182: Scaling Up Insights — Coach Panel with Andres Zylberberg and Kim Bayer-Augustavo

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done. I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have. Talk to Docs of Talent and you won't be disappointed. Go to docsatant.com Bill G. Again, that's doxatant.com Bill G. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G. Check it out today. Hello everyone and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today, a couple other coaches. This is a podcast coach panel show. Andres in Perth, Australia. You'll note from his accent that he's not fully or completely stereotypically Australian. He was born in Madrid, moved to Argentina, eventually landed there. Truly a blended global travel. Welcome to the show, Andres.

Thank you very much, Bill. Thanks for inviting me.

And 2am where you are, right?

Absolutely. But you know, for growth there is no timing.

Oh good. Slave to the cause. All right. And then Kim up in Seattle, done quite a bit of work up in Seattle. Welcome to the show also. And Kim, you were born in Barcelona, right?

I was not, but that sounds really intriguing. And boy, I wonder what Kim that was. Actually I was born in the Northwest so I can't claim that.

Yeah, Northwest native. I actually have long ties. My great, great, great grandfather, the guy I'm named after, was an early settler of the state in the first state senate and that kind of thing. And my family's always pushed me to live up to his name. So we're talking today about all things new in the world of scaling up. Both Kim and Andres are scaling up coaches and I love to have different coaches on to share experiences with their clients and react to some things in the world. We've just drawn a range of things from the Scaling up insights that Verne shares with us and the news of scaling up. Start off with the news. I'm just back from a week in the Middle east where Aramco has IPO'd and gone over 2 trillion market cap. Huge news in that world in a traditional business but that has been government controlled forever. And things are changing in Saudi Arabia. I didn't visit Saudi on this trip but have been in the past. And the things that I hear now are remarkable. The women can drive, tourists can enter the kingdom, there's Western entertainment throughout. Things are changing dramatically in that world. Right. Did you guys see this also?

Yeah, no, it was very interesting. And the fact that the winds are changing for sure in those countries and then you're certainly seeing it in major developed countries and yeah, that's pretty exciting.

You can see a big change in the culture around the world. Right. These countries, they had very old practices and it's never too late to change. Right. To improve. And that's remarkable.

Well, so I was there working with our partnership with the EO Organization on the accelerator program and we did sessions in Kuwait, in Bahrain, in Dubai. And Dubai is well known for large expat community and mix of gender roles and things like that. But Kuwait and less so and Bahrain may be in between the two. But I'm surprised at how many non traditional businesses and how many women are participating in these companies and roles. Verne talks about how we're seeing and there's just a Accenture report on the notion of equality in the workplace. And I was earlier recording a podcast with our summit speaker, Karthika Roy about the need for broad gender equity. But Accenture found that there was a big increase in innovation in companies that had more equal cultures. And of course, the CEO of Accenture today is one of the top women leaders in the world. Julie Sweet, what do you guys notice in your client companies and that? How do you see how much consciousness is there about gender equality and what are you noticing?

Well, yesterday I was just finishing one of the annual planning for one of my clients and we were talking about specifically innovation and what it really takes for the culture of these companies. And they all acknowledged, the leadership team acknowledged that it was so important to bring safety, to bring vulnerability in the space where you say, hey, when we actually innovate, we're going to fail, probably more than we actually succeed. But we need to learn from that. We need to celebrate that. We need to embrace that sort of culture rather than, hey, if you mess up, you're out. And that was all in the heart of training, continuously training, continuously growing. And we had a very good discussion about how they can actually train their staff. They have around 30 people and they are about to hire 10 more in the next six months. So how are they going to bring that training in and for the existing people and for the new ones, which is pretty much what people are expecting as well.

Kim, I always feel like that Northwest is more progressive in a lot of respects, but not always. And especially if you get out of town a little bit, it can be less so. What do you.

Yeah, I have just finished a couple annual planning sessions and on that same vein that Andres was talking about with training and development is huge. But when you relay that back to gender equality, you know, I have one client that is a bank and it was very interesting. They were a fairly new client, all male, and they are struggling with trying to really think out of the box and their culture is very much driven from the top down. And so that was one of the biggest big insights when I first started working with them, is that we got to figure out how to get more diversity here. And they agree it's going to be moving forward this next year. But what they couldn't do was they really couldn't get out of the box and they really felt that they needed to have more innovation, but they didn't know how to get there. So when this topic came up, I said, oh, this is absolutely perfect because it's something I'm working on right now and clearly agree. I have my actually own experience in corporate America. Prior to becoming a coach, I was actually one of the first directors in my region when I was moving up the ranks to hit the six figure mark and that was a big deal. Now this dates me, but this is back in the 90s, so it was when that was kind of a big deal. But I'll tell you how I felt. Was extremely empowered. I felt very passionate about doing even more bigger and bolder things with the brand. And it really kind of set the tone for me to feel that I could fail fast fail, of course, but to have the support of my superiors and be able to really go out, think out of the box and innovate and. And so just looking back, the company is McDonald's. So you wouldn't think that McDonald's was known for innovation, but certainly as far as gender equality and promoting thinking and rewarding innovative thoughts and being a change agent was clearly a key to my success in my career there. And so I try to adapt that to my coaching clients today.

Yeah, that notion of developing, well, it's interesting. So Accenture went on and studied all the different things that might affect innovation and equality. And the main thing they found the top thing was that the organization provides training to keep its company skills relevant. And Verne emphasizes the need for relevance. So we want to pick relevant training and development things, not just random kinds of things, but things that actually matter. Now I Think there's some value in random and serendipity and in the area of innovation and stuff. But the most useful thing is actually working on the areas that are of direct concern to people. And the other would be a secondary kind of thing. And the other factor that they said was that the company's training times and formats were flexible, so inflexible. Traditional things that impact or make it hard for me are not as easy as if I create easy to consume training things where I can work on the areas that are of concern to me in a way that works for my work and my life schedule. Right. Like the more that you can do with that. Of course, that's something that we're very concerned with and have a lot from our summits to our growth workshops. Right. We're always. Even the work of the coach themselves. We're always teaching our clients a new tool or two that relates to what they're dealing with. And we're thinking about the relevance, not simply giving them the next thing in the sequence because it's what we think is important, but trying to make it relevant. How are you guys bringing in training and learning into the companies you work with?

One of the things I've been working with a client, it was around the training itself and how to think out of the box. Not just the training that you got for a course and you get something and then you come back to the office and you don't know if you can implement it or not. But what they did was a hack day. It was actually a two days hackathon, this is how they called it. And it was two days taking ideas from what Google is doing as well. What are the things that you really want to work on as well as learning new technology, new products, anything that will help not only the employees, but also will help the company. And it was really interesting when it came up from that hackathon. The people were fantastically engaged with all that. They were learning hits from working with their peers or people that they haven't worked before. And also it was fantastic for their company because they've got so many ideas that then when they go into the quarterly planning, they think, hey, should we implement one of these? This could be our next product. This could be our next feature that could make millions for us.

So this is a collaborative environment. They're doing.

Absolutely.

Working through that.

Absolutely, yes. Yeah.

I have a tech consulting company here in the Northwest and they are doing webinars for their training. They are, you know, they're working remote because primarily they're consultants that are scattered throughout and they. One of their differentiating activities has really evolved around training and development to stay relevant. As you know, in the world of Microsoft and all the other tech companies here, they have to stay on top of it. And so this has been a huge pivot for them in really deploying, deploying a lot more resources towards their training and development and trying to be where their consultants are. And that means again, you know that the webinars anything that they can do from a remote access standpoint and it's working.

It's working.

Yeah, yeah.

That actually makes me think of something that happened the other day. I went to one of my clients offices and they were actually doing a lunch and learn and that person was showing how he could write music with coding in software development. And I thought there's no way that you can actually write the same quality of the music. And this guy was explaining by using artificial intelligence how he could create a very similar music that you hear anywhere and you could tell a difference. And actually he did that showcase where we couldn't tell the difference between what he did and the original song. And it was fantastic because obviously from that there was a lot of learning for all the people in the company. What that inspired you to do moving forward that what Kim was talking about, that out of the box thinking and what are the opportunities when you actually remove those constraints? It helped you in your growth. It was fantastic to work.

Well you know the other thing I hear in that I've heard a few times now and companies often get jammed up or struggle with the idea of managing some proactive learning. But I've heard quite a few now create lunch and learns that are self organized and the more we can use volunteerism and self organizing, we don't have to budget and hire people and do things like that. There are people that would gladly show up and lead aspects of these things and organize themselves around learning. So even if you don't have the size, the budget, the resources to make learning a funded formal affair, you can actually formalize it informally by engaging the teams. And we've seen that a few times where people are doing lunch and learn on either very narrow topics or just broadly and training each other in things.

That's a great point, Bill. One of my clients is using this training opportunity as a development development opportunity for their middle managers and being able to switch roles and be able to take the lead on some of these training new training topics that they find that are going to be relevant for their workforce.

So that's a good place to segue in and remind folks we've got a range of training solutions. Of course we're doing business growth workshops getting people started in the world. People read Scaling up, they listen to the podcast, they love the ideas of it and then they, they need a little help to get started. And one of the first places that we've got to begin to hear a little bit from the coach's perspective about applying these are the business growth workshops. Do you guys have any workshops coming up in the next year? What do you do around this?

I'm going to be planning one in the spring, so sometime in April. I just conducted one just recently in the fall. It wasn't a public workshop. I partnered with my client that's a bank, so it worked out great.

Oh nice.

For their coming up next spring in April.

Nice. And Andres so here in Perth, I.

Haven'T put anything in the agenda, but I'm thinking of planning something for the winter. So the winter here in Perth, by the way, is in July, August. So it might be a very good workshop for the people who are just, just starting with this journey or the ones that are in the journey already and they want to experience a bit faster growth.

So I do about three to four public workshops a year. I try to do them at roughly the same time every time. We might skip one due to a holiday or some other conflict. And then I do a whole bunch with partners like you've done Kim, with clients or other organizations, ypo, eo, et cetera, speak to Vistage groups and alumni, MBA alumni groups, things like that. I did one recently for the UCLA Anderson School CEO alumni. So we do a range of these. We've got them coming up in Vancouver, Nashville, Tennessee, Denver, Colorado, Atlanta, San Antonio, Waltham, Amsterdam. I'll be doing one in January in San Francisco. It's open for registration now. We've got them in New York, Louisville, Ann Arbor, Columbus. Anyway, there's probably 30 there and we do get people traveling to them as well. So if there's not one where you are, go looking and you can find them. Quite a few of them are listed on Eventbrite, but probably the best place to do is just go to scalingup.com and then find the link for the workshops in the top menu and look and see if there's one either near you or at a city worth traveling to around you that I would say they range 400 to 600 bucks a seat. So super, super economical to get started. And you'll typically spend a half a day With a coach diving into each of the four decision areas of scaling up and just getting a little in that area. So get you started. Give you some thoughts on how to actually and where to begin in each area, but definitely an easy return on that. We also recommend you bring a couple of people when you come to one of those workshops. Preferably don't come by yourself, but come with at least one other, perhaps as many as three other people, and attend together and get started. You'll begin to learn how to collaborate more effectively in that environment.

Yeah, I just had a conversation with a CEO that attended Vern's boot camp.

Oh yeah.

And was super excited and wants to just jump right in to start executing the Rockefeller habits and ready to go. So it was very helpful for him and wished he could have had his leadership team there.

I think there's two ways that people come out of these experiences, right? One is, and maybe the first one is, wow, there's so much I'm not doing that I should be doing, right? As you read the Rock Habits checklist or you read scaling up, you're like, there's a world of things that I feel like I should be doing and yet here I am in business, I'm doing okay already. And in fact, you can do all right. But to really scale, effectively, sustain that over time, profitably with the right people, and not to lose your mind in the process is where scaling up comes in and the value of doing it. So the next thing is, wow, there's all these things I could do and I just start doing a little bit of a the time and figuring out how to get them done within my company is a big difference. It's really hard to do it on your own, right? So speaking of doing it on your own and knowing when it's time to step aside. New York Times talking recently about Google founders, Larry Page, Sergey Brin stepping out of their roles, handing it off. Now is the time to assume the role of proud parents. I think there's a time with many of our founders, especially when we go through like functional accountability roles, we talk about the succession and the eventual growth of the thing. What is the role that you should have over time? Do you really want to have yourself in all the key functions? Is there one that you want to have? Is it even head of the company? Should head of operations, head of the company be someone other than you? Should you maybe be head R and D person or the proud parent, watching your company graduate and grow? Of course, Google is one of those out of reach, like Way beyond anything that most of us are dealing with, but something to learn from because really they emerged on the scene as a couple of students working on something years ago and now of course, their search engine is handling 9 out of 10 Internet searches and Android powering 3 quarters of the world's smartphones. Right.

You know, Bill, one of the stories that I have from clients is when we actually face this situation where the company is scaling and they can no longer keep those chairs or those functions, it takes a lot of courage to say, hey, I need to step back and lift someone else in that chair so I can actually add massive value somewhere else. But it could be within the company as well. And usually takes a lot of time, a lot of courage to these people to say, okay, this is the best for the company. That's why I usually go back to when we actually go to the functional accountability chart, I usually refer back to their purpose and I ask them, well, what's the impact in the community that you want to create and what could be the impact by you stepping back and leaving someone else in that chair? And that usually helps them link their decision to something bigger than themselves.

No, I love that, Andres. And just again, going through annual planning every year I'll bring out the function accountability chart and go through that exercise. And it's so key because you want to see change at first. It's of course their name is in three boxes. They're head of the company, they're overseeing sales, they're overseeing marketing. And you keep asking, do you have the time you really need to rise above at the 50,000 foot level, do the market facing, customer facing activities and they're beginning stuck in the weeds. And it's that I just can't delegate because no one can do it better than me. And then seeing that progress every year to get to that point where they're just head of the company and they can really start getting out of those weeds every day. So it's nice to see that progress.

So one of the tools that I use on a regular basis, I use the Gallup strengths finder and I use our love and loathe exercise to have people identify what they're really good at, what they're not good at, what they love doing, what they hate doing, and then continue to evolve their role. It's not necessarily redesigning the job, although sometimes it begins there, but sometimes it's about taking yourself out of certain jobs and migrating your role within the company, especially for the founder, but the whole C suite as well.

You know, I find it very difficult for the founder of a family owned business. And I don't know Bill or Anders, if you work with family clients, but I have one in particular that the son is now the head of the company. But the founder keeps coming in in the 11th hour and wanting to change things and so working on getting him in the role of RD and innovation. And that has helped a lot to be able to empower the son to be able to finally take over the company. But family businesses have been a little bit more of a challenge sometimes of trying to find that right role for the founder. And the purpose that you said Andres earlier is really a key to kind of help them rise above and focus on that.

Yeah, you're absolutely right, Kim. I'm working with a family business as well. And it's that decision right from the founder. What do you need for you to be comfortable stepping back, leaving other people, as you said, Bill, recreating or reshaping your role, you don't have to be out of the company, but what are the absolute critical value that you can add and how would be the impact in the community, in the world that you want to create by letting others do what you're doing now? And what are you reducing the drama by doing that? Are you reducing your stress by doing that?

What you think about as our company scale? And I probably, I don't see many companies, there's a handful that I start below 100 employees for one reason or another. But quite a few More start at 100 and then add hundreds more employees as we go. And there's always a concern about how do we preserve the culture that started us and what do we keep constant and how do we evolve stuff. There was a HBR article recently about culture and the culture's impact on diversity. Right. We've been talking about the neat. We opened with the notion of diversity. So then is culture promoting homogeneity or is it, you know, are we narrowing it by calling it culture fit? And I think that in my experience, culture is not like, hey, we're all straight white dudes, let's have more bros in this thing. That's not the culture. The culture ought to be organized around the things that we talk about in scaling up. So your purpose, the values, the bhag, the brand promises, things like that. And those are the culture elements that we're talking about, not what we all look like or sound like.

Absolutely. It's funny when you start working with a client and you ask, do you have core values? Do you have A core purpose. And many times they'll say, oh yeah, absolutely. And then you ask them to recite them and they have difficulty or their leadership team has difficulty and then you really start trying to work with them to how do you bring not only core values that have true meaning to the DNA of your company and tie with your purpose, but also bring them, make them alive and well within the organization and start building that true differentiated culture that's unique to them?

Yeah, absolutely true. I couldn't agree more with Kim. One of the things that I tell my clients is once you define those values, how do you use them? Tell me how you drive an interview, a new person comes to the office and why that person would like to work with you and use those values, use the purpose, use all that core of your business to explain to everyone, even on the company and everyone knew during the interviews why they should work with you. That creates way more engagement. And as we said as you were highlighting Bill, that creates the culture that you want, regardless of why do some umbrellas.

You know, as you guys talk, it occurs to me that there's a distinction between the stated culture and the culture and practice. Right? And I think sometimes people will put things on their wall and in their documents and that kind of thing. And yet you walk around and you see there's a culture and practice that's distinct from it. And every now and then I interrogate that and challenge that. But I probably should do that more then I'm doing it because I think there's a big disconnect. I mean famously in the Western U.S. in particular, we had this company, Enron. It was notorious energy trading company and they manipulated the markets, things like that, to their financial advantage, taking glee and cleaning out people's savings. At times they were captured later in their recordings, but one of their values stated and published on their website that you can go look if you use the like Internet Wayback Machine, it was integrity, right? But if you walked around there, you would have seen that the real culture was not about integrity. It was about like winning is everything or to win somebody has to lose. Not a win win type culture. So the culture and practice and I think that there are times that we work with companies. Most of the ones that I think of where there's a huge disconnect are places we don't end up working. Because if you're willing to be one way in reality and say something else, you're probably not going to last long with one of our coaches, right? Have you guys had that experience where People sort of failed the process. There was a disconnect in who they thought they were and said they were.

Yeah, absolutely. I have several clients where when we actually go to the identity of the company, they start to doubt themselves. They start to. The misalignment comes up with perception of one person is something and then the perception of the other person is different from what's the current culture in the company. And one of the things that we work together is what's the culture that you want to create and what are you willing to change? Which is the key thing is what are they willing to. Or what they want to change, what they want to drive different. As Kim was saying before this out of the box thinking your core values are actually representing what you're doing. Is that who you are as a company. And it usually takes again, courage as well for them to acknowledge when it's not what they intended to be originally and how we drive that back into what they really, really want.

Yeah, I will say that. You know, and I've been told this by a couple of the CEOs, it's really helped having fresh eyes and a fresh perspective from a coach outside party to look in and kind of call them a little bit on the carpet on are you really executing these core values? Is this really the image that you're projecting in the marketplace and even looking at the talent that they're hiring? So looking at culture, you mentioned this bill culture fit. But when you're looking at top talent, you want to hire a players, you want not only the skills, but you want them to match your culture. Are you hiring the right people based on what you perceive your company should be as opposed to what your core values are saying you are. And there sometimes is a disconnect. And so really trying to get that alignment is going to be key in really attracting those right players to be able to do what you need to have happen and be passionate brand advocates for you.

You know a story that I just remember I was having a conversation with a CEO and he told me the moment the culture started to change in his company when he actually removed his tie. He used to wear suits and a tie, and he removed his tie one day and never again. And everything started to change. People started to realize, okay, that's my role model. He's changing. I can change as well. And it really hit me. And now I tell my clients all the time, it starts with you. You need to be the role models of that culture that you want to create. People will follow you.

That's A really good thing. It always starts with you. One of our company values here at Scaling Coaches is never finished. And it's the notion that I've always got to be working on myself, learning and growing. If I want my organization to grow, I have the organization that I deserve today. I need to level up myself as I level up the organization, or I'll pull it right back down with me. Right. And I think we don't necessarily see that that's a good segue to the next thing in the world of culture. Right. So Ben Horowitz has a new book, what you do is who you are, how to create your business culture. And I think that we see that enough like, people write things down, but then they have regular practices and traditions Ben talks about. It's what people do, not what they say, that determines culture. So are your actions a match for the words that you say? Can we align the two? And that strategy shapes the culture over time. So core to our intentional cultures is the core elements of strategy. Right? The values, the purpose of the company. The values are the essential DNA of how we do our work, the purposes, the why of the work. And the BHAG defines a particular thing that we're striving towards. The brand promises are what the world can expect from us. So at the core of all that, that would be the core of strategy, those elements that ought to be core to the culture. And there ought to be traditions, touch points, things like that along with it. And then he talks about a shocking rule. Do any of your clients have a shocking rule that you can think of?

You know, I love that I read that article as well, as far as having a shocking rule. And it just. I wrote that down and said, you know what, I need to go back and work with my clients on trying to instigate that, because I really do think that gets everyone's attention. But yeah, I'd love to hear more examples.

Yeah, absolutely. I haven't actually dig into this shocking rule. I think I agree with you, Kim. Definitely need to challenge my clients on that. What I've seen also work really well is some of my clients, they start with what they consider the rules of play so they can have the right strategy and they have the engagement from their people. But how do they manage? How do they do stuff on a daily basis? And those are the rules of play that I don't mean trust, respect. But what's behind those words? What are the behaviors and the habits if you actually want it? On the daily engagement, how do you address to people during the meetings, outside the meeting, how do you communicate those styles actually bring that culture alive again and bring those values? As we've been talking throughout our life, I know Ben has this new word called virtues instead of values. So actually that actually made me think, oh God, I really want to read this book and say what can I take from this and bring back to my clients.

A couple examples in that article. And it's funny, I had heard this before with bezos on no PowerPoint at meetings. How many times do we have PowerPoint to nauseam? So I find that I have a.

Lot of teams that want to do all their business planning, all their meetings in PowerPoint or, or presentate, you know, Google based presentations. And I'm like, it's just, it's bad form. It's not the, it's a static document. It's not alive and well. But we're used to, certain of us are used to organizing our thoughts that way.

Right.

Like with bullet points and pages and things.

So how he's approaching meetings is intriguing and kind of one of those rules. Now, no PowerPoint and then the other one, and I can't remember who it was, but I used this last night at a board meeting I attended and it was if you're on time, you're late. I think that one right at the start and I actually shared that and they found that pretty interesting.

So I've used a variation on that forever. But I don't find that that many clients embrace this thing. But the notion if you're on time, you're late, I would peel back and that is to say that if you're unwilling to be early, you're going to be late. Right. And if you're not willing to be early, you ought to ask yourself why you're in the meeting in the first place and how do you hold yourself relative to the meeting and to the team and to what you're up to. Right. In order to be consistently on time, you've got to be willing to be early. And I find the vast majority when they ask that question, are you willing to be early? Are always trying to put it right on the line.

That's great.

Just deliver right on the moment and then not sacrifice stuff. But to hold it as so important and so valuable is to generate and bring the value and give the importance that that meeting is going to make the difference. But it's not the way we relate to our teams and meetings. Right. Like this is important enough that I'm willing to be a few minutes early and I'm willing to show up prepared right now. People show up at the last second and they wing it. Well, that's crap. And you get the results that go along with it.

You know, one of my clients was telling me the amount of meetings they actually have during the week, and I was asking them, what do you do with those meetings and how often do you help them? And some of them, they have back to back. And that's a term that I try to challenge.

No transition time. No time to go to the bathroom, fill your coffee, or do whatever. Right?

And I call that the outlook trap, because outlook, when you book a meeting, it just goes as a default for one hour. And I challenge my clients, why? Why 60 minutes? Why not 45? You save the last 15 to wrap up and prep for the next one. So you actually are early and on time and you respect the next meeting as well as you're respecting the current that you're in.

So if you're going to be early and prepared for a meeting, and that's the way you're going to operate this year and going forward, then you might be able and willing to end early and not show up all the time in the meeting. And you could even practice putting buffer time between each meeting so that, you.

Know, I'd also look at the leader being the role model. So if you have a CEO or president that comes in and sets the tone, they aren't prepared, they aren't showing that they really are command of the topic and what's occurring at this meeting, they're certainly not being the role model for their rest of their leadership team. So I try to coach and make sure that CEOs are coming prepared and are setting that tone and expectation for the rest of their team members.

Some of our teams will have people check cell phones at the door. What I like about Bezos no PowerPoint meetings is where we're not showing up and then reading things to each other and going through a lot of standard briefings, but instead we're showing up to identify breakdowns or gaps in performance, figure out where we are collectively as a team to get on the same page. That could be a place where you'd be tempted to use a PowerPoint, but it would be much better to use a dashboard, whether it's a whiteboard or an online tool. We have the software tool, the Scaling Up Scoreboard, formerly aligned today. That Scaling Up Scoreboard is one of the ways that you could eliminate things like reading a report to each other in the process, and you could actually talk about and look at. Okay, which are we ahead at? Let's celebrate that and which are we behind at? Let's collaborate on those things. So collaboration, ideation, decision making, getting a quick survey of things, appreciating each other's world, those are really good roles for effective meetings, right?

Absolutely. And then having a clearly action plan, coming out of it with a who, what, when and making sure that everybody is clear on the outcome and what needs to happen next.

Reminder to our listeners that the scaling up is a best of framework. We're continually pulling in thought leaders and the best tools and approaches in business and then simplifying them and working them together in a way that respects the intellectual property creators but builds this kind of living open framework, which is what I loved about it and why I came to it and why I embraced it when I was a CEO and use it as a coach. The best place to hear the latest in that world and speakers like Ben Hurwitz is at our summits. We have these scaling up summits. There's probably 1200 people at our US summits and then we will do smaller ones around the world. But the next one coming up 5-5-7 in Dallas, you can find those@scalingup.com and then February 10th we'll have one in Sydney. I'm guessing you'll go to that one, Andres.

Absolutely, I'll be there.

And I think the registration link for that one, we'll put it in the show notes as well. But I think that registration's on eventbrite for the region.

Yeah, the summits are such a great learning and training opportunity and again just to reinforce to the power of bringing your team and being able to after a keynote be able to have that conversation with your team right there and then at a break really talk about how you can apply that to your planning moving forward right in real time is pretty powerful.

I learned a great deal at each of our summits. So we talked a little bit about family business earlier and I think I find that I always have a family business or two and that can make letting people go should they stay or should they go very difficult. But this is true across all companies. One of our really our newest client, we had a conversation about whether or not someone should go. And our coach in Egypt, Omar Haikal talked and had two great questions to share with us. And our coaching community is pretty collaborative. Obviously conversations like this with other coaches as how and as we have issues we brainstorm and share with each other. But he had two great questions. How would you feel if they quit tomorrow and you know, if the answer is something like relieved, then maybe you should let them go. Right. And then the second question that really just emphasizes it. What if you had 10 people like them? Oh, and that ought to drive a dagger into your sense of urgency or drive a dagger into your complacency. Right? Raising your sense of urgency.

Absolutely. One of the things that we challenge our clients is would you enthusiastically rehire every single person you have in the organization? And I love these two questions because whilst the question would you enthusiastically rehire? Some people might say yeah, it's great to get to what's behind their rationale, what's behind their minds by actually asking these two questions. I love them.

Yeah. What I found with family business is as the company continues to grow, is their skill set growing in the position that they're in. And a lot of times I find that's not the case. So kind of get back to this training, development and trying to reinforce. Do you each have individual development plans? What is it, you know, what is an A player within this position? And would you, if you're going to hire somebody outside the company, what traits and skill set would they need to have to be successful in this position? And a lot of times they realize there's huge gaps where they are. So we have try to have the conversation, are you better served to be able to move into another position, whether, you know, I don't know, human resources or somewhere else and bringing in somebody from the outside that's really going to take it to that next level. And those are sometimes difficult conversations. But in experience I've had it completely broke through a barrier that they had and allowed them to flourish and scale up because the person in that position just was not, didn't have the right skill set.

I have more family business with my international clients than with anything else. Generational companies with successive waves of folks involved and I think sometimes there's a collapse of the role and the ownership. So in a couple of my US based family companies that have been more successful with this, they separate the ownership from the role. So you have some ownership stake which is inviolate until that's sold or bought out or something that remains yours. But your role may change and that has to be earned and kept and may evolve over time. And we have to ask ourselves if that's appropriate.

It.

You know, there's a, it definitely complicates things more when you have that, that dynamic. Right. And yet there's also power in it. We know and understand each other there's some commonality. There's something. There's a different level of trust and experience there in some families. Right.

I think there's a strong sense of the fear of losing control. And when my clients are being challenged to think in that way, would you rehire them? What if you had more 10 of these B or C players, they start to think about, what if I lose control? What would happen? And they create this image in their mind. But it's interesting to see how they all challenge each other to create the image that they actually want to create, to actually link back to the purpose, back to their value, back to the culture and the impact they want to create as a company.

I think we've all heard that phrase, right? Hire slow, fire fast. But in reality, if you really probe and people stop and really ask themselves, would I rehire everyone on this team if I was starting the business over again today? Enthusiastically, you probably see that almost all of us and our listeners and our clients have people that are still sticking around and that you're not doing. So it sounds nice as a concept, we go, yeah, we should do that. But then in reality, we have people that we're not doing that with. Right. There's no better time to do it. The people and the company, both a profound disservice to keep people around an environment where they're never going to win.

Absolutely. And what I was just going to tag on to that was if you're able to make that happen and look outside and be able to, you know, really attract the right talent. Culture. This comes back to the culture piece of really making sure that you have this strong, identifiable culture that is flourishing, that is out there in the marketplace and you're able to attract top talent. You're not having to just settle for a B or C player, which you definitely don't want.

Yeah. You know, it's funny, we talk about family business and this. The difficulty of making changes, but of course, we know that making changes, staff is difficult in any team, and there's a reluctance to let people go. Author summit speaker, past podcast guest Denise Leon makes a case in a recent Forbes article about not talking about your company like they're a family. And we've had. I once had that we're like a family in our company values. And we had to retire that and change that because we found it like, no, actually, I might fire you. You play a role here. You're here for a while, but in fact, you're not a family. And once I let you go, I'm not inviting you to Thanksgiving. You're not coming to Christmas dinner.

So just jumping on that. I mentioned that I worked at McDonald's and it used to be called the McFamily. And I'll tell you, the culture has really changed with the prior CEO Steve Easterbrook, where they really said McFamily doesn't apply anymore because we are a business. It is a business. Clearly, culture and gender equality and all those things come into play and need to come to the forefront. But as far as the family approach. Yeah, we. Because that's what was happening is that people were thinking they were safe, that they didn't have to really do their.

Job like my family.

They were protected. And so that was a great example of culture starting to change for a business mindset, not just a family.

Well, some people would say differently, but I'm never going to fire or lay off my kids. Right. My son and daughter will always be my son and daughter and they'll always be welcome no matter what they do or say or anything like that. But that's not true of my company. Right.

You know, one of my clients was facing something very similar when they started to shift their culture towards growth mindset for every single person in the company. And they realized that family connection, by the way, connection is very, very important. But that family idea, it wasn't working for them. And so the idea of shifting towards what this is a growth mindset organization. What do you want to get out of working from the company? And they were asking every single person the same question. What do you want to get out of this? You're going to be here for a while, let's say a few years. Times are changing now, and people are not staying for 30 years in the same company. You might want to get the best out of those one or two or three or years that you put in that company and be able to move to the next one or next level in the same company. But it's all about the growth mindset rather than that family connection.

So a better analogy is a team analogy, right. So in any sport, you're going to have different team positions. The CEO might be the captain or the quarterback or the team manager or the coach even. And then you're going to have positions. I might have a receiver, a quarterback, I might have a pitcher, a catcher. I've got a goalie. Right. I've got a striker. I've got different roles that, that are going to be played by different team members. And I may bench some people, take them in and out of active play, go to standby, replace folks, recruit new players. Right. That's probably a better analysis for that.

And something that families, they don't have the sports, just following your analogy, Bill, is a score. You always have a score that you're aiming for and the families don't have that. And that's probably why one of the main reasons to think of your business as a team, as a sports team rather than a family.

Well, and that's why we have the Scaling up scoreboard, the software tool for keeping the key elements of the plan, progress on the plan, and the key metrics visible. Right. Whatever your sport is that you play or watch, there's a scoreboard and it wouldn't really be a game if there wasn't a scoreboard. And yet so many of our teams operate without effective scoreboards. If your only scoreboard is a monthly financial statement that only a couple people read, then you have got a problem making a great game of your business. What are you guys doing? How many of your folks are using the scaling up scoreboard? What other tools are you using? Talk to me about that.

So I have two clients that are on Metronome, which is a similar dashboard software program. I have several that are jumping on the Scaling up scoreboard. And one comment I wanted to make on the importance of that is again, it clearly establishes a culture accountability as well with the individual team player because they clearly can see and it captures their own individual contributions and where they are in progress in accomplishing that for the quarter weekly and be able to see how that ladders up to the company goals and results. So I absolutely believe that the dashboard approach is clearly a key ingredient for scaling up companies. And in any company, you have to know where you're headed and how you're getting there and how you're doing right now. And what are those key KPIs that you're tracking and being able to see if there needs to be a course correction at any given point?

Yeah, regular visibility to a few key things. Anders, what are your guys using?

So my clients, some of them are using a line and some of them are using. They're still on paper. And what I actually challenge them is if you're going to have it on paper, have a massive paper and put very massive, huge paper in the middle of the company and keep that accountability, keep those updates and keep it updated because that's going to shift, as Kim was saying, quarter by quarter, things will change. We will need to shift direction and you need to keep everyone communicated, everyone aligned Rolling towards the same direction.

More and more of my teams have these scoreboards, like the Scaling Up Scoreboard. But I also have quite a few teams that I've worked with through hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, where we have in each work group a whiteboard and or a laminated vision summary. That's our simpler one page, one page plan. And we have a vision summary in the workgroup that we update each quarter and each day and each week with critical elements that we do. And we are actually picking up a dry erase marker and interacting with it as a team in those environments. And sometimes I find that works better than the software ones or better at the lower levels to complement and roll up to. So if I've got a particular shop or work group within a company, they might have one of these whiteboard type or dry erase type scoreboards that they're using to track their progress within each quarter.

So one of the things I found with clients where they have distributed teams around the world, the software digital tool really helps them. And I do have clients where they have everyone in the same location. And yet the whiteboard, the laminated page, or the huge paper as I call, really helps them visualize it in a different way.

I was just going to say coaching clients on the value of transparency has been huge in the fact that employees can clearly have a line of sight. You brought up the vision summary, Bill. I think the. That's such a fantastic tool to capture everything right there in front of you as far as where the company's headed long term as well as a little bit shorter term. But clearly the one page strategic plan is a master tool that I use with all my clients and making sure that everybody clearly has a copy of that and understands where the company is headed. And it's updated, of course, monthly or quarterly as needed. But both those tools are very key and helpful.

I think this notion, right, of having tools and systems that provide consistency and reliability. You worked at McDonald's. One of the favorite movies that I or clips I like to pull out is showing the kitchen development scene from the founder movie to my teams and having them think about organizing the workflows in their business, identifying the processes and honing them and refining them over time. And you see so much of that. We think of McDonald's as being this consistent thing, right? They've got the Big Mac, the Quarter Pounder, but they're forever experimenting with little things and tweaking little things within the organization. Verne shares one of our past speakers, past guest of the show as well Paul Aker FastCap CEO, who, who has become an expert in Lean practices, wrote a book, Two Second Lean and he talks about making lean a regular way of life. He talked most recently about creating Kanban systems. We think of this in manufacturing. Kanban are like request communications or reminders. Hey, I need something now and that's the triggering element. So it could be like a red card at the bottom of the bin that says okay, now we need more of these and we pass that up. Or a two bin system where when one empties then we refill it and pull the next one into but we're not doing something before it's needed. Do you have triggers and procedures and processes to doing that? Obviously a scoreboard helps you to move through that. But what do those workflows look like in your business? Right. And I think that becomes more and more important as you scale.

Absolutely. What I found in the last probably decade, it's more technology companies, software development companies are embracing these lean and candid scoreboards where they actually visualize and measure absolutely everything it happens in their workflows. They're quite transparent with their customers.

Yeah, absolutely. Having the consistent processes and systems to deliver on what you're promising in the marketplace as well. So going back to my experience at McDonald's, clearly you couldn't have speed and consistency of product and even the value factor of price being delivered without the supplier systems, without the operational systems that were applied throughout. And you had to continually, to your point, bill, refine them and get them better to be able to deliver on those brand promises. So it's very key in making sure that you have those in place and are continually looking at improvement and how you get better and better.

So I think even better than the 2 second lean book by Paul Akers are Paul Akers endless videos on stuff. And when you start to see how he evolves his desk over time or how he tweaks the break room or, or re engineers a trash can with a lip on it, that's annoying and that doesn't get closed or open properly or that kind of thing. Always looking for the friction or the tweak. That mindset of never being done with anything right. Always tweaking and improving on something is really cool to look at.

And one of the key behaviors that I found with my clients is how important to make this happen and to make it successful. How they drive decision making all the way down to every single person in the organization. So when the decisions are coming all from the top, it is difficult to have a Very lean and agile organization. I know Vern Harnage talks about agile scale ups and that actually scale ups is the empowerment of people making decisions as they, because they are closest to the customer and what are the decisions they need to make then to be more lean, to be more efficient, more agile, more nimble in the organization.

You know, I think there's an important distinction too that you're pointing to or that I'm hearing and that's that we're refining something. We're not wholesale. So this is not the same as changing everything all the time and being in different lines of business with different customer groups and different brand promises. This is about refining what we do, tweaking and trying different approaches in the same general direction. This is the path of scale up where we're focusing and refining and choosing to do something really well for more profit over time. So we're tweaking and trying new approaches, but we're not moving in different directions.

Well, and I think this gets back to establishing that culture as well of feeling that employees are empowered to be able to bring up ideas and bring up opportunities that they're seeing to refine those processes. And it's not just coming from the top down. So I think that's an important aspect as well.

Microsoft recently tried a four day work week in Japan, right. Giving people a three day weekend and productivity jumped. I wonder if it isn't like one of those situations where you just change something and that causes a jump in productivity and you change it back. It's the notion of changing that engages people, has them work with a little more urgency, but that it might decline over time. I guess we'll have to follow that. That was reported in CNN piece about Microsoft doing that. Shake Shack is doing something similar. I don't know a lot about what they're doing there, but they're looking at could they change the work cycle, the standard work week?

Yeah, I'm seeing that more and more of companies using that as a benefit and hearing positive feedback from their employees that this flexible work schedule or having more time, more days off together is actually helping productivity.

Yeah.

So in this article it's interesting how they go back to that saying, well, don't fall into the trap of the one hour thing. Can you have the same conversation in 30 minutes and if not, 40, 45, tighter, shorter. Absolutely. And how much? And this is a good measure, and I measure that myself, how much time during the day you spend checking emails, answering emails, what are the critical ones? What are the ones that you shouldn't be reading this or someone else should be reading this, which goes back to Lean and the metrics that we measured to be more efficient. What are the tweaks that we can do? Right. As you were saying, Bill, I put.

In some filters in my email to filter out all emails with subscribe unsubscribe language in them and from some of the key mailers. And now the vast majority of those bulk email things get filtered off into a bulk email box, which I never, ever read. But then every now and then I just don't. I'm like, it's there. Should I? But. But sometimes if I'm searching for something, those results will come up in a search and that's useful from an archival standpoint. So it, you know, the server spaces is approaching infinite these days, so I don't really worry about getting it out of my stores, but it just gets all shunted off to something that I just don't even bother with. And then there's a few that I will accept and pull out. Like, I really do need to read the coach updates. I need to read Vern's email regularly because that's core to my world. So that gets pulled to the front and foreground. But I don't need to hear, I don't know, the latest news from away travel luggage. Right.

It goes back to the prioritization. Right. That we do Google, they released years ago an important email feature that you can actually mark and track. What are the key emails that are actually absolutely must read today? And the ones that, yeah, I can filter them out and I encourage my clients to do the same thing. What are the key things that you need to read and the things that, hey, can you leave without reading these emails?

That just gets back to you mentioned prioritization, Andres. And you know, making sure that you set what your top five priorities are the day before and check those off. What's your top thing you got to get done the next day and make sure that you accomplish that and then go down the list but without setting those priorities and those tasks that need to get done. It's amazing how work we can go by and. And you're like, what happened? How did Friday get here so fast?

What did I actually accomplish before, not prior to? Well, that goes to this McKinsey article that I was just bringing up. They put out a new article, the mindsets and practices of excellent CEOs, studying a group of them and then distilling them down into what at first seems like an enormous list of 18 practices. But in reality, it's focused around six elements. So. So focus on beating the odds. Manage performance and health. Put dynamics ahead of mechanics. Help directors, help the business center on the long term. Why and do what only you can do. I think these are good principles then within them, these mindsets are a set of three or four practices that you can hone in on and drive. I think it's a great read and a great resource to check yourself as a diagnostic. Which of these am I doing? Which am I doing the weakest? Which one of them should I focus on for the next little bit? Right. You can't use and devour 18 practices every day, every way, but you could pick an area and work on that for a quarter or so until you've gotten better at it.

It's a really interesting article. It reflects the essence of what we coach as we know the Rockefeller habits and all the different practices that we coach in scaling up. Not to address them all at the same time, but if you tackle one or two a quarter, you will have a massive scale in two to three years, if not sooner. And it addresses the same essence where, hey, this is the checklist of all the habits that you can have to be an exceptional CEO. Just address one by one. Right. We go back to what we were discussing before. What's the number one, the weakest one that we have or the one that you really want to excel now, which is the prioritization and what's your plan to do that? What are the things and this is what I bring to my clients all the time. What are the things that if you want to address this one by one, the things that you need to start doing to really excel in these habits.

Yeah, I really like that article and I just recently brought it to a client and we sat down with the leadership team and talked about incorporating again, going back to the individual development plans that we're instilling for the quarter, picking one and again, can't do them all. But where's an opportunity you could focus on and making sure that's incorporated into your own development plan that you're putting down and you're accountable for delivering or at least improving on for the next quarter?

Yeah, really great. Which goes to our Growth Institute. So we've got a whole suite of online learning and video courses from an hour 90 minutes all the way up to longer form courses. Growth Institute is where is our online learning platform for the world of scaling up. And there's a Master of Business Dynamics course which is like a scaling up version of an MBA for growing company CEOs and leaders. And you can take that whole course. I think the cost for folks we'll put the link in is about $10,000. But a huge education could be had there for developing your key leaders and yourself for only ten grand. And then there's, we've got a master course in scaling up. We've got the exponential organizations from one of the guys that I worked with years ago, Salim Ismail, talking about creating exponentially scaling companies and then things on top, grading and so on. So we've got a whole range of masterclasses as well as shorter form courses that you can share as a team at the Growth Institute. This notion of never, we've been talking quite a bit about this never being finished working on yourself, your company. Right. Are all kind of critical to scaling up. Are you bringing those kinds of things into those courses or others into your teams?

Yeah, absolutely. With my clients, I provide more than 100 videos of the top thought leaders around the world and we create learning path for every single executive and we review one of those videos every quarter and we get the key takeaways. What are the things that we can get inspired by that video about that training and what are the things we can implement from that in the next three months?

Yeah, the Growth Institute is just such a fantastic resource and wealth of knowledge. To your point, Bill, about the top thought leaders and being able to have it all housed in one area. And leaders are readers. We've heard Vern say that many times and it's absolutely true of being able to tap into top thought leader books. Again, having the resources all housed in one stop shop. So I encourage all my clients to be a part of that and then also again, getting back to the summits, making sure that they're taking advantage of this community scale up summits as well.

As our teams grow, one of the key skills for our CEOs to develop is coaching skills. Right. And to train the managers to go from hands on directive styles to more coaching styles is kind of critical to growing the count of people on your team. The size of the team and the approach developing your people, obviously it's fine in the beginning to tell people exactly what to do every step of the way and then have them do that. But you don't really develop strengths and depth of your team if you're not becoming more of a coach. What are the things that you guys are doing to develop leaders as coaches and bring coaching into the organization?

So one of the things I've been working with clients is to stop removing the word manager from the organization and to really challenge that.

Just stop saying it.

Yeah, exactly. Just change it to a lead, you know, whatever project program manager, just swap it for lead and how you can lead your people. And by leading, I don't mean do exactly as you were doing before, just with a different name. But what are the specific outcomes that you're going to give your people because you're hiring. As we discussed and Kim highlighting, we hire a players and when you hire a players, you don't want to tell them what to do and how to do it, but instead you want to give them what are the outcomes that are expected from your role in the next three months. So one of the things that we. One of the tools that we bring from scaling up are the job scorecard. And the scorecard, we actually work with the leaders and the executive to say, what are the specific outcomes that you want in three to six months to achieve, therefore how you do it? It's a different discussion. You are the expert. We ask the employees. You guys are the expert. You tell us how we should do this. That's why we hired you.

Yeah. Developing a coaching environment versus managerial, I think is key to future success for any company in today's marketplace and mentorship programs is something that I've worked with clients on, really developing and identifying certain mentors, I.e. coaches. But it's a little foreign in some of my clients right now, thinking that they should be coaches as opposed to managers. So it's work in progress. But definitely I think that's where we need just being realistic that this is where the outcome is. This is where we want to be getting the leadership team to understand the benefits and then started putting the plan to get there. And so with several clients, that's where.

I'm at as I work with teams. And it arises as a chief concern. We're adding a lot of people, we're changing roles. I'll do role plays where they'll work with each other, coaching each other on some real issue, and I'll give them a framework for coaching conversation and then just have them experience it and have them coach each other and then notice and reflect what worked and didn't work in the coaching interaction. The role plays are useful for all kinds of things, but in particular for this one. It's one thing to read about it, it's another thing to actually do it and see what it's like. It's really hard not to give advice throughout the whole thing. I know I struggle with it, especially As a coach, I just want to go right to, well, let me tell you what to do. I've seen this before and eventually I get better if I delay. Right. Role playing it. So everybody pick an issue that you're really dealing with. And then in twos or threes, we work through the conversation. If you work in a three, one person coaches, the other receives the coaching and then somebody observes and then you can rotate around and there's value in being a direct participant recipient as well as watching it happen and you'll see and notice different things. I think really useful for that.

Yeah. And I love the idea of role playing just to get that experience of, okay, how is this versus just giving a directive, so being able to ask a lot more questions and not getting to the point where I'm just telling you what you need to do. And that comes back to the empowerment and how that feeds back into the culture. So. So, yeah, I think that's a win for sure.

So maybe the last of the topics that we'll talk about today, fast versus smart goals. We all know we've been talking about smart goals. Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, right. Time based. But has become repetitive and clunky. There's a new article, MIT Sloan Management by Adam Grant, it's a little bit older, but talking about fast goals. And Vern is playing with that more in our world. And I think the first aspect of that is really useful. Frequently discussed. We have teams that again and again create quarterly priorities right for the company and by department and down to the individual. And they all cascade and relate and then they do sometimes a mediocre job of looking at them in the quarter. We get together again the next quarter, review how things go, and the results are only loosely tied to those things because they forgot all about them. So if you bring frequently discussed, you're aligning them to daily, weekly, quarterly meeting cadence and you're looking back at those things regularly, you're way more likely to achieve some of those things than if you just say them. Once you write them down on a sheet of paper, they disappear into a conference report and you don't look at them again until the next time it comes up.

Yeah, one of the things challenging my clients all the time is to go into these weekly sessions that you were saying bill and bring these topics, use the whiteboard if you have it. And you don't have to think about this thing. You just follow the agenda and you make sure that you cover those topics and start from the most important one. And it's not about everything is green. Right. The heated conversations. It's what's really important. When the things are not happening the way you plan during the quarterly planning, how are you gonna go through that quarter, which is that 12 week race that we. 13 week race that we have throughout the quarter and you can adjust towards the outcomes that you want.

Yeah, it's amazing. Thirteen weeks can go by really fast.

Really quick. Really quick.

Where it's key to always be measuring every week. Where are you? And this gets back to that transparency piece as well of making sure that things are visible and people are aware of where you are weekly, monthly. So you're not at the end of the quarter and everyone's surprised.

Yeah. The A goes from being attainable or achievable to being ambitious. And I think that ambition is a nice kind of stretch. We don't want to look for playing it so safe. And you can get that a little bit with attainable and achievable. Of course, we don't want to go to absurd either. That's not. There's a. There's a. There's an a there that works. But. But in the fast model, we want to put a little ambition in there, a little bit of stretch in it. Maybe we're not going to achieve all of the goals 100%, but they're pushing us, stretching us a little bit. And that makes them interesting. Right. Specific, I think is always relevant. We saw that before in the smart world. Right. Measurable. But we want specificity. And adding a metric or clarity to it is as much as having a verb as it is having a measure. I find when we first start working with people, they'll write down things like a priority. This quarter is marketing. Okay. What does that mean? What are you actually going to do? Who's going to do it and for how much and how long. Like getting it more specific. Clear. Can anybody else see that? That's one that I think is always hard to do yourself unless you're deeply practicing this. But if you work with partners and a supervisor, if you work with teams, that'll get better and better, right?

Yep. I absolutely have my clients that they will sit in one on one when they're putting together their quarterly plans in their own individual priorities and challenge each other and then share that openly. So if there is something that you know, again is very vague or just is not on point that that discussion happens and they end up with a much better and stronger priority.

One of the things I almost always start people in pairs first. Yeah.

Andres I've seen some of my clients really struggling with the specificity. And what I found there is a direct correlation between the level of trust they have and the safety, how safe they feel in terms of putting some measures, putting some targets in that specificity. And the more they trust each other, the more they say, hey, it's okay, just put some numbers there so we can work throughout these 13 week race rather than just marketing, as you said. And it's by the time that they get to the weekly sessions and even on those daily huddles, they talk about their specific tactics and what they're going to do on that day towards those goals. That's where they get the traction that they want, they really, really want and they see the changes happen.

Yeah, I think it makes a big difference. And the last one that they say in fast is different but transparent. Vern talks about the need for a scoreboard to have there, but I think he's really talking about bringing visibility to it. I didn't get that far through the article. How are you guys using that?

Yeah, this gets back to even the frequently discussed of having that trans transparency and having, you know, clearly it's on a scoreboard, it's on your one page plan, it's on your quarterly plans. And having that transparency through the teams to be able to see that line of sight, I think is key to be able to get to that ultimate outcome.

Yeah. One of the challenges that I bring to my clients is don't just keep these in the executive team. Drive all the way down to your team, every single person to be transparent in what they're doing and what they're not doing. And it's not about blame, it's about supporting each other and collaborating. In terms of what are the critical things that we have to do and has to be visible. Why not? If there's anything to adjust and change, we can react faster, we can be more agile, more nimble, the more transparent we are.

I think that challenging and bringing in a new approach like this is helpful in having us consider it and improve it, revolve it as we're talking about just not leaving things for granted forever but continually tweaking and evolving them over time. I think there's value in bringing up this. I'll probably at the next, at my next series of quarterly plannings, write fast on on a board and then have people challenge and work through them using new and see if we can raise it up a little bit just by changing the acronym that they think about rather than just doing the Same old, same old. Right. And some will probably love aspects of this more than others. Right?

No. I think people are so used to hearing smart and they just kind of tune out.

Audio wallpaper. It's just back.

Yeah. And I really like it. And I know we didn't talk about ambitious too much, but I love that piece of it. It is that stretch, that additional challenge. It's playing to win. Kind of gets everybody in that mode of oh, wow, how can we really go after something as opposed to, you know, I just put it on a piece of paper because it's a smart goal. I like all four of those together and I'm going to start using it.

One of the elements that I coach my clients into these ambitious is as you said, Bill, hey, we might not get the hundred percent but have different metrics. If you start with what's the main goal, what's the main target you have? And then have a stretch, which is the super that you can find the opsp. And having these different targets going from super green, green, amber to red actually gives you a bit more space. It also, it gives you that ambitious. What are you willing to do beyond what you have to do to get to that super green? Can you get more people engaged? That's right. That usually works really well.

Well, I think we've talked everybody to death, Andres. Hopefully we've talked them to life and fired them up. But I think we're. I think we're about done for a show. Andres, where can people find out more about you and your work? What's your.

They can follow me on my website, www.andres silverberg.com.

We'Ll put that in the show notes so they get the spelling right. Silver.

Absolutely. Yeah.

It's a silver mountain like Lithuanian or Paul.

And I'm releasing a few more videos tip videos 2 minute max on YouTube as well to help my clients and help anyone who's struggling with certain topics from scaling up.

And Kim for you.

Yeah, Kim Baer. Augustavo. So that's quite a mouthful. My professional name was Kim Baer, but when you get married for the second time, I had to somehow incorporate that because my business is Agostavo International. You can find me at agostavointernational.com and.

Email is kimogastavo international.com augustavo international.com and andresilberg.com we'll put both of those in the show notes as well. Of course, you can find us and all our other shows@scalingcoach.com and if I can't help you I don't have something there for you to download for free and all that. I'm happy to point you to someone in your neck of the woods who can help you. So scalingcoach.com, we've done, I don't know, about 190 of these episodes now and we bring a new one every week and we'll keep expanding that over time, whether they be conversation with fellow coaches in a panel format, our growth leaders like the several that we've mentioned, this show from Paul Akers to Denise Leon and so on that we bring as well as some of our clients and the case studies. We're always trying to bring you something to help you scale up, to give you new ways of thinking and looking about the growth of your business and the development of yourself as a leader in the business. So thanks to everyone and a special thanks to the originators of all things Scaling up, the original growth guru, Verne Harnish. This show is produced by Lucy Summers and the audio production is done at Podfly Productions. The audio is edited by Albert Burge. The show notes are compiled by Ein Codena and proofread by Tim McGowan. If you got any value out of the show, please share it. Please like it subscribe all of that so you get them regularly. We really appreciate if you give us a review over on itunes that's very helpful to us us and subscribe it so you get every week. If you want to drop us a note you have a question or we can help connect you to something, send an email toinfo scaling coach.com thanks again for listening everyone. Keep scaling up. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software. Powered by Align, it's the official software for Scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Align. To try it now go to aligntoday.combillg One more time. Aligntoday.combillg that's aligntoday.combillg Check it out and try it now.