mean there?

Adrian Gostick
Exactly, yeah. And what we do is we give people the structure to be able to talk about this, because in many cases they really don’t know what gives them that skip in their step every day. And so we give them a series of questions they can go through, and then they can begin having these conversations with their managers that they can sculpt their jobs and say if it is analytics that drives you…
Unfortunately sometimes we as leaders sort of peg people into, “Well, Pete – he’s the creative guy, so he always wants to be creative” or, “Susan – she’s the behind-the-scenes, detail person. I always give her those assignments.” Well, maybe Susan wants to work with some clients and challenge herself and push herself. So really, this is a two-way conversation, to be able to understand what drives our people, and also if there’s a chance, to be able to give them a few things that’ll motivate them. In many cases people will actually even work harder if you take the time to work with them in that way.

Pete Mockaitis
So then, I’d love to hear some of those excellent questions that help surface the stuff that people like and gets them going.

Adrian Gostick
Well, a few of the things we really challenge people to think about in this case, is, “What is it exactly that you’re doing on those days when the day really flies by? What are the activities that really you are undertaking?” And also, “What are the activities that frustrate your work, that on those days when you have to do them, you hit the Snooze button? What exactly is it about those activities that demotivate you?”
So we just start driving down. You’re using the Socratic method of saying, “Why?” “Why does that demotivate you? What is it about it that’s frustrating you?” So very simple questions that we’re pushing there. And what you do is you start near-term and then you move farther-term. So you start with the day-to-day – what’s motivating, what’s demotivating – and then you go bigger picture.
For example, “If you had three wishes for your career, what would they be?” Because then people typically are thinking a little further out – 5, 10 years. And then you can sort of talk about educational, skills, opportunities that’ll be needed, different things that’ll help you get to that point. And of course too, as a leader, you’re also helping temper expectations and say, “To get there, this is what you’re going to have to do” or, “You may not be ready to get there yet”, and just be able to have those honest conversations with people.

Pete Mockaitis
And what I think is so powerful about this is not only sort of the content that flows from it for job sculpting; it’s also the content that flows from it from an organizational perspective. It’s like, “Oh, we’ve got a process that’s just broken. You hate it because it really does not make any sense that we do this dumb thing.” Or, “Oh, in this certain area the decision-making roles are just wildly unclear. Well, no wonder that just sucks. So let’s see if we can clean that up.”
So I guess it helps them both in terms of the assignments they’re taking on, as well as cleaning up little messes all around, as well as just conveying that, “We care about you.” Because I don’t know, maybe you’ve got some data on this – how many organizations take the time to have these conversations? And I guess it can vary even leader by leader inside an organization, but if you had to give a rough guesstimate here, what proportion of leaders are having conversations like this on a regular basis, versus aren’t right now?

Adrian Gostick
Yeah, that’s a really good question. I don’t have the specific data; we just know what we’re showing is this is what the best leaders that we found were doing, those that had the highest engagement scores. But also, when we would go into an organization to study them, we would… For instance we went into Danaher, which is a 70,000-person technology company and we said, “Okay, give us your best manager.” And they would send us to XYZ person and we would interview that person.
So typically we’re getting the best of the best, and this is what we’re finding the best were doing. And they were having these sort of career discussions, these job sculpting discussions, as well as regular weekly updates with each of their people about what was happening in their jobs. So really, this is what the best of the best are doing. If I had to guess, probably 10% of managers, I would say, are probably really good at these types of things, but those 10% are blowing the doors off of performance.

Pete Mockaitis
And I guess now I’m wondering if someone’s listening and you’re in an organization like, “Dang, I wish my boss did that, and we just don’t.” Do you have any pro tips on trying to do a little bit of steering the change or starting the shift within, if you don’t have sort of a big power title authority from a positional perspective?

Adrian Gostick
Yeah, a couple of things you can do. The Best Team Wins really is a book for anybody who leads a team, but also anybody who aspires to or anybody who tries to influence others around them. And so there are lots of sort of hacks for all of us to help us become better at this. If you find yourself as a member of a team and maybe your manager isn’t as good at this as perhaps he or she should be, you can always hopefully set them up for success, to be able to give them a few of these ideas, to be able to say, for instance on this idea of job sculpting, “Hey, here’s what I read in this book. This is what some great leaders are doing.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Buy it!”

Adrian Gostick
Yeah, buy them a copy of the book. But that besides, “This is what some of the great leaders are doing. They’re having regular career discussions with their people. Doesn’t cost them anything. It’s a 15 to 30-minute conversation once a month and it helps them sculpt jobs, find out what’s frustrating them, helps them give direction. I’d love to do that with you. Is that something that you feel like you could commit to, just for a few months to see how it goes?” There are some simple things you can do to help your manager see the power in some of these very simple ideas.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. So, I want to hear maybe just a quick bit about speed productivity, because I want to go into some depth on healthy discord and challenging things. So, how does one get productivity flowing all the faster?

Adrian Gostick
Well, what we find is there are a couple of things here. One is that we have to help people understand this idea – it’s security, if you will – it’s overcoming the fear factor and understanding that, “Look, you now belong on this team. You may be a new employee, you may be brand new to our team, but here’s why you were invited, here’s why you are important, and here’s the role that you play.” Clarity is so huge in this process.
The second part – and I’m giving you very fast here – is context. It’s helping your new people understand not only where they fit in the team, but where the team fits into the entire organization. You think about it as you’re in the mall and there’s the red dot that says, “You are here.” Well, I know it sounds odd, but we are so poor in most organizations at helping people understand not only the big picture, but how the widget I’m making or the thing I’m selling or the customer I’m speaking with, really impacts the big picture, and giving me that context.
And the last one may sound really warm and fuzzy, but in great teams that speed productivity there’s a greater level of affiliation, which basically means friendships: “I feel like I’m accepted here, I’m valued as a human being.” We found one bank in our study – it was a call center – that simply had everybody go on break at the same time, versus the old system, where people would sporadically go when they could.
The entire team went on break for 15 minutes. It was a silly little thing, but they had to do a lot of work to send the phones elsewhere, but all of a sudden productivity soared, and people started looking out for each other. And why? Because they knew each other’s families, they started talking about things. All of a sudden they became a tighter team. So there’s lots of little things you can do to build these ideas of affiliation and context and security to help build a great team, and fast.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. And that notion of security, I think really does help enable folks who feel capable of engaging in some healthy discord and to do some challenges. And so, I think that you had a great turn of a phrase about “disagreeing without causing offense”. And boy, what a skill for our time and place right now, and I think that it’s huge. And so, I’m a believer and I’m so curious on your take on this. Any sort of data-driven insights, and particularly how do you get there, especially whether it’s sort of changing from within: “When people disagree with me, I feel offended.” I know you can’t change people exactly, but influencing others to adopt that same kind of a mindset, where they too can be challenged and not think, “Well, this person’s dead to me” or, “They’re an enemy of mine.”

Adrian Gostick
Yeah. It’s unfortunate, but how often do we… Probably most of us have worked at some place or other over the years where debate is just quashed, whether overtly or covertly. I had boss who stormed into my office once after I debated with him in one meeting and he told me, “You’ll never do that to me again.” Do you think anybody was giving their best ideas in an environment like that?
So really, what we found, and we do have quantitative data that says those environments that are more about the debate, are more innovative, etcetera… But this is more on the qualitative side, that when we went into these great organizations, we would ask them, “Okay, how do you create this discord without it turning into a … and it turning into, as you said, where feelings are hurt, etcetera?”
So typically they have some sort of ground rules – things like, “You challenge the position but never the person, you don’t make things personal.” And again, the ground rules come up and the leader of the debate may say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, I think we’re crossing over the line there. You remember our rule is…” For instance, another one: “Seek to gather facts and don’t jump to conclusions.” Okay, so another rule we heard in another team. Another one was, “Remember, you’re in a competition to win. The best ideas win. You’re not here to ram home your points.”
And so, I could go on with the rules, but really that’s the “A-ha” from this, is that there are rules, and that there are some rules to make sure the debate is lively. All of us want to argue out things. You think of your last family event. Did you guys sit around and just make small talk or did you start debating politics and sports and all the things you’re passionate about? Of course, we do it in our personal lives. We want to debate in our work lives; we want to make things better, but there do have to be rules that help keep us positive and focused on the right things.

Pete Mockaitis
You said we could go on about the rules, and I really would. I’d love for you to go on about the rules. Could you share a couple more?

Adrian Gostick
Yeah. Another one is – and this is an interesting one – is that one other word we heard quite often was, “Look, after the team makes a decision collaboratively, we’re going to support it, even if it wasn’t our own idea.” Now that’s huge, because you may not agree with it after you leave. And it doesn’t mean we all have to be automatons and robots here walking around, but the point is if we are a team, we’re going to support the team.
And one of the things we heard, one great CEO that we interviewed for the book said typically 98% of the time he says, “My team as they’re debating, is able to come up with consensus.” He says, “I really don’t have to make a decision as a leader, because it’s so obvious by the time we get there.” And there are a couple of things he says you’ve got to do though. He says typically you may have somebody on the team who hasn’t spoken up, and you’ve got to make sure they’re really bought in, because they could leave and sort of undermine everything.
So he may say, “Cindy, you really haven’t said anything. I need to hear from you. What are you thinking? Do you feel like we’re on the right track or not?” And he says, “There are times where I do have to make a decision, I do have to say…” But he says you can still be very respectful about that as well. So for instance he may say, “Boy, this has been great debate on both sides of this issue. A reasonable person could go either way. I feel like we’ve got to make this decision and go this direction this time, but thank you so much for this excellent debate.”
Now, really simple, right? He says by doing that, next time people feel free to speak up, and when they leave the meeting they don’t feel like they’ve been quashed. They feel like their voice has been heard. So just some really simple little things we can do to create this environment, where we lead debate and we help steer it toward a great conclusion, where people are still respectful but the best ideas emerge.

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

Adrian Gostick
One of the other things I guess I would say with this is – and it’s always fun to hear – is that now and then after we put out a book… And I think this will be the same way – our book’s coming out February 13th. So typically I get some emails afterwards about different things and how people are using this in their work situations. But what’s been really fun is that people will send me an email and they’ll say, “I’ve now tried this at home and it actually does work.”
Some of these different ideas about debating healthily, or the ideas about understanding what drives each person, or figuring out what our collective challenges are, what our purpose is within our families or our relationships. So it’s fun to see this work at work, but it’s really quite heartening to see these also work in our homes lives too, in our personal lives. So there’s just one little thought.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good, thank you. Cool. Well, now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Adrian Gostick
One of the things Maya Angelou once said was that people don’t care or they won’t remember what you say or they won’t remember what they do, but they’ll always remember how you make them feel. And really, what our whole career has been about is helping leaders and managers and people who want to become leaders of others succeed.
And one of the things that really we have to remember as a leader is that we don’t know where people have been their other 16 hours they’re not with you during their day, but the 8 hours they’re with you can be the best hours of their day. But really it’s a sacred charge; we’ve got to realize these people in our care are literally in our care. And how do we motivate them, how do we engage them, how do we challenge them to do more than they ever thought possible? That’s our charge.

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

Adrian Gostick
Let’s see. Well, we do so many research studies ourselves. One of the bits of data from The Best Team Wins actually is – and this really shocked us, but we found it over and over again – was that how much time people typically spend today in working collaboratively. Deloitte has found that 80% of an average employee’s day is spent working collaboratively. Now, that is definitely a change from even just a few years ago. We’re moving at light speed toward a world where we no longer work alone. We work with others, and we really have to figure out how we work best with each other, and in many cases change our thinking about this.

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

Adrian Gostick
Let’s see. I just finished a terrific book called Beneath a Scarlet Sky, I believe it’s called. It’s about during the Second World War an Italian young man who helped Jews escape across the mountains, the Alps, during the Second World War. And it was one of the best reads that I’ve read in a long time.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And how about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Adrian Gostick
I travel a lot, so I’m always on the Weather Channel app, I’m always sort of surfing blogs. Really, it’d be hard to nail it down because I really do believe whether I’m reading The Wall Street Journal online or the Harvard Business Review blogs, that there are so many great ideas out there, and unfortunately so much of it can start sounding the same.
And what I really look for, and as a team, our little company is called The Culture Works – we’re firing things back and forth every day using Slack actually – one of the tools we use – and, “Hey, did you read this article?” Like yesterday there was an article from ESPN on the Patriots and sort of the dysfunction that’s going on right now via communication in their team.
And we started talking about what’s falling apart for a franchise that’s done so many amazing things for so many years. And we started talking about that idea – it’s communication, is Belichick having problem with generations, and this, that and the other. We just started bouncing ideas around; it was a really fascinating discussion. And so, I think that’s one of the things we have to do, is keep pushing ourselves and our teams to learn and to grow and to think about problems from different perspectives.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent, thank you. And how about a favorite habit, something you do that helps you flourish at work?

Adrian Gostick
Well, one of the things, every day I’ll probably put in three or four hours of writing. Sometimes I’ll be out working with a client, but if I’m in my office probably half a day will be spent writing, but the other half will be spent reading. So, I think it’s so important, whether you’re reading a new business book or articles in journals or publications, or blogs, or listening to podcasts like yours – whatever we do; I think that one of the things I try to do is make sure I’m learning and growing and I’m not stagnating.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget or a piece that you tend to share with clients or audiences or readers that you find is often repeated back to you? An Adrian original that’s really resonating?

Adrian Gostick
One of the things we try to help people understand is, because everybody is so focused on the customer, and we let them know the customer experience will never exceed the employee experience, that you’ve got to start the service profit chain with your people, because if you care about them, they will care about what you want to care about. But they’ve got to know you care first.

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

Adrian Gostick
TheCultureWorks.com. We’ve also got a website at CarrotGuys.com, so we’d love to connect with you. Send us a note, pick up the new book The Best Team Wins, and we would love to hear if it’s working for you and your organization.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. And do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Adrian Gostick
I think probably the most important thing is really every day you’ve got to be focused on… If you are a leader of people or you’re a leader of projects or teams, the little things really do make a big difference. And what we’re saying from all of this – I’ve thrown out lots of ideas and talked about a lot of stuff today – really, try one thing at a time, and don’t try to eat the elephant.
Is there one thing you can add tomorrow to your management style, your leadership style, the way that you are part of the team or operating the team, that may make you more effective, that may make you more valuable to your people and to those around you? Don’t try to do everything. In the back of our book we’ve got 101 ideas for real team leaders. Grab one of those and see if it makes your team better. That’s what I would recommend, is don’t try to do everything. Just try one thing and see if it works.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. Well, Adrian, thank you so much for taking this time and sharing these perspectives. I think this is so powerful and has the opportunity to be transformational in many ways for many work places. So, I wish you tons of luck with this book and all the things you’re up to!

Adrian Gostick
Hey, thanks, Pete, and thanks so much for your great questions. Appreciate it.

Dec 08
0

239: Building Yours Systems for Success with Sam Carpenter

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Sam Carpenter says: "Your life is a collection of separate systems."

Sam Carpenter explores how you can effectively work with the collection of systems that make up your work and life.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The benefit of seeing your complex life as a simpler collection of systems
  2. How to analyze and fix the kinks in your system
  3. Top systems that are most often dysfunctional

About Sam 

Sam has a background in engineering, journalism, publishing, forestry, construction management, and telecommunications. An author and entrepreneur, he is president and CEO of Centratel, the premier telephone answering service in the United States. Other businesses he founded and operates are Work the System Consultants and PathwayOne, an online marketing firm based in Italy.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Sam Carpenter Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Sam, thanks so much for joining us here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Sam Carpenter
Thank you, Pete.  Glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it was really fun chatting with you, that in between the time you said, “Yes, I’ll do this interview”, and this interview happening, you announced a run for governor.  How’s all that going?

Sam Carpenter
Right, in the state of Oregon.  Very well.  We’re ahead in the polls, I’ve got 50,000 followers on Facebook, and I only announced three weeks ago.  So, it’s fun.  And I ran for US Senate two years ago, and that was not fun. [laugh] It’s good to be in the lead and it’s good to have a lot of people behind you, so it’s been very fun actually so far.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool.  I’m glad you’re not just sort of losing your sanity along the way.

Sam Carpenter
I didn’t say that.

Pete Mockaitis
Fun and insane – I guess not mutually exclusive.

Sam Carpenter
I may be insane, but I’m not losing my insanity in any sense, no.

Pete Mockaitis
So, we chat with folks with all sorts of ideas along the political spectrum, but the idea I’m most interested in learning from you is as an area of your deep expertise, when it comes to systems – you’ve got the books Work the System and The Systems Mindset.  So, could you share with us what are the big ideas behind these books and why they’re helpful?

Sam Carpenter
Well, the two books – they are interesting – one was written in 2008 and the other one was published in 2016, and they both have the same thread.  And the central thread is this: It’s that our lives – and I’ll get a little sort of metaphysical here, but not really – our lives are collections of systems and processes.  And in our houses – and you and I were just talking about our houses for instance – I can turn around here from my computer and I could go to the sink and turn the water on and the water will come out, because the system of delivering that water is a good system and the water pressure is right and the little town here in our second home here in rural Kentucky, the water system works well.  And I could go flip the light switch on over there – that’s a separate system.

Those systems have nothing to do with each other, anymore than your heart has anything to do with your kidney.  I know they’re connected and I know they work together, but really, they’re separate.  And it’s the same for your radio in your car and your brakes in your car.  And every tree that’s outside my window right now is separate from the trees next to it.  Your life is a collection of separate systems, and if that’s the truth, the hand of God reaching down is not going to get you where you want to go, some new law isn’t going to do it.  What’s going to do it is seeing your life as a collection of systems.  And moment to moment, since 1999, when I walk through a room I see a collection of systems, or when I’m driving in the car – every car is a separate system, every driver and every car is a separate system.

And then you can fix things.  If your life isn’t going very well, then take it apart and find the most dysfunctional systems and work on those first.  But another loan from the bank isn’t going to help, and another wife is probably not going to help.  So you take things apart.  And so, Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less, which was published in 2008 and is in its third edition and we’re just doing another printing now – I think it’s our 12th printing – it talks about business and gives you documentation and processes, and how to document your processes, how to define them, how to pick them out, how to correct them and how to make sure they stay good.  And then The Systems Mindset: Managing the Machinery of Your Life – it’s the same thing, but it’s designed for people who don’t own businesses.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool.  Thank you.  And maybe could you help define a little bit for us – when you say a “system”, do you have a precise definition on the components, or what makes a system a system?

Sam Carpenter
It’s an entity that stands on its own with a purpose.  For instance, a car is a separate primary system, okay?  And its purpose is to get whoever’s in it from point A to point B.  And a house is a system – an enclosed system – which is a collection of subsystems designed to house you.  In a business a separate system would be your phone system.  Another system would be how you answer the phone at the front desk.

At Centratel – and I’m sure we’ll talk about Centratel – how you answer that phone at the front desk is very well defined.  There happen to be seven steps: You pick up the phone, you put a smile on your face because if you put a smile on your face, there is a smile in your voice, and you answer in a very certain way.  And anybody who answers the phone, answers it exactly that way.  And the way we got that system to be perfect was we took all the people together who answered the phones, including me – the owner of the company – and defined what a perfect answering system would be.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m intrigued.  If we could maybe make this come to life all the more.  So, could you walk us through what is a perfect phone answering system, that could come in handy for anybody who picks up their phone.

Sam Carpenter
Well, I gave you the first two steps, and then you define how you want to… I can’t remember how they’re doing it at Centratel now; it seems to me it’s changed a little bit, but it’s something like this: “Centratel, this is Mary.  May I help you?”  Very generic, but if John’s answering, it’s the same thing, except he uses his name.  And then the next couple of points in that process: Try to help the caller get to the destination they want to get to, whoever it is – our CEO, our tech guy, whatever it is.  And then another system will take over once it’s delivered.

Everything is documented too; everything is exactly documented – how our operators answer the phone, how we handle a complaint, how we do a sales pitch, our marketing.  There are many, many, many processes.  Now people don’t walk around reading those processes; they are documented.  But the fact that they’re documented and on our hard drive means that they’re paid attention to.

And here’s the other thing, Pete, which is pretty cool.  If your life is a collection of systems, and therefore your business is a collection of systems, wouldn’t it make sense to work on those systems 24/7 and have other people do the actual work?  So, my management staff of seven at Centratel – we have about 40 people there, we do 400,000 a month at the call center, the little answering service.  All of those managers do nothing but work on systems, and if I catch them doing the work, I give them a lot of grief.

For instance, I found my CEO Andi was answering the phone because we had a real rush.  We take messages and deliver them – that’s what our answering service does.  So she has a console on her desk, and it got really busy in there and she jumped on to help the 15 or 20 TSRs that were out there to handle the traffic.  And I said to her, “Don’t ever do that again.”  We were laughing, don’t get me wrong.  And she says, “I know, I know.”  I said, “It’s so heroic, and I guess there’s some value in showing everybody out there that you care, but don’t do it anymore.  I pay you way too much money to do this other stuff, and the TSRs understand that.”  Our telephone service representatives – regular people that answer the phones.  “They understand that you have things you have to do in here.”  For instance, we’re putting $100,000 new heating system in our building – that’s got to be her top priority and she can’t get distracted.

But my point is this: It’s that everybody who’s in management works on processes and systems.  And so she’s working on this process and working on this system.  And we have three words that we use, Pete: automate, delegate, delete.  That’s what a manager should be doing all the time.  Automating it so you don’t have to do it over and over.  Anything you do over and over again, you shouldn’t be doing probably.  A real chief, a real manager, is always on a new project doing creative things.  Automate, delegate to somebody else – an assistant, for instance, or off site.

Automate, delegate, delete.  So many things we do we shouldn’t be doing at all; there’s no pay off.  And you go back to the 80/20 rule, which is absolutely the truth of the matter: If you can get rid of all the superfluous stuff that has no ROI – return on investment – you’re going to have more time to expand on the things that are profitable.  I do consulting, because Work the System is a book on how to do all this stuff, and you wouldn’t believe the businesses we run into, you wouldn’t believe the government of Oregon.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.  So, I’d love it if you could maybe walk us through some examples of let’s say… The audience here are professionals, they want to be awesome at their jobs.  Can you give us some examples of some systems that probably could benefit from some attention, or maybe some transformative innovations or interventions that you’ve brought about for some folks, that can spark actionable ideas here?

Sam Carpenter
Yeah.  The innovation that most companies should have, and most don’t, is what we call – and it’s a document – it’s called the Strategic Objective.  And you can get my book at WorkTheSystem.com and download it for free.  The whole book, audio, or any number of text iterations.  And we fixed over 500 businesses in the last seven years – Josh Fonger, my main guy and I.  They don’t have documentation.  And so, the main system you need is a system of what is it you do and where do you want to go.  And it’s got to be more than a mission statement.  A mission statement is a total distraction.  “Oh, we want to be the best and we want everybody to love us and we want our employees to be happy and all our customers to be happy”, and blah, blah, blah, blah.  It means nothing.

What you need is to take it apart in more detail.  Instead of a little paragraph it really needs to be on one sheet of paper, maybe 300 words, and you list what you do, where you want to go, kind of how you’re going to do it, the things you’re not going to do, sometimes the tools you’re going to use.  And you have to get everybody going in the right direction.  And if everybody is going in a different direction, they all have their own little individual ideas of where you’re going, it’s going to be a dysfunctional mess, and 9 out of 10 businesses are dysfunctional messes, small ones.  The big ones didn’t get big by being dysfunctional messes.

Now, I have a system of documentation I use – there’s other systems – the point is, everybody has to get on the same road, whatever process they use.  And then another document is the Operating Principles.  So we have 30; we call them 30 principles.  These documents are in the back of the book, in the appendix.  And the principles are like, “There will be no clutter in the office”, figuratively or literally.  I’ve got the book here – I could read through them, but you get the idea.  There’s 30 principles and we use these principles for gray area decision-making, when you’re not really sure really what to do.  “What would you do here?”

Well, another one is the simplest solution.  Occam’s Law – the simplest solution is invariably the correct solution.  And I had somebody define it – a new employee, a manager that I think I’m going to hire for the campaign – she said, “The simplest system is the most elegant system.”  And that’s a beautiful thing.  So, that’s just one of the principles.  And we have 30 principles there, and the person could go to the book and plagiarize both the meaning and the tone of both of those two documents I’ve mentioned.

And then the last series of documents – there are three – are the Working Procedures.  And that is where we document how you answer the phone, how you handle a complaint.  We’ve got hundreds and hundreds of them in the office.  But if you don’t get everybody going down the same road and doing things the same way, you’re going to have a mess.  And the other thing is you don’t have a system for them to say, “Hey, this is changed over here.  Process A over here is no longer any good, because one, two and three happened over here.  We’ve got to change the process.”  And then you’ve got to let everybody know the process has changed.

So you can see how I, as a leader, work on processes and systems and protocols, and these are the things that get everybody going in the same direction, and you become efficient, because the thing that kills businesses is inefficiency.  Fire killing – that’s what it is.  Fire killing destroys businesses, fire killing destroys administrations and government, fire killing destroys marriages, it destroys everything.  You want to get from A to B in the most efficient way possible, and you can’t be waylaid by problems that come up because you didn’t have a process to prevent the problem from happening in the first place.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.  So I want to get super, super tactical here, if I could.  So Sam, do you have a system for doing your laundry or having others do your laundry, and what is it?

Sam Carpenter
No, this is very interesting.  The new book, The Systems Mindset, is for anybody who doesn’t have a business.  And in there I say you don’t need to document this stuff in your personal life.  You need to document how the car wreck goes on the car – you need to write down somewhere that the front connectors are 18.5 inches back from this corner of the windshield.  And maybe how you change the filters in your HVAC system, maybe, if somebody else is going to do it.  But there isn’t much documentation in your personal life; it’s a matter of thinking.

So The Systems Mindset subtitle is Managing the Machinery of Your Life.  But in a business, because you’ve got a lot of people doing this stuff, John needs to know how Mary does it, and Mary has to do it the same way Frank does it.  You’ve got to get everybody doing things the same way, and then those are the people who create the processes.  It’s not top-down like military; I don’t write up all the procedures.  I wrote up the first procedures for the first few months – that was in 1999.  I haven’t written a procedure in a couple of years.  And the one I wrote was for me in the office.

But they write the procedures.  What a great way to do things is to have the people who do the work do the procedures, because they know how it works – they know how to talk to the customer, they know how to do this, how to do that.  Now, my CEO and I keep everybody going down the same road.  “No, we don’t want to have this new service; it just isn’t in keeping with where we want to go.”  And you can go back to the strategic objective and figure that out and make an argument for it.  But for instance, if we had extra space in our office, we could have a tanning salon for example.  I mean, it would make sense; there’s people there 24/7.  It could be Bend, Oregon 24/7 Sam’s Tanning Salon, and it would probably make money.  But we’re not going to do that because it’s got nothing to do with our main concern, which is telecommunications and so forth.  So, it keeps you going.

And so when you ask me for, “Give me a process, give me a system” – those three documents are critical.  And then you can go down to how you handle a complaint, how you can… So, what happens is, and I’ll get to your main question, which I think I understand, is when Josh goes out in the field, what he does is go in… And either one of us can walk in any business and tell you in 20 minutes what the problem is.  And sometimes your brother-in-law does need to be fired, okay?  Sorry about that, explain it to your wife, but he’s a problem.  We get into that too, but once we get into the business, we see how it’s run and what are the mechanical – and “mechanical” is such a great word – what are the mechanical irregularities and dysfunctions?  And you fix the biggest problem first.

And maybe the biggest problem is your brother-in-law needs to go – okay, I get that.  But within the business there are processes that need to be documented.  For instance, if there’s something that’s handled by six different people – say it’s a 20-person business – six different people and they all handle it a different way – that’s ridiculous, because some are going to do it real well and some are going to do it in a horrible way.  Why don’t we all do it the real, real fine way?  Put all six people down at the table, “Okay, what’s the first thing you do?”  And then it’s, “Number one – do this, number two – do this, number three – do this, number four – do this.”  And then when that process is done and everybody agrees it works, you put it into place and you move on to the next biggest problem.

You really do start with the biggest problem, I don’t care what it is.  I can almost guarantee you the second problem won’t have anything to do with the first problem.  It will be something completely different, I don’t care what kind of business you’ve got.  And you work through based on what are the biggest problems first, and all of a sudden you get through five of those big problems and things start to smooth out; there’s not so much fire killing.  You might’ve fixed 60% of all your problems by fixing those five things.

And it could be anything; in a machine shop, it would be how the guys are doing a certain piece on the machine, and everybody is doing it in their own way.  It might be a drill press, it might be a lathe, it might be anything.  But you’ve got to get the guys together and sit them down and say, “What’s the best way to do it?”  And Frank over here is doing it this way and he says, “Oh John, I didn’t know we could do it that way.  Yeah, man, it’s really great.”  And then John is going to learn something from Frank too.  It’s really the most simple thing and it’s all based – at the beginning of our chat here, Pete – it’s all based on the mechanical fact that our lives are collections of systems and processes.

That little beagle that’s sitting on the couch in the sunroom there – he’s a separate system too.  And I just got this Garmin tracker for him because he’s a hound, and when we go out in the woods, he’s gone, man.  If he gets a scent of anything, he’s gone.  And so this fabulous tracker – and it took me about a half hour to figure it out on how to work – I can take him out and it’s got a little antenna that comes up, and the documentation is the little book I got with it.  But he can run anywhere and I know exactly where he is.  He got out 600 yards from me the other day and I just went back and got him.  And it’s even got a little what they call a “stimulator” on it – it’s actually like a chock that you can adjust.  And I adjust it so he knows it’s happening, not so it hurts him.  But if he gets out too far, I can just hit a button and he knows to come back to me.  That is a separate system too.  It’s a separate system from the beagle; the beagle has nothing to do with it; they just work together very well.

And that’s how a business should be – if you could take your business apart and stop believing you just need to hire a better manager or if you could just get that other loan – no, no.  Instead you go exactly the opposite and you take it apart piece by piece, but you’ve got to get this thing in your head, about the separate systems.  So Work the System and The Systems Mindset.  The Systems Mindset book is a smaller book.  It’s in two parts.  The Work the System is in three parts; the middle part is about documentation.

But essentially the first part of each book is getting the systems mindset, and that means you can walk down the street and you see separate systems; you don’t see this massive confusion.  I like to say “a mass confusion of sights, sounds and events”.  The barking dog over there has nothing to do with your belly ache, has nothing to do with the dog on the end of your leash.  And the trees when you’re walking by have nothing to do with each other; they’re all separate.  When you can drive down the road or walk down the street or sit in your house and really see that – that’s called the systems mindset.  And it usually comes in an instant, it comes in a flash.

It did for me, it happened one night.  I won’t go into how that happened, but I woke up the next morning and I saw the world differently.  And that was in 1999 and my whole life got cleaned up at that point.  I was a mess.  I was a mess in the business, I was a mess in my personal life. Everything cleaned up beautifully, because I started facing reality.

Do you know what it means to be red pilled, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Is that from The Matrix?

Sam Carpenter
Yeah, man.  It was the greatest science fiction movie ever made, in my mind.  So, listen to this: “Morpheus…”  And this is 1999.  “I’m trying to free your mind, but I can only show you the door.  You’re the one who has to walk through it.”  And so in the campuses there’s this thing called redpilling, and that is all of a sudden seeing reality for what it really is.

But back to The Systems Mindset – redpilling in my mind is seeing your life as a collection of separate systems.  Very few people will get it right away.  Some people who are listening to this get it right as they’re listening to it, but most don’t; it takes a couple of weeks.  Download the book, look at it – your life will change forever.  You’ll get what you want out of life.  I got everything I wanted out of life.

I’m going to run for governor for just the hell of it.  I mean, that’s not really true – I’m going to run for the hell of it because I’ve got the time, and I want to make some big changes in our state.  The forests are burning down, the government’s out of control. I mean, why not go for something big?  I see it in that sense: Why not do something big, because the rest of my life has come together so well?  I have the time and the money to do it.  I have more money than I need, I’ve got more time than I need.  This is something I can do.  And I’m in my late 60s, and this is the time of my life when I want to help.

I have a non-profit overseas and people say, “How come?”  And I say, Why not?”  There’s a bunch of teachers over there; you know what they make in these back-country Pakistan towns?  $15 a month, Pete.  And the kid’s tuition is $1 a month, and that’s high.  And so, I can go over there and get so much bang for my buck with my non-profit to help those kids. So if you could see your life in this way, everything comes together, everything starts to make sense and you start getting what you want out of life, because the reality is, your life is a collection of systems.  And if you treat it that way and go for the most dysfunctional systems first, or the biggest system that you think you can get a grip on, all of a sudden things will go your way.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, can you give us some examples then, in terms of for individuals for systems they have that are frequently dysfunctional, or how do we zero in on, “Of all the systems in my life, this one is probably the most dysfunctional and should get my attention first?

Sam Carpenter
Are you talking about in a business environment?

Pete Mockaitis
No, I’m just talking an individual professional.

Sam Carpenter
An individual professional.  Okay, number one – communications.  And so, that’s what we were talking about before we started talking here.  So, we have these tools; one’s called EVM, and we’ve been using it for many, many years.  It’s relatively new, and if you have an iPhone or Android, doesn’t matter, but there is a way to attach a voice message as an attachment on to an email.  It’s powerful stuff.  It’s how I run my companies.

So, I’ve got 40 people at Centratel.  I could get on the phone after we finish here and I could say, “Hey everybody, just want to let you know I’m coming back tomorrow.  I am, by the way, flying back from Kentucky.  And we had a great report, great numbers, our bottom line was terrific.  I just want to thank all of you.”  And I say that, I attach it to a group email and everybody gets it.  Josh – Josh is my field guy and we’re partners.  He’s in Phoenix, but he’s on the road all the time.  I don’t even know where he is most of the time.  So, “Hey Josh, I was thinking about this or that, and what do you think about this?  Get back to me.”  Well, he might not hear it for a few hours ’cause he’s working with a client, but he will get back to me in the same way.  We very rarely are on the phone at the same time, and it’s the same with my CEO, and it’s the same with my campaign people – very, very seldom.

So to the professional who’s got people that he or she works for, I would say, do that, because our tendency, Pete – maybe your tendency, and it used to be my tendency – is to sit down and write a long email.  I’m sorry, it takes 20 minutes; and with an EVM I can do the same in two minutes.  And you get your tonal inflection in there, the whole thing.  The only thing we document are processes, and anything that is very sensitive or complex information, we sit down and do an email.  So, if your professional is super efficient, they will be better at what they do.  And there’s other tools out there, other communication tools too.

One of the big things I changed recently, because this tool has been bugging me… And what happened was, I had my PC computer, we were down in Savannah, Georgia, and I lost it.  I lost it in the hotel.  It turned out somebody had found it and picked it up and it got put in the wrong place.  I ultimately found it three days later, but it ruined the vacation, because I knew half of it was on the Cloud and half of it wasn’t.  And Diana and I said… I know that I can get another PC and download most of it, but there’s so much that I’m going to miss and I’m going to be struggling to put the pieces together for a year, and it’s going to be like my house burned down.

So we had been talking and she’s kind of had the same problem, where booting her computers all day long.  It’s a Microsoft problem – sorry about that, Bill Gates.  But I got my computer back, everything was fine, but you know what we did?  We said, “To hell with it.  We’re switching to Apple’s computers.”  And we switched to the Mac Pro, and I’ll tell you what – replacing that system with this system was one of the best movies I made in the last 10 years.

Pete Mockaitis
And so now it automatically backs up then to the Cloud?

Sam Carpenter
Everything’s on the Cloud, everything makes sense, everything’s intuitive.  You know what?  What do you use, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
I also have a MacbookPro.

Sam Carpenter
Yeah.  So, everything’s intuitive, it never breaks, you could go a month without having to reboot it.  You know what I’m talking about.  I don’t know if you’ve ever dealt with a PC, but you want to kill yourself.  I’m sorry, you want to put a bullet in your head half the time.  And 30 years I was a PC user, because of the systems we used professionally in the call center.  I don’t need to do that anymore because I don’t do much in a call center.  I don’t do more than an hour of work a week at the call center.  So, the process, “How’s your computer doing?” or, “How’s your…”  We went from Androids to all iPhones, because they’re just more reliable, and everybody doesn’t have something different.  And I don’t care how many extra apps you can get on an Android; the basics never fail on the iPhone.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you tell me, this electronic voicemail – I assume that’s what EVM stands for – it sounds pretty handy.  How do I start doing that in my life?

Sam Carpenter
Well, there’s a native on the iPhone that works.  I like Say It & Mail It.

Pete Mockaitis
Is that a website I can go to?

Sam Carpenter
I think you can find it on Google.  I like that, I use them both.  Say It & Mail It – you’re pretty much limited to five or six minutes, and you can’t stop it and then start it again.  So if it’s something quick, you know what you’re saying, if I’m leaving a message for Diana or something – it’s real fast and I use that, and you can get it on an Android too.

Pete Mockaitis
So I can do this natively in email on my iPhone.  How does that work?

Sam Carpenter
Yeah, it’s there.

Pete Mockaitis
The menus, the settings for mail.  Okay, got it, cool.  So communications is one system – make sure that your technology isn’t causing you all kinds of headaches and frustrations and crashes and restarts and delays; your email isn’t dominating your life, in terms of lots of long messages that take a lot of time.  What are some other systems you think professionals can get some big gains?

Sam Carpenter
Yeah, here’s another more of a mental thing, and I know you’re into the mental part in the consulting you do.  Don’t ever have more than 30 emails in your inbox, okay?  Ever.  And you know what I do with my email?  I don’t have a task list – there is another simplification.  My task list is in my email.  When I open my computer and look at my inbox, all my tasks are there.  Oh, I have some on my calendar, like this one, so I don’t forget meeting with you today.  But I have all my tasks and all of my correspondence is in one place.  Obviously it’s on my iPhone too.  Think about those processes and systems.  So take apart your day.  What are the things that are frustrating you?  Figure out a way to make it really good, automate it, delegate it or delete it, and work on the processes of your life.  You know what I mean?

Your car.  Okay, so I have this argument with people all the time, and half your listeners won’t like what I’m going to say.  I don’t believe in buying a used car, because when you buy a used car, it’s used for a reason, usually, unless some young kid went off into the military and didn’t expect to, and this kid is perfect.  Some used cars out there are perfect, but why would you want to give up the best years of a car’s life – the good smell, you know it’s not going to break, you know you’ve got a great warranty.  I always buy a new car.  People say, “Well, as soon as you drive off the lot…”  Yeah, that’s true – as soon as you drive off the lot it loses value, but with a used car, the best years of its life are gone.  So you buy a used car with 40,000 miles – I’m sorry, it’s going to be the muffler, it’s going to be the belts, it’s going to break.  I guarantee you almost all the time there’s some big problem that made that car be a used car.  So, one of the systems I have in my life, one of these mental systems, is I buy close to the best and I always buy new.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool.

Sam Carpenter
These are head processes, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.  Well, is there anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about a few of your favorite things?

Sam Carpenter
Well, another thing we did, and people can’t run right out and do this, but we built this house we’re in.  We moved in the last day of July, and this house is exactly the way we wanted, right to the size of the TV to where the hearth is to how the lights work.  Try to design where you live. But take the time to work on the place where you study, the place where you live, the place where you sleep.  Take the time to do it.  Clean the garage, get everything in order.

There’s that, and then you go back to the business.  You’ve got to document your primary systems if more than one person is doing the processes.  That’s number one, and it could be anything.  I don’t know what people do out there – they sell cars, they sell insurance, they’re working for a big corporation, they’re an engineer with a high tech company – you’ve got to document the main things that the people around you are supposed to do.

And it makes a lot of sense in some cases to document the processes you do, because when you get them down on paper, you can say to yourself sometimes, “Why am I doing this like that?”  And then you get them down on paper and you say, “Why am I doing this at all?”  And you get super efficient. And everything I’m doing with the campaign right now has to do with building the machinery of the campaign.  And when I get elected, I will go into Salem, Oregon and I will do the same thing there and work on the processes and the systems.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool.  Thank you.  Well, now could you share with us a favorite book?

Sam Carpenter
How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World – Harry Browne.  This was written a long time ago, back in the ’70s.  He did a second version in the ’90s.  He ran for president on a Libertarian ticket.  And he’s deceased now.  And it says, “Freedom is living your life the way you want to live it.  This book shows you how you can have that freedom now, without having to change the world or the people around you.”  It’s a brilliant book.  I don’t have any problems at all with it, and I’ve read it a number of times.  This hard copy here cost me $140 on Amazon, used.  It’s out of print.  And I give it to my very best friends and closest people and I say, “This is mandatory reading if you breathe.”  [laugh] It’s my favorite book.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.  And tell me – how about a favorite habit, a personal practice of yours that’s effective?

Sam Carpenter
My clean-up habit.  So I take 30 minutes every day at some point during the day and I just clean stuff up – I pick up the table, I do something in the garage, the car may need it.  I spend 30 minutes a day, at least, cleaning up after myself.  Not that I’m a slob, but if nothing needs to be cleaned up, I do some organizational thing to jump ahead.  That is a really good personal habit to have.  And I exercise every day, of course.  Maybe not every day, but five days out of the week.  It’s so important to get some aerobic exercise and some resistance training if you can, to keep that brain system working right and keep this incredibly complex miracle that is our individual bodies working properly.  And I am convinced that aerobic, heavy breathing, pushing your heart, cures a lot of evils and cures a lot of problems that you’re never going to have.  It prevents them happening.

Here’s another saying, and this is mine: “You can’t measure the bad things that don’t happen.”  You can’t measure them.  And that’s a very important thing, and I think keeping the clutter picked up and getting out in the woods and climbing or skiing or doing whatever it is anybody wants to do, cycling – very important in keeping your brain together, but you can’t measure it really.  You can’t measure the good that it does you, and you can’t measure the bad things that it prevents.

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

Sam Carpenter
WorkTheSystem.com is a good place, and there is a link there to TheSystemsMindset.com, and you can go there.  And people can Google my name and there’s all kinds of stuff out there.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool.  And do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Sam Carpenter
Yes, I do.  Right now, right this moment, even if they’re not at their jobs, even if they’re driving in the car or listening to this on their smart phone walking down the street – just look around, wherever you are, even in your living room or your desk at work – but look around and see the separate systems around you.  As I described right at the beginning here, Pete, I don’t care what environment you’re in – you can see 100 separate systems around you if you look for them.  And do that little routine over and over, and all of a sudden it’ll dawn on you, “Oh my God, that’s the way the world’s put together.”

My big TV down here has nothing to do with what goes on in the laundry room over here, with the washer.  They just have nothing to do with each other; they’re separate from each other.  Yes, they all work together – I get that.  But here’s the thing – let me leave you with this – if you walk down the street and you get hit by a car and your leg is shattered, you know what?  They’re not going to take you to a dermatologist.  You’re going to go to an orthopedic surgeon who specializes in that.  And so, keep that in mind – the people who do well in life learn to compartmentalize the world around them, so they can find the dysfunction, see the dysfunction and get it fixed.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, beautiful.  Well Sam, thanks so much for taking this time here off the campaign trail and such, and I wish you much luck in the systems of life and the impacts you’re looking to make!

Sam Carpenter
Well, thank you, Pete, I enjoyed this.  Will catch you later.

Nov 10
0

228: The Essential Keys to Team Excellence with Gary Morton

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Gary Morton says: "Understand and be honest with yourself about what you do best... and find ways to do more of that everyday."

Gary Morton reveals the key ingredients to the “secret sauce” allowing teams to be at the top 1% of their fields.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The first steps toward achieving clarity of purpose
  2. How to spark empowered obsession in your team
  3. Guidelines for unleashing your group’s creativity

About Gary

Gary Morton graduated from West Point with honors and had a five-year career as a tank officer, the highlight of which was being part of an extraordinary unit that achieved unprecedented results at the US Army’s grueling National Training Center—the only unit to ever win every simulated battle it fought. Morton completed a master’s degree, also with honors, from the University of Southern California, and transitioned out of the Army to medical-device manufacturer Stryker, where he held positions of increasing responsibility in project management, engineering, R&D, operations, and marketing leadership becoming the youngest VP at the company. This culminated in twelve years as Vice President and General Manager of the EMS equipment business that he cofounded. Today, he is retired from Stryker and lives with his wife in the Midwest, where he writes and invests.

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Sep 15
0

205: Doing Big Things with Your Team with Craig Ross

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Craig Ross says: "When you think about our purpose as a team, how is that consistent with our purpose as people?"

Craig Ross explains what is required in order to do big things and how teams can attain epic impact.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The 3 decisions required in order to do big things
  2. The 3 enemies of fulfillment
  3. How to guide the energy of your team toward achieving big things

About Craig

Craig W. Ross is a facilitator, coach, author, speaker and CEO of Verus Global. For 20 years Craig has partnered with c-suite executives and leadership teams across numerous industries in global organizations, such as P&G, Alcon, Oceaneering, Cigna, Nestle, Universal, Ford, and other Fortune 100 companies. Combining a passion for uniting people and a conviction that organizations achieve extraordinary things through teams, Craig delivers practical and real-world expertise to those he serves.

 

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