Podcast Ep 55 | Building a People Magnet Machine

One of the most impor­tant things required to build a great endur­ing com­pa­ny is a peo­ple process. One that draws indi­vid­u­als in like a mag­net so that the best peo­ple real­ly want to work for you.

Orga­ni­za­tions often do this well on the mar­ket­ing side of their busi­ness­es. We’re great at bring­ing in cus­tomers yet we don’t do the same when it comes to attract­ing the right people.

In this sec­ond ses­sion talk­ing about the Peo­ple Mag­net Machine, Kevin and Brad answer a range of ques­tions about the process and how to attract and retain the best peo­ple, like a magnet!

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 that Brad and I talk about that’s Kevin and Brad. Every­thing that we talk about is about build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies. That’s com­pa­nies where the leader, the CEO, Pres­i­dent, what­ev­er you want to call him or her, and the team build a com­pa­ny that lasts for gen­er­a­tions and does incred­i­ble things on this won­der­ful plan­et of ours. Joined today, as always, with Brad Giles, my co host, Brad, how you doing today?

Brad Giles 00:41

I’m doing love­ly today. Real­ly well. Love­ly Autumn in Perth, a love­ly time of year. And things are good. I’m pret­ty hap­py and com­fort­able. I’m pret­ty awesome

Kevin Lawrence 00:57

and love­ly. That’s just such a sweet term. Almost some a lit­tle bit of British in there. Just as a nice word. I’d say I’m doing pret­ty good today to the sun is out in Van­cou­ver. And let me tell you, it feels like we’re in the mid­dle of sum­mer. It’s April, and it was 24 degrees today. Well, so this week­end, I got to get out­side, got out on my motor­cy­cle got out in the car with the top down. And it’s just like hav­ing just absolute­ly amaz­ing the whole city is out even walk­ing by the beach, or we’re dri­ving by the beach, actu­al­ly. And you all the take­out restau­rants, the biggest lines I’ve seen, it’s like, you know, every­one is out soak­ing it up. And it feels awe­some. So today, what are we? Well, we’ll talk about the word of the day, first of all, and then we’ll get into today. So Brad, what’s your word of the day or your phrase of the day?

Brad Giles 01:55

Look, it’s peo­ple today, and specif­i­cal­ly peo­ple because our city went to 100% venue capac­i­ty, which means that on Thurs­day, I went to an actu­al real live con­cert with the per­former called Mis­sy Hig­gins, which was fan­tas­tic. Fan­tas­tic just to be out, you know, amongst peo­ple live music. And then on Fri­day, I went to a foot­ball game with 60,000 oth­er peo­ple that were at 100% capac­i­ty at a local venue here. So it’s just peo­ple is my word for the day.

Kevin Lawrence 02:37

And how does it feel to be in a crowd with that many peo­ple? I it’s been a long time for me.

Brad Giles 02:43

Yeah, it’s love­ly. It’s we’ve had a long time build­ing up to it. So we start­ed I think, like 20% and went to 50% and 70%. And it real­ly is feel­ing quite famil­iar, or back to nor­mal, in a sense. So that did­n’t feel too strange. But, you know, I’m in an area which let’s just say it’s a it’s like a box area. So there’s not as many peo­ple and then we did go down, you know, to the front row area to have a look. And it was absolute­ly jam packed full of peo­ple and no one had a mask, of course not one per­son that I saw. So yeah, that was it. It was a lit­tle bit strange to be in such a crowd­ed envi­ron­ment again, but good.

Kevin Lawrence 03:40

Awe­some. Well, my phrase of the day is vit­a­min D. And I think that’s the one you get from the sun. Pret­ty sure it’s the one you get from the sun. And it’s just amaz­ing how spec­tac­u­lar and for those of you that aren’t from Van­cou­ver would know that we get a lot of cloud and rain here. And we do get the sum­mers can be beau­ti­ful, but at the off­sea­son could be a lit­tle gray. And the amount is look­ing out and just see­ing how beau­ti­ful it is out there. It’s just it’s soul-lift­ing and inspir­ing and it feels great. And you can see the whole place comes alive. I mean, more peo­ple are out than ever so vit­a­min D in the val­ue of it. I used to get a lot more of it when I would trawl­ing worked in the Mid­dle East for years and a lot of time in Cal­i­for­nia is no time in Hawaii and lots of oth­er places nev­er­mind vaca­tions. And so get­ting in our in my home­town feels darn good, and I’m very grate­ful for it. So speak­ing about peo­ple in vit­a­mins, what are we talk­ing about today? Brad? What is the show about today?

Brad Giles 04:46

Yeah, we’ve got a dif­fer­ent episode today. So quite a break from the norm. Often we’re talk­ing about one sub­ject and how do you solve that sub­ject but we intro­duced this con­cept The peo­ple mag­net machine. Pre­vi­ous­ly, we’ve spo­ken about that a cou­ple of times. And we’ve had about a dozen ques­tions about that, that we’ve we’ve brought togeth­er to try to answer today. So, yeah, we’re talk­ing about what does it mean to build a peo­ple mag­net machine?

Kevin Lawrence 05:24

Yeah, per­fect. And we’re gonna go through these ques­tions. And we’re both gonna kind of share our per­spec­tives on them to give some oth­er ideas and con­text for peo­ple that are inter­est­ed. I mean, I hope you’re inter­est­ed in build­ing a peo­ple mag­net machine. Because, you know, if you want to build an endur­ing great com­pa­ny, you need lots of great peo­ple to make that hap­pen. And peo­ple make our lives won­der­ful. Or the oppo­site. So let’s, let’s jump in Brad.

Brad Giles 05:52

Okay, ques­tion num­ber one. Why do you believe as you say, you can’t build an endur­ing great busi­ness with­out great peo­ple? Why do you believe that you can’t build an endur­ing great busi­ness with­out great peo­ple, Kevin? Well, you know, you actu­al­ly might be able to,

Kevin Lawrence 06:14

or at least you can build an endur­ing, okay, busi­ness, you could think there is a chance, you know, and we’re not about, you know, it’s like, if we were gam­blers, we’d be card coun­ters, ie, we’d want to put the odds in our own favor. I’m not a gam­bler. I’m not a card counter. But, but the idea is, is you there’s a slight chance, you could, but the odds are dra­mat­i­cal­ly against you, because good peo­ple build good or mediocre com­pa­nies, because they’re wiring, great peo­ple have the great think­ing, and the great skills and the great exe­cu­tion to build a great com­pa­ny. So it’s very dif­fi­cult. There’s always excep­tions, but it’s very, very unlike­ly, because what hap­pens is a com­pa­ny gets filled with good peo­ple. And then more medi­oc­rity starts to creep in and more bureau­cra­cy creeps in. And the orga­ni­za­tion just grad­u­al­ly fades. And then they get bought out, or some­thing else hap­pens. They’re not along for anoth­er round for the long time, or they’re not a leader for the learn­er long term. So I’ll say like, because, you know, generally

Kevin Lawrence 07:23

you kind of need to, and because those great peo­ple are con­tin­ue to do the things to make the com­pa­ny con­tin­ue to be great. And to be around. Brad, what would you do?

Brad Giles 07:37

what i love that you said there is that the odds are dra­mat­i­cal­ly stacked against you. And, we’re both great fans of the work by Jim Collins, and in the work that he’s done. It’s sim­ply a num­bers game, if you don’t under­stand your val­ues, if you don’t under­stand what high per­for­mance looks like, if you don’t hold peo­ple to high­er stan­dards, if you don’t do all of the work, and you kind of Bum­ble along and you might be good. The data says that you’d have a much low­er chance of endur­ing on stick­ing around for the long term. And you might be bought out. So yeah, so I think in answer to the ques­tion, you can’t do it, because that’s what the research tells us. And if you want to out­last the com­pe­ti­tion, if you don’t want to be bought out, if you want to sur­vive for the long term, you’re going to have to sur­round your­self with great peo­ple. The only oth­er point about that is that you spend a lot of time work­ing on repair­ing the dam­age that is done by mediocre peo­ple, you spend a lot of time Yeah, you spend a lot of time work­ing, not on the good parts of the busi­ness. But on the bad parts. How can we solve the fact you know, ulti­mate­ly, that we haven’t got great peo­ple in these seats?

Kevin Lawrence 09:06

Yeah, and you end up spend­ing more time man­ag­ing down or over­see­ing stuff you don’t have to do with great peo­ple. It’s as soon as con­sumes more your time as a leader, and you’re less like­ly to focus on the for­ward look­ing things that will make your com­pa­ny stronger in the future is you’re stuck in a day to day because your peo­ple aren’t great. The oth­er thing to think about is if in doubt, look to pro­fes­sion­al sports, pro­fes­sion­al sports, put an exor­bi­tant amount of ener­gy into mak­ing sure that they have the best peo­ple peri­od. And they have mas­sive sys­tems for the best peo­ple and peo­ple aren’t per­form­ing at their best they don’t play the game, or they don’t even stay on that top team and they get pushed down. So it’s not rock­et sci­ence, but that’s endur­ing great, like an endur­ing great sports fran­chise. Alright, let’s go on to num­ber two. What do you mean by a peo­ple mag­net machine and you’re kin­da kind of had a flash­es that was big as read­ing that bright of, of, you know, Scoo­by Doo and the Mys­tery Machine. Did you ever Yes. Yeah, that’s hilar­i­ous. So Scoo­by Doo was a hilar­i­ous car­toon a group watch, you know, prob­a­bly too much grow­ing up as a kid, they had their van called the Mys­tery Machine. So we’re not, it’s not a mys­tery machine. We’re not hid­ing all of our peo­ple in the back of the van. And gob­lins aren’t going to come out and be in the haunt­ed house, like there always seemed to be in Scoo­by Doo. What we’re talk­ing about is, is a com­pa­ny that con­tin­u­al­ly attracts awe­some peo­ple to it, the best want to work there. And some of the best are also devel­oped there. It’s not just about hir­ing great peo­ple. It’s also devel­op­ing. So imag­ine a bunch of cogs in a machine. And one of them brings in new peo­ple that become great. Anoth­er one brings in great peo­ple already into the exist­ing sys­tem. And there’s this ecosys­tem of awe­some this. So it’s got a great big mag­net to attract peo­ple towards it. And it’s a machine that makes peo­ple better.

Brad Giles 11:14

Yeah. And the only thing I’d add to that is, if you think about a busi­ness as being a machine, and I’ve kind of said before, a few times that this is a machine that spits out $100 bills, okay? If you make it work that way. Now, some Unfor­tu­nate­ly, some busi­ness­es that peo­ple build, you need to put $100 bills into it, you just need to keep putting them in, and it nev­er gives you any­thing back there, to be hon­est, is that unfor­tu­nate­ly, lose mon­ey. Well, ide­al­ly, we’re mak­ing a machine that spits out $100 bills con­sis­tent­ly. And it’s all the work that we do that gets that to hap­pen. So we think about the con­cept of the busi­ness as being a machine that peo­ple work­ing. We want it to be a machine that attracts exact­ly what you said, a machine that attracts peo­ple, but not just attracts peo­ple. It’s like a mag­net, they can’t help but be drawn towards it. You get two mag­nets and try to pull them apart. You can’t do it. It’s it’s a mag­net, like attraction.

Kevin Lawrence 12:16

Exact so it pulls them there and it keeps them there. And that is per­fect. And by the way, Brett could Can I request that we build ones that have $1,000 bills? Maybe 100? I pre­fer the $1,000 bill machine than the $100. Bill.

Brad Giles 12:29

If you can get if you got Zim­bab­we, you can have one that makes a $1 bil­lion bill. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, yeah, it does­n’t last that long. Yeah. So that’s what we that’s what we’re say­ing you can’t build an endur­ing busi­ness unless in some form, you build a peo­ple mag­net machine, because you’re not going to be able to attract and retain great peo­ple. Let’s go on to num­ber three, you rec­om­mend that employ­ers share their great­ness using a sto­ry? Define a great­ness sto­ry? And can you give us an exam­ple? Yeah.

Kevin Lawrence 13:08

Now why would you want to let peo­ple know the awe­some stuff that you’re doing? I mean, come on. That’s just crazi­ness. Yes, of course, we want to share those sto­ries. And, you know, it’s inter­est­ing, I have seen so many dif­fer­ent ver­sions. And it depends on the cul­ture of the com­pa­ny. You know, some orga­ni­za­tions are very hum­ble, and many are hum­ble, hum­ble, in a way where they don’t like to talk about them­selves, right?

Brad Giles 13:34

Yeah.

Kevin Lawrence 13:34

Oth­ers still have hum­ble lead­ers, but they have a strong PR machine or a machine of, of telling the sto­ry. So I’m not say­ing it’s not about humil­i­ty. But there’s, there’s lots of great exam­ples of what peo­ple do. And if you would look at unfor­tu­nate­ly, he’s no longer with us. But you know, Tony Shea, built an amaz­ing cul­ture at Zap­pos. And not only did a write an excel­lent book on it, called Deliv­er­ing Hap­pi­ness, he would do tours of their place of or of their offices, which are wild because, you know, peo­ple had lots of auton­o­my to how they dec­o­rat­ed their offices, they had a cul­ture of fun and engage­ment, which trans­ferred through to their, to their cus­tomers. He spoke about it, you know, I’ve been at con­fer­ences where Tony spoke and shared about what they did so, so so he has done an amaz­ing, amaz­ing, amaz­ing job. What are some oth­er ones? I mean, and there’s many more, but that’s what that is one that was, you know, very impact­ful and, and he taught a lot of peo­ple about that a lot through what he was doing. How about your­self bribery?

Brad Giles 14:47

Yeah, I did the tour of Zap­pos on a quick note in Las Vegas when we were there, and it was just a fan­tas­tic insight into hap­pi­ness, but to the ques­tion well, I you I think that it’s a bit like brush­ing your teeth. Okay. And this is you need to always help peo­ple to under­stand the great­ness through sto­ries. And we con­nect that to core val­ues and core pur­pose. So, you know, one of the exer­cis­es I do in quar­ter­ly work­shops that I run with teams and annu­al work­shops is asked the ques­tion, so can you tell me some­thing great, some­thing great that some­one has recent­ly done in the past quar­ter or the past month. And some­one will always come up with some­thing now which core val­ue or core pur­pose does that con­nect to? And so build­ing a rhythm and a habit around those sto­ries, and real­ly a lega­cy that we can draw upon in the future to help new employ­ees under­stand the val­ues and the pur­pose through lived stories.

Kevin Lawrence 15:55

Now, we’ve done just had a meet­ing last night with one of our client last week and we do strat­e­gy meet­ings, we every quar­ter do a sur­vey. And we ask peo­ple about you know, high­lights that peo­ple have the great things peo­ple did and the core val­ue link to it’s part of our sys­tem we do. And we gath­er those the client last week, they go through and ask for sto­ries about every sin­gle core val­ue which they then go back and share with the whole team. Oth­er ones, you know inter­est­ing about in terms of shar­ing the, the macro sto­ry. So shar­ing of the val­ue sto­ries are awe­some. And a great part of a cul­ture, anoth­er client work with an India ashi­ana hos­ing their father on gupt, oom Gup­ta has start­ed the com­pa­ny and he had passed now the three broth­ers are run­ning it. But one of the broth­ers did a whole biog­ra­phy on his father shar­ing his sto­ry. And not only was it a, you know, an act of love and appre­ci­a­tion towards his father, but then the sto­ries of how he built the com­pa­ny are able to stay alive as part of the lega­cy of the com­pa­ny as well.

Brad Giles 16:57

And that sto­ry­telling is so impor­tant, because as humans, we con­nect with sto­ries. You know, before there was Excel spread­sheets before there was com­put­ers. Before there was even the writ­ten word, the only way we could com­mu­ni­cate was by telling and recall­ing sto­ries. And that’s the way that our brain best Con­nect lived behav­iors and lega­cy and what to do and what not to do. Don’t go near the big black snake is the sto­ry, that big black snake it could cause you harm.

Kevin Lawrence 17:33

Yes, you know, there’s anoth­er big black snake in our world these days. And that’s called glass door. It’s where peo­ple go to share their sto­ries when they’re not hap­py with an employ­er. Some peo­ple have made some pret­ty extreme accu­sa­tions about Glass­door and their busi­ness mod­el. A lot of peo­ple do not like it. I haven’t done enough behind the scenes, but what I know is you need to con­tin­ue to share your great sto­ries, because there’s often some­body who wants to share bad sto­ries. And you know, and what, whether they’re true or not, is a whole sep­a­rate con­ver­sa­tion. But there are forums out there where peo­ple can share the bad ones and as a com­pa­ny and as a brand. And we want to make sure we con­tin­ue share those great sto­ries, the pos­i­tive sto­ries, and par­tic­u­lar­ly I find reach­ing back some­times into the her­itage and found­ing of the com­pa­ny. Now some of the best brands in the world. I’m a big fan of Porsche as a brand and the way they do things. Yeah, no, they’re under­stat­ed, amaz­ing, amaz­ing prod­uct that they make. But they always reach back into the archives. And they’ll talk about races in the ear­ly years or ear­ly mod­els, they’ll high­light a car from the 60s that they built and angle back to the kind of, you know, look­ing back and look­ing for a point is bring­ing the her­itage of the com­pa­ny into the sto­ries they tell as well.

Brad Giles 18:50

Awe­some. So let’s move on num­ber four. Yeah, to par­ties come to the table in an employ­ment rela­tion­ship, the employ­ee, and you, the employ­er. Tell us about what makes an ide­al employ­ee and what makes for an ide­al employ­er. Mm hmm. Well, I guess, real­ly, this is Yeah, we real­ly only look from the employ­er per­spec­tive. Because if you want to be an ide­al employ­er, you there’s cer­tain­ly a you can’t real­ly change who you are, you can’t real­ly change. You can’t become Apple overnight, for exam­ple, you can cer­tain­ly adapt and imple­ment sys­tems to become a bet­ter ver­sion of what you’re doing and we encour­age that at every turn. But specif­i­cal­ly, what makes an ide­al employ­ee Well, I have writ­ten about this exten­sive­ly in my book made to thrive the way I do and you and I have spo­ken about this con­cept before you and I orig­i­nal­ly start­ed talk­ing about it many years ago. And so my thoughts are you’ve got an ide­al cus­tomer who’s the cus­tomer that you’d like to serve. And you also you have an ide­al employ­ee that real­ly comes about by under­stand­ing who is the employ­ee that if they were on your bus in your com­pa­ny, they would be most liv­ing their own per­son­al hedge­hog. Okay? So they would be liv­ing their pur­pose, they would be doing what they’re the best at who is that kind of per­son so that if you can think about the bus use that you’re the lat­est stand­ing at the front, look­ing back at the bus and the whole bus­es, the com­pa­ny’s HR. And as you looked at all the seats, there are all these peo­ple who have who are liv­ing their own per­son­al HR. Well, that’s an ide­al the­o­ret­i­cal mod­el. But yes, the point is, the ide­al employ­ee is going to align with your com­pa­ny pur­pose, okay? And they’re going to also align with what you can be best at, and your kind of brand promise as well. So that, that, in a way, you’ve got the peo­ple who absolute­ly love doing what you are doing and what you can be the best that so yeah, for me, I think that that’s one of the rea­sons that we spend more time hir­ing and less time fir­ing, we want to get the best peo­ple, but maybe the peo­ple who are the best could be the best some­where else. Kevin, what’s your thoughts?

Kevin Lawrence 21:30

I think is high omega real sim­ple response. And it’s, you know, imag­ine, you’re just gonna have a great big par­ty, and you got your friends there. And you know, your friends that you nat­u­ral­ly get along with, and even the ones you might not have seen for years, but you nat­u­ral­ly get along with them, and you can count on them, and you under­stand what they’re good at and under­stand what they’re not. Well, that’s kind of like an ide­al play there. First of all, they’re the peo­ple you’d want at the par­ty. They’re, they nat­u­ral­ly get along with all of your friends, as as kind of a proxy for the rest of your team. They’re real­ly good at what they do. And you have a good sense of what they do and what they don’t. And

Brad Giles 22:14

that’s real­ly all it is. Because you know,

Kevin Lawrence 22:15

a great team is a col­lec­tion of peo­ple who are all weird in a sim­i­lar way. They’re all on a sim­i­lar wave­length. And the ide­al employ­ee nat­u­ral­ly fits in with what you need. And that’s hard to do. And that’s why like he said, we spent a lot of time defin­ing clear­ly what is the job? What is the excel­lence required in the human to thrive in this par­tic­u­lar role. And then what’s all the oth­er stuff around it that are that is need­ed. So for exam­ple, you’re hir­ing a CFO right now help­ing to hire a CFO for one of our clients. He is an out­stand­ing entre­pre­neur, you know, ser­i­al entre­pre­neur, you know, dri­ven his hell, spec­tac­u­lar busi­ness, like every­thing about it’s awe­some. So this per­son not only needs to be a spec­tac­u­lar CFO, able to dri­ve a very tech­ni­cal and com­pli­ance ori­ent­ed back into the com­pa­ny, but they got to be able to work with our awe­some, but very entre­pre­neur­ial CEO. Yeah, so the idea of employ­ee It is not about the skill sets, they have a loan that is impor­tant, and their expe­ri­ence is impor­tant. The per­son­al­i­ty fit with the CEO is impor­tant, but they also have to be able to work with an entre­pre­neur­ial CEO. So there’s a lot of vari­ables at play. So the ques­tion is that sit­u­a­tion­al, and it’s worth time and ener­gy to fig­ure it out. And I’ve seen so many times, were some­one that could have been ide­al, some worlds can’t, because of the com­pa­ny, like I’ve seen, even, you know, I go to exec­u­tives, there’s exec­u­tives who can report to an entre­pre­neur­ial CEO. And then there’s those that count those that can’t, or almost might be able to be an exec­u­tive some­where else. But they prob­a­bly would need to be a notch down or a direc­tor of that com­pa­ny. So any­way, nat­ur­al fit, great for the par­ty, if it metaphor­i­cal­ly don’t take a lot of man­age­ment. And they’re thrilled that they get the oppor­tu­ni­ty to work with you and you’re thrilled you get the oppor­tu­ni­ty to work for them with­out that’s kind of set­ting the bar pret­ty high. But that’s what we aim for.

Brad Giles 24:14

Well, that’s it’s ide­al. It’s not it is. Yeah, it’s

Kevin Lawrence 24:19

one thing that we do Brad on it, sor­ry, for­got to say and you men­tioned it, I think, but we come up with we call an employ­ee promise. Like what is it that we offer that is dif­fer­ent than oth­er rules out there? Because every envi­ron­ment has some­thing dif­fer­ent to it. It’s like, like every dish that a chef puts up, has­n’t, you know, they read those nice lit­tle descrip­tions of the dish? Well, every com­pa­ny has a very dif­fer­ent envi­ron­ment and cul­ture. So we’ve come up with com­ing up with two or three major things that say, here’s what you’re going to get here. And that might be dif­fer­ent than oth­er places is a way to try and help this process as well. And peo­ple either run towards that or away from that. Some cas­es to

Brad Giles 25:01

Yeah. It’s inter­est­ing and that an employ­ee promise does not mean. So we’ve got good pay. We You know, we’ve got health insur­ance, and we’re going to give you four weeks off per year now, that is def­i­nite­ly not it. Call the

Kevin Lawrence 25:17

job. A good job has all those things. That’s almost every com­pa­ny offers iden­ti­cal things.

Brad Giles 25:22

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So give me

Kevin Lawrence 25:25

a good exam­ple. Give an exam­ple com­pa­ny. Yeah. And theirs was, you get a lot of auton­o­my. lots of oppor­tu­ni­ties to grow. And you get to work with an amaz­ing group of high per­form­ers. So yeah, high per­form­ing col­leagues, auton­o­my, oppor­tu­ni­ties to learn and grow.

Brad Giles 25:51

And if that was explained to you dur­ing the, dur­ing the inter­view process, it’s draw­ing the can­di­date like a mag­net, which is exact­ly what we will zap­per. Exact­ly or

Kevin Lawrence 26:06

repelling them like a mag­net if the polar­iza­tion is backwards?

Brad Giles 26:11

Absolute­ly, absolutely.

Kevin Lawrence 26:13

That com­pa­ny, for exam­ple, at one point had 91% A players.

Brad Giles 26:18

Yeah.

Kevin Lawrence 26:18

And so if you were not a high, strong, high per­former, you would get crushed like tram­pled. Yeah. And they’re mak­ing it very clear if you’re awe­some. Come play with us.

Brad Giles 26:30

So in my book made to thrive, I talk about South­west Air­lines, employ­ee promise, and I looked quite deeply into their job adverts and what they do and it’s, it’s, it’s sub­vert like it’s not over, it’s kind of between the lines, but it’s lots of love for our team. It’s lots of fun. And it’s a col­lab­o­ra­tive team envi­ron­ment, like you can count on your team mem­bers to help you out. And that’s the secret sauce that helps them to deliv­er their brand promise, which is lots of love. Lots of flights, and lots of fun. So that’s the kind of con­nec­tion thrust. So let’s move on to num­ber five. How do you rec­om­mend employ­ers go about mar­ket­ing to attract a play­ers? Inter­est­ing ques­tion, how do you go? How do you rec­om­mend employ­ers go about mar­ket­ing to attract a play­ers? Well, to answer

Kevin Lawrence 27:29

we first got to start with how do we nor­mal­ly find our a players?

Brad Giles 27:34

And before that, do you know what I think AI play­ers don’t respond to adverts because they’re not in the mar­ket, because they’re high­ly like­ly, they’re high­ly in demand, you know, most AI play­ers are going to be poached or are going to be head­hunter, rather than respond­ing to a job advert. And that’s a real­ly impor­tant Cor­ner­stone to begin this con­ver­sa­tion with

Kevin Lawrence 27:59

it is and that’s and I was going a dif­fer­ent road to the same place, Brad, which is we are look­ing at where they come from. Nor­mal­ly, many of them come from rela­tion­ships, right, where we have known them or oth­er peo­ple on the team have known them.

Brad Giles 28:13

Yes.

Kevin Lawrence 28:14

And so if we know that the source, you’ll always go back and look at where your best peo­ple come from same with your cus­tomers. And if you go back and trace your steps, you’ll find a lot of it came from relate a lot of them for most com­pa­nies, maybe yours is dif­fer­ent, right. And so it’s some rela­tion­ship, some­one worked with them before often or went to school with them or knew them. And if that’s the case, then we need to grease that chan­nel or work that chan­nel or lever­age that chan­nel of the rela­tion­ships. And for most com­pa­nies, what we try and it’s hard is to get both the CEO and the key lead­ers to con­tin­u­al­ly reach out to their net­works. Yes, build­ing a bench of inter­est­ed peo­ple that are ready to come in at some time. But it’s no dif­fer­ent than prospect­ing for new clients. It’s like prospect­ing for new employ­ees. The chal­lenge is, most peo­ple don’t put the ener­gy into it. Right. And as a result, so when when when they don’t have any­thing in a prospect sys­tem, then they got to spend a lot of time and ener­gy quick­ly going and try­ing to find some­one and then you end up spend­ing a lot of mon­ey to get a recruiter to go and do that for you because the recruiter already has a warm net­work gen­er­al­ly. And but if we’re cold, it’s very, very chal­leng­ing to do so. Yeah. It’s tap­ping into rela­tion­ships and try­ing to find ways to get the team to put time into that proactively.

Brad Giles 29:39

There’s no sub­sti­tute for a vir­tu­al bench. It’s as sim­ple as that. There’s no sub­sti­tute for mar­ket­ing is impor­tant, I think in advo­cat­ing the employ­ee promise in advo­cat­ing Yeah, this is what we stand for. And so you and I’ve men­tioned before I used to own one of the busi­ness­es I owned was The job board, okay, so like mon​ster​.com, or seek if you’re Aus­tralian. And I got to see vir­tu­al­ly the same job advert almost the same words, okay. And the traf­fic was the same, every­thing was the same. But the amount of peo­ple that clicked on the advert because of the employ­er brand was like 100 times dif­fer­ent, it was remark­able. And it all comes back to what is your employ­er brand. Now, you may think, oh, one was a big com­pa­ny, and one was a small com­pa­ny. That’s not what I’m talk­ing about. It was, you could have com­pa­nies that were, let’s say, multi­na­tion­al, and known, it was the employ­er brand off the bat that was mak­ing a sub­stan­tial dif­fer­ence. So hav­ing a estab­lish­ing and bought employ­er brand is one thing. Yeah. But equal­ly, there’s no sub­sti­tute for build­ing an employ­er, vir­tu­al, so employ­ee vir­tu­al bench or bench. And that means we’ve it’s the hard work, which means we don’t have to rely as much on recruiters, as you said,

Kevin Lawrence 31:10

Okay, so and oth­er things that we see clients do, peo­ple do put a lot of ener­gy, those that recruit from uni­ver­si­ties, do put a lot of ener­gy into recruit­ing in that and build­ing rela­tion­ships at the schools can be a great strat­e­gy if you’re bring­ing in new recruits. And peo­ple will ded­i­cate a lot of resources to that. And on the employ­er brand, like any­thing, you know, a com­pa­ny we work with will spend a lot of time and ener­gy on LinkedIn, shar­ing good con­tent, build­ing their net­works, and even LinkedIn as an exam­ple, if they’re recruit­ing a high­er lev­el exec­u­tive piece, as were their undo­ing some of their employ­er brand stuff or oth­er plat­forms. And the oth­er final piece, it’s a lit­tle con­tro­ver­sial. But the oth­er thing that com­pa­nies will do is the best places to work or great places to work sur­veys Now, look at those con­sul­tants that help you win it. So the sys­tem can be gamed, and it’s a bit of a van­i­ty con­test. But it does get you to do things and it shows your desire to be a great place to work. And I have those things I love about that and things I don’t, you know, and there’s, there’s pros and cons, but it is some­thing that gives almost an endorse­ment of poten­tial great­ness, that can also help can­di­dates feel more com­fort­able with you because it shows you have an inter­est in or a ded­i­ca­tion to your employ­ees. And again, I guess my, my own con­cerns about it. But gen­er­al­ly, it’s good mar­ket­ing, let’s just say that. It looks real­ly good. It looks good to candidates.

Brad Giles 32:44

And we’ve real­ly drift­ed into ques­tion six, which is a good thing, which is, and I’m going to con­tin­ue on what you said, How does a com­pa­ny’s brand in the mar­ket­place fig­ure into recruit­ing? So you’ve men­tioned great place to work one of the teams that I work with Kris­ten, who, you know, they’ve won the Best Place to Work or great place to work, I should say, for the past 10 years in a row. An amaz­ing achieve­ment. And, you know, like, it is a great place to work. There’s such a car­ing group of peo­ple, they always begin their emails, for exam­ple, with Kevin, how are you today? And it’s sim­ple, but there’s these tie in that kind of voice Yeah, and I don’t know how you do a voice on an email, but they seem to do it. I got it. Yeah. It’s just a car­ing place to work. Awe­some. Yes. Awe­some. They’re a physio ther­a­py com­pa­ny called the physio CO in Mel­bourne. And yeah, they, they just, yeah, I’ve been work­ing with prob­a­bly six years, I think now maybe sev­en years and they’re employ­er brand with­in the mar­ket, they always need to work on it. But what it means like that mag­net and why we’re using that mag­net anal­o­gy, because in physio ther­a­py, you’ve got one group of peo­ple who were like, here’s what I want to do. I want to become a sports physio ther­a­pist, and I want to be on the side­line for the ath­letes when they come off and do all this stuff. And like, I love com­pet­i­tive­ness. And then there’s anoth­er per­son who is more like, yeah, I want to help peo­ple to help hur­dler like and so they’ve got that mag­net north and south attract­ing the peo­ple who are the lat­ter. The ath­letes because they spe­cial­ize in aged care, phys­io­ther­a­py, that’s their mar­ket now.

Kevin Lawrence 34:41

Right, which is a spe­cial mar­ket or dif­fer­ent market.

Brad Giles 34:45

Yeah. So that’s my thoughts on that. Any oth­er thoughts? Awesome.

Kevin Lawrence 34:50

No, I think it’s impor­tant and going into the bud­get for you know, mar­ket­ing these things. Yeah. Every com­pa­ny is dif­fer­ent. But invest­ing in things like that are help­ful and every­one will be dif­fer­ent. But you got to put it no dif­fer­ent than what I’ve seen over the years. You there’s ener­gy you put into your mar­ket­ing for cus­tomers, if you’re going to be a great com­pa­ny, you have to put ener­gy into your mar­ket­ing for employ­ees to it’s not just a side of the desk thing. They both need sys­tems that help bring great tal­ent to the table, or great oppor­tu­ni­ties to the table.

Brad Giles 35:26

Yeah, so that was to the ques­tion, should a com­pa­ny bud­get for invest­ing in mar­ket­ing to attract new tal­ent? How much might that cost? Yeah, from

Kevin Lawrence 35:35

zero to a bil­lion, I don’t know, depends on how many peo­ple but it’s impor­tant. And again, it depends on the scale of your company.

Brad Giles 35:44

But how much does attri­tion cost? How much does every time you lose some­one we’ve, you know, the stats are some­thing like for front­line employ­ee, because one time their salary to replace them by the time you hire, recruit, train onboard all of this stuff to get them back up to speed. So he you know, then you can go up to I guess, 10 or 15 times for an exec­u­tive lev­el role can be, you know,

Kevin Lawrence 36:13

what, it’s 30. Yeah, and I don’t have a stat on what it is. But it needs, if you’re going to con­tin­ue to add more peo­ple, some­how you’re going to do it through mon­ey, or through labor, or through pay­ing recruiters to do it. Either way, some­how, you got to do it. And it’s an impor­tant part of your growth engine, because peo­ple’s growth is usu­al­ly lim­it­ed by their access to tal­ent. That’s what we find is access to great tal­ent is what lim­its their growth, or lim­its their san­i­ty, because the stress kicks in when they don’t have enough of the right people.

Brad Giles 36:45

Yeah. So if you’re not get­ting enough, a play­er’s apply­ing, not with­stand­ing what we’ve already said about the vir­tu­al bench, and you’ve got an attri­tion rate that is very expen­sive. You know, then that’s where you can begin to think, well, if we were to reduce our return our attri­tion rate, like rather than hav­ing every­one leave after 14 months, we could get them to leave after 12 months. That’s where you can begin to devel­op your bud­get pool from.

Kevin Lawrence 37:15

Yep, I think and you’re say­ing leav­ing after 12 months is less desir­able? Okay, good. I got that. I got it back­wards. Okay, per­fect. So yes, we’ve sud­den­ly been in 14 months, we will have to leave at 24 months, stay longer if you’re good. If you’re good. Please stay longer. Okay. Num­ber eight. Once an employ­ee is hired onboard­ing takes place, We sure hope so. Then devel­op­ment, that would be awe­some. Describe your vision about how com­pa­nies might best onboard their new hires. Now, Brad, I know you’re work­ing on a book around this, I’ll share a cou­ple things first, from the sim­ple lev­el that we see. First of all, when you onboard some­one to crit­i­cal things, I see one, have a plan. And it’s more than just meet Sal­ly and in HR to get your paper­work done. So you get a pay­check, like, have a seri­ous plan. And I know you can talk to that, you know, very, very well. But a seri­ous plan over a long peri­od of time, which I know you’ve taught you’re doing find­ing in research. So a real detailed plan and num­ber to make sure that they don’t feel the pres­sure to do too much too fast. Now, I get most involved in the onboard­ing a senior execs. And when they come on, I have the same talk with them every time it’s like, Hey, I’m so excit­ed, you’re able to join this great com­pa­ny that I get to work with. Remem­ber, there’s a lot going on in this place. And it’ll take a while to real­ly under­stand it. So my expec­ta­tion is the coach to the com­pa­ny, is you take the first three months, and you get to under­stand the busi­ness, under­stand the nuances, get to know the rela­tion­ships, get to know the dynam­ics tru­ly under­stand it, get in there, get your hands dirty, help out as much as you can. But don’t expect we don’t expect you to pull a rab­bit out of the hat. We don’t expect you to go and rev­o­lu­tion­ize the entire com­pa­ny in the first few months Actu­al­ly, we don’t want you to, we want you to learn and then put togeth­er a plan of what you would do. But when peo­ple come in to try too hard to do too much too fast, it almost always ends up in a night­mare, because they have beau­ti­ful intent and they have under­stand­ing where they come from, but they haven’t learned this place yet. So my sum­ma­ry is a very clear plan of all the activ­i­ties and not too much too fast. Tell them just to calm down, and that we don’t need them to turn the world upside down in 90 days actu­al­ly pre­fer they don’t

Brad Giles 39:49

agree with every­thing that you’ve said there. A cou­ple of quick points because I could talk about this for hours. Because I’m so heav­i­ly invest­ed in writ­ing this book at the moment. Num­ber one 86% of com­pa­nies have a onboard­ing process that is 14 days or less, okay. And the mag­ic that comes from onboard­ing hap­pens after 30 days. So the real ramp up in, in qual­i­ta­tive, impact­ful out­put hap­pens between 30 and 60 days. And my advo­ca­tion is that a onboard­ing process should be 90 days. And I’m going to very, very spe­cif­ic and par­tic­u­lar process around that. The only oth­er thing that I’d say to close that out with­out hav­ing a pod­cast about onboard­ing, is that onboard­ing is not train­ing. onboard­ing is not induc­tion. onboard­ing is about get­ting a per­son to under­stand three things, which is under­stand­ing the cul­ture of the busi­ness, under­stand­ing the tech­ni­cal and process expec­ta­tions of the busi­ness. And third is under­stand­ing the man­agers expec­ta­tions, how their man­ag­er Dys­port defines suc­cess of that indi­vid­u­al’s role. Yeah, so that’s prob­a­bly what I would say about onboard­ing for a few key points there. So let’s move on.

Kevin Lawrence 41:21

And let’s make sure we do a full episode on a Brad, it’s a very impor­tant top­ic. Okay, go ahead, please,

Brad Giles 41:27

a note on how I should employ, devel­op and invest in their people.

Kevin Lawrence 41:35

Well, the first thing they should decide is whether they should devel­op and invest in that per­son or not. Not every­one should be devel­oped or invest­ed in if you don’t think you’re going to get a return. Because some­times we’ve got a wrong per­son, either in that job, or they’re actu­al­ly they should­n’t even be in your com­pa­ny, they’re not a fit. So make sure you devel­op the one make sure first that this per­son is some­one that you want to tru­ly devel­op, or maybe you should be doing some­thing dif­fer­ent. So that’s the first ques­tion. Jim Collins has an amaz­ing sev­en ques­tions to help you make that deci­sion. Look up Jim sev­en ques­tions of whether you should devel­op or replace. But so that is, that is the first thing, but gen­er­al­ly, should we of course, you should devel­op an invest in peo­ple, you just got to be look­ing for a return on that invest­ment. And in every case, it’s not, but it’s almost a min­i­mum require­ment, unfor­tu­nate­ly. And it’s almost like if you buy, whether it’s a jet, or a boat, or any piece of equip­ment, it requires main­te­nance. And in the pur­chase of things like boats and jets. There’s a cal­cu­la­tion and, you know, rough num­bers, but it’s about 5% of the ini­tial pur­chase val­ue is required for annu­al main­te­nance peri­od. So same thing kind of goes true for humans. There’s a min­i­mum amount of we’ll call it learn­ing and devel­op­ment that we require to stay at our best. And there’s the salary is a cost. But there’s so I think that’s very, I think it’s very impor­tant. And, Brad, I know you have lots of thoughts on this.

Brad Giles 43:19

Yeah. Very sim­i­lar. So how much? So first of all, how should employ­ers devel­op and invest in their peo­ple? Well, num­ber one said bud­get, and you just said 5% of salary costs. Great. So it does­n’t need to be 5%. But pick a num­ber, allo­cate that as a bud­get line, item num­ber one, lim­it num­ber two, who is account­able for that? All right, peo­ple and cul­ture man­ag­er or it’s the man­ag­ing direc­tor, or I don’t know how some­one has to be account­able for that. And then they’ve got a bud­get, and we’ve got some­one who’s account­able. And then the third part is where is every­body at in their growth curve. So Bob, maybe at a dif­fer­ent learn­ing and devel­op­ment require­ment lev­el than Jen­ny, or who­ev­er it is. And so each per­son has an has a next step in their career that that per­son who is account­able for the, for the bud­get pool, knows and is work­ing along­side them, and ide­al­ly, inter­act­ing with their man­ag­er as well. And that’s how they’re allo­cat­ing the bud­get through inter­nal or exter­nal learn­ing and devel­op­ment curriculum.

Kevin Lawrence 44:30

And don’t for­get your­self. Even the CEO and the senior lead­ers, they also the I actu­al­ly think they need it as much as or more. And if you might, in the­o­ry, if you had a 5% bud­get for train­ing and devel­op­ment 5% of salaries as a bench­mark based on that’s based on air­planes and boats, it’s not based on peo­ple that haven’t done the math and com­pa­nies so you know, there’ll be a bet­ter source for that. But it might be that there’s 2% that goes to the front line or 3% or 4%. And on your exec­u­tives, actu­al­ly, this, this, I’m talk­ing myself out of a bribe, because salaries go up as you get clos­er to the CEO. So the 5% would allow more dol­lars for the exec­u­tives, because it’s 5% of a big­ger num­ber. So I’m just I was thought it might be more per­cent­age allo­ca­tion, but the allo­ca­tion might not be. But that’s those CEOs and exec­u­tives need­ed. And we often when we start work­ing with com­pa­nies, to get them onto a path of greater new­ness, or back on the path of great­ness is that the exec­u­tives are antsy or under edu­cat­ed or under­de­vel­oped themselves.

Brad Giles 45:32

And that real­ly leads into the next ques­tion num­ber 10. Should there be a for­mal lead­er­ship devel­op­ment pro­gram? Should you use mentors?

Kevin Lawrence 45:42

Well, let’s split that up, then there’s a built in pro­gram, the answer is, yeah. Now do you run it inter­nal­ly? Or do you out­source? It is one thing at a cer­tain scale, lots of com­pa­nies build their own uni­ver­si­ties. But most of the times until you get into the many hun­dreds of employ­ees, many hun­dreds, you’re bet­ter off out­sourc­ing and hav­ing some­one else do it, but you don’t have enough the crit­i­cal mass run­ning lead­er­ship edu­ca­tion pro­grams that we do, we do a pro­gram that we have pro­vid­ed an open source solu­tion to many of our clients. But that’s a lot of work. Now, for every hour in the room, you got 10 hours of prep, at least. Yes. And that assumes you already know the con­tent. So yeah, so should you do it? Absolute­ly. Um, but you know, at a cer­tain size, you might inter­nal­ize it. And in my view as men­tors, yeah, men­tors are mag­ic. Just mag­i­cal. There are peo­ple who can pro­vide guid­ance, they have the been there done that, right, and guid­ance and wis­dom, we encour­age our exec­u­tives to get men­tors all the time. Same with the CEOs not that we work with. So the answers are Yes. And yes, it’s just a mat­ter of how brand­able you are,

Brad Giles 46:59

the only thing I would add to that is in terms of lead­er­ship devel­op­ment pro­gram, a cou­ple of episodes ago, we spoke about spi­ral­ing up where we want every­body in the orga­ni­za­tion to be spi­ral­ing up where they’re get­ting every month, every quar­ter, every year, they’re becom­ing a bet­ter ver­sion of them­selves, for the rea­son that they can stay ahead of the growth of the busi­ness, they can. They you know, as the advi­sor, Coach, you and I need to stay ahead of the CEO and the busi­ness, the CEO needs to stay ahead of the busi­ness and the man­agers or the exec­u­tives need to stay ahead of the growth of the busi­ness broad­ly as well. So we all need to be con­tin­u­ing to learn as much as we can through that jour­ney. So look, absolute­ly. Alright, let’s go on to num­ber 11. The cost of replac­ing an employ­ee can range from one to two or even more times the salary as we spoke about ear­li­er, when you work with a com­pa­ny plagued by her high turnover, how do you go about diag­nos­ing the problem?

Kevin Lawrence 48:04

We know worst of all this the stats we’ve heard like 14 times salary for a wrong per­son and that’s more for a miss hire some­one who has­n’t worked out and done dam­age which we have seen. But yes, I los­ing good peo­ple. I mean, I if you want to watch me get mad, and I’m pret­ty fiery to start with. But when we lose a play­ers and the com­pa­nies we work with, I get angry, and I want answers. And I’m just the coach. They’re not my com­pa­nies. But I’m although I feel like they’re los­ing a play­er as a mas­sive sin and a mas­sive mis­take. So you know, it’s a big thing. So, for me more plagued by a high turnover, first of all, because we do quar­ter­ly sur­veys, and we often reach down a cou­ple lay­ers, to test engage­ment, a cou­ple sim­ple ques­tions to under­stand what’s going on. It gives us a sense of it. So we already kind of have a clue. Or we can see the trends of what peo­ple aren’t hap­py about, espe­cial­ly when we split them by divi­sion. So we get a lot of data on this on an ongo­ing basis. But the biggest thing is always data. And there’s the data is on two dif­fer­ent things. The a play­ers we lost, why do we lose them? Again, it might be through the engage­ment sur­veys or exit inter­views. We’re a big fan of exit inter­views. And some­times we even do them our­selves for clients when if the HR we don’t think can get the truth. So and then sec­ond­ly, if they’re los­ing a bunch of peo­ple that aren’t a play­ers, then we either go back into the hir­ing or the onboard­ing process I’m excit­ed about new book comes out because of will give it’ll give us more of a bench­mark to look at for what to com­pare their sys­tems to. But we you know, if you’re los­ing a lot of peo­ple that aren’t a play­er’s which is gen­er­al­ly good for a busi­ness, but if there’s too many that means there’s a hir­ing prob­lem, gen­er­al­ly a hir­ing prob­lem. But if the onboard­ing is bro­ken, bro­ken, you may have peo­ple who could be high per­form­ers who are not look­ing like it because the they’re on board. sys­tem did­n’t serve them.

Brad Giles 50:01

One of the objec­tives of onboard­ing, okay, one of the spec­i­fied objec­tives is to be con­fi­dent that we can fire this per­son with­in the legal­ly pre­scribed peri­od of approx­i­mate­ly 90 days, depend­ing on your coun­try. So, yeah. You know, it’s like the rip­cord on a para­chute. Like, we want to know, okay, it’s time to pull. This per­son­’s got to go or Yes, this per­son is, you know, going to be we’re con­fi­dent they’re going to be high per­form­ing per­son in the team. So yeah, obvi­ous­ly, it comes back to onboard­ing. I think that the thing that I’m real­ly inter­est­ed about in this book is why do peo­ple cre­ate bad cul­tures, which is kind of talk­ing about the prob­lem here? So every­one talks about, do you have a bad cul­ture? Have you got a bad cul­ture? Can you diag­nose that you’ve got a bad cul­ture? Every­one talks about that. And then we’ve got the anti­dote to solve that prob­lem. But no one talks about, well, why did bad coach­es hap­pen in the first place? And my part of my the­sis is, yeah, part of my the­sis is that it comes from onboard­ing like it’s you don’t have we’ve got a onboard­ing pro­gram that’s a week or four days. So yeah, all I can set some­one up to win. Yeah. So how do we know the prob­lem? We know that the prob­lem of high turnover is there, because we can see the attri­tion rate we can see how many peo­ple are leav­ing. And then we kind of dig into depart­ments, is that always one man­ag­er or what­ev­er? And then what are we doing on the row­ing that’s cre­at­ing that? So let’s move on to the last one. What are your rec­om­men­da­tions for employ­ers to retain their best people.

Kevin Lawrence 51:53

we do a lot, a lot, the first thing is to actu­al­ly just care. Because a man­ag­er should be car­ing for and under­stand­ing their peo­ple, their job is to serve their peo­ple and help them to do their best work and achieve their goals. So you know, the first thing is to tru­ly take an inter­est in and care and that takes time, some man­agers are way too busy. But under­stand­ing where they’re at, ask them what they need, you know, so that was a start­ing con­cept. You know, one of the ways that we do it is by doing quar­ter­ly tal­ent reviews, where we go through all of our key peo­ple, and look at where they’re at, and how do we help them to grow and thrive. And in some cas­es, with a play­ers, they may or may not need to grow, but they def­i­nite­ly need to keep thriv­ing. And some­times we got to do stuff for them. So we unfor­tu­nate­ly get caught up in all the prob­lem peo­ple. And our best peo­ple often get neglect from lack of atten­tion or lack of ener­gy. And, but we need to be care­ful that we don’t do that. So care, every quar­ter real­ly do an eval­u­a­tion of your team and know what you got to do to sharp­en up the peo­ple who aren’t per­form­ing, but also to real­ly take good care of your A’s. And, you know, the best acronym for it was I heard both Mark Cuban share this with us an event which is kyp know your peo­ple, like you got to be in there with him, you got to know what’s going on in their world and what’s good and what’s bad, and what’s stress­ing them and what they’re up against. So you can assist them. Anoth­er CEO, Charles, built a com­pa­ny called Vega, he said some­thing very sim­i­lar. That was a very suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neur here in Van­cou­ver, and he came to one of our retreats for a client. And he just said that, you know, with his peo­ple that you got to be real­ly close and tight. And you got to under­stand, you know, what’s going on? And a lot of peo­ple don’t, a lot of peo­ple aren’t close enough to their peo­ple. And that’s, you know, one of the biggest things, I think, because then you’re gonna know what the issues and things are to help them. How will you read? What do we think we’d recommend?

Brad Giles 53:50

Our last episode was the sev­en hid­den rea­son employ­ees leave. And we spoke about a book by Les Brown and Yep, gee, you know, the last thing, the last thing is pay. Okay, the last rea­son that peo­ple will is paid. So what are all of the oth­er rea­sons? Like, yeah, go back and have a lis­ten to that episode? Have a look at Lee’s book? It’s fan­tas­tic. Yeah. Um, you know, there’s an old say­ing, which is peo­ple, you know, peo­ple don’t leave a com­pa­ny, they leave a man­ag­er. So, you know, invest­ing in your man­agers to care, as you said, invest­ing in your cul­ture, mak­ing sure that there are lead­er­ship devel­op­ment pro­grams and men­tors. Like it. This real­ly sum­ma­rizes a lot of the stuff that we’ve spo­ken about today and last week, as well.

Kevin Lawrence 54:48

Yeah, and one of the big things, just make sure that you’re set­ting them up to want to be com­ing to work or work­ing, doing their work. Yeah. And that some­times involves as I talk about my book, you know, I call them tox­ic Ace, no the high per­form­ing jerks. Get them out of the damn sys­tem. Because the way that you can real­ly lose good peo­ple is by keep­ing bad peo­ple because it will dri­ve them bonkers and cre­ate a lot of unnec­es­sary stress in their world.

Brad Giles 55:15

Indeed, all right. What a good chap­ter I found that answer­ing some ques­tions today about one sub­ject that we’d been, we’d been asked. And so let’s move to close. I don’t know that we need to sum­ma­rize them. I think we’ve kind of we’ve been through them and answer. So with that. Thank you for lis­ten­ing. This has been the growth whis­pers pod­cast. I’m Brad Giles and as always joined by Kevin Lawrence, my co host for myself, Brad, you can find me at evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com​.au. And for Kevin, you can find Kevin at Lawrence and co​.com. Thank you very much. We look for­ward to hope­ful­ly chat­ting with you again next week. Enjoy your week.