Podcast Episode 71 - How to Use SMART Goals with Your Team
IN THIS EPISODE:
SMART goals are used to help teams achieve better outcomes. They turn a vague intent into a direct, specific understanding of what needs to be achieved. This helps in both measuring progress and determining whether the goal has been achieved.
The problem with goals that aren’t SMART is that they don’t clearly state what needs to be achieved and when. This leads to poor execution and ultimately teams who regularly don't achieve their goals.
This week we discuss what SMART goals are and why you should use them in your strategic and business planning.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Please note that this episode was transcribed using an AI application and may not be 100% grammatically correct – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.
Kevin Lawrence 00:12
Welcome to the growth whispers podcast where everything we talk about is building enduring great companies. Not good companies, not okay companies, but amazing, enduring companies. I'm Kevin Lawrence. I'm here today, as always with my co host, Brad. Brad, how you doing today?
Brad Giles 00:28
Very good. Very good. Actually. My gosh, it has been the wettest winter, I think ever or maybe by one year. It's very, very wet. Looking forward to now beginning to get closer towards spring. How are you doing? Awesome.
Kevin Lawrence 00:45
Actually, we had rain here for the first time in over a month today. It was our last couple of days. It was kind of wild. Yeah, I'm doing great. Really good. Looking forward to the show today. And what are we digging into today?
Brad Giles 00:56
Oh, today we're talking about smart goals, how to use SMART goals where your team why they matter. And why you and I are so picky about them why we are so annoyingly yes annoyingly picky and dig right into them with the teams that we work with why we make sure that they're always smart. But let's begin with Oh, yes. Yeah, it
Kevin Lawrence 01:22
seems to be forever. It's one of these things that we work on and continue to work on. Because it's very hard to stay smart. When it comes to goals. We'll dig into that. Let's talk about the word of the day. Brian, was indeed I was okay. Let's hear it. What's the word, the phrase the sentiment of the day?
Brad Giles 01:38
That's what we advocate people do. So mine is performance. Now why? Because we have just finished the Olympic Games who bought that the 2020 Olympics would be done. But yeah, performance we've seen performance. I know Australia has done quite well only because it's my country. But there's a big focus on performance for myself. And it's, I guess it's a global arena. That highlights where people focus on performance. What's your skin?
Kevin Lawrence 02:15
Oh, by the way, I think Canada did pretty well in the games, too. I think we did quite well, I was the best that we've done in a while I think I haven't been up on it. last few days, I'm mine. My word of the day is normal seat. So it was on an airplane last week, and went to take an actual meal trip to another place on an airplane in airports and hotels and tourist attractions, that kind of stuff. And then even today back into a sports car group. And we had a little mini car rally today with a bunch of people. And it was just, it was great to be back on the whole bunch of things with humans. So a little bit of normalcy, hoping it stays that way.
Brad Giles 02:57
or so. Awesome. Yeah, I think I think just quickly, I think that Canada got seven gold medals and 24 medals overall. So that's quite a good outcome.
Kevin Lawrence 03:08
Well, within Australia get 17 gold and 46 medals overall. So Holy
Kevin Lawrence 03:15
yes. Similar populations.
Brad Giles 03:17
Yeah, East similar episode that I didn't mean to bring that up. Sorry about that.
Kevin Lawrence 03:21
I am well, you know, and that's good. I set myself up there and waiting to go the fact spread. So smart goals we're talking about today. And it's and it's something that it shocks me how smart people are when it comes to goals. It's it is mind blowing, actually, and incredibly smart, educated experience, executives and leaders come up with these mushy, squishy, and smart goals all the time. And even when they understand that there's, there's something about human nature that gets in the way. And it's something that we basically end up putting a lot of energy into, we have some tools to help to do it. So it's a, it's a real challenge for a lot of companies in teams. So to start a lot of talk about what is a SMART goal
Brad Giles 04:16
is it? Well, a SMART goal. It's an acronym, an acronym, but what it does, and we'll dig into what the acronym stands for in a moment. But what it does, is it helps you to set a target or a goal. That is I guess, that that is more specific than otherwise An example might be so we're going to sell more stuff. You and I have both been in many, many meetings where many people put down goals or priorities that are not specific that are very generic. So we need to increase sales. And the obvious comeback is well, how much and by when. And then like, the person who's making this statement kind of looks and thinks lemon really thought about that, but we definitely need it need to increase sales. So smart goals help us to be very clear about what it is that we're trying to achieve. So that in the progress of the 13 week race or the year over the time period, that I we can measure it and be we know when we've crossed the finish line.
Kevin Lawrence 05:40
Yeah, it just makes it real clear what it is. And it's shocking how a lot of times people think in generic terms, and they have good intentions. You know, one that I've seen in people's personal life is I want to get healthier. While Isn't that nice? Was it? Okay, well, I'm gonna work out more. Okay. And if you so so what does that mean? What does that mean? What does that so we're all going to work out three times a week. Okay? What kind of workout? Are you going to? Do you know what I'm going to want to want one of my team members and Tim, he's got his goal, his goals around sweating. I think he says he wants to sweat three times a week. Not workout, but you know, still sweating three times a week for at least 30 minutes. Because it takes into account a whole bunch of things, it means your body's working really, really hard. That's a certain type of workout. Go ahead, right? Or it's summer. Or it's or it's somewhere Yes, or, or he went somewhere really hot, or he just came out of the sauna. But it is and whether it's an activity goal, you know about that, or it's a goal someone has around blood pressure or weight or who knows what, it's just getting really tangible. And the more tangible, the easier it is to know what it is you need to focus on. Number one, number two was easier from a management perspective to hold people accountable or to hold yourself accountable when you get down to release something's tangible.
Brad Giles 07:03
Yeah, yeah. So. So smart goals, or smart priorities are really, I guess, we would talk about it in the context of priorities, because KPIs are almost by their very nature, smart. So if I was a sales person, okay, I would probably have a sales budget. In other words, I need to sell 100 units. And that 100 units inherent in that would be a time period per month, or per week, or per year. So So in a way, it's a little bit like the KPIs or working in the business. They're kind of in their very nature set in a oftentimes, in a smart way. But the priority is to work on the business. That's what we're really big. That's where I need to be smart.
Kevin Lawrence 08:03
As I said differently, you know, KPIs or performance indication, errors and metrics, whatever you want to call them. They are numbers by nature. Yeah, we're goals generally are more likely to be projects. So numbers by nature are measurable, and they can be a bit messy. But goals or projects need a little bit of help. By nature, they're good, intense, but they're conceptual, rather than tangible. So So Brad, I know you did a little research on the history of smart goals. You want to share that and then we can dig into what they are and some examples.
Brad Giles 08:40
Yeah, so where did SMART goals come from they, they were developed by a chap called George Doran, Arthur Miller and James Cunningham in a 1981 article, there's a s m AR t. y way to write management goals and objectives. So it's very closely linked and with Peter Drucker's management by objectives, so so he refers to the SMART goals as well. And it very much comes from that very popular school of thought. And so then, I've heard before that there are about 81 different ways to write the acronym smart, you could set start with specific or you could use targeted or time based. So these are the ones that that, in my humble opinion, are most popular. But really, there there are some similarities. So let's just quickly go through them. If you like.
Kevin Lawrence 09:51
And before you before you mentioned Drucker's management by objective. Yeah. And when we look at leadership's you know, leaders or CEOs or execs, that is The one gap a lot of them have with their people because their people are hard to manage, they'll say or they drive them crazy. And time and time and time again, what do we do? We start and set objectives. Because end of the day, how I feel about Fred on my team is interesting. But how did Fred produce versus his goals? And how did he do on his operational metrics. And when you start managing by objective, takes a lot of the emotion out of it starts with a little more facts behind it. And at the end of the day, it makes it more constructive conversation with someone like Fred or easier to have conversation, because it's about things happening or not happening, versus maybe how you feel. And you know, you might not even be justified to have a conversation about how you feel. But when it's around objective, it's the thing that's supposed to happen is less personal, it just, it makes it a lot easier to lead and manage people and for them to know, their marching orders to.
Brad Giles 10:55
Yeah, it introduces a third element to the relationship. I like you, Kevin, but you know, you're only doing 50% of the stuff that you're supposed to do to retain your position. And that's a problem that we got to work through. And so that's a very different conversation to only it being the two of us. And I don't think that you're doing the right thing. In that sense. It, it introduces that important third element. So let's perhaps go through them, Shall we do it Pacific is number one s smart, specific. So they need to be these priorities need to be specific and narrow for more effective planning.
Kevin Lawrence 11:41
So Rob, we can't be wired. Yeah, it just it needs to be very pointed at something. And often they will have words in there like all or every or things like that, which are danger words, to improve all things, or everything is almost statistically impossible in a lot of cases. So it's specific narrowing down on something.
Brad Giles 12:03
One example is I'm sorry, one example is software project. So in a person's priorities, they might write the new Salesforce project. And that's it. And it's, it's, that may be way too wide, or way too big relative to the timeframe of 90 days.
Kevin Lawrence 12:23
Yep, exactly. second one's measurable, and basically define the evidence that will prove you're making progress, and have completed the goal. This is the one that I am a big stickler about. It's what's the number and I always say, what, what number can we put in here, that would make an accountant happy, because then they can know for sure if it's happening, or not happening, it's not just story, it's a statistic. This is critical. So it's, you know, no sweat. By working out at the gym, three times a week for at least 45 minutes as an example of exercise sales. It would be, you know, a measurable would be to sign contracts with for new clients to a value of a minimum of $2 million per contract. Right? And then there's the dollar value in there. There's also whether it was signed contract or an invoice contract all these little details that really help you to get a measurable.
Brad Giles 13:30
And yeah, very simple. The simple thing that I say is, how do you know when you've crossed the finish line using a metaphor of a rice? Like, because we if we don't know, we don't know, we can look at the gold medal tally, and know exactly where country rates? And so the simple, quick and dirty that I use with teams is I say, so. Does your priority have a number or a percentage on it? Is it measurable? Because if it doesn't, we'll let's put it and I would be as picky as to say rather than finish the project 100% complete is what I would encourage them to write
Kevin Lawrence 14:12
it right when and I will add in things sometimes like presented to the Board or approved by the board or presented to the executive team or approved by the executive. The fact that you wrote your report is interesting, did it get approved, because maybe the approval is good or presented to the Board and funding secured? Right, like whatever the final line, you want to cross this measurable piece and I find generally, there often needs to be two or three or four specific, tangible things and it's like, I'm going to get the gray, whatever it happens to be to weigh under 72 grams and make maintain the quality of at least x, whatever it happens to be this, you generally need to add quite a few clarifying things. Because also what happens is three months or a year later, you sit back and look at it and you forget what it was. Yeah, like I've learned, for example, after doing this, so many times the, when it comes to revenue, invoiced versus signed are two very different things. The contract signed, versus the invoice sent to a client, those are drawn in some businesses, that can be a lag time of an hour, or it can be a lag time of two years. Yeah, depending on so that that that detail there when you're talking about sales. The other piece is all sales aren't created equal. We're gonna ale sign those clients for $2 million each. Okay? At what margin, because not all sales are created equal. So anyway, there's all kinds of other things we can get into lots of details, but being really specific will being measurable.
Brad Giles 15:56
And the last thing about measurable is that you can track its progress through the period. So if you need to sell 130 widgets in the next quarter of 13 weeks, that means that you're going to have 10 widgets per week, on average being sold. So at the weekly meeting, you can report to the team on the progress. If it's not measurable. What do you talk about it? The weekly meeting, it's is
Kevin Lawrence 16:26
an opinion fest is going great.
Brad Giles 16:29
Yeah,
Kevin Lawrence 16:29
it's going awesome. And the last thing I'll say a measure, well, we gotta we're gonna move along over there. We're trying to do a little quicker episode here today. Is the other thing I've measurable, just slipped on my brain, it was really good. Brad, it was one of those things, it was measuring the whole, it'll come back and come back. The key is, is being crystal clear. And making it easier for people to know what great looks like, so they can help themselves and their teams to lead towards
Brad Giles 17:00
Oh my god, I'm so excited about the next one. achievable. Oh, my God, it is achievable. Yeah. So here's what we're gonna do, we're gonna build a new electric car with no experience in the next 13 weeks, and it's gonna be awesome oil. And everyone gets super excited about that. And they're high fiving, they're pumping each other on the back of the back. And then we get 10 weeks in, there we go. And you know what, like, maybe we set the bar a little bit too high.
Kevin Lawrence 17:34
And we didn't even get government approval to test one nevermind, build one, you know, or whatever. And, and so this is a part of the achievable sometimes we work on action plans, in our meetings, we'll build a 10 2030 point action plan. And you'll notice things that are time sensitive, or dependencies. And it also helps you to lock down the achievability because you realize some things just aren't possible. But the achievable one is big, because that's why we have things where people will say all and every, yeah, we're going to fully implement the RP system this quarter. Like hell you are, what specifically Will you absolutely get done will be this year piece taken a couple years to implement normally, because there's a whole you know, but it's Is that possible? Or, you know, we're gonna land for new clients at 2 million bucks apiece. Great. How many did we land in the last year? Yeah, none. Okay. Or we're gonna do it a gross margin of 48%. Okay, what's our mark? Gross Margin? No, 32? Well, no, that's not possible. Like, there's a build, even if it could be possible. It's, is it realistic, and, you know, where people when I was younger, and a lot of youthful exuberance, you know, we often would set stretch goals, and really push yourself too hard. But that sets up as organizations get larger for a lot of failure. So is it is good to stretch, but is it actually seriously achievable. And sometimes your best to talk to some people on your team to really get a reality check on it. We also have in meetings, a cooling off period of 48 hours. Because sometimes people get excited and over committed to meeting because they feel pressure or just enthusiasm. And then they get a reality check. So within 48 hours, you can come back and make a change. Because we like to give people time, so we don't over commit because you're going to be held accountable. Yeah,
Brad Giles 19:27
I do a very similar thing I would say you've got between now and the first weekly meeting, to stress and test your ideas to make sure that we're going to go for 100 we're actually going to go for it because I learned a little bit of stuff to tighten up that stuff. But it's let's say it's within the ballpark at the end of a planning session. And I guess the only other thing about achievable is people will sometimes say when they have failed at the end of the quarter about the previous quarter. Yeah, look, I just didn't I just didn't really realize I had as much time as I did, like I thought I had more time to devote to this and my team took all this time away. So it's got to be achievable within the time period. Right? And, and, and give yourself a bit of grace in the early days, because you get, you get to better appreciate this, the more that
Kevin Lawrence 20:19
there was, there's achievable based on the forces of nature and resources, that is achievable in your schedule. Anyone and when people are taking vacations or other things that are going on, so when shapeable content concerning everything in the environment, alright, so that's what we got specific, measurable, achievable. Now we'll go to the are in smart, which is relevant, basically, do they matter? Like, does it relate to your long term goals? Does it fit with your values and your culture and what you're about, if you have a big we're at an event today. And we were doing an environmental tour. And we're we went through a bog called burns bog near where we live, and learning how bogs are created, which is like a wetland. And, and, and we went on, there's a lot of stuff about wetlands today, it was quite fascinating this event, but the long story short is, you know, as someone was saying, you know, here we are driving around in sports cars, which is the other spectrum of the environmental world. And then this beautiful woman was walking us through and teaching us all about wetlands and rehabilitating wetlands and how it's good for the world and the environment. And we're driving gas guzzling cars. And it sort of say, that's, you know, in many ways, it's almost kind of funny, it's almost like a values conflict. You know, and, and I care about the environment stuff. But it's almost like if you're, you know, if you're a real strong environmental company, you know, buying or setting up something to start burning fossil fuels, you'll may not fit, it's not relevant, even though it could be a good business idea. It may not be relevant for your culture, it could be a conflict with what you're about as a company. And then there's ones where goals, just, people get excited about it and have pet projects, but they actually don't fit into the strategy. Yeah. And that's why we have our top three or five priorities for a three year time horizon, and a one year and a quarter. But it better darn well fit into what we want to make happen in the next three years. Otherwise, it may not even though it's your pet project, it may not be relevant enough to even be on the list.
Brad Giles 22:22
Yeah, I met with a CEO recently. And she was saying how, how her biggest problem is that she had these eight areas of opportunity. And she was overwhelmed because she didn't know where to focus, which is kind of relevant, irrelevant. Okay. And that. So what we did then is we focused in and discussed the hedgehog, we discussed what we've spoken about the hedgehog on this podcast from Jim Collins before, we discussed the hedgehog, how it works. And she pretty much eliminated about four or five of them to focus on the things that really matter. So when building your smart priorities, they've got to be relevant to your, your overall company values and goals and long term objectives.
Kevin Lawrence 23:16
Yep, not maybe not just you or someone's pet project, okay. And then finally, the T in smartest time based, just a realistic time. Now normally, in the methods that we use, most goals have a quarterly rhythm, it's makes it simpler. So most of our priorities, it's based on the 90 day rhythm maneuver, our firm and lots of our clients run on a calendar year. So that this quarter that we're in is July, August, September, which means at this point, we have about two months left little less than two months left. And by default, it's by the end of September is us is the starting point. Now, we might sequence them and have them at different times, but a clear deadline of when you are going to aim to have a complete and it helps that's why we do quarterly goals is you've got you know everyone crams for the exam leaves their homework till the end. But really at the end of it, it's when we do coordinate because you have four times a year you cram for the exam, you might do some monthly goals or even weekly goals to help move progress more often. But the point is a deadline to help you stay focused. So you can be creative about getting it done more quickly, rather than letting it dry.
Brad Giles 24:29
And maybe it relates to other people's priorities as well. Maybe someone else has a goal or a priority for the quarter that's relying on what you're doing. So you've got to liaise with them to make sure okay, so I'll get it done by week four, so that you can get yours done by week 12 or whatever it is. But it must absolutely must have a date on a priority. It must have a number and a percentage and a date. If it doesn't, then that's the question you've got to ask.
Kevin Lawrence 24:58
Yeah, and so that's it. I'm gonna show them both. I have another example, we'll wrap this one up. But there are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and time based. I just had a flash of a meeting I was in. And in one of the companies that we work with, we review company level goals and department goals, right? Each of the there's like seven or eight key departments. And we review those every quarter, we set them every quarter and review them. And I remember being in a meeting when I was, you know, probably like 18 months ago. And as we went through this, we saw and reviewed the department goals and one of the department, their goals weren't smart. And everyone's going through and you can feel the tension in the room. People are like, Ah, you're saying you're 87% complete? Like, yeah, I'm not buying it. But I can't challenge you. Because there's nothing there to challenge against. It was their opinion that they were 87% complete, there was no way to have an intelligent conversation. And I believe they worked hard. And I believe they did some good work. But the goal was much and it was very, very hard to do anything constructive with it for them or for us, because there was the measuring stick was non existent.
Brad Giles 26:09
Yeah, it's like, go back to the Olympics. Imagine being at the Olympics, when there was no definition of when you crossed the finish line. Yeah, like, you absolutely need that. And you need the time to know how other people are performing. Yep. So awesome. What a good chat around SMART goals today. And a quick note, our next two episodes are going to be about how the best leaders hold people accountable. So how to create a culture of a culture of accountability. So do look forward to those ones. So let's do a super quick summary here. Often the problem is goals aren't smart, they don't goals or priorities. They don't clearly state what needs to be achieved. That leads to poor execution. So they need to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and time based. Kevin, would you like to close this out, please?
27:10
Yeah,
Kevin Lawrence 27:11
and it's a very smart thing to have smart goals. And the truth is, it makes your life and their life he's not cheesy as an awesome, but it makes your life in their life better, because it's crystal clear what greatness looks like in their world and what they must achieve. And it's crystal clear for you as a manager, because you can have conversations, how you doing on the five things you said are so important. And because it's mathematical, the measurements, you don't have to have an opinion fast, and you have a lot less tension. So basically, in many ways, it's like having lines on the highway and speed signs on the highway. Everyone knows what to expect. And it makes it a heck of a lot easier. So be smart. Help your people be smart. That's kind of what we're here to help you. And if you're already doing it, congrats and if not, if you need a tune up, just tighten it up. So let's say want to wrap this up there, Brad. Okay.
Brad Giles 28:01
Thank you for your time today. We heard that you've gotten very about smart goals. As always, this is the growth whispers and I'm Brad Giles. You can find me at evolution partners.com.au. Kevin, you can find out Lawrence and co.com. And of course if you are so interested, this is on not only podcasts, but also on YouTube. So do have a good week and we look forward to chatting to you again next week. Take it
Podcast Episode 70 - What's the Difference Between an Operational and Strategic CEO?
IN THIS EPISODE:
Operational CEOs focus on the short term horizon (1 week to 1 year) and address tactical items such as margin, sales and people performance.
Strategic CEOs focus on the long term horizon (3 years +) and address innovation, sales relationship health and people development.
In this episode, we talk about the differences between an operational and strategic mindset and how to become a more strategic CEO.
SUBSCRIBE TO THE GROWTH WHISPERERS:
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Please note that this episode was transcribed using an AI application and may not be 100% grammatically correct – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.
Kevin Lawrence 00:13
Welcome to the growth whispers podcast where everything we talk about is building enduring great companies with enduring great teams and enduring great strategy. And during great cash flow, just enduring greatness all around. I'm Kevin Lawrence. I'm here with my co host as I am every week, Brad Giles Brad, how you doing today?
Brad Giles 00:31
I'm doing excellent. Thank you. Excellent. Just got off an interesting week, down south, and pumped and ready to go. How are you doing?
Kevin Lawrence 00:44
I'm doing great. I'm just up up up the lake, on some vacation time surrounded by awesome forest fires here in there, which has made it very interesting because we're in the desert region, but it's great. And just have some nice time to let the brain cool off. So it's good.
Brad Giles 01:00
So very clear, what
Kevin Lawrence 01:02
is let's jump into Our word of the day. And we'll talk about our topic actually talk about a topic first. So what are we talking about today, Brad? And then we'll just quickly jump into the Word of the Day in and away we go.
Brad Giles 01:10
Yeah, for sure. We are talking about? Are you an operational CEO, or a strategic CEO? CEO is one role. But are you an operational CEO or a strategic CEO? So we're going to talk about the difference and the impact? And actually how that can make you feel as a leader? Yeah, it's
Kevin Lawrence 01:32
awesome. I love this topic. And it's something we talk about all the time as CEOs grow through different levels. I call it a shift from a lowercase c CEO, to a capital C CEO, which we'll get into that good. So word of the day or phrase and today, Brian, what's yours?
Brad Giles 01:49
Um, yeah, so it's kind of in tune with our topic today. But it's about Napoleon Bonaparte. Okay, now, this is not going to take forever. Napoleon Bonaparte before every battle, he had a thing that he did, he would get onto the horse and secretly ride into the enemy's camp, undercover and suss out the whole of the enemy. He be honest horse just going through the enemy's camp to get where they were at. He did that in every single battle that he fought except for one, which was Waterloo, which you may or may not know that he lost. Because he had, I think it was Hemorrhoids at the time. And couldn't ride a horse. So yeah, that it's a little bit different to the word of the day, but it's just something that I picked up that was like, Yeah, you've got to know your enemy.
Kevin Lawrence 02:45
Yeah, firsthand. I love that. Um, mine is what are you really afraid of. And it was interesting. We had an experience, they doing a combination of ropes course we're kind of up in the treetops, climbing things, balancing on things zipline in between things. And I have a notable fear of heights. But yet, when I'm doing that, I had almost no fear. So it's interesting people take this thing called fear, fear of heights. And it can be a fear of anything, anything that kind of psychologically gets in your way in your work your life. But then when you go on to unpack it, it's interesting, because I'm actually not afraid of heights. I'm afraid of jumping. And I have this impulse to jump and this thing when I do this course, you're connected, so you can't, so move them, it was a couple times is a bit tense, but generally not fearful. Because it's it's not about the heights, it's basically afraid of myself. Yeah, yes. You know, we come across things all the time, and we learn as coaches and is it when people think there's an issue or a challenge, if you unpack it and dissect it down, you often find that there's something very different edits. So that was mine. I had that experience again today, of how I actually quite enjoyed most of it. And, but it's because I understand what really is at the root of when I'm stunned standing on the edge of a tall building on a short railing. Why that feels very different.
Brad Giles 04:15
Awesome, awesome. Let's so I'm looking forward to hearing you mentioned these two together today
Kevin Lawrence 04:20
I know and you know, as I'm, as I'm thinking about that, you know, it's actually unpacking what you might be afraid of, and basically getting to know the enemy. So if the enemy is fear, you know, and really getting to know what it is you can unpack it and make it go away. And that's what Nepal said. He would go to the enemy, which would know many people would fear and really dig in there and figure out what they're about. Also, then probably help them to figure out how to beat them.
Brad Giles 04:48
Awesome. Okay, so, let's, let's get into it. Are you an operational CEO, or are you a strategic CEO, so maybe we be no one's gonna want to stay there,
Kevin Lawrence 04:58
then people are gonna want to stay there strategically. This sounds more impressive.
Brad Giles 05:01
I'm surprised AJ Don't you know me? I'm clever. Yeah, clever,
Kevin Lawrence 05:05
say and we all, you know, again, so listen, everyone, everyone really think about a reality? Are you truly more operational or strategic sort of router jump in
Brad Giles 05:16
there? That's okay. There's a saying, which is if you're so smart, then why are you not happy? Yeah. If you're so smart, then why are you not happy? And that really leads into the first part here that we want to talk about, do you believe that you can continue in your role for 10 to 20 years? and retain the energy?
Kevin Lawrence 05:43
Yeah, and the effectiveness and just be outstanding? And that's, it's a great question, because a lot of CEOs we talked to get exhausted by what they're doing. Because it's hard. It's not the easiest job in the world. Yeah, it means. And in a lot of cases, what happens for some people is that they're so burdened by their role, and many cases, so burdened by the operational challenges, shorter term operational challenges. And when you're earlier in your career, those are great ways to cut your teeth and get really good and learn and grow. But as you go forward, that becomes more, more of a challenge. And some fun energy and maintaining your energy becomes hard for a lot of people because they feel like they're carrying the weight of the company on their shoulders.
Brad Giles 06:30
Yeah, yeah. And it doesn't need to be that way. As Mel Brooks, the famous Hollywood producer, actor said, it's good to be king. The good thing about being king is that you get to set the rules. And that's kind of what we're saying through here. If it is good to be king, if you do get to set the rules, then you've just got to understand what are the rules that are going to make the difference so that you can continue, or at least you feel like if you wanted to, you could continue for the next 10 to 20 years and retain the energy. As you said, so many people we talked to, they just can't feel like they can continue for a long period of time. And it's a problem, it doesn't need to necessarily be like that, if it's not sustainable. And then you can't build an enduring business. That's what we're all about, and what we're always talking about here,
Kevin Lawrence 07:28
you need that you need to have endurance in order to build an enduring business, because it's a lot of work. And it's a challenge. So in that first question, you know, do you have that, and if you believe you can continue to grow, and thrive, and add great value to your organization for the next 10 or 20 years, then great, then you are potentially more likely to be a strategic CEO, or you just love it, and you're set up to be, you know, in your sweet spot all day. And if you're not, which isn't the case, for a lot of people, they're more operational than they want to be. Yeah, and strategic carries a great mental what weight but so does the operational side of it. So let's, you know, and the distinction between an operational CEO and a strategic CEO. And this is important that we break it down. And they're very different types of CEOs. That's the difference between when I say as a lowercase c CEO, it's almost like a junior CEO, versus and or if you have a smaller business, if you have a smaller business, you're more likely to be a lowercase c CEO. Although he has a smaller business that you want to get big, you need some of that capital, see strategic stuff to get there. That's how you get there. So let's talk here. So what if we were to draw some distinctions between an operational and a strategic CEO, let's, let's look at some of them. And one of them we got here and I'll start the first one, you can go on to others or bribe, but it's the timeframe of the projects they work on. You know, operational CEOs are generally focused, sometimes it's a day or a week or maybe a year. But they're closer to the day, week, month, maybe quarter focus on the projects that they work on, the decisions that they make, the emails, they respond to, the meetings that they're in. So for example, we would take, you know, if it was a sales real revenue side of the business, if they were involved in a weekly meeting about key customers and opportunities. That's more of an operational CEO, that's a weekly, you know, weekly meeting with a focus probably have a few months of when that business plans, if they're strategic, you know, they're gonna be focused generally on stuff that's about three years plus a lot of the time and there's no right amount of time. Like it's, it's different for everyone. But they're going to be looking at partnerships. Maybe it's acquisitions, maybe it's new products that they that are gonna, you know, take the business in a new direction or new markets, it's things that will impact the income statement or balance sheet in three years versus, you know, day, week or month. That's the first is timeframe. And we want to be really clear the amount of time that you should be strategic versus operational. There's a lot of debate that we can have, there's no right answer, it depends on you. And it depends on the stage of your business and your goals. But it should be if you're wanting it north of 25%, at least for almost for most CEOs. On the strategic side, but it could be as high as 70 to 80%. If you've really got a massive growth, ambition, and have the right other pieces in place,
Brad Giles 10:46
I love that's one of in my humble opinion, one of the two nuggets of today's episode, and that is look at your email, look at your meetings that you're having as a later. Where are your what is the timeframe? Is it a week, a day, a quarter? Or is it three years? And now that's a there's a bit of specificity in there. But I think that Yeah, it's a really great measure to say, Are you operational? Or are you strategic now? it you can't switch it all off and go from tactical or operational to strategic. It takes time. But the more that you work on the strategic, the less that you will need to work on the operational.
Kevin Lawrence 11:33
Yeah. So what are some other things? Brad, in your mind? That would be things that would be very different between an operational CEO and a strategic CEO?
Brad Giles 11:41
Yeah. So I love this one as well, this is are they focusing on growing the margin? Or are they focusing on innovation? So an operational CEO, now we've spoken about gross margin, gross margin is one of our very best friends. Yes. And it, we've got a fantastic episode about that. Gross Margin matters, but, but equally, it is one of the signatures of an operational CEO, the sales manager should be obsessed with gross margin. But the strategic CEO is focused on innovation. And of course, higher gross margin will be born of innovation, ultimately, but are you spending your energy, your time more on for on the gross margin or more on the innovation, so that's another, that's another
Kevin Lawrence 12:46
innovation is really going to benefit you. And again, we'll go back to the three years as a concept, it's going to benefit you a lot three years down the road or longer. Where that gross margin squeeze or dialing in would be a little more short term. It could be this month, this quarter this year. Yep, that's a great one. Oh, another one is how they look at people. And one of the things with people is that they would be looking at output or performance, which is good. And an operational CEO would do that and do that. Well. A strategic CEO would be looking at development, ie enhancing people where there's a an investment today that pays off down the road. They also might be looking at high level recruitment, or attraction strategies to get some of the best talent to start to come to the door over the next three to five years,
Brad Giles 13:39
like building a virtual bench.
Kevin Lawrence 13:41
Exactly like building a virtual bench, which we've also done a show on as well. So but really, it's the lens of people get them to produce versus building an amazing team that will be able to handle four times the opportunities in a decade.
Brad Giles 13:57
Yeah, yeah. It's, it's interesting. are you focusing on the performance? I mean, let's be fair, that is still in tune with the timeframe that we set before, are you focusing on people's performance this week, this day, this month, or this quarter? Or you focusing on the performance that they will be making in a year or two or three, again, around development? building out the difference between those. And so what do we got? What do we got for our next item, the difference between an operational and a strategic CEO?
Kevin Lawrence 14:33
Well, you know, there's also, it's basically around sales, like if they're looking at sales, an operational CEO is going to look at, you know, the deals that are closing and the pipeline, the pipeline of transactions. Now, there are some strategic CEOs are going to make a call. I've got one strategic CEO I've worked with for years, on some massive opportunities that might drop $10 million to the bottom line. They might be invested in those opportunities, that's a long term deal, they might end up because there's exceptions to everything. But generally, the strategic CEOs are looking at enhancing relationships that will pay off in the long term or continuing them. So we're out on the boat yesterday, actually, with a good friend rather chatting. And he's, you would different title equivalent to the CEO of a large company, a very large company. And we're chatting about how he spends his time versus how his team spends their time. And he basically talked about how he is building relationships with the CEO, and continues to talk to the CEO about long term strategic things, and that at the right time, opportunities end up coming from that. And his team focused on a relationship with the CFO. Right, it's more of the tactical relationship, not completely, but you know, it's it's still strategic, but more on the operational end of getting the deals done. And he's focusing on the relationships with the CEO is because it's a you know, it's that CEO to CEO conversation that brings opportunities, and then the rest of the team executes it. Yeah. But it's instead of the pipeline, it's about enhancing relationships, that will fill the pipeline for decades, if done right.
Brad Giles 16:19
Yeah. So an interesting thought around that is, can you have a general manager or a CEO and still be operational CEO?
Kevin Lawrence 16:35
No, absolutely. Because what happens, and here's the challenge, what happens is the CEO doesn't get the capital seeing their title, and they stay operational. Yeah. So you can have someone with the title of CEO, but you may not let them run the business like they generally do in there's different versions of that title. So there's one, having the people will come to the summit, and we get into the stucks. And the opportunities, it's having two people in roles. And then secondly, it's operating like that strategic CEO and pulling yourself out of the weeds and out of the details. As hard as that not because it's your comfort zone, and you've been doing it for years.
Brad Giles 17:17
Yeah, yeah. And, and that, and you know, it and you know, once what works, but to our very first point today, maybe it's not sustainable, maybe the way in which you run the business, across everything on a very short term manner, isn't sustainable. Now, that doesn't mean it. That doesn't mean, if you had a CEO who was doing that, well, it would be sustainable for them, it should be okay, it should be sustainable, because they're not also carrying the other burden that the CEO is. But being able to pull that apart and say, the CEOs role has to be sustainable. Therefore, we want to work in the long term to be more of a strategic role, rather than an operational role is certainly what we're advocating here.
Kevin Lawrence 18:11
So why don't we Why don't we dig into what are some of the things that drag a CEO more operational, or lift them more strategic, like specific things that we have seen. And, and, and I'll start with one of them, but to also to, and they're tied, one is the strength of their team. And to give an example, if they have a team, and if we take a look at levels and companies and think about a vice president versus a director, in turn, basically an autonomous leader that can manage almost anything with someone that still needs help with some decision making. Generally, and they're still earlier in their career, often, not always, what often is, is that they have very strong bite VPS, or whatever title, you want to call it under the CEO, that are strong and actually don't need a lot of care and attention. They need to be supportive, but they're accountable. They know their stuff, they deliver, and they get stuff done. So whatever it is, having a team that's incredibly strong, allows them to not have to get into the weeds. Now, they still may have a problem with that some personalities do, but they don't have to be in the weeds as much or as on the other side. So that's one is a strong enough team. So you have the opportunity to and the other side is taking that opportunity and picking projects that are about three to five years in the future and working on them like the new facility, like the acquisition strategy, like the expansion into another market or innovation like we've talked about, but having notable amounts of their time on those projects, and then going and meeting the partners and the vendors and everyone around That future state idea that they're working on. So that, you know, they're less likely to get too much into day to day. But they got so the right team, and then the right products, a little bit of both one sets you up, the other one pulls you.
Brad Giles 20:14
So what was and you know, what I would add to that is, is trust, maybe a little bit of a different angle from what you've got there. But I would say that trusting the people to do the shorter term stuff, trusting your team, I've seen it in leadership teams where, you know, CEOs have been burned, they've been burned by, you know, poor performance or bad situations, and, and they just, they can't build up enough trust in their delegates to their team, to be able to completely hand over to them to be able to completely let them run with and take full responsibility. So they can step out of the week or the month or the quarter, and spend a lot of their time working on the longer term stuff. And, and so that kind of they get into this, this, this terrible loop of that they can't escape from a random trust.
Kevin Lawrence 21:21
Yeah, and I would always add, when people have say the word I need to trust, and I would add the word verify, oh, yes, and verify it, and which is usually you need data and reporting to be able to do it. And we've done other episodes where, you know, doing this is is like being a, this is the shift from a visual of a pilot, a visual licensed pilots called VFR visual flight, where you can fly when you can see where you're going, ie good weather and sunshine. Yeah, versus instrument rated pilot, where you can fly in the dark in the storms. And in a snowstorm when you can't see a thing or a sandstorm, we can Sandstorm, I'd be more dangerous. I don't know if that's true. But where you can fly with it when you can't, when your eyes can't guide you? Yes, it's not possible. And then having the right reporting in that it makes a massive difference. And whether it's on the people on the process, the financial KPIs, the operational KPIs, how people are doing and bringing the strategy to life in terms of the execution plans, all that stuff really, really makes a difference to Yeah, so and a lot of people don't have the right data. And that's why they have to have their hands in it. And it's, you know, it goes back to the fate, one of my favorite phrases, which is managing by objective, you know, and the processes that we set up in companies. Everyone has clear operational metrics, financial metrics, they have cleared quarterly goals by group and by person. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell where performance is and isn't people doing the work or the people that oversee that. But a lot of people don't have tight enough systems to make it that way. And then they can be feel, or maybe truthfully do need to be over involved to make that happen.
Brad Giles 23:05
Yeah. So what can we do about it? What what is it that that leaders can do? If they've listened to this episode, and identified themselves as an operational CEO, and think, you know, what I actually want to induce, I feel as though my role is not one that I can maintain for a long time, then. And I'm trying to find a way to get out maybe rather than selling the business and idea could be to turn to become a strategic CEO. So what can people do about it? Well, I've
Kevin Lawrence 23:43
got a couple. I mean, I'm like you, I'm always working with CEOs on this. And actually, most of AI CEOs, we're working on this to some degree, they're all at different levels of climbing this ladder towards strategic CEO. Because most of want to keep going for the long term. But where we normally start? Is them getting clear on really deciding that they're going to do this. And usually they're in enough stress and pain that that's an easy decision. I go to the team, like I got one that we're doing this with right now. And he drew me his org chart. And he thought he needed to make a change and restructure it. I just as we started going through it, I'm like, well, there's this person in this box here, who isn't an A player who you have all kinds of stories about, who is your you're dropping down and doing part of their job, and we're gonna go and verify the structure. I think his structure is fine. He needs to get an A player and a couple of critical roles. So he doesn't have to be as involved as he is. And he's involved. He's creating work arounds and bridges and holding people's hands on stuff that he shouldn't have to be. But he's kind of you know, the person He's been with a long time he likes them. And he doesn't realize he's kind of the amount of pain he's creating for himself in the organization. So it's, you know, make sure you have the right structure and basically surrounded by a players in those key roles. We talk about some of those other projects for him, but until he gets that stabilized, and get the strength he needs around him, it'll be very hard for him to the next part, which is my favorite is working on more of those strategic projects.
Brad Giles 25:26
Yeah, it's it's Jim Collins reverse reaction or response to many things, which it's first people, you know, first, you got to get the right people on the bus. And then we can think about the other thing. So yeah, first of all, we've got to, we've got to have a team of competent a players or people who are good enough to be able to do this, that's, that's kind of sets the foundation, but then start working on the things that are going to carve out more time for yourself. So start thinking about the longer term things, what is it that you can obviously delegate this, it's there's some obvious stuff around there, but begin to work on the things that are long term, the things that are important and not urgent, and maybe you start off spending three hours a week on that. And then, and then that will begin to free up a bit more time so that in two months or three months, you can go to four hours a week,
Kevin Lawrence 26:33
for sure. Other things, is to stop taking meetings that are about short term things, or stop attending meetings, that your direct reports should be able to handle it one of our CEOs is deeply involved in the strategic planning meetings. And one of their, their, their decisions, is that they're no longer going to be involved in the group discussions. So when people go off into breakout groups, or individual rooms, when we're in person, they're just gonna sit and hang out whether they're in the room with me or go do something else. Because those are operational discussions. They don't need to be there. But they've been there for all the years, they've been running the company. And so there's there it's about the meetings that you stop attending, or you attend once in a while, and you just sit and listen. Other another piece, and it's interesting. One of these, the hallmarks of the operational CEOs is they take a lot of notes in meetings. Sometimes though, the damn scribe. Sometimes I've seen the people running 250 $300 million businesses, where the CEO is noting down the action items. I mean, they're really helpful. But the real operational ones have a hard time letting go of that. And that's just, you're in the way of other people and letting people handle those things themselves. And again, it's not it's, it's more common than I would think that it would be, especially you know, when and
Brad Giles 28:01
so, but all of those things that you've said is about figuring out what you need to stop doing. And what I love that one of the scribe because there's a leader that I work with, you know, let's say, a greater than $200 million company, and he's taking notes at every single meeting. And I just, I just think that that is, you know, your, your time is much better served. Yeah, but overall, what we're saying is what he stopped
Kevin Lawrence 28:34
you at that level, you just shouldn't do it? Yeah, that is somebody else's job. And that's just an indicator of other things you're holding on to and we do, it's interesting. I have one client that I've worked with many amazing strategic CEOs, but one in particular. And I remember this amazing CEO would take almost no notes. He might write down, you know, seven words in a meeting. Yeah. But because everything else was up to everyone else. And he would get people to present. He would ask a whole bunch of questions, a number of questions. And then he would get them to make a recommendation he needed to decide, or ask them to update it, and then come back and see him in a couple weeks. Yeah, but he didn't take a strategic CEO almost never comes away with any homework. You not leave, they leave the meeting with everyone else having things to do, but rarely do they have things to do.
Brad Giles 29:31
Also, awesome. Awesome. So are you working on things that are three years plus? Or are you working on things that are one week or one month? So let's move to a quick review of what we've spoken about here. Really, you an operational or a strategic CEO? We begin by asking the question, do you believe that you can continue in your role for 10 to 20 years and retain the energy. That's the big problem that we come across all the time with leaders. So, operational CEOs focus on short term one week to a quarter, maybe even six months or a year, they focus on operational CEOs focus on the tactical items. And they focus on the margin, they focus on sales on the people's performance, you know, tell us about the strategic CEOs, Kevin,
Kevin Lawrence 30:33
strategic CEOs are not caught up in the day to day firefighting in the business generally. And they're looking at three years out and innovation and building long term relationships, developing people developing new products, or markets or alliances or things that just add long term value to the business. So they're working three years out, versus working in the fire that there is today. And like he talked about upfront, like Napoleon, you know, riding out to go and assess out the next battle, they still get their first hand information, they don't lose contact. But they're thinking about how do we win long term, not worrying about the details of what's going on. And we didn't talk about we've kind of talked about, you know, for a lot of people the shift is when deciding you're going to do this. It's saying no to a whole bunch of short term tactical stuff like don't be the scribe, don't come away with homework, other people are supposed to have homework and not you. And, and, and finding ways to build the team that's so darn strong that you can trust and rely on them, although you verify them and that's usually a big gap. Aside from them being control freaks not letting go. It's not having a strong enough team that can handle what truly needs to happen at the scale that they're at.
Brad Giles 31:44
Awesome. Well, thank you for listening. This has been the growth whispers on Brad Giles. You can find me at evolution partners.com.au and you can find Kevin at Lawrence and co.com. Again, thanks for listening. We hope you have a great week and can catch up again next week.
Podcast Episode 69 - Topgrading Virtual Bench
IN THIS EPISODE:
This week on The Growth Whisperers, we talk about the Topgrading virtual bench, a recruiting tactic for executives who need a better way to find additional leaders or key team members.
The Topgrading virtual bench is important because it builds a list of vetted, pre-qualified candidates for a job opening that you can draw upon when you need to.
In the episode, we explain why it's important and provide a simple role-play on how you can cold call potential candidates to put them onto your virtual bench.
SUBSCRIBE TO THE GROWTH WHISPERERS:
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Please note that this episode was transcribed using an AI application and may not be 100% grammatically correct – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.
Brad Giles 00:13
Welcome to the growth Whisperer is where everything we talk about is building enduring great companies, companies that will last companies that will have a meaningful impact companies that you care about. That's what we're about. As always, today, I'm joined by with my co host, Kevin Lawrence. Good, Kevin, how are you doing today?
Kevin Lawrence 00:35
I am doing awesome Brad, I'm excited to be here. I just love doing these shows, because it gives a good chance to think about some of the things that we work on all the time and learn as we're doing the work. And then we get to kind of, you know, mash our brains together and come up with even better ideas. So yeah, I enjoy it. And I'm, you know, as we're at Episode 69, we're, you know, past two thirds of the way to 100. And for something that started off as a Hey, let's try this for a few weeks and see what happens. It's been pretty cool.
Brad Giles 01:06
Yeah, I'm enjoying it, too. It's good. It's good fun. I remember, in the first few episodes, we were saying, Yeah, we'll give it a few. And we'll see how it goes. But no, no, it is going very, very good. Well, as always, today, we like to start with a word or phrase, as we advocate people do in their meetings just to break the ice for one of a better term. So Kevin, tell me, what is your word or phrase for the day? Mine is groggy. I had my second shot of the vaccination the day that we're recording the show, and it's starting to kick in a little bit. You know, it's funny, last time I got my first shot. My arm was a bit sore. That hasn't happened yet, although I'm sure it will. But yeah, I just feel a little bit groggy, a little tired. And, but I feel awesome. Knowing that I'm done. And soon, I'll be able to travel. And I'll be able to potentially come to your country or other great countries that I'm used to going to. So I would say I'm, I'm groggy and grateful is it would be the you know, has the tag a second word on there. How about yourself run? Mine? Is it human nature? Human nature? Okay, two words. I don't think I've ever said one word, but that's okay. I don't think you've ever said one word you're generally have a couple. Yes, yeah. So human nature. And the reason is, we are enjoying the dance in Australia, we've had quite a few lock downs. And a lot of people are pointing fingers at each other. about why and you know, it's getting a bit tiresome, but I guess I'm just thinking, do you know what it this is just human nature. When we look at what happened in India, where there was a big surge, a second wave that was just horrible and terrible. I think that a lot of these things are caused just by human nature, people get tired of things, they get complacent. They want to go back to normal, they don't want to have to do the things that they need to do to play safe. And that's kind of what happened, you know, in the 1918. Flu as well. So I'm a bit off track here. But my point being, I think it's human nature and knowing that human nature is a part of the negative consequences, sometimes of things that happen that can actually be applied to business as well. Sometimes people do things, it's just human nature. And you just got to deal with it and move on, or try to actively be conscious of it.
Kevin Lawrence 03:45
Yes, it seems like it's human nature, to have a lack of discipline.
Brad Giles 03:51
Yes.
Kevin Lawrence 03:53
I watched on on July 1, in Canada, Canada Day, are in our province for sure. They announced you no longer had to wear masks. And like whoosh, they fell off everyone's face that was up in a smaller town. But if they fell off everyone's face, like almost immediately, like people like let's move on. People want to have parties. People want to do stuff. And I hope that because of the level of vaccinations that we have, that it'll stick and, you know, we're past this thing. Yes. Because human nature is like, we just want to socialize. You know, I had friends come over tonight. My parents are with me. moving house, parents are here we're doing some packing and some friends came by to drop off a car and, and they're there. They're giving my parents a hug because they've known my parents for years. But that's just human nature. We want to hug people and we want to be close to people and all this wear a mask and stay apart. You know, it kind of grinds on people or did it grind on people and hopefully, that's mostly behind us. Awesome. Well, let's, let's dig into the show today. So what are we talking about? We're not you know, we're talking literally human nature comes into play. Being groggy could be an excuse for not doing what we're going to talk about today. And hopefully by the end, people are grateful for what you've done the show. Let's hope but so so what's the name of the game today, Brad?
Brad Giles 05:14
Yeah, the name of the game is what is a top grading virtual bench and why you need one. So many people talk about the virtual bench. The virtual bench is a concept that comes from top grading by bread smart, and hiring is a problem. Back in the 1920s, around the Great Depression, there wasn't really a problem with hiring because it was unskilled labor generally, for a lot of roles. And there was no shortage of people to fill those unskilled roles. So it wasn't really that complex. As we've moved into a knowledge economy, the war for talent has become more and more of a problem. Or opportunity, depending on how you look at it. And what that now means is that there's no substitute for having the best people, we call those people, a player's a player is defined as someone who's in the top 10% of available candidates at the pay rate that you provide. So this isn't paying a lot more, this is the pay rate that you provide. So it's a top 10%. And so they are that is a top grading concept that you and I both work with. But the virtual bench is another concept in that area, to ensure that you can actually fill vacant roles. It's a tactic, because many people just put an advertisement on an online job board, and then get really surprised when they don't get amazing candidates turn up,
Kevin Lawrence 07:02
right, and they've got this position that they need to fill, and they get kind of desperate. So imagine, imagine, you know, a basketball game, they will have the National Basketball League NBA, which is mostly based in the US they play odd. Sometimes they played some other place, but most of us league. And imagine you're out there in a very important game,
Brad Giles 07:27
and one of your key players gets hurt. Well, if you don't have any other players, you now have a problem, you're going to panic, you'll pull someone out of the stands if you have to, ah, but the sports teams are smart, they have this thing called a bench on the side of the court, and they've got other players warmed up ready to go at all times. So one so they can trade off. So people don't run out of energy, too, they can replace an injured player instantaneously. Now, that bench getting those second line players in some cases, sometimes they rotating, but they put a lot of work into getting that bench that's right there to have additional players ready to go. That's how they operate in sports, they have to now bless them, they have other virtual benches of the feeder teams, you know that are playing in different lower level leagues that feed into that higher level NBA league. And it's like that way in most sports.
08:22
But we don't do that in business. Generally, we have our players that are on the court playing. And we don't generally have backups. So if something happens, we generally end up being desperate, which makes us more likely to pull somebody out of the stands and have them come play who's not the most qualified, not even a great fit. But man, we just need someone on the court,
Brad Giles 08:45
anybody and any anyone, please. So so. And we make a lot of budget, nevermind that we make a bad choice. But we are also in a pinch. And sometimes for the right people, it takes 369 months to recruit these high level capable people. So the idea of the virtual batch is that you have your own group of people who are warmed up, ready to join, you are ready for a more serious conversation to join you. So that if there is an opportunity, you're not starting from zero, you know, it's like they're already warmed up to six or seven or eight verses starting at zero and having none and you're much more likely to have great candidates because yeah, that's the whole idea is you've got people warmed up who you already know are amazing. People are what we would call a players. So you're not desperate and crossing your fingers and hoping because that's the real problem, isn't it? that many people they only think about it when a person resigns. There's no succession plan. There's no, not a week. How are we going to maintain a high quality team. It's just a case of, Oh well, someone's resigned. Let's Go to HR and let's put an advert on the job board on the online job board to try to find someone and then we'll see what comes in. And then they say, well, the market isn't that good at the moment? Of course not. But
10:13
imagine it's actually insane. Brad, imagine if our salespeople did that, you know, when they lost a customer, they started to prospect and look for a new one. We would never grow. No, but our salespeople get it, and our sales teams get it. But we as executives and leaders don't normally, and our salespeople know, they have to put time into prospecting and qualifying and wooing and lunching and coughing, and all of these things, to build relationships. And sometimes it takes years. And the truth is, as leaders and executives, we need to do the same. And we are often not, I've got some CEOs I work with that are amazing. They never stop, literally never stop.
Brad Giles 10:57
But it's a disciplined effort that leaders need to have. So anyway, we're very passionate about this. We've got some great examples we'll get into but the first point I want to get into is that really the highest performing people rarely or almost never apply for jobs.
11:14
Because the amazing a players are very well taken care of. Yeah, the companies know that they're great. They take very good care of them. And when they do decide that, enough of this, something has pissed them off, and they've had enough. Generally, they have a chat with a couple of people. And they instantly get an interview and get hired. They don't even make it to the marketplace. Yeah, they don't make it because they talk to some relationships, who already know them, love them, and probably have been courting them along the way. And then the way they go, and then most are not headhunted. That's what another word for they can be headhunted. And in those in those vulnerable moments. Exactly. But they're not. They're rarely ever getting to the point when they're applying. Yeah, yeah. Because they don't have to, because they're being pulled out all the freakin time.
Brad Giles 12:06
And then we wonder if a player's rarely apply for jobs. We wonder why we don't get a player's through the online job board system. It's it's logical, like people don't go there, they're not going to say, I'm going to go and try to find a job because they've already got multiple inquiries inbound on a regular basis. Correct. I would make one distinction, though, there is a level of role where that is true and where it's not true. So what's interesting that we found in our work is that, you know, if we're looking at sort of a player, administrative people, sometimes even like executive assistants and administrative people, they're often not as connected as say, your director of sales, your director of operations, your director of social responsibility and things like that. So we I would say sometimes at a manager level or a director level and up for sure everything we're talking about is true. And there are some positions closer to the front line. That that it's not as true, there is some closer to the frontline where they might apply for jobs, but it's it's almost like a different part of the market. Yeah. So we're talking about managers, directors, executives, all that kind of stuff. You know, that's that's kind of what we're talking about today. Yeah, yeah. And so the second point, it's like sports and sales. So we gave the example of the NBL. Before, but But what we're, what we're saying is, you've got to have some kind of funnel, you've got to have some kind of thinking beyond the reaction. So you need to be proactive in this area to Yes, have an example. I'll give you an example. I worked with a customer in the homebuilding space. They were one of the large home builders in our area, and I walked into the one of the senior managers office and he proudly pulled out his drawer on his desk. And he showed me, he said, I've got every single sales person's business card in our industry. And I've got notes about them. So if I need to fill a role, I know exactly the three or four people that I'm going to go and have a chat with now, maybe it's not the right time for them, but maybe it is the right time for them. So he said, I never advertised for jobs because in my role as a leader, we spoke about this a few weeks ago, the ambassador role. Yes, my job as a leader. I'm out there and I'm always understanding and building my virtual bench. I know exactly who is where and who. actually even unhappy. And for the ones that are crappy, you know, it puts simply, he just doesn't communicate with them anymore. But he is very good at identifying who are the better ones, and then maintaining a dialogue with them. Another one of my clients had a list of similarly, every top sales person in their industry in Western Canada, and he would do coffee with them all the time. And I remember, there's one guy we recruited, who had a non compete, so we had to work some legal things to make it all legit. And give this guy a guarantee for a couple of years. I think the one guy alone was magic, I love the guy still keep in contact with them. Over a 10 year period, probably put five to $10 million dollars of profit into the company, one freaking guy that he pursued for more than two years, coffees, chats, all of these other things, and it was a beautiful decade, an amazing decade. So yeah, it's, it's, it's a proactive activity that's really, really required. And a lot of people just don't do it. And then when it kind of takes us to the next ones, like whose responsibility is that people think hrs role is to hire people. Well, if your HR people are in charge of all of this, you're generally going to be behind the eight ball, because they're wonderful support. We love the HR teams. But it's the executives with their networks and their relationships, which we'll talk about next. And the managers and the directors who can really be out there because they know lots of people. And spending time doing this, unfortunately, people get too stuck doing their tactical day job. And don't spend enough time doing this stuff. But it's not hrs responsibility to do the recruiting, their support, they're here to make sure that we do it well, that we filter well that we onboard, well, all of those other things. But it's in a response.
Kevin Lawrence 17:04
If I had it my way, and some companies we do do this, every executive would have a KPI that related to their recruiting activities. Because they're responsible for building the teams now and the best ones do the best ones absolutely are proactive in recruiting and do this. And and and some of the ones who are great don't and it's just because they don't think of it. It's not because they're bad. It's, it's hard. It's hard to think about and but when people do, it's amazing. Amazing what happens, oh, hrs job is to support it. But not do it. Because it What can HR do? While they can top their network a little bit. They won't have the same network as a lot of executives and directors. And then two, they can hire, they can hire recruiters. That's about it. Yeah. Where we have a lot of other things that we can do, because we're doing other activities and have other relationships we can leverage. Yeah, the I think that the what matters with the virtual bench is that it's working on the business not working in the business to pick up on your point. So if we do Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, what we're saying is that the virtual bench is it's important and not urgent. Okay. It's important and not urgent. And that means that people so often get sucked into the important and urgent and then when, when they're doing that, okay, it means they're not dedicating that time. So many times I've seen executives put an item on the action item list that they want to build a virtual badge. And they know it's a great concept and they know what works, but they never actually because it always sucked back into you use the word tactical, I'll use the word working in the business versus on the Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. And, and that's where it falls over as a concept. So you've got to dedicate the priority to it, you've got to know that this is important. There was a team that I worked with, we're going through a bit of a skills shortage in many places around the world. Certainly we are here. And so we actually run a session with the leadership team on the virtual bench. And we said every single person had to come with five people who could who were most likely in a player as homework, and we needed to flesh them out so that we had basically I think it was like eight people insane. So 40 potential people to come and work in the business. Now some of them weren't suitable and so forth. But the it was really the first time that that leadership team had spent time thinking about a virtual bench for many of them, and we got some cracking names. We got some real Really good names on that bench that we can now work with and begin to build relationships with. So yeah, it really is working on the business, not in the business.
20:11
Yeah, it's investing
Brad Giles 20:11
in your future. It's investing energy today that pays dividends in the future, because one amazing person added to the team makes a massive difference. So we, we talked about this a lot, Brad, one of my favorite times when we brought this to life. Because some people are really good at this naturally. Or we're down in Orlando, Florida, doing a quarterly meeting for one of my clients, one of my American clients. And I was talking to the CEO, when I'm going look, we're growing like crazy. We need some other key people at this table. And at the director slash leader table, and it was his idea. His name is actually Angela Mora, CEO of medx. staffing down in the US, he's like,
Kevin Lawrence 20:52
okay, we're gonna do it right now. So he goes, guys, stop, open your laptops, go to LinkedIn. we're recruiting, other recruiting company, so they know how to do it. Yeah, it was a way to go in your network, who do you know, who do you know, that's
Brad Giles 21:07
an A player that you would love to add to our team in the next three to five years? And who do you know, that knows, a player's like, every time we need an executive, Andrew would come up with somebody, he would always be digging out and doing some awesome recruiting. Now, the team needs to filter because you know, sometimes, you know, he would, he would get them to the table, but we need to make sure that they were good. And because the ones he brought sometimes are good, sometimes more, but that's okay. He brought them on our job was to filter them. So we had everyone make their list of the key people. And we got a couple of great hires that have just that 30 minutes that we spent on LinkedIn, because you were going into your current network of people, you know, and saying, hey, let's pull them over. Yeah, they were also digging back. And we said, Look, look back with people you haven't talked to for 10 years go into your dormant network, which is sometimes more powerful, because those are people who don't run in the same circle. They run in different circles, so their circle of friends or people you don't even know. Yeah, so we worked our active network, looked at our dormant network, and just made a list of people that people continue to follow up with, again, and it produced some great results. But the point of it is, everyone has LinkedIn, as an example, everyone has these contexts, but not everyone was doing anything about it. So it was a simple it was 30 minutes in a meeting, and it worked beautifully. Yeah, yeah, it can be as that's what I did, that can be as simple as that it makes it, it makes a difference, because that is a proactive activity, rather than reactive, which is let's put an advert out there and see what comes in. And then subsequently, as I said earlier, complain about the market. Okay, so let's move on. Where do we look, we've said LinkedIn was there was a very good example. So where
Kevin Lawrence 23:00
else LinkedIn, in your network of people, you know, went to college with Yes, yeah. All that stuff. The people that you know, and your dorm it never we haven't talked? For sure over that.
Brad Giles 23:10
Yeah. So So Where else? A couple of other examples where you could look to build your virtual bench might be suppliers. So you could bring up a supplier and say, we're hiring at the moment, who is the best possible candidate that you think might possibly work for us? Who's the best person in our industry that you know, of who just consistently creates results? And a supplier? You know, they might say, Oh, I don't know. But equally, it's worth the question. Because they might come up with two or three candidates. That could be fantastic.
Kevin Lawrence 23:47
Yeah, another one's trade shows, which hopefully will be happening, again, is the practice, you get to see people in action, and you get to network and schmooze and build relationships. Like, you know, one of my clients trade shows was his number one recruitment source. Well, keep in mind, those of you that go to trade shows that your people could be getting recruited, but that because they could have social time and get to know them. And some people go there looking for clients. He went there looking for employees, that was his, his strategy.
Brad Giles 24:21
Yeah, and look, the other one is customers, you could bring up your customers who probably know your competitors pretty well and just say, look, we're looking for an amazing person who do you know, that might be an amazing person that that could work for us? That's not an unreasonable question to ask a
Kevin Lawrence 24:41
customer or who do you know that is like the best sales person that you deal with for anything? Yeah, but you love dealing with and then Okay, well, then then we can we can chat with them for sure.
Brad Giles 24:54
And so then the next point is how do you reach out so so this is a cold call, so situation. So let's roleplay that I'll be the employer if you like. And then let's see how this goes more like you it. Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring ring. Hello, Kevin. Is it, Kevin? it this is Kevin, Who the hell is this? Hi, this is Brad, how you doing today? Look, you know, I work at ABC Corp. Maybe you've heard of us? Maybe you haven't. But you know what? Your name just keeps popping up? And I don't know, I just thought I'd reach out to you because so many people have mentioned that you're a bit of a star in your industry that you're doing really well. Now. We don't actually have any jobs at the moment. Okay, I'll just caveat that. But I just thought I couldn't help but reach out because you're obviously doing some amazing things, and wondered if perhaps you'd like to catch up for coffee. Now. Maybe we could work together one day, maybe we couldn't. I'm not saying as I said, there's nothing on the table. But I wonder if you'd be open for a coffee or coffee sometime in the next couple of months? Sure. That sounds interesting. That's how you do, right. Yeah. Let's book a date. And research says and you know, different scripts, different situations, about 70 to 80% of candidates that are qualified for the role you have, will have a conversation. Yeah. Will the topic people will listen, because, you know, it's like, everyone wants to be invited, although, whether it's men or women, they want to be sexist. Everyone wants to be invited to the prom or go to the prom, ie people want to be asked people take pleasure in being asked. It's affirming and makes people feel good. Right? And whether or not they have any interest. It's just it's Yeah, it's terrain asked.
Kevin Lawrence 26:52
It's flattering, it is flattering. And if anything comes from it, who knows? But just it's really reaching out. And just as you did, hey, let's grab a coffee. love to chat with you. I hear amazing things about you, like you said, which was all true, I'm sure in that roleplay. But that's as simple as that.
Brad Giles 27:11
Yeah, that's it. That's it. I flat out. I'm flattered. I've said we've got no jobs. So there's no, there's no purchasing threat. When I do that. It's not like, Hey, Kevin, I want you to come and work for us. We need someone by Tuesday, do you reckon you can do that, in desperation, it just reeks and so instead, it's like maybe one day we'll be able to work together. We're just building a team of players per team of stars. And everything I've heard about you sounds like you might be a good fit. Yep. So yeah, that's an example of how to reach out to a customer. And then I think the other thing is that you've got to nurture your leads, you've got to nurture your virtual bench. There's no point having a coffee with suspects. Yes, if you're going to have a coffee, you're going to be prepared to have 14 conversations. I never forget when I was in sales earlier in my career, one of my clients that became the number two client of the company I worked for that I cold called, I had 17 meetings with him before he signed off. 17x 17 Follow up sorry, 17, follow ups, combination of calls, meetings, etc. But then he became the number two clients, the company. And that's what it takes. That's how you win. But if you're going to don't bother doing one if you're not going to do 17, because it's very unlikely to happen with one conversation. It's like, you know, meeting someone and going on a date, and then expected that you're going to get married and spend your life together by the second time you meet them. That's not how the world works. That's not how the world works. No, it's not it. But but but a lot of people will not do the 17. Yeah, I've seen some stats. I know that was your example 17 that it takes 12 calls to make a sale in a b2b environment. But think about it this way. If you think about the absolute top a player in your industry, the person who will do three times the work will produce three times the result of anyone else. How many phone calls, would you be prepared all coffees would you be prepared to have with that person in order to have that person work for your organization? loss should be the answer. Lots and lots. If the person was in sales, and they were gonna put 10 mils on the bottom line, how many conversations would you have? Or if they were an amazing a player that was going to make your business much better make it award winning, make it sustainable, take pressure off your shoulders, like amazing people are worth whatever the heck it takes. But we don't act in accordance with that we ask HR to go hire a recruiter to go and get it for us which is really almost absurd. It's almost like It's wrong, right? It's wrong. And I understand why it happens because people are busy. And they got other things they need to do. So it's a great strategy that can produce amazing returns, both in terms of great people. And, and often you can get them quicker on your team, you know, not, not even a few weeks ago, I was in a quarterly, offside strategic meeting with a client. And we were talking about the skills shortage again, and the CEOs there. And then the operations manager, or the general manager is also there. And we're talking about who could we get to fill some senior roles? And I said, I said, well, in terms of the ambassadorial role, they call the CEO, the candidate whisperer, right. So that's the kind of the joke that they say, because he goes and meets with a candidate, and then they somehow come to work for us. But we said, Why don't we roll out the candidate whisperer, because they'd had there been one or two conversations over the past year with this person, they needed a role. And I said, Look, why don't we just get the candidate whisperer? Why don't we get the CEO there to go with the operations manager, you have lunch, and then we'll get a really amazing person. Now, that may seem so simple and easy to us in this conversation, but it hadn't really dawned on them. So we were saying, How can we strategically use the leader as an ambassador in this role, to get the candidate to come over. And so that is not only just about that individual's capability as a candidate whisperer, that is every leaders potential to attract people on the virtual bench.
Brad Giles 31:46
And that's a great way to summarize it is that really, to be most effective in your role, you need to build a virtual bench because you need to continually add the right talent. And you want to be able to be proactively doing that even it might even be if a team member is faltering, and they need to you need to move them to a different part of the business or something else. Being able to do this is not rocket science, it is not a highly skilled activity. It's just a disciplined activity. Like most things in business, and I go back to Jim Collins, it's, you know, what, what makes companies incredibly successful, is relentless execution of the boring basics. And this is one of those. It's a disciplined activity, no different than sales, people prospecting, or sports scouts scouting. But when you do it, you have a much better chance of building a better team and know the better team. So as we talked about, really, so we got like five things here today, really, is that a player's rarely apply for jobs, especially at the mid and senior levels. You know, like sports and sales, you got to have active energy into proactive recruitment. And that's having your most talented, connected people doing it, you know, not not not delegating it too much. whose responsibility, it's yours. HR is a support, and they're great support. But you know, when a hired recruiter is a solution that we use all the time, because people haven't done this if people did this consistently, we probably wouldn't need to do the hard recruiters are not near as often. And where suppliers, customers, LinkedIn dormant networks, trade shows everywhere, anywhere, your local cafe, whatever it happens to be in recruitment mode, like like, like you're a commissioned salesperson,
Kevin Lawrence 33:32
then how reach out, say, Hi, tell them truth that you've been told great things about them, and invite them to the prom, invite them to a coffee, let them know that they're important and special and to be willing to have a conversation with them. With no strings attached. Let's just have a chat. Knowing that you'll probably have 17
Brad Giles 33:51
awesome. Yeah, virtual bench such an important concept. So thank you for that. Thank you for that summary. Let's move to close. Thank you for listening to the growth whispers I hope you got some value today. I especially got value out of our roleplay I hope that you did too. Yeah, we should try that in the future. You can find us Kevin Lawrence is available at Lawrence and koat.com. And myself, Brad Giles available at evolution partners.com.au. And of course as always, you can catch us on YouTube. Just search the growth whispers and you'll find the video version of this. Thanks for watching. We hope that you have a great week.
Podcast Episode 68 - Profit Per X
IN THIS EPISODE:
Profit per X (PPX) is a concept from Jim Collins where companies gain clear insight into how to most effectively generate sustained and robust cash flow and profitability. In particular, they discover the single denominator that has the greatest impact on their economics.
In this episode, we discuss:
- Why PPX is strategic and not an execution metric
- What makes a good PPX
- How to align this concept with your hedgehog
- Profit per X examples
SUBSCRIBE TO THE GROWTH WHISPERERS:
Podcast Episode 67 - Why Should People Want to Work for Your Company?
IN THIS EPISODE:
Why should anyone come and work for you at the same salary as your competitors?
Employers often complain that it's difficult to find staff and yet pay the same amount as the competition. However, if you consider the situation from the employees perspective, you can appreciate that if the pay is approximately the same, then many things you might not consider are actually quite important to a candidate.
For example, the purpose of the organization, the role flexibility, career growth opportunities, the manager, or the organization's prestige, all become critical considerations if the pay rate is similar.
SUBSCRIBE TO THE GROWTH WHISPERERS:
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Please note that this episode was transcribed using an AI application and may not be 100% grammatically correct – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.
Brad Giles 07:04
Recently, I'm in a workshop and annual workshop with a company. And I won't say who, but we got through this debate. And part of that debate was people complaining about we can't find people or there's a skill shortage. And then some of the, you know, we've done this thing called the talent assessment where we're assessing the different people in the organization. Yep. And then I just blurted out, I said, why should anyone come and work for you at the same salary as your competitors? There's no difference. And so that is what we're talking about today. Why should anyone come work for you, the listener at the same salary as your competitors?
07:57
Yeah. And we can even up it same salary, or maybe even less, because I have seen a lot of people come to clients that we work with, for same or less salary, and I've seen some come from more, but there's sometimes people will come for less, which means there's something really compelling there. But let's just stay for the
Brad Giles 08:18
It's not double. That's the point. No, windfall. It's not a windfall. Yeah, right. And that's, and that's the idea, you can always not always it's, easier to get caught up in thinking you just have to pay more. And, you know, the thing I would start with is, you know, compensation is part of why people work for a company, I've always maintained, it's half of their paycheck, half of the paycheck is money, half of the paycheck is all the other factors that make them feel good about their work, or that the other needs that the job meet. So half of its economic needs, half is other needs. Truthfully, I think the economic needs are even less, but you know, the money, the money needs to be there. That's what makes the world go round. So So the thing that we want to kind of frame this up with it starts about thinking about what's in it for them. Yeah, beyond money, because money is easy, but it's easy to think about. But it's interesting, as we've been building our firm, and again there as well, by the time we get into the fall, there will be you know, 11, maybe 12 people it's a small boutique firm that does, you know, boutique services. But, but one of the things we that we noticed and we learned along the way, one of things we noticed and learned along the way. Is that because we have such an amazing team. Like it's all a players doing great work, that I found that there was many really successful consultants and coaches who actually wanted to be on an amazing team. Yeah, and that the team was probably equally More important than the economics and a bunch of the things I'm hearing from people and When, when, when we've gone through our process, and they've been offered opportunity to join us. There, they're saying I'm excited to be a part of that team. And that was even in our initial discussions, what they were looking for. So, you know, the numbers of the numbers. But that is an example in, in, in our, our, our little firm, being a part of an awesome team is a big, big pull a big poll. And, and, and a lot of companies, though, there are maybe 10 or 15 different variables, the main thing is, is, is looking from the perspective of this person, and what is awesome about your company that you might not even realize, particularly, because you may have been in your company for 10 or 20 or 30 years and not even know the difference. So what is distinct and compelling for somebody else that would meet their needs. And that's what we're looking at today. You know, one of the businesses that I used to own was a job board. And so it's a bit like monster or seek in Australia, where, you know, it's an online portal, people go on, they place employers place adverts, and people apply for jobs. It's simple. So it was very small in the context, it was industry specific and very small. But I got to see really interesting statistics between companies that had what looked to be effectively the same advert and the same pie. And one company with the same number of views on an ad would get, like 10 applicants, and then the next company would get like 100 or 200 applicants, it was absolutely outrageous, because everything else seemed the same, including the plan. What was it? What was the difference? Well, I, I would call it the employer brand. I would call it the employer brand. Like it was the subtleties in that advert. It was the positioning of the company, people thought that they were going to be working at a better company.
12:21
So it was the way they told their story basically, the way they articulated the story of the company.
Brad Giles 12:27
Yeah, that's another way to put it. Yeah. Awesome.
Kevin Lawrence 12:31
So what are its great insight and, and what, what, what are the other variables that we see that bring companies in? Or bring people into companies that pull people in? And one of our clients does a lot of recruiting right from colleges. Yeah. Right. And for them, they talk about one, the opportunity for growth is something and they're competing against a lot of other companies to get to land these students a lot, because everyone's trying to recruit these college grads. And in some cases, their pay is lower they were in based on their economic model. And they talk about the purpose of their company. Right. And the purpose of their company is positively impacting lives. It's legit, they're trying to help make people's lives better. They do an incredible amount of charity work, and the heart of the company radiates through the people. Yeah. So they that for them is the meaningfulness of that company and what they're doing in the world, and because it's so damn authentic, taken into account your earlier word. Yeah, people get it. And it's like, some people, and it's a filter, but some people really, really, really want to be about it, because it's such a meaningful place to work that gears so damn much. And also has that optic. So that's, that's in their case, we're recruiting new grads, that's a powerful strategy for them.
Brad Giles 13:54
Because if it matters, that original question like, why would someone else why would someone come and work for you versus someone else? Because people often complain about being unable to find staff. They're like, Ah, this is cool. Short, he's like, it's so hard to get good people. But you've got to look at it from the armor angle, which is, well, why would the good people come and work for you? What did they see through their eyes? Right? When they look at your organization, and this is a bit like looking in the mirror, it can be a bit difficult at times it is, especially when it's midnight, but you know, it can be difficult, but it's worth it to understand why would someone work for you? And if you can't come up with a viable answer, then look to some of these other things. So another company I owned was an electrical contracting business and we did communications in it and things like that, and people were great. amazing skill shortage, like the, you know, you'd write business cases about how amazing this skill shortage was, people would come in, and we would explain, the first thing that I would say to them is, look, we're not like all the other employers, we're trying to build the best of this type of company in the industry. And let me just before you, you know, get a bit hesitant on that. We've won the Best electrical contracting company in the whole of the country, the only one from our state to have done that, and we've done it twice.
15:36
Right, so, so an award winning company, kind of like people that jump on the bandwagon for the local sports team when they're winning. Yes, people like to be a part of that. And then they get to feel like they're winning.
Brad Giles 15:48
Yeah, we couldn't necessarily pay twice the amount of everybody else. But there were other ways that we could bring the bride to life. And the point is, that was true, and you made it part of the sales pitch, we'll call it
Kevin Lawrence 16:03
Yeah, all companies have awesome things that are true, but we forget about them. Yeah. And that's what this is about you, you have already awesomeness there, the unique value is there is just there, there might be 15, different things would resonate, and you got to figure out the ones that resonate, that would absolutely resonate most. And that's why you'll lots of people do these great places to work surveys, right. And they get certified as Bill Best Places to Work in Canada or my state, British Columbia or, you know, whatever it happens to be or inks, fastest growing companies like these, these kind of getting on the list. And it's kind of getting on that list, especially I have, you know, some beliefs in some of those awards are a little bit. gamble, and not necessarily authentically, truly representation of Best Places to Work. But it is a list, it is a certification and it gets people's attention. And it gets as long as you're not just gaming it like some organization. And if you're actually using it to make your company better. Those things work. Because it's a it's an external certification that you're special, a good no different than leave your externally certified as organic, or organic product or an ISO certified business. So those those those are other things that can kind of take you up a notch in the perception of potential employees. One of the teams that I work with is called a physio co here in Australia, a guy called Tristan is the CEO, they've won the Best Place to Work in Australia or been in the top 10 for 11 consecutive years. Now, that says something to a potential employee when the pay rates are the same. It just says that you guys aren't assholes. Yeah, like that. It's that they're not going to be coming into a nightmare. And that's, that's valuable. Because people don't, a lot of companies aren't great to work at. Yeah, so that would be another thing that could be if it's true is, is if you have an awesome culture, like if it actually truly is an enjoy, I mean, Work is work, but you can be in environments that are healthy and productive and have a great culture and don't. So one of the things that we do when we do quarterly engagement surveys, as we prep for our strat session strategy sessions, we collect word clouds. And we say we don't how would you describe the culture of the company? in three words? Yeah. And then many of those word clouds go into what we pitch to potential employees saying, Hey, here's what our team says about our company. This is the survey from June. And here's the word cloud of what our people say is, is their choice of words for us. Here is the things that people love about our business and why they like working here, this is just the survey from June, you can read what we're about. And, you know, it gives people again, a validated source that you are not and it's a way to articulate the message and it's another thing. The other thing that comes up in some companies, and it's not maybe not your company, some companies, its flexibility and room for a better life, you've got a lot of very successful companies that have a philosophy. Yeah, if your kids got a really important baseball game, or dance performance, or anything, it's you got to get your work done. But if you need to take off for an afternoon and go and get something done, we want you to do that. You know, one of our companies has a core value called the importance of family. So so that might not be yours. I'm just giving you examples. In some companies, flexibility for your family can be a really important thing especially not especially but well whether it's for mothers who are caregiving or fathers or caregiving, or parents that might be involved in child's sport. or activities or something maybe for their parents or their who knows. But flexibility of some sort can be a big value prop for people,
Brad Giles 20:09
and especially after in the pandemic with working from Yes, a lot of people at work, we've spoken about this before, a lot of people have been working from home. And it's become an expected right or benefit of working in a place that people now say, Well, if I can't work from home at least one or two days a week, I don't really want to work there. We actually have a new person that joined our team a few months ago. And she worked in downtown Vancouver, but now that she has a family and she lives in the suburbs, she doesn't want to commute downtown every day. When we talked to her boss, for previous boss for reference check, he was glowing, he would hire her in a second. But she's not willing to go into the city. regularity, even two days a week, not something she wants to do. So we have we, for us, she could work from home, she still got to get the work done. And she can catch up on her work at night after her kids go to bed if she didn't get through it all. Yeah, so that one single thing aside from that were awesome. But aside, aside from that, it was that alone, otherwise, she wouldn't have been available for a new role, she would have stayed where she'd already been, I think, for 10 years. And what, and that's awesome. And what you touched on is actually our next point, which is a specific leader that they might want to work from, if you're paying the same as others, understanding that, you know, one of the things that matters is have working under a great manager, yes, that can make a huge difference to someone's career, or even their personal satisfaction and happiness.
Kevin Lawrence 21:52
It is and thankfully, I have a great manager on my team, because I don't think I might, I'm a great manager. So shout out to Dean, Dean Ritchie, my team is amazing. Dean is the person who is working with her as her kind of her manager and, you know, jennison, my team and collaborates with her on, you know, training and helping her to learn things. But he's a great guy, and he owns it, and he will make sure she's successful. And things go well, but and that's, that's a critical part of people's decision. Yeah. And some people will follow great managers, right, they will come just because of the manager. I mean, that's a sign of a great manager, by the way. Yeah. Is that that people want to follow them and go with them for sure. The next one is, is growth. And, and for some people, and I've seen this a lot, you know, if people are working, you know, at a large company, and they're a cog in the wheel or a number on a spreadsheet, right, like they follow a process and grind it out. And it's like, they, they want more. Right and and, and they want to go from being a number or a cog to a decision maker or a real leader, a different decision maker or a difference maker. Yeah. And, and that's a big thing, we see a lot of people like, you know, one of my favorite places to get to find CFO is from the cpmg company. So the packaged goods companies, because they have their they're like outstanding environments for financial analysis and reporting, and just running the financial end of the business because they're masters. And but there's many times you'll find ones that have been in a big company for a long time. But now, you know, they want to go into the actual CFO type role or a VP of finance type role. And if they have the right wiring to go from a large corporate to an entrepreneurial, which isn't always the case, you got to look at some of the things, but then they get to put their stamp on things. And they get to be a part of building something versus operating a big machine. And that's that is for some people, that is a huge value, a huge benefit to them. And, and you and I work with many fast growth companies. And that's definitely a story that we can sell that our teams can sell. Because fast growth companies create opportunities for employees, they come up more often. Yep.
24:18
All right. So the final thought here is is is the pride and prestige. You know, and if you think of you know, we talked before you were talking about a company called apple or others I've got a
Brad Giles 24:28
many companies that work with our places that people will be proud. I have many clients that I am proud to work with. Now we're this company in India called a shout out and they are a leading home builder for the mid market in terms of trust and quality and beautiful communities and all of these things I'm so I'm working with over a decade. I'm so proud to work with them. And their employers are two. Yeah, and that is something because if you say you work for ashiana that is something special in the cities that they're in India and That pride flows throughout the whole company. And just like you would for some if they work for Apple or any, you know, company or brand that they resonate with, or somehow it provides meaning and just don't forget that your
25:14
company does have something special, there is something that is special that people can connect with. You just got to think about it and make sure it's part of the conversation when they're deciding. Yeah,
Brad Giles 25:25
yeah, it is really so important. The pride. Alright, so a quicker conversation today. But, um, yeah, I think that thinking about this for people who employ Why should anyone come and work for you at the same salary as your competitors, because that's the market and, you know, we're expecting people, a players to come in hordes to us, as opposed to everyone else who's paying the same pay, and it's not a logical, it's not a logical conversation instead, what are the other things that will really matter? And how can we make those shine?
26:09
Yep. Awesome. All right. Well, hey, thanks for joining us on the growth whispers today. I'm Kevin Lawrence. My co host here is Brad Giles. For the video. Go to youtube.com to get a hold of Brad evolutionpartners.com.au or for myself, Lawrenceandco.com. hope you have an awesome week. We'll see or hear you or you can hear us next week.
Podcast Episode 66 - The CEO's Role as Chief Brand Ambassador
IN THIS EPISODE:
One of the most important roles for a CEO is Chief Brand Ambassador. In that capacity they must activate the pride within their employees in order to build a high performing culture. Pride for their team, products, managers, and the organization.
Ultimately, if the head of a company doesn't have a face, the organization becomes faceless. And faceless corporations are very difficult to trust.
In this week's episode we'll discuss five components that make up the CEO's Role as Chief Brand Ambassador. In addition, we'll address WHY it's important for CEOs and leaders need to understand and perform the role of an Ambassador in their business.
SUBSCRIBE TO THE GROWTH WHISPERERS:
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Please note that this episode was transcribed using an AI application and may not be 100% grammatically correct – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.
Kevin Lawrence 00:13
Welcome to the growth whispers podcast where all and everything and all that we can consider is about building enduring great companies because we'd like to, we believe in it. I think it's fun. And in many cases it can make the world a better place and just great for the people involved. So I'm Kevin Lawrence are joined today, as always with my co host, Brad Giles, Brad, how you doing today?
Brad Giles 00:34
Good. How are you? I'm doing pretty good.
Kevin Lawrence 00:36
I'm doing awesome. Actually. It's summer here. And when it's summer, and it's we're recording this podcast in the morning. So it's bright outside, and it's wonderful looking forward to a great day.
Kevin Lawrence 00:49
What are we talking about here today Brad?
Brad Giles 00:53
today, we're talking about what we call the ambassador role. So I wrote a book called made to thrive, the five roles to evolve beyond your leadership, comfort zone, maybe thrive. And within that one of those five roles of a leader or a CEO, is what we call the ambassador role. And so we're talking about the ambassador role, why CEOs and leaders need to perform an ambassador role. That'd be great.
Kevin Lawrence 01:26
So it's not like the ambassador, where you go to another country in a new set up and represent your country. It's what how you represent your company, essentially, what taught me Great, well, digging into that, and looking forward to it. So what's your word of the day? What's the word for Mr. Giles today?
Brad Giles 01:43
word or phrase? It's, it's really about? What do you want to do? So for me in the last week, so many of the conversations, many of the conversations that I've had with CEOs or business owners have been, what do you want to do? And what I had several conversations with people who are saying, Look, it's the top of the market. I've had an offer to buy the there are listed companies out there who are hungry for deals, and they are, you know, they're coming into our clients, and they're saying, Hey, we want to buy it. And they're like, they're flattered and thinking about it. So I come back to Well, what do you want your life to look like in 1,3,5 10 years? Is this what you really want? And after you
Kevin Lawrence 02:40
sell, and after six months, and I'm poking your eyes out, because you're bored to tears?
Brad Giles 02:45
Yeah,
Kevin Lawrence 02:46
then what are you gonna want to do?
Brad Giles 02:48
Yeah. And so yeah, like, you've built this amazing business. So yeah, for me, it's what do you want to do? Interesting, different one.
Kevin Lawrence 03:01
My Word is frictionless. And that when things go well, in the world, we've found ways to remove the friction from wherever the situation is, whether it's decisions, how teams function, machines, and, you know, a lot of you know, leading and building companies thinking that all we got to do this, we've got to do this, Nicole, what if we just thought about removing friction, and making it easier, making it easier or frictionless for the customer to enter or business, frictionless for the customer to work with us? frictionless for the employees just basically, and it's more operational thinking than strategic? Right? It's optimization and another model I created it's, but it's really frictionless. How do you make things easy because you know, when there's people that you work with or spend time with and there's not a lot of friction in it. It's great. Now friction builds up, but then you got to clear it out of the system, and then things get frictionless and flow again. So that's it. So what do you want to do? And frictionless are words for today or phrases for awesome? Well, let's see. Oh, speaking of the ambassador rule, I mean, I'm just thinking about this we're preparing for today and I can picture the CEOs that I work with that are outstanding ambassadors and play that role really really well. And some love it like it's actually all they want to do yeah, they just want to be ambassador and and and those people will get some good ideas but then there's the others who they don't enjoy that as much. Yeah, it's not their natural style. So So what why do we need an ambassador like why is it important for this to happen? In right and your this is your you're the expert on this, but why is it important that happens?
Brad Giles 05:01
Well, in my, in my opinion, the first thing that we've got to do is to go back and say What does the word invested? Or name? Or where does it come from in our language. And if the origins of the word Ambassador is m Baptists, a Latin word which means servant, or to serve servant. So that's where I'm drawing this Ambassador role is, is saying, one of the roles of a leader or a CEO, is that you need to serve the business or the staff or the customers. Now, this is important, because this is definitely not about doing other people's jobs. It's very easy to say I will serve the sales manager by going in and meddling around. That's not what, that's not it. No,
Kevin Lawrence 06:03
don't go do his job for Okay, good to know. Okay,
Brad Giles 06:06
but how can a leader serve a sales manager? Or an operations manager or a customer best? And that's the, the genesis of the ambassador role. So it's not PR. Okay, it's not designed to create sales, necessarily. It's about what is the customer needs? What is the employee need? What is the our other employees need? Or stakeholders? And in saying, so from that angle? How can I best serve those people? Now one of the other? What's the difference, though,
Kevin Lawrence 06:51
Brava was there assuming an ambassador and a manager, it sounds like a manager? And I know, that's not what it is. But that's what it kind of landed for me? Oh, it's a good manager. What's the distinction?
Brad Giles 07:02
Well, for me, the ambassador is one of five roles of a leader. Now a leader could be a manager, or it could be a VP, it could be a CEO, whatever, okay. But this is one of the roles. So a manager is a manager, I mean, I'm going to go back to Peter Drucker, he said that the job is in the job of an executive is to be effective, and the job of a manager is to be efficient, efficient. Yes. I love that. Yes. So that I come back to effective, okay, being a servant to the all of the people that need to, and then really saying, Okay, so what is the best possible way that I can serve our customers in my role without doing other people's jobs without going and selling? Or without going and making or whatever it is that you do? And that's the ambassador role. So here's an example. Okay, the only one, imagine that you are buying a house? Yeah, you go in, and you've looked at the display at home, and you've had plans drawn up, and you've got all of the design stuff, and everything is great, and you've got the contract. So you go in for a meeting with the sales manager. And the objective of the meeting is to sign the contract, you're checking it all out, and it's all good, and you're ready to sign. At that meeting, the CEO comes in and says, Hi, Kevin, I'm here. I'm not here to do the sales manager's job. I'm just here to say, look, I want to let you know that we value you as a customer, that what matters to us is doing it right. So if you've got any major problems, you should really go to the person who's appointed to your build. But I want you to know, if you've got really, really major problems, then I might step in. But what matters to us is that we're building a really long enduring home. That's, that's going to last you for generations. And we want you to be really, really satisfied again, I'm not here to do the sales manager's job. And so Kevin, say thank you again, so much for buying our house. Yeah, let me know. And then the CEO steps out. So that's an example of the ambassador role. It's not showing off. It's not being show we got it.
Kevin Lawrence 09:44
And I'm just trying to figure out so I got here the manager is efficient. The leader is effective leader, the executive as effective as the ambassador is. I'm trying to get the word there because I see it in my head and I'm trying to land on the right We're getting built, you got me thinking with Drucker's quote. So if one is efficient, the other is effective. The ambassador is not engaged. It's not empowering. I'm traveling with a word actually is what I'm trying to do, Brad, and we can figure that one out later. But how would you describe the difference between a leader and Ambassador
Brad Giles 10:19
wouldn't because it's if I'm going to completely get all of what you've just said, and throw it up in the air and perfect how it lands. Love it. If you're going to be an effective leader, you need to perform five roles.
Kevin Lawrence 10:34
It's one of the leaders roles, correct one of it.
Brad Giles 10:39
Yeah. So you need to have accountability ambasador. So you need to have, you need to have a system of accountability. You don't need to necessarily hold everyone accountable. But you need to have a system of accountability, you need to have a
Kevin Lawrence 10:52
strategic, one of the hats. It reminds me of Edward de Bono's six thinking hats. Yep, it's one of the hats the leader wears is where they just show up and they're seen, and they engage with important relationships.
Brad Giles 11:04
For the listeners, I'm going to just close out those five. So yes, about a system of accountability, where everyone knows what they've got to do. And there are KPIs and all of that accountability stuff, the role of an ambassador, as we're talking about today, culture, a conscious culture rather than one that happens accidentally, a strategy that differentiates you in the market, and then succession planning, and not in the way that you instantly think about all the how are we going to pass this to the next generation? This is how do we protect that revenue stream? How do we protect that key employee? How do we protect that? So So having backup plans and things like virtual benches fall into that and succession planning? So they're the five roles of a leader? And one of those roles is an ambassador? Yep,
Kevin Lawrence 11:57
that makes crystal clear sense. So basically, it's a role or a hat or a mode that that leader steps into, it's not so much something a manager would do, or they might do it in different ways. But it's them showing up as, as, as the, in many ways, the representation of the overall company, or the vision or whatever the company is about, and heroes love it. Yeah, let's, let's dig into like, how does a CEO do this effectively? Like, what does it take to be an effective ambassador for your mind?
Brad Giles 12:33
Yeah, so like your book, your oxygen mask first, which is full of really useful tools. That's, that's the same as my book. So my book is structured with five roles. And there are five components to each role. So we're going to go through those five components today. And the first one is, is the CEO has a system to build a public profile, such as an industry forums, industry, leadership, blogging, or speaking. Now, the first thing that we're going to say is, but I don't like that. That's not who I am. I don't want to put on a face. It's not my cup of tea.
Brad Giles 13:24
it's a common, it's a completely legitimate thing. So what I would say in reaction to that is, this is best practice. How do we get best practice to work? So that you're deeply comfortable with it? And I say that within the context that imagine the organization, you know, like, you're the head of the organization, without a public profile, it's like, there is no face.
Kevin Lawrence 13:56
Yeah, and I've seen different Everyone has their own way of doing it. Some people will go speak or Keynote at industry events. Some people will sit on a very important committee for an industry association. Yeah. Some people will write papers or reports, you know, I've got one, one amazing CEO, who was an incredible ambassador, but in his own way,
Brad Giles 14:23
yes.
Kevin Lawrence 14:24
And his way of doing it would be to write letters. That's how he would do it, he would show up to the most important, the critical, critical meetings, and those relationships because, you know, they had lots of key relationships, but, but his CEOs would do other ones for their key relationships. But for him, it was letters, yeah, letters, and actually letters and lunches. That was the way that he did it, but he's not the type that would speak at an event. He's not the type that would shoot a video or any of those things, but through many things, and he was, he was very selective in what he did. But he did those things.
Brad Giles 15:07
Yeah, so what I'm saying it his way, and it's got to be in your way, it's got to be authentic to who you are. But without something like this again, you know, it's like that we've got the head of the company. But without a face, we need to have a face of the company in some form. It does drive
Kevin Lawrence 15:25
me nuts on many of these companies, that people who build these great companies, and there's not a name on the damn website or a face on anything. And it's all this typical corporate stuff. And in many ways, I,
Brad Giles 15:38
I don't trust,
Kevin Lawrence 15:41
yet. Now I've got one other very large successful company and the other but one that was like that, where the CEO was the ambassador, but he was not the public ambassador, he would ever basically No, no, not very little customer facing except for one piece of the business that he knew well, but with the team. And, and, and the employees, he was like the best, he would just show up, he'd have a little chat, do a little teaching and, and he would remind people of the purpose and the strategy, and engage people. But and the funniest thing about this guy's interesting is, when I first met the whole team, I'd never met the CEO in person. Yeah, when they were all at a restaurant and came to say, Hi, you wouldn't have been able to pick the CEO or the room, you would never know he just blended right in.
Brad Giles 16:30
And that's fine. That's his cup of tea. Exactly. And, and that's what we're saying here. Like, you don't need to become a professional speaker or anything like that. But remember that the opposite of the CEO, public speaker is a faceless organization. And it's hard to trust.
Kevin Lawrence 16:49
Exactly.
Brad Giles 16:50
Perfect. Let's move on to number two, the CEO attends all major customer contract signings or product launches. Now this depends obviously you're if you're in a b2b or b2c environment, we acknowledge that straight off the cuff. But I gave the example of the home builder that that's really designed in here. So if you've got a major product launch, you should be attending it. Yes. Sounds pretty simple. But some people don't. If you've got a new a major contract signing, and you only send along your, you know, sales manager, maybe there's an opportunity for you to go along. You think about the Queen of England, they roll her out with respect, they roll her out for special occasions. Yeah. And it makes the same, it's the same.
Kevin Lawrence 17:41
And at the scale, you're at special, maybe different. Again, one of my CEOs, they had 100, they had they worked with probably 10, no 15 major brands that they worked with as representing them. And they had like 250 locations. He didn't go to every store opening. Yeah, other but somebody else would play that role. But when the head of the brand would come to town, they would meet that person. So those critical, and again, it's at scale, those relationships go Yeah, to a higher level. But the principle is the most important. And I remember this one CEO, he was insanely busy with a massive business. But he those key relationships, he would fly to Italy for a two hour meeting and fly back. Yeah, literally, because it was only as the ambassador and it was hard on him. And then he would go to New York for four hours sometimes or a day. Because they had that matters. That's that it was because it was a business built on relationships. Yeah. And if you don't if and if you're signing an international treaty, and the Queen doesn't come, it's not real. Yeah. And then but it's being very selective on that. And just knowing here's the ones I need to be at. Here's the ones I don't and by the way, if you're at every single one too often, it's not special anymore, either.
Brad Giles 19:05
And let's go back, this is serving the people this Yes, this by doing flying to Italy for a two hour meeting that is serving those people in the best way that you possibly can for that individual. Absolutely. Yeah. So let's move on to number three. All employees learn core values and core purpose stories monthly from the CEO. So this is something that we've spoken about quite a lot on the growth whispers Yeah, the just the importance of stories, how our brain is connected to stories. And if the CEO is the one that's telling some of those stories, why it matters so much to the people in the organization, because people respect what you inspect.
Kevin Lawrence 19:55
Yeah, and again, I'm going back to some of these CEOs, another one. I'm thinking of him, he would always talk about the purpose and division, right. And then he got to a certain scale where then he would hand off to some of the executives to talk about some specific core value stories. And that was a larger business, but that they're the ones who need to keep breathing life into those things. Another one I'm working with, they're, you know, they've grown very well over the last 30 years. And the CEO just went through a project to update the core values, and then they're going to be the one that rolls it all. And I got an amazing, amazing video. Bundaberg brew drinks down in your, your, your good country, they're, yeah, they're there. Well, I worked with them and updated their purpose and their values. And I just saw the video they did to roll it out and reinforce it in their induction bread in their induction and onboarding, which I know that you're very passionate about, uh huh. But they got a video produced of the CEO, talking about the core values and how it relates to the business and how important it is. So not only is he rolling it out, but they've done it as a video. So it's permanently part of every new person that joins the company
Brad Giles 21:08
invested in one on 101. Right there. That's awesome. That's awesome. So let's move on to number four, all new employees are welcomed by the CEO, either physically or virtually within their first week of employment. Now, Hmm,
Kevin Lawrence 21:26
I love them, or virtually, and never thought about that, huh? That's brilliant. Now, obviously,
Brad Giles 21:34
it depends on your size. It clearly depends on your size, right? You're gonna if you got
Kevin Lawrence 21:40
10,000 employees, that's not going to happen unless it's a more senior person.
Brad Giles 21:45
Okay, so let's go, sometimes to play at the extremes is to normalize the middle, right? So let's look if you look 10,000 employees, how many people joined in the last week? 100? Probably, okay, so maybe, maybe
Kevin Lawrence 22:03
50 to 100? Yeah, probably.
Brad Giles 22:04
So the story or the example that I use around that in the book is, okay, so if I am doing a recorded video or a live video for the week, as the CEO, I'm going to say, I want to especially welcome the 25 people that are come and I'm going to say an English name when I'm trying to find an Indian name. Surely, Asher in India, I want to welcome the 25 people who've come under Asher in India. We've got some great stuff going on in India, and I want to welcome the other 50 people who've just joined us in Connecticut, that's a really exciting thing that we're doing out there. Yeah, that's taken me 10 seconds. And I've just gotten through 75% of the new hires. So it means a lot. Now that might not be everybody's cup of tea in that form s. And that's okay. But there are other things you can do in the ambassador role as well. But do you know what if we go from the extreme to the average, like in matters if it does, and
Kevin Lawrence 23:16
I love it, Brad, and there's a part of my stomach that turns as you're saying it to it, because I love the principle, and I know a bunch of the CEOs I work with, like they, they they they would be like, Are you crazy? I have no time as it is. And but it does matter, Brad people that I agree that it matters, and it's finding a way to find looking for a way to try to do that. Yeah, because how people feel in that first short know, when they first arrive at a company, it's a big decision. So and I would suggest that, for example, you know, if I was going to talk to a CEO that had, you know, 500 employees, you know, I would suggest that you know, and I do have a CEO that probably welcomes every single one, like literally, it's about that size, but it might my view would be is okay, great. Well, how can I for the top three or four layers of the business? Right? The CEO, there should be a threshold for the CEO that they would do that. It's definitely the top two layers, probably the top three layers of their business, it should be something that they in their EA work with, and they absolutely welcome each one like no matter what. And then beyond that, there just needs to you know, if they did it would be for some of them. I think it would be it would be exceptional. And maybe I'm a little bit you know, I love the printer. I just can't see some of them doing it. So what would you say to those people?
Brad Giles 24:45
Well, there's two things. Not everyone is those people if we think about how, if we think about someone with a 50 or 100 or 500 person business, like it, this is best practice. Because if you put yourself in the shoes of the new employee, it's like Magic. It's magic it is, the higher up the ladder. If I'm if I've got shouted out amongst 25 other new employees in India, I'm like, Oh my god, these people actually care.
Kevin Lawrence 25:14
Yeah, I'm abroad. And I worked in a company that had a few 1000 employees when I first got into the media business. And the chairman of the company, the founder was an amazing, amazing man. It was a company in Vancouver called Western no so called, it was called Quick Western international communications. They own the hockey team, they owned a bunch of the TV stations, radio stations, a bunch of stuff. And I remember I went to a party at their house, because I was in head office. And I remember I remember this or this guy names it was, it was Frank Griffith senior. And I remember and it was, it was a well known guy in Vancouver anyways, and it's, it's, it's like probably one of the nicest houses in Vancouver. It's out on its own. It's not just waterfront, it's on its own little peninsula of land. Yeah, and it's got a garage that will park a 40 foot boat. Like that you drive up like a land garage. It was amazing. But I remember I showed up to his house, and I remember the rest of my life. And then like, after this event, and he's like, Hey, welcome an Angel Angel chat. And I seen him in the office when I was a young kid. He's like, hey, just take a walk around noon, check the place out. And he's always telling me to want to wander around his mansion on the water with a 40 foot boat garage. And, but he's down to earth, but the way he connected and Yeah, hi, and how to track and Well, that was like life changing for me.
Brad Giles 26:39
Yeah. You know,
Kevin Lawrence 26:40
and, and that's what's what happens when, when the big boss connects with people who are not, you know, senior people, it has a lot of it creates a lot of value. And it's my brains twisting on how to get some of my clients to consider that
Brad Giles 26:57
role of the leader. Like, if you not lose, let's go to the opposite end of the spectrum to some of the great leaders that we know, right. So this might be an engineering or technical type leader, who is very, very competent, but thinks, I don't really like people. I don't want to manage people. I don't want to be involved in people, what I'd actually prefer to do is just work from home forever, and never ever, ever get involved in people, not talk not even communicate well, that that mindset is not serving the customers or the employees, and it's the servant of the ambassador, looking for. So we even in that mindset, we can find things to do. So let's move on.
Kevin Lawrence 27:47
I'm just thinking, I'm thinking, I'm just thinking. I'm just thinking because we have three new people joining our team in the next couple months. And we always do some things to welcome them. And I think I can do a better job when we have a small core team. But I'm actually thinking even how I could and should do a better job. And this is good. I love this broad. Alright, let's keep going.
Brad Giles 28:16
Let me just answer what you said before we keep going. The one of the objectives of these welcoming is to activate the pride of MBAs
Kevin Lawrence 28:25
totally. And, you know, people do it sometimes by you know, sending people flowers on their first day of work or whatever it happens to be. And that's a nice thing. It's not the same as a personal welcome from the CEO.
Brad Giles 28:39
And it could take you 15 seconds in the way that I just demonstrated, like, it doesn't need to take hours out of your day. Just Anyway, let's move on to number five. Every quarter, the CEO launches the company plan and priorities to all employees. So so we have a planning process that we talk about often, which is gather quarterly, off site. If if you go off site with the leadership team, you determine the plan, either for a day or two days, you determine your plan for the next 90 days. What happens next is an ambassadorial role. task, which is Yeah, we went off site and we believe it or not, we didn't just go and do winetasting. In actual fact, what we did is we determined the priorities and the goals for the next quarter. How we're going to execute that and why that matters. Yeah, and this is what it is and who's accountable for it. Now that could be a 15 minute speech, or communique, but in an ambassadorial role, serving people so that people know, not only the leadership team, but everyone else is on the same page and they know how much it matters to Later of the business, yep.
Kevin Lawrence 30:03
Yeah, that's a no brainer. And that's pretty easy. And I've seen some people do that, again, when they're distributed where it's, it's done our short video, or a conference call one of my clients in the US, called medics, Andrew Morris, the CEO, and he'd be happy for me to mention them. And, you know, they launched thing by conference calls all the time, right. And they got about 500 people all across the US and a few in Europe, too. And that's how they do stuff and they communicate. And he Andrew is the ambassador, he is, was you to keep talking with his brother, Andrew, I think, Brad, I think about Andrew, because he does this stuff all the time. He shows up to important meetings, networking in the community, building relationships, welcoming people, creating culture events, launching plans, you know, as executives obviously helped to do it. But that's, yeah, it's, it's, it's critical. Because, you know, when you're launching those things, it gives importance and meaning to them. Yeah, that's the whole idea. It brings energy to them. If the queen is coming to the opening of a new building or facility. It's a frickin important building or facility. Right? And if Brad or Kevin show up, then even know who the heck we are. Right? It's like, it doesn't have that same meaning. And,
Brad Giles 31:17
and also, it doesn't invoke the pride in England. Yes. That's great. That's right. It's the pride. The pride is one of the net effects of the ambassador role.
Kevin Lawrence 31:29
So the ambassador role is about invoking pride. Activating pride, activating pride. So, so, so good, I got my word. I need a word with pride that starts with E. and then and then I'll be happy. Yes, let's
Brad Giles 31:49
say with a Canadian x by
Kevin Lawrence 31:54
the Canadian, Italian Italian accent, which I can't do. Yeah, that's that. So that's, that's a fairly normal thing for CEOs to think about. And to do you know, I love this brand. It's got me thinking about and this is because this is your area of deep thought and mastery. And, you know, what, there have been a few CEOs over the years that I've talked to about, you know, doing they should do a monthly video. And, and to share that one of our other clients, you know, has been doing it and it's been very effective. You know, another CEO, I know from the past, he would do a weekly letter to the team, every single week, he would send a letter to the fan of the
Brad Giles 32:35
big fan. Yeah,
Kevin Lawrence 32:37
yeah. Weekly letter. So yes. So what are some, if we break this down into simple things that people can activate, attending all key relationship type meetings, whether it's partners or suppliers, or customers, like real, really important meetings or signings? Some sort of regular communication to the team, welcoming people launching plans, will be some other simple little things that people could do
Brad Giles 33:05
for number five, launching the plan and priorities. Do you mean? Which one? Do you mean? Or do you mean,
Kevin Lawrence 33:10
I'm kind of summarizing a bunch of these ideas? I'm just playing out? Oh,
Brad Giles 33:13
yeah, I'm very prescriptive in those five things. So there are five things without spending hours going into it. They are the headlines. And then each of those has got a story and a tool around that in the book that helps a leader to go through and say this is how you can do it. But again, whilst it's prescriptive, like it's choose your own adventure, you've got to be able to do it in a way that is authentic to you,
Kevin Lawrence 33:46
here's the principle of what you need to do and the execution consumed and the execution whether you show up in their office, whether you send them a video, whether you write and send them a letter, or whatever that happens to be, or Yeah, you organize a party, whatever, whatever, whatever your style is. So let's, let's summarize. So number one, and the whole point is, is to remember that there is an ambassador role and it's part of your role. That's the first thing and, and the idea of the ambassadors to evoke pride, and to bring that pride out in the organization, the purpose, the relationship, whatever it happens to be so one CEO to build a system to have a public profile, whether it's industry forums or leadership or blogging or speaking but to be a part of, of the industry, to attending all major, you know, customer contract signings or product launches, events that are kicking off commercial, important relationships or activities. People hear about the core values and purpose through the CEO ideally monthly. new employees are welcomed by the CEO physically or virtually, and I leave in the virtual that's so easy to do, and we've got so comfortable that I thought that was a big takeaway from me on the spread. And then and then the CEO launches the quarterly company plan and goals to all employees again, virtually. And some people would do roadshows to do that stuff. And they would go and see all the people or you know, doing that in person that is, this has been great. I love because this is your area of expertise. And it's not area for a lot of time into that I'm learning a lot of stuff on the show as well today. It's a nice kicker.
Brad Giles 35:27
So the book again is made to thrive. The five roles to evolve beyond your leadership comfort zone, by myself, they're so interesting chat today, a bit of a different one, perhaps, digging into one of the chapters of one of our books. Yeah, I hope that you've enjoyed it. So thank you very much for listening. My name is Brad Giles. You can find me at evolution partners.com.au and of course, Kevin Lawrence, you can find at Lawrence and co.com. And of course, if you would like to you can see the other version of this on YouTube as well as the podcast. So thanks for listening. Have a great week.