Podcast Ep 157 | Jim Collins 6 characteristics of right people in the right seats

We’ve all heard of the phrase ​‘get the right peo­ple in the right seats on the bus’. It talks about ensur­ing that team mem­bers are aligned and com­mit­ted to suc­cess. How­ev­er, Jim Collins has a very spe­cif­ic def­i­n­i­tion of the ​‘right peo­ple’, and when you’re con­sid­er­ing if you have the right peo­ple in the right seats, and this includes six key char­ac­ter­is­tics that might help to under­stand what ​‘right’ actu­al­ly means.

This week we’re going through Jim Collins def­i­n­i­tion of the right peo­ple in the right seats.

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.

00:13
Brad Giles
Hi. Wel­come to The Growth Whis­per­ers, where every­thing we talk about is build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies that last, com­pa­nies that endure, com­pa­nies that peo­ple actu­al­ly enjoy work­ing at and own in. My name is Brad Giles. Today I’m joined, as always, by my co host with my co host, Kevin Lawrence G’day. Kevin, how are things today?

00:33
Kevin Lawrence
Things are great, Brad. Isn’t it fun to you see, it was a good way to start the show, kind of mix­ing up a cou­ple of words, kind of being cre­ative. I’d like to call it hey, indeed. Being cre­ative today.

00:45
Brad Giles
Indeed. Indeed. So, Kev, we like to start with a word or phrase of the day. Tell me what might be your word or phrase for today, my friend?

00:56
Kevin Lawrence
Sales cures all.

01:01
Brad Giles
Does­n’t it just it does.

01:03
Kevin Lawrence
It’s inter­est­ing in this dynam­ic in the econ­o­my, I’m hear­ing a lot of CEOs and our teams talk­ing more about sales than nor­mal­ly. Yeah, we always talk about it, those lit­tle thoughts of, I don’t know why my sales team isn’t pro­duc­ing like it used to. I’m won­der­ing, peo­ple are start­ing to look under the hood in sales a lot more because the frothy growth isn’t in the mar­ket as much as it was in most indus­tries. Peo­ple are just tak­ing a clos­er look at sales and say­ing, well, what’s real­ly going on there? I’ve always said some of the best sales reps I know work part time or three quar­ters time, and they are amaz­ing at what they do, but they might need to be putting in a bit more time. Sales a lit­tle hard­er for a lot of peo­ple. But any­way, sales cures all. Put the ener­gy towards the front of the house, and gen­er­at­ing sales is what a lot of peo­ple are doing, and they’re just look­ing under the hood a lit­tle more is what I’m seeing.

01:59
Brad Giles
Very good. Mine is time­less. I had a chat with one of our lis­ten­ers who shall remain name­less and said, what I love about the pod­cast is that you’re talk­ing about things that we’ve per­haps often learned before, but it’s with a dif­fer­ent take, and it’s things that are still time­less prin­ci­ples. I kind of said that’s the intent, because these things work well, we’re not try­ing to rein­vent every­thing. We’re try­ing to talk about things that work because they work and so time­less. Yeah. We’re not try­ing to come up with this is our answer and this is the only way you can do it. We’re look­ing for things that work and that work con­sis­tent­ly to build these endur­ing great companies.

02:47
Kevin Lawrence
Yes. Not the flash in the pan idea of the week. Chat GPT going to change the world or save the world or destroy the world? Those are great things, but the prin­ci­ples are beyond those things. They’re time­less. Speak­ing of prin­ci­ples, one of our favorite thought lead­ers that we’re dig­ging into today, mr. Jim Collins, who’s done some amaz­ing research, which he’s thank­ful­ly shared with us through his books and his talks and his ses­sions with CEOs, and he has six. And thanks for dig­ging us up, Brad. Six great char­ac­ter­is­tics of the right peo­ple in the right seats. We all talk about build­ing a great team and right peo­ple, right seats and all this good stuff. It’s a great con­cept, and we know what makes a mas­sive dif­fer­ence, and we often refer to it as a play­ers or high per­form­ers or what­ev­er the heck you want. Jim’s got six prin­ci­ples like he does.

03:46
Kevin Lawrence
He has sim­ple lists that we’re going to walk through them and share some exam­ples of things we’ve seen in com­pa­nies. But six prin­ci­ples? How do you actu­al­ly have the right peo­ple in those most impor­tant jobs?

03:56
Brad Giles
Yeah, we talk about A play­ers, top per­form­ers, we’ve got to get the right peo­ple. What does that actu­al­ly mean, the right peo­ple? What I love about this list is that it’s very spe­cif­ic. This is what the right peo­ple means. We know that Jim Collins said you got to get the right peo­ple in the right seats, doing the right things the right way, and then over time, we can build fly­wheel momen­tum. If we’re doing that, cou­pled with every­thing else that he talks about, it’s good. Now, this is from a book called Built to Last, one of Jim’s books in his cat­a­log or in his library. It’s so impor­tant because this way you can look at this list or lis­ten to this list and ask your­self, do I actu­al­ly have the right peo­ple in my busi­ness? You can look at them and maybe you think, yeah, maybe.

04:56
Brad Giles
When you go through this list, you can actu­al­ly say to your­self, okay, is Joe or Joanne or who­ev­er it might be, real­ly one of the right people?

05:07
Kevin Lawrence
Yeah, I can help you think about a spe­cif­ic per­son­al role. What I’m going to sug­gest, Brad, maybe we’ll should we just list off the six, or should we go through? Okay, were going to go through them one at a time. I just won­der if we should give peo­ple the list and then we’ll dig in. I’ll leave that up to you to decide.

05:22
Brad Giles
What do you think? Yeah, I think we’re going to go through and we’re just going to see just elab­o­rate on what that means. We prob­a­bly should pre­pare before­hand, but hey, we’re shoot­ing from the hip­pies. It’s okay.

05:35
Kevin Lawrence
Some­times you get an idea. Well, back to cre­ativ­i­ty the idea in a moment, we’ll go through one more time. Here’s the thing in sports, and here’s the way I think about it, and we talk about sports metaphors a lot in busi­ness, and much of it trans­lates and some does­n’t. The one thing about sports, and whether it’s soc­cer or bas­ket­ball or hock­ey or foot­ball, peo­ple have posi­tions, and they know their posi­tions, and they’re so clear. They do train­ing based on those posi­tions, and they have coach­es and pro­grams and every­thing else about those posi­tions. That’s what those key seeds it’s so crit­i­cal, but their expec­ta­tions are so clear in sports and mea­sured like crazy that if some­one isn’t the right per­son for that role, it’s real­ly clear and they make a deci­sion real­ly quick to keep them or move them on. In busi­ness, we’re not quite at the same lev­el that it would be in the NBA, the Nation­al Bas­ket­ball Asso­ci­a­tion, in the US.

06:35
Kevin Lawrence
Or the NFL or what­ev­er it hap­pens to be. That’s kind of what I guess these peo­ple are crit­i­cal. How do if they are real­ly thriv­ing in their job when you’re not just watch­ing them on the bas­ket­ball court all day, every day? Prac­tic­ing is a lit­tle hard­er to see. Should we just jump into the first one?

06:53
Brad Giles
Brad let’s do it. The right peo­ple fit with the com­pa­ny’s core val­ues. This is num­ber one. This is some­thing that we talk about quite a lot here, Kev. Core val­ues, like a freebie.

07:07
Kevin Lawrence
It’s almost a free­bie. We’ve talked about this so many times. It’s crit­i­cal, but yeah, go ahead.

07:13
Brad Giles
Yeah, but it is crit­i­cal, and we should keep talk­ing about it because core val­ues make a dif­fer­ence. We’ve got count­less sto­ries about com­pa­nies who maybe did­n’t know what their core val­ues were artic­u­lat­ed or then per­haps redis­cov­ered those core val­ues and then looked and mea­sured peo­ple against those core val­ues. What’s impor­tant here is that you can’t get peo­ple to align with your core val­ues. You can’t change peo­ple, you can play at the edges. This is about hir­ing and onboard­ing peo­ple don’t change what they value.

07:53
Kevin Lawrence
Yeah. The key thing is you got to pick the right peo­ple to start with. And it was inter­est­ing. I was with a client last week. I won’t say the city because I don’t want to give away the details of the sto­ry, but I was with a client last week in anoth­er coun­try, and we have a per­son that we brought on to the team. Now, this is a hard­work­ing, high per­form­ing team, down to earth as it gets and not flashy by any means. Well, it was inter­est­ing. I got a ride back to the air­port with one of the execs one day, this new guy that had been hired. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, he did­n’t go through the prop­er hir­ing process. He just sort of got slid in. As I’m sit­ting there and I’m notic­ing he’s got a lot of real­ly fan­cy stuff. I like nice things. I’ve worked a lot in lux­u­ry, and I appre­ci­ate lux­u­ry because not a prob­lem with them.

08:39
Kevin Lawrence
We’re in the office, and he’s got his Louis Vuit­ton wal­let and key fob. This is a com­pa­ny. Now, if some of the women might have their Louis Vuit­ton bags that they wear on the week­ends, but in that work envi­ron­ment, there’s none of that. I’ve been in oth­er com­pa­nies where that’s com­mon, but in this com­pa­ny, it isn’t. He’s got his fan­cy wal­let and stuff and this is a com­pa­ny where the execs dri­ve GMs, Toy­otas, reg­u­lar mid mar­ket cars. Peo­ple aren’t dri­ving fan­cy cars. Turns out this guy in the office, he was dri­ving his Maserati to work every day. Now, I like nice cars, I appre­ci­ate those cars, but in a com­pa­ny like this, that’s not the kind of car you dri­ve to the office. He had all kinds of oth­er issues, but gen­er­al­ly he was very much a flashy, shiny type. At the core of who he was that did­n’t match the DNA, he could have been great at his job and it still would have been an issue, because that’s off cul­ture and there turned out to be lots of oth­er weird stuff after we let him go.

09:51
Kevin Lawrence
You’re not going to change that about a per­son. That’s who he is, that’s what they value.

09:57
Brad Giles
The val­ues the right peo­ple fit with the com­pa­ny’s core values.

10:03
Kevin Lawrence
Yes.

10:05
Brad Giles
You’Ve got it hard to pick up what car they drove to the inter­view in at a job inter­view, did they dri­ve in the Toy­ota or the Maserati? There are def­i­nite­ly things that you’ve got to pick up and those peo­ple will stand out. The quick­er that you act on it, the bet­ter. So let’s move on.

10:26
Kevin Lawrence
Let me be clear. I want to make a point, though. In a dif­fer­ent com­pa­ny, if every­body drove Range Rovers and Maser­atis, the per­son who loved to dri­ve the Toy­ota also might not fit. So, please, it’s not about the cars that peo­ple dri­ve or the clothes that they have or the jew­el­ry. It’s not about that. It’s about it being in align­ment. And that’s just an easy visu­al exam­ple. So, please, it’s not good or bad, it’s about what the com­pa­ny is about and what the peo­ple in the com­pa­ny val­ue to cre­ate a kind of a cohe­sive aligned team.

10:58
Brad Giles
Yeah, every time you bring a new per­son onto a team, the team fun­da­men­tal­ly rein­vents itself and you want that rein­ven­tion to strength­en or to be aligned with the val­ues. Not a com­plete mismatch.

11:12
Kevin Lawrence
It’s crit­i­cal. I want to make sure it’s real­ly clear for peo­ple that I worked at anoth­er com­pa­ny that every­one did dri­ve Range Rovers. The whole team drove Range Rovers. The prob­lem was the guy that drove the Fer­rari to work, right, because it was tak­ing it too far. If you drove a Toy­ota to that com­pa­ny, it might have actu­al­ly been a prob­lem because they were in that kind of lux­u­ry space. So, again, please, it’s not what it is, it’s just being in align­ment. We’re on that one and we’re try­ing to cre­ate a team that does­n’t have a lot of fric­tion. The sec­ond one, this is a bill, but basi­cal­ly the right peo­ple don’t need to be tight­ly man­aged, peo­ple need to be led. If you have to fol­low up and get involved and this is a killer one, this is the one that kind of makes it or breaks it for a lot of peo­ple on teams when we’re not sure what to do.

12:04
Kevin Lawrence
If you have to drop down and help them do their job and I’m not talk­ing about when you’re onboard­ing a per­son and train­ing them and devel­op­ing them. I’m talk­ing about gen­er­al­ly even when they know what to do, you still have to be get­ting involved and man­aged and fol­low­ing up on some­thing. I had to do it today with an exec­u­tive. In a sim­ple exam­ple. We had a meet­ing about six weeks ago. We set some goals. Peo­ple were sup­posed to do some fin­ish­ing work on their goals. It nev­er got done. We had a fol­low up meet­ing last week. Every­one on our team did about one. I said to that one per­son, when can you have it done? Blah, blah, I’m busy. They com­mit­ted to do it on the week­end and have it to me for Mon­day morn­ing. Mon­day morn­ing, I go to my com­put­er. It’s not there.

12:51
Kevin Lawrence
I send it on note. Thought we dis­cussed this was a be here. I said it nice­ly and I had to fol­low up and ask for it. They final­ly end­ed up send­ing it the third time. After I’d asked about it again today, I final­ly got it. That’s fol­low­ing up and hav­ing to man­age some­one, that’s not a good sign. If it’s one time, hey, every­one makes mis­takes. If you’re con­sis­tent­ly hav­ing to do that, it’s not the right per­son. Whether it’s because of their capa­bil­i­ty, because of your lead­er­ship, there’s a lot of rea­sons it could be, at the end of the day, the right peo­ple in a job that isn’t required, they’re obsessed with get­ting things done nor­mal­ly. You don’t have to tight­ly man­age them. You got to man­age them to stay healthy and maybe keep them from tak­ing on too much because they’re just obsessed with crush­ing amaz­ing amounts of work.

13:44
Brad Giles
We’re talk­ing about adults and most like­ly lead­ers here. These peo­ple. The fact that you’re laugh­ing means how fun­ny this is.

13:56
Kevin Lawrence
Adults. This is not kinder­garten kids that you’re telling away. Yeah, sor­ry. Just how fun­ny was it reveal­ing with adults? That’s true.

14:07
Brad Giles
Yeah. They don’t need to be tight­ly man­aged. It makes me think about one team where this team, the CEO is we do home­work prepa­ra­tion before an off site. We’ll be say­ing, this is the series of ques­tions and pre read­ing that you’ve got to do in prepa­ra­tion. We can tell when lead­ers have done it and when they haven’t. The CEO is hav­ing to con­stant­ly go back to one per­son in par­tic­u­lar and say, can you com­plete this? Can you com­plete this? Of course, it comes back to we’re deal­ing with adults here. If they don’t com­plete it, there’ll be con­se­quences. That per­son­’s con­se­quences were the leader had to say to them, look, if you don’t want to be on this team, that’s fine. If you don’t want to be a leader on the lead­er­ship team of this busi­ness, set­ting the strat­e­gy and mak­ing deci­sions, that’s fine. You’ve got to know that there’s con­se­quences that come with that.

15:13
Brad Giles
Fur­ther con­se­quences. We’re not ask­ing you to build the Titanic.

15:17
Kevin Lawrence
We’re ask­ing you to do your job.

15:21
Brad Giles
Do some sim­ple prepa­ra­tion. If you are being tight­ly man­aged by your boss, there is some­thing in that for you to look a bit more deeply at.

15:35
Kevin Lawrence
If you’re the boss and you need to make a list of things to fol­low up with a per­son on, it’s also a bad sign an A play­er. You don’t need to make lists. They make their own. You might choose to, but you don’t need to. By the way, one of my favorite lines is, hey, how many times have you had to fol­low up with me to make sure you got your pay­check in full on time? To which they should only be able to say nev­er, and then you can say, well, great. It would be won­der­ful if you could keep up your end of your bar­gain as well. I’m doing my part. It’s a bit in your face, but I had a CEO said that to some­one once. You don’t have to ask me to. I have to fol­low up with you to do your job.

16:18
Kevin Lawrence
You don’t have to fol­low up with me to do mine, which is to pay you for doing your job. Fun­ny. That okay. It’s an awe­some one. So that’s a chal­lenge. That’s num­ber two, right? They don’t have to be tight­ly man­aged or almost man­aged at all. You just have to watch out to make sure they stay healthy and don’t push them­selves too hard. Go ahead. Go ahead.

16:45
Brad Giles
I feel like this is a big deficit in the world, and that is the right peo­ple under­stand that they do not have jobs. They have respon­si­bil­i­ties. They know the dif­fer­ence between their task list and their respon­si­bil­i­ties. They know what they’re respon­si­ble for. And it’s not hav­ing a job. It’s a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent mind­set. I had an exam­ple of this just the oth­er week, and it was a CFO who was, I would say, six months into the job and was using the phrase, when address­ing the team in our work­shop, I think you need to. Rather than say­ing, I think we need to, it’s a very sub­tle difference.

17:34
Kevin Lawrence
Sure.

17:35
Brad Giles
I think you need to do this. I think you need to do that as if they were an exter­nal accoun­tant or some­thing like that.

17:42
Kevin Lawrence
They’re not on the team.

17:44
Brad Giles
Like, they’re not on the team. Like they don’t have the respon­si­bil­i­ty. Yeah. If you look at peo­ple in your team, do you think that they have a job, or do you think that they have a respon­si­bil­i­ty? And what do they think?

17:59
Kevin Lawrence
What is when some­one’s got a respon­si­bil­i­ty, most of the peo­ple in the exec teams we work with have respon­si­bil­i­ty, and if they think it’s a job, usu­al­ly they don’t get there, or they sure don’t stay there. When it’s a respon­si­bil­i­ty, you’ll stay up at night, you’ll get up ear­ly. So it was inter­est­ing. Peo­ple make excus­es in meet­ings all the time. I remem­ber I was hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with a CEO last week, and it was a morn­ing that I was behind. I had a busy week. I was trav­el­ing, and I had to get up at six and start work­ing at 630 on to get a project. Nor­mal­ly I like to start my day, but I skipped my work­out and start­ed crank­ing on to work ear­li­er to get things done. I’m on a call and the exec­u­tive makes an excuse of not get­ting some­thing done. Like, I want to freak­ing kill him.

18:44
Kevin Lawrence
Like, hey, if I can get up and self sac­ri­fice at times to do my job, you can do yours. Now, I did­n’t say it smart enough not to do that, but it’s like when you have respon­si­bil­i­ty, you’re going to make it hap­pen. An excuse is not even you can’t even con­tem­plate make an excuse because it would be wrong, because you feel deeply respon­si­ble. Just no dif­fer­ent than rais­ing a child or some­thing like that. Any­ways, I get fired up about this one. Yes, these peo­ple have respon­si­bil­i­ties, and you can see it in their actions and their com­mit­ments. If they do miss, man, they’re upset with them­selves, which takes us into num­ber four.

19:22
Brad Giles
It does.

19:23
Kevin Lawrence
The right peo­ple ful­fill their com­mit­ments, and at the end of the day, they do what they say they’re going to do. They find a way, and they will stay up late, they will get up ear­ly, they will work the week­end, they will ask for help, but come h*** or high water, they get it done. You can count on them. They’re going to get it done. The thing at the root of this, these are the peo­ple you want on your team because they don’t let your cus­tomers down. They don’t let you down, they don’t let their team­mates down. It’s inter­est­ing­ly. We start going into an exec team. We see all kinds of peo­ple who are very nice and per­sua­sive and every­thing else. I’ve learned over the years to become loy­al to per­for­mance. I e that’s deliv­er­ing. And we just give peo­ple tools. Like, we have the right score­card by exec for what they’re going to deliv­er every quarter.

20:17
Kevin Lawrence
We have their KPIs and their goals, and how they’re going to pro­duce and their tal­ent review, and how they’re going to devel­op their team. We just red, yel­low, green, every­thing just to make it vis­i­ble. At the end of the day, if some­one has a bad quar­ter and gets a bunch of red, that’s under­stand­able. Maybe they’ll learn and get bet­ter. But you can see over time. I eval­u­ate exec­u­tive teams for how they pro­duce based on what they say, which is this? Do they deliv­er what they say they’re going to do or do they back up the excuse train more than just anyways?

20:48
Brad Giles
In the roles that we play, we’ve got a great deal of pat­tern recog­ni­tion about peo­ple who com­mit to pri­or­i­ties and how many of those are they con­sis­tent­ly exe­cut­ing and they com­mit to KPIs? One of the real­ly impor­tant things about this, again, the head­line is the right peo­ple ful­fill their com­mit­ments is that they don’t over­com­mit, they don’t promise what they can’t deliv­er. They’re very care­ful in pick­ing that out. For us, we can see on aver­age how many this team or this indi­vid­ual, how many pri­or­i­ties do they exe­cute each quar­ter and how often are they mak­ing their KPIs, the met­rics that they’re account­able for work­ing in the busi­ness and based on real?

21:34
Kevin Lawrence
They’re not just set­ting super low goals. They’re set­ting real­is­tic goals. And they’re push­ing still. Yeah, basi­cal­ly they deliv­er. It’s inter­est­ing you talk about pat­tern recog­ni­tion. A lot of the sys­tems that we set up in com­pa­nies enable us to get more data to see the pat­tern. I was talk­ing to a CEO today about an exec and I pret­ty well have enough data to know we’re done. There’s a 90 some­thing per­cent chance it’s not going to work. We’re still going to keep on try­ing with this exact because they got a lot of poten­tial but there’s just way too many points of data of all basi­cal­ly the things that vio­late what’s on this list. Peo­ple ful­fill their com­mit­ments and we need sys­tems to help us to get bet­ter at that, some­times to have more data. But it’s usu­al­ly pret­ty obvi­ous, like this.

22:23
Brad Giles
Next one is obvi­ous. The right peo­ple are pas­sion­ate about the com­pa­ny and its work. They’re pas­sion­ate. They’re not just say­ing this indus­try, we’re not real­ly that excit­ed about it. Now, it does­n’t mean that they need to be excitable peo­ple, but it does.

22:42
Kevin Lawrence
Mean that they’re pas­sion­ate about the indus­try. It might not be about the indus­try, but they are excit­ed about what we are doing for what­ev­er rea­son that is.

22:51
Brad Giles
Yes, because if they’re not pas­sion­ate about the com­pa­ny, the team, the lead­ers, well, it’s very hard for them to get some of these oth­er five things to.

23:07
Kevin Lawrence
Be effec­tive for them and that belief and that ener­gy is con­ta­gious and that spills over onto peo­ple. At the end of the day, they’re pas­sion­ate in their own way about some­thing, about what the com­pa­ny is doing. And it’s obvi­ous. That’s why we con­tin­u­al­ly help rein­force cul­ture and instill cul­ture. Basi­cal­ly either they’re adding good ener­gy into what we’re doing qui­et­ly in many cas­es, not nec­es­sar­i­ly just the extro­verts, but their ener­gy and their pas­sion and their com­mit­ment is show­ing up and adding to what they’re doing because they want to be there and they’re get­ting some­thing out of it, more than just money.

23:46
Brad Giles
This is how the com­pa­ny’s pur­pose can be under­stood and used. You talk about the core pur­pose of the com­pa­ny, either with a can­di­date or a per­son who’s already there or in their onboard­ing, when you’re talk­ing about the core pur­pose and you’re per­haps talk­ing about core pur­pose sto­ries where peo­ple have lived the core pur­pose, how does the per­son relate to that? Are they a bit hohum or are they get­ting a bit excit­ed about that?

24:16
Kevin Lawrence
Yeah, some peo­ple are real­ly excit­ed about the pur­pose and some are in align­ment with it. Some are real­ly excit­ed about the work they’re doing or the team that they’re build­ing or the oppor­tu­ni­ties they’re giv­en peo­ple. Like they’re there for more than just the check.

24:33
Brad Giles
Yeah, cool.

24:34
Kevin Lawrence
Num­ber six. Final­ly, and one of my favorites is the Right Peo­ple have More of a Win­dow and Mir­ror Matu­ri­ty, as Jim calls it, and to explain it real­ly sim­ply, you can get more deep. The sim­ple ver­sion is when things go well, they often give cred­it to oth­ers and when things don’t go well, they nor­mal­ly reflect them­selves in the mir­ror. They look in the mir­ror and reflect it them­selves instead of point­ing out the win­dow and blam­ing some­body else. Dur­ing good times they share and give oth­er peo­ple the cred­it for it. Dur­ing bad times, they take a lot of respon­si­bil­i­ty and look into that mir­ror because they learn and they get smarter and they get bet­ter. And that’s the prob­lem with the excus­es. The most dan­ger­ous look at and we all make excus­es. I make excus­es some­times, right? It’s a nat­ur­al reac­tion to save face or feel bet­ter in a situation.

25:29
Kevin Lawrence
I’m not talk­ing about the per­son that makes an excuse on the spot because they feel crap­py. I’m talk­ing about peo­ple who do that and believe it and are always try­ing to blame. For exam­ple, if I made an excuse about some­thing and it hap­pens some­times, for what­ev­er rea­son, I’m quick­ly going to come back and take respon­si­bil­i­ty, learn from it and try to do bet­ter and artic­u­late that to anoth­er prob­lem. Don’t judge them into 3 sec­onds after the con­ver­sa­tion, judge them in the three or 30 min­utes after. Gen­er­al­ly there’s a lot of peo­ple who it’s always some­one else’s fault. It’s just great say­ing if every­one you meet turns out to be an a******, maybe you should look in the mirror.

26:12
Brad Giles
Yeah, it could be you. This is crit­i­cal because if you’ve got peo­ple who aren’t dis­play­ing that win­dow and mir­ror matu­ri­ty, then they’re not the right peo­ple. That’s the head­line at the top right of this episode. They’re not nec­es­sar­i­ly the right peo­ple because they’re always going to be cast­ing blame else­where and it’s prob­a­bly not appro­pri­ate. Often it can come back to them and equal­ly, they’re prob­a­bly going to be tak­ing cred­it for the suc­cess­es when it should be due else­where and that’s dis­en­gag­ing for those oth­er team members.

26:56
Kevin Lawrence
Exact­ly. And they don’t learn, basi­cal­ly. And that’s a key indi­ca­tor, real­ly key. Let’s just review these real­ly quick so, num­ber one, they fit the val­ues. Two, they don’t need to be tight­ly man­aged, although they still need to be led. Let’s not for­get about that. Three, they know that they have respon­si­bil­i­ties, not just jobs. Four, they do what they say they feel like. Five, they’re pas­sion­ate about the com­pa­ny and its work. They’re not just there for the mon­ey. Final­ly, six is that they are more of a mere type per­son, is that they learn from their mis­takes, take respon­si­bil­i­ty, and then get bet­ter next time. So, for more lessons, I know in your oxy­gen mask. First, I’ve got a book, a chap­ter that’s called Make Your­self Use­less, which is about build­ing an amaz­ing team. This sup­ple­ments that a lot, or vice ver­sa, about just hav­ing an absolute­ly amaz­ing team that sup­ports you in what you’re doing.

27:58
Kevin Lawrence
Any final thoughts there, Brad, before we wrap up?

28:01
Brad Giles
Well, this is just a sim­ple list that you can use to assess. Do I have the right peo­ple on the bus? What are the right peo­ple look like if I’m interviewing?

28:11
Kevin Lawrence
Yeah. Well said. Keep this in your eye, because at the end of the day, you deserve to have a great team. Again, as the great Jim Collins says, you can’t build a great com­pa­ny with good people.

28:24
Brad Giles
Right?

28:25
Kevin Lawrence
You need great peo­ple to build a great com­pa­ny. Jim is doing a live event that we’re help­ing with in Octo­ber in Chica­go, octo­ber of 2023 in Chica­go. If you’re inter­est­ed in bring­ing your team to work with Jim one one, it’ll be a spec­tac­u­lar event. He is the absolute mas­ter and very grate­ful for the great thought, lead­er­ship and research he has done to put into our hands so we can help our clients build endur­ing great com­pa­nies. All right, well, thanks for lis­ten­ing. This has been the growth. Whis­pers with Kevin Lawrence here in Van­cou­ver, British Colum­bia, Cana­da. And Brad Giles down in Perth, Aus­tralia. If you haven’t sub­scribed yet, please do and give it a rat­ing for the video ver­sion, Youtube​.com, and search The Growth Whis­per­ers. You can see our smi­ley faces. Brad and I both put a lot of ener­gy into our newslet­ters and a lot of resources on our sites, and we’re here to help.

29:19
Kevin Lawrence
We have peo­ple on our teams that can also help you if you would like. Brad is Evo​lu​tion​part​ners​.com​.Au and my firm is Lawrence​and​co​.com. Hope you have an awe­some week. Remem­ber and keep in mind that you deserve to have a team of the right peo­ple in the right seats, and it’s just a mat­ter of work­ing on it and find­ing things like these prin­ci­ples to help you get there. Have a great week.