Robert Glazer — Elevate Your Team

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 talent. Talk to Doxatant and you won't be disappointed. Go to doxatant.com Bill G Again, that's doxatant.com BillG One more time. Docsatalent.com Bill G Check it out. Today. We are talking about elevating your team. We talk always about elevating your company scaling up, right? But how do we get the team to come along for the ride? That's the subject of our conversation today. Hi there, I'm Bill Gallagher and I'm really excited to bring to you a terrific new program that we've developed for coaching in growth. This program is based on more than 18 years of work coaching over 10,000 people around the world. And I'm really proud to share with you that our clients on average within two years more than double their companies in that time that we know of. They've raised over $2 billion. They've acquired more than 50 other companies and 10 of them have exited, including one sale, over a billion dollars and multiple IPOs. This is not a program for everyone though. You only want to apply to this program if you're between 2 and $20 million in sales, if you have at least 10 people on your team, and if you're really hungry to grow 10x or even 100x and beyond. And you've really got to be willing to do the work and to share with the other people in the community. In this program, we'll give you live coaching. We'll give you live accountability groups with an accountability coach to keep you on track to what you're planning to do and keep you from getting stuck. You'll have expert speakers every we'll train you in all the proven scaling up tools and the tools from the Gallup Strengths Finder assessment. And we'll lead your annual strategy and quarterly planning sessions. We'll do all of this together in a curated community of ambitious people just like you. And this whole program will combine these things in a way that has more power than ever before, but at a fraction of the Cost of typical scaling up coaching. So if you think it's maybe right for you, apply now to secure your spot. And if you're accepted in the program, I'll guarantee your satisfaction. So our show comes to you every week and we've got hundreds and hundreds of shows now on everything to do with your people. Strategy, execution, cash and the leadership required to get you there. Today really is the intersection of people and leadership with a dose of execution. How do we get that going and particular focus on like remote companies, remote workers. We're talking today with Rob Glazer. So you find all our shows and more@scalycoach.com all that back catalog of stuff or wherever you're getting this right now. Apple, Spotify, etc. Wherever you love your podcast, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. Watching or whatever, get them there@scalingcoach.com all right, Robert Glaser, welcome to the show.

Bill, thanks for having me back.

Yeah, so let me just say obviously he's been on the show before. We first met years ago through the old EO organization and he's been a speaker around, he's been a guest. We talked about accelerating, elevating. But he's founder and chairman of a company called Acceleration Partners. It's a global marketing agency that has won all kinds of awards for its world class culture and it's a fully remote team of approaching 300 people. He's a Wall Street Journal USA Today best selling author on a range of books around performance and growth and partnership, marketing and remote work. And this Elevate youe Team is what we're talking about. Today is the latest book. It's a roadmap for creating an organization that helps people develop both personally and professionally without burning out. And that's a huge topic for today. So I'm delighted to have on this show talk about it.

Imagine that.

Investing in your people. Why would I want to do that?

Yeah, look, had I written this book and it came out in 2021, I'm not sure anyone would have listened. But we're at a really interesting time now, right? The sort of money has been pulled from the great growth machine. The sort of grow at all costs has come to an end. And at the same time you've got people kind of exhausted from two to three years of a pandemic. So right now I actually see like a lot of companies playing defense and eventually we'll switch back to offense. But I kind of think the game's got to be different. I mean, we saw Elon Musk Say, hey, working here is going to be super intense and you're on board or you're out. You know, the playbook that he's used and a quarter of the company quit the next day. So I'm not sure the, you know, super pump formula of growth is going to work going forward. So I think Nieder's leaders need a different playbook.

You know, I think some people hear that and they're like, yes, I believe in this company and your leadership and.

That kind of thing.

And other people hear I'm going to get rung, I'm going to put through the wringer, I'm going to get totally worn out and then you're going to fire me anyway. So let me take that exit package now.

Look, A, people are tired. B, I just don't think that's going to, it's going to work anymore because I mean, just look the investors, you know, we've gone from top line growth is everything to, you know, now it's about profitability and sustainability. And like I said, we're gonna, we're gonna switch from this. Everyone's playing, if they're playing offense, they're playing careful offense, they're playing defense to. Companies have to grow, right? But when they get back to growth, I just think growth is going to look a little, little different.

So sustainable growth, right, is what we're always focused on, healthy, sustainable growth we've seen now. I mean there's still net job increases and a demand for people across most sectors where I live and with many of the companies I work with, there's layoffs going on, but that's not across the country and everywhere around the world right now. And there are some of those companies grew too fast. You know, people got hired on in, in droves at Facebook and now they're laying people off. And, and some of the people said, you know, I had trouble finding work. Like I, I was employed but I didn't have anything to do.

So you mean at face? Yeah. Afterwards. Yeah, yeah. I mean look, no one there was interesting chart yesterday. You know, Apple did not have the same sort of hiring and has not had any layoffs as of yet. I think we see these headlines, 5,000, 10,000 but not the hundred thousand, 200,000 hired. By the way, I remember losing people to Those companies in 2001 or other venture backed companies. I'm like, look, I don't, I don't know how this company, not Facebook is paying you 30% more when they don't make any money. We have this Backwards things where the company's losing money, we're paying more than the companies that were profitable. I just never thought that that would last.

Yeah, it never does. I mean, it has a time. It runs up on speculation that somebody's going to build something that's leverageable. So let's tell a little bit of your story around this book. In particular, maybe a little bit about the company and then the insight that you had in 2017 that began the work that led to this.

Yeah, so we are a affiliate and partner marketing agency. Kind of a big fish in a small pond. We're a real specialist helping large global companies build partner marketing programs. So instead of buying an impression or a click, they can partner with someone. That partner can have access to their catalog, they can promote it, we can track it using software partners, and they pay on a performance basis when they get the outcome we want. I tend to think it's a pretty good thing to pay for marketing after you get your sales. That's sort of what's attractive about it, what makes it leverageable. But yeah, we've been growing 20 to 30% for over a decade before we had any investment partners. And it was kind of, we were in that scaling up world and it was kind of a wild ride. And in 2017, talked about in the book my sort of genius idiot epiphany. And that was our growth was kind of breaking a lot of people and some people did well and some people didn't. And I was trying to understand why this was and what we could do about it. I think again, we talk about this sort of steroid growth era. Think about the analogy of would you want to send a rocket to the moon if it didn't have enough oxygen to sustain the life of the astronauts? Can you imagine NASA celebrating if the rocket landed on the moon and everyone was dead? But that's sort of what I saw around in the high growth world. And I was like, I don't want to grow a company where I have to change the people every couple months or year. I want to win with these people. So how do we do that? And I had just developed the sort of capacity building framework for my book Elevate. And when I kind of looked over, I was like, huh, maybe this is the solution. And I think we were doing some of it, but I didn't have the framework, I didn't have the nomenclature. And then we kind of really doubled down on this. How do we build people up holistically irrespective of let's not make Them better at their job today or try, you know, better on the assembly line, although we don't have one. Like, I think there was a set of holistic things that when people got better, improved, the business would get the benefit of that, they would get the benefit of that outside of work and they could become our, our next generation of leaders. And 80% of our team has, you know, really is either kind of promoted to their highest level from, from within. So we, we've been able to do that more successfully and not have to, you know, as I say, kind of change the tires every time we, we did a loop around the lab.

Yeah, I think that's a good thing to underscore. Right. Are you just churning through people and always looking for more? And we hear this a lot with the companies that, that go through our programs and our coaching. Like, oh, I need to find some, I need leaders who are ready for this. I don't have the right people for this. And they're not talking about having any technical skill or background or whatever. They're talking about not displaying or possessing any leadership, not leveling up to join the company on the journey. And I think a lot of times there's an underlying assumption that people have only got so much and that just as a coach, that's deeply disturbing.

Well, people understand physical capacity when I talk about these four elements, right? They understand that Bill, if you can't lift a 10 pound weight, you know, 10 times that, if you practice that for two a day and three a day and four a day, and after, after two months, you probably lift it with ease. And so we understand that that's improvable. When we look upon these other elements, the spiritual, the emotional, the physical, we tend to assume people have them or they don't. Um, I, I've always thought it was weird that someone would think that, you know, Bill's, you know, has terrible habits. He sleeps four hours a night. He, he doesn't know how to balance his checkbook. And he would show up to work with a ton of energy and be great at balancing budgets and financial things like, that's a, that's very unlikely. You're, you're the same person now. There's not even a show up to work now. Now it's, you know, turn on your computer and boom, you're at work. So these, these, these behaviors and habits and best practices outside of work and inside of work and the things that make a leader are all one in the same. I don't, I don't know how you could Untangle them.

Well, you know, let's pick apart something there because I think there's a thing that we commonly say, well, people are kind of how they are and you know, the tiger doesn't change its stripes and like that kind of thing.

Like yes, you get.

And, but I, but I think we collapse in that capacity, aptitude, skill level, a whole bunch of things in getting with the sort of basic nature of people. Like, I have certain values, I have a way of looking at the world. I have things I care about, I have what drives me and motivates. That doesn't change a whole lot, but my capacity to do certain things changes dramatically over time. If I work at it, right? Like if I do something correct.

If you want to do it and you work on it and look, this is, you know, you probably know the answer to this question, not trick question. Who, who typically makes the worst managers? I can tell you in my experience what I've seen. Who, who are some of the worst managers?

I don't know. It's, it's all sounds like a trick question.

First time managers.

Oh, the work, Right.

Yeah. People have never done it before, right? And then people are like, oh, they're a terrible manager. Well, they've never done it before. They've never had a difficult conversation. They've never had a performance thing. They' they haven't done any of this stuff before. Why, why would we assume that they would be good at it?

Well, I remember distinctly the first little manager job I had. I was working on a big live event and I was running one of the teams and they're like, you've got the stuff. I was 20 years old, right? Like, you know, maybe 21. And, and so they, I had a team of like seven people or something like that. And at first I was unconsciously just trying to, to keep my team unburdened. Like I was shielding my team from work and they were really unhappy and I could tell something was going on. And I'm like, what's up? And they're like, we don't have anything to do. We're like bored. We're here to be part of this thing, to help make it happen. And we need things to do. And so then I started looking for things and they seemed to get happier the more I loaded them up. So I just started loading up our team and organizing the work and moving people into different things and thinking. And I had that first early epiphany like, oh, people want to be really used up. People want to be put to work. People want to feel like they did something, like they matter, like they added value. It was so like at 21, you know, it was like life altering insight.

So, yeah, a lot of, I mean, new managers really struggle with delegation. Again, perfect example of capacity. Let's pretend you're a new manager and you have to have your first, this isn't going to work conversation with someone. Right. If you haven't had that conversation before, if no one's practiced you, trained with you, otherwise you're likely to lose four nights of sleep, think about it all day long, not get anything else done. Someone who knows how to do this, who had it, you know they are, it is not going to ruin their entire week. So that's an example of like the operating system is improved. Your, your knowledge on how to do something, your ability to do it makes it easier, right. Much less of a cognitive.

You're like, oh, this isn't working. Call them in. Hey, this isn't working. What are we going to do about this? Like, yeah, I didn't have any angst at all about that. You know, we could.

You didn't. You were like, we're going to have an honest conversation. I, I mean, I, I understandably, people, before they have the first one of those, lose three nights of sleep and they don't do anything else for the couple days before. Maybe even the first one, running it through their heads.

What, Maybe even the first five or six. Sometimes I think it takes people a little while.

Yeah. And I'm not saying like, those are fun or, you know, you want to be really good at having difficult conversations. But it's like anything else. It is a skill. You can improve your operating system, you can improve your capacity and you can change the outcome for both you and the other person.

Let's talk about then. So you went to work on developing the people as you grew the company and you went into four areas. You have some great stories in the book about this. I thought we should actually start talking about burnout first. Physical overwhelm. And we mentioned at the top of the show, oh, post Covid, right. It's 2023. Covid started in 2019. Really 2020 for all of us in practical terms. And a lot of people are like, Covid's over. But I think that there's still, like, we're still in the hangover of that kind of thing.

I was about to use the same word. I was going to say the party's over, but the hangover seems still pretty real.

We go around everywhere, but there's a lingering effects of things. I was at a meeting recently and there were a couple people who were visibly audibly sick at the meeting. And I thought, God, that's so weird. Here we are all at a unmasked kind of a meeting, in person, regular thing. And we've got people who think it's cool to show up without like a mask or something on, or show up sick. Like, why didn't you call in? And like, that struck me as a very post Covid thought, like, before I'd have just had, yeah, I want to stay away from that.

But now I'm like, yeah, and it's moved from the line employee up to the leadership level. I just think if any CEO went to its company right now and said, we're going to go 300% this year and we're going to. I actually not sure that people would be excited about that. Like, I, I think five years ago that would have been super exciting. And now they're like, oh, dude, it's been so hard. Like, I don't want to grow 300%.

Yeah, well, in response to trauma, an event like that, right? We rally, right in the response to Covid. We stay home, we work weird, we do things, we bang on pots and pans, we start nonprofits. Like, you're. Well, let's find a way to, to come together. But then you need to like, recover if you go run a race.

Look, I couldn't agree with that more. 2021 was much harder for me than 2020. I think 2020 was pure adrenaline. It was mission oriented. It was like, we need to save the company, we need to protect people. Otherwise, once we got through that, and then you started dealing with all the, you know, complaining and what's the term I can't think of now, great resignation and supply chain things and where, you know, supply constrictions, like, that's where I just started to be like, I don't, I don't. I can't. You know, I'm not sure I have it in me to, to, to do this again. The adrenaline's worn off and this is hard. And I think, you know, so the supply constraints then went into demand constraints in 2022. And so everyone just from all the. Look, even if you were making refrigerators for freezers for Pfizer in 2021, you were then working double shifts and couldn't get parts. And it was the same strain as if you were trying to make up for, you know, losing 30 or 40% of your business. It's generally Been average, things have been, have been harder. And so I think we need to recognize that. I think that's part of the reason why people are a little bit in a defensive mode. But again you have to get back to growth. I mean things need to grow, they need to change, they need to evolve. And I think we will get back to it sometime in the next year or two.

So in the book you talked about Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer. Tell us about that and what's that story and the lesson of that?

Yeah, it's kind of an anti case study that I don't think it's talked about as much. So Marissa meyer was the CEO of Yahoo from 2012 to 2017. Again to be fair, challenging time for the business kind of business in decline. She came into that business kind of after this meteoric rise at Google known as super brilliant and a workaholic. Right. You could find articles about her bragging about her 100 hour weeks, talking about her 130 hour week. I would tell you to take out your paper and do the math on 130 hour week. You can't make it work in, in five. I can give you that thing. And, and you know she caused some consternation around having turned out she was pregnant and had her first child. I think a son returned to work two weeks later, built a nursery next to her office and you know, told employees that, you know, that that was what she needed to do, not what they needed to do. Which I haven't found works as a leader or a parent in my experience. So but, but here's the thing. Yahoo did a ton of stuff. I think Mercen Meyer is one of these people who generally only needs to sleep four hours a night. The problem is studies show the rest of us who continually sleep less than five hours a night are the equivalent cognitively impairment of being legally drunk. So Yahoo, you know, hustled. They did 52 acquisitions. Almost all of them were worthless. The company morale collapsed like working harder and on everything 100 miles an hour actually didn't get any results. So I think there's a lot of lessons there and I'm sure as you work with teams on the number of priorities you have and the number of things you're doing. I also think this is a big part of remote work and what needs to change. We got to stop valuing inputs and hard work. We got to start valuing outputs on the dashboard and smart work and encourage someone to do and if you can go figure out how to do something in one hour with ChatGPT that would have taken you 20. I want to reward that. Not just burning the midnight oil for 20 hours.

I wish I could say that everybody that I've coached and worked with has been an outstanding success and doubled and tripled and 10x and dominated the world. But people do fail. Things go wrong. And I think I hear sort of two things. One is no prioritization.

Right.

When we think about execution and strategy, it's about focusing on a few things and doing them really well. And we definitely didn't see that. And I do see that with some of our companies and CEOs that struggle, they try to do a lot of everything and they try to work 20 hours a day and sleep for it. And even if they are physically capable of it, the rest of the team isn't. And it sets weird expectations, has all kinds of ripples across. And maybe, I mean, I've seen it affect people's families. It doesn't actually foster leadership either. If you're trying to be Superman or Superwoman, it's not good for everyone else, even if you're capable of. And I've worked with a few who, who famously thought they could do two to four hours of sleep a night on an ongoing basis.

Yeah, most people can't. There are some people that can. But as you said, the problem is most of the people can't. And that's what they see modeled. Look, this is where what leaders do is more important than when leaders say, and if you are going and people are really struggling. All the data says with work from home and hybrid with boundaries like we've lost the last remaining boundary of kind of the sanctity of home. And I think people need rest and relaxation and personal hobbies and things that want to come back to work the next day in grain. So if I, if I'm the CEO and I send an out of office on my vacation that says, hey everyone, I'm going on vacation next week, but you can text me, email, call me like I'm available if there's a problem like that sends a very clear message of what vacation looks like. I don't have it with me. But I shared when I was talking about this, a message that a CEO, a different CEO of a venture fund posted to his company. He said, look, I'm going on vacation next week. This is really important time with my family. If you need me in emergency, here's my wife's cell phone number and you can text her and she'll get in touch with me or email me at interrupt My vacation at the company's domain.

Nice, nice.

Yeah, those two things send a totally different message. Likewise. I for last 5 years I like to. I used to my kids were younger clear through a bunch of emails on Saturday morning I realized the CEO of the company though, you know, if it wasn't the management team and they couldn't discern the priority and look, some things are required after hours communication when you're building a company. But they just thought I wanted a response and so I learned to. I started using delayed delivery for any email I really send out of normal time. It goes out at 8am or 9am the next business day and people really appreciate that. The other thing is I could be sleeping on a Monday morning and I look like a hero. My email's popping with things at 8am in the morning.

I think that's, that's a really cool clear message. And I hadn't heard that hack before but I think about how often we hear that same thing. Oh, I'm going on vacation. I really want to do this. I try to tell people, listen, I'm traveling or I'm going on vacation or I have whatever and if you really need me, like send me a text if it's an emergency. But I really, I don't want to.

Do coaching or text says emergency. Right, you're trying to let me know.

And I will interrupt that to give you some time. But I need some time off and I think people kind of appreciate that. And I think also about, I used to do those other vacations. Look, I'm going away and I thought of being like, okay, I'm the servant, I'm the leader. I've got to be available for them. I'm doing it. But it sets that example and that tone of other people who want to do that. And then I think about when we set up a different kind of trip in 2010 and I spent nine months telling people I'm going away for a month and I don't want to hear, I want a daily report and I do not want to get on the phone and solve problems.

So.

And all year long I just kept asking people, how are you going to handle that when I'm gone? What are you going to do if I'm not here?

And sure, when you came back, you didn't take half that stuff back, right?

You never came back to the old way. Yeah, yeah, never.

We pay people, we have paid people part of their wellness reimbursement to go on a vacation and not communicate. They can actually will pay for A part of their vacation. Look, some of that is motivated by wanting to give them a break, but some of that is selfish. A lot of people, you know why they don't have a vacation, they design everything to go through them. When people go on maternity leave, I think it's really interesting. Like, that's when they're more faced with, if I don't figure out other ways to do this, someone is going to be calling me with a newborn, and I don't want that. And they design different systems and they come back and they don't go back to those things. I think maternity leaves are really interesting case study and delegation and paternity.

Right. For the dads who need to take some. I just came back last night from our son's house where my wife and daughter are still, and our son has had a baby. I'm now a grandpa.

Congratulations.

And he also did a major release of their software a few days before the baby arrived. And now he's really checked out. And he spent a lot of time setting up people to do almost nothing so he could really focus on his baby girl.

Yeah. And look, it takes. It takes intention to do that and it takes planning. And like I said, I've seen a lot of people who are the. They are the problem, right. They can't go on vacation because of how they have designed everything to go through them. And so you kind of have to save them from themselves a little bit there. And that's. Look, that's where incentives matter. You know, if you incentivize people to the right behavior, they tend to follow that.

So let's. Let's move on to the next bit. The other point of your book. So we've been talking about physical, right. The hours in the day and the energy you have on tap and your capacity. Capacity and all that structurally physical stuff. But the other one's emotional. And we encounter people all the time who say some variation of, I'm not very emotional, I'm not an emotional person. Or they'll say, wow, they're really emotional. And they end up thinking of themselves on different ends of that spectrum. But it's all sort of nonsense. Everyone has emotions. And you talk in the book about one last talk, which I think is really beautiful. Talk about that.

Yeah. So we, you know, look, I think big part of emotional capacity in an organization is psychological safety. And I think psychological safety to me is sort of taking the trust that you and I could establish one to one and having that be institutional when you walk into a team or an Organization and that, that requires vulnerability, that requires feedback, that requires sort of being able to speak truth to power on the vulnerability side. We had had people at our company off site give these TED talks for years. And a lot of them were personal and interesting. And I heard about this program called One Last Talk with a gentleman named Philip McKernan. Philip had coached people all around the world, in prisons or otherwise, to give this one last talk. This is kind of your exit speech before you exit stage, right. And he doesn't let you get away with the three tips to a great life, stuff like that. So I was like, maybe we should do this at our off site. And I put it out there. I wasn't sure anyone would do it. We had eight people sign up for four sl. We kind of got it down to four Philip coach them. Those people got up on stage and told their co workers things that they had never shared publicly in a work setting or maybe otherwise, or maybe to their closest friends or family about themselves, their lives, meaningful things, you know, that that had happened to them. And you know, not only was there kind of not a dry eye in the room when they were done, but the, the, the sharing that happened organically at our event over the next couple of days where people just started kind of taking off the mask and people they worked with for five years and having a real conversation was just palatable. So, you know, just seeing those people be willing to be vulnerable set an incredibly powerful kind of standard for everyone else. And then also seeing that that was totally safe to do that within, within the workplace and they wouldn't be judged and in fact they'd be celebrated for that.

It's a really powerful thing. And I think you're right. It's, it's definitely about emotional safety. It's does start with the leader, our leading value and in our company, and is definitely affected who's stuck around in the company and who hasn't is courageous authenticity. And I had someone work for me who got in a thing and confess something odd in an interview. And I'm like, that actually demonstrates the value right there that you could come in an interview setting and say that is a really good sign for having that up. Right. And it's not a normal thing to just share yourself and how you feel and something that isn't. And there's some time where it's not appropriate. Right? Like, I don't want to hear any more about your divorce today. I've been hearing about that.

Yeah, this is, this is, this is a great point. This is A really tricky balance. I know some people get upset when I say some variation of this, but I would just say it's the truth, which is in the right environment. Right. Look, emotion related to the context is important. If you're talking about doing a layoff and someone who's been affected by a layoff and is in the room gets really emotional, that makes total sense. Right. And it's relevant. It's related to what you're going on. Some ways, if you're, you know, you have someone in your family pass away or suddenly, that's obviously going to impact you. And that should be a rare event, right? And that sort of could come in and you should be able to be like, you know what? I'm. I'm not. I'm not here today. Like this is on my mind or otherwise. The flip side of that is, again, I think teams can, can, can adapt to that. And with empathy, it can't be all the time, right? You got to be able to fire a wall if you've been going through a typical. A tough thing or a divorce or whatever. It can't. It can't be every day or else people will manage around you. They will say, I don't know which bill I'm going to get today. And I've had manager after manager tell me that they lose trust, that I'm not sure which version of this person I'm going to get today. And, you know, and so I think people need to be conscious of that. It is a thing that you should use. I believe you should be emotional in the workplace. But like anything, if you overdo it, you will wear people out. Emotion is right in the context. Right? Like I said, you're talking about a layoff. You're talking about a hard decision. You're talking about a new product. Like, everyone should get very emotional in the context of. Of what that is, because that's what's contained within the four walls. We obviously bring things from the outside world. I think if we bring them on occasion, that's one thing. If we bring them every day, just look, if people. The reality is, imagine the opposite. We all have a partner who, when we come home, was like, I need you to leave work at work today so we can have a dinner that's not about work. Right. We've seen what it looks like on the other side when you're constantly bringing work into home.

Yeah, let's. Well, I think one more thing maybe to say about that is that balance, right? Like being open, real authentic, having safety, having a Range accepting people's humanity is not a substitute for people having therapy or other means of emotional self care.

Right.

You may need some other support services.

And don't try to do that at work. I mean that there were some stuff that came out over the days of our thing where people should not have jumped in, they should have said let me refer you to hr. Let's see if we can get a resource to help you with that. I you know there's some studies around surveys around how Gen Z wants therapy in the workplace. Like this is a terrible idea I wrote like I think the workplace needs to be cognizant of mental health issues. But I do not think you want. This is not like billions where you go downstairs to the therapist who by the way is paid by your employer. Nor do you want amateur mental health people in the world.

Right. That range of it. But that, but at the same time if we suppress emotion, we suppress emotion universally. So the passion that I have for the product, for the customer, for the problems that we solve also gets limited if I remove my ability to share some pain and struggle some fear things like that that might be.

And I talk about this in the book Bill but like, like one, one last talk is like a level 303 college course. I would not recommend most people jump into that. A one on one is just introducing basic sharing in your meetings. Like you start a meeting, what's a high and low from the week. You just learn something about someone. You know what's we did once in the Quarterly Review. What is something you really screwed up last quarter. Like just getting people to have these sort of discussions so that they can see that it's safe, it's okay to talk about. You know I always joke the highlight when we do our management highlights, you know it's always the highlight from the last week is always my in laws are here and the highlight from the next week is my in laws have left, you know, from a lot of people. So you know it just gives you a sense of, of where people are, what they're thinking about. I, I think that's a really easy thing that leaders can start doing. Tomorrow is again before you jump right into a transactional conversation, even in a one on one, any one on one one that I have, I'd be like Bill, hey how's it going? And, and you know someone said to me well this week it was a long weekend and there have some problems going on with a, with a sort of post divorce situation and we spent half the time talking about that because, you know, they had a frustrating weekend and then I'll check in with them on them next week. And rather than, you know, jumping right into business.

Yeah, I think knowing that holistically, it's also an access to some performance and probably a good segue into our next story. But if you know what people want and what they care about and what they're dealing with, if you have a good read on people, then you have also some access to connecting the job or jobs that are possible to be done in the company and what they need and want and how they're feeling like, oh, you want to go take an international trip or buy a house or start a family or whatever. But I think if you did this, that like, that drives that in some way, you know, that those are connected kinds of things and there's a lot of access there.

And sometimes that means helping someone with a new job or a different job outside the organization because it's really clear that you're never going to get lucky. I don't like what they're doing. Yeah. So like that's where actually having that relationship works with a more difficult conversation where if you didn't have the relationship, you'd probably avoid that.

So emotion, we don't often think about that. The other one that you mention in the book is the spiritual dimension. And spiritual is a loaded word for a lot of people. And I think a lot of people would say, what the f does it have to do with work? So what do you mean by that? And tell us the story of Andrew.

Yeah, so spiritual capacity is kind of understanding who you are, what you want most, and the standards you want to live by for a lot of us that are personal core values. And I think if you're trying to develop leaders at your organization or Level 5 leaders, as Jim Collins would say, it has to be those leaders are built from a self awareness and authentic foundation. And a lot of people don't have that clarity. They're not clear on their values. They're like I did. I built my Leadership 101 things around things that I really liked that some leaders did and things that I really hated that other leaders did, but like they weren't authentically me. And so I had to sort of strip that down. So we actually spend time helping people figure out their personal core values, their strengths, the things that they do well. Out of these come a lot of stories connecting kind of, you know, early childhood events, informative events and even trauma to someone's enduring leadership style. And so the story of Andrew was, as we did this exercise, Andrew realized that he had a core value of self awareness. And when he thought about it, Andrew had a parent that was very unself aware. The person would walk into a room too loud, say the wrong thing, maybe one drink too many. It was actually a source of embarrassment. And Andrew realized that actually when anyone on the team, his team showed any sort of hint of a lack of self awareness, he was all over them and they had no idea what they did wrong. And so he was able to actually figure out that value. Other values, go to the team and say, look, here are the really important things to me and here's why they're important. Kind of, here's how you can manage. Up to me as a leader, I've heard multiple stories too similar of trust. People who have strong trust issues tend to come from a violation of trust as a core value. And if someone on their team is five minutes late to a meeting, if they can't be found at 4 o' clock in a remote work environment, if they miss a deadline, it strikes real deep fears of like this is someone who can't be trusted. And when we dig into it, we found these people are in this penalty box that they're never getting out of that no one that the key is thrown out that the leader couldn't actually articulate to them. Similarly, those leaders went back and they're like, look, trust is really important to me and I trust you and I give it, but I keep a small circle and it's easily lost. And here are the ways that it can be lost. I'm a better way person, I'm a better way core value. If you come five minutes late to the meeting and you figured out a better way to do it, I'm all good. It doesn't create the same versus if you come on time to the meeting. To me and you're like, look, we just can't make the situation better. We have to just do it the way we did it. That to me I'm throwing the key and you know, and throw, and locking you in and throwing the key out. Yeah. So if you are, if you are leading authentically. I spoke to a company recently and they gave me their standards for their leaders in their company and I said look, these are their standards for leadership. But they're not saying to you there's one way to be a leader and I think the only way to be a really level five leader is to be very self aware and authentic about how you're going to lead from the things that, that you value. Right. And Bill, and you're founding your company and your company's values are going to be very tied to your personal value.

Very close to my personal values. Yeah. So that's a really useful thing. What do you care about? What matters to you? How do you view yourself? What do you know? Like all of that kind of what kind of people do you do well with? What kind of people do you not do well? What situations do you do well with? What are you proud of in your life? What are you ashamed or embarrassed about? What are you afraid of? All of those are great access points. So when you say spiritual, you're talking about kind of your core and essence.

Yeah. This is not a religious connotation. It is who you are foundationally, probably who you have already been. And by the way, if you're a 30, 40, 50 year old manager, a lot of that stuff is not going to change. Right. It's baked in at that point. I think you're going to. If I hire someone or when I hired people, I would say here's why you will love working for me, here's why you'll hate working for me. And they're kind of one in the same. Right. I got to a point where I'm like, this is who I am, this is my playbook, this is how I'm going to be. And just sharing that with people openly and honestly.

Yeah. So here's a thing that I have heard and noticed a lot. Many of our listeners, viewers will have spirituality and religion and be up person of faith. Right. So if you are that, and I've had people say I'm doing God's work on this earth or whatever, great, that's fine. What aspect or nature or quality of God's work are you focused on? So what does that. If you get past the surface layer of name your deity and your belief in them. But what about them? What about their quality? What work? What do you do in. In their name? And that is actually revealing to, I think what you're speaking about here. The personal values and purpose.

Yeah. And look, if the person's wearing that on their sleeve, you know, and they're, they're about doing this, then then other people can make a decision of whether that works for them or doesn't work for them or they are aligned to those, those values. Right. You said if it's about gratitude and giving back and empowering others, you know, that could be great. If it's about some other thing, it could maybe not work for that person I talk a lot about in CORE Values because it helped a lot of people with this work, and I found it just transformative, the sort of big three. So your chosen company or vocation, your community and your partner, you have to be in values alignment in those situations or they won't work. My wife and I are not the same person. We don't have all the same activities and stuff. But when it comes to the big things, we are aligned around them. If we weren't, it'd be really hard. Right. If you live in a community that doesn't reflect the things that you value, it's really hard like that. It just seems like that's just kind of like two magnets that are opposite all day long.

Well, I think that's why sometimes we're perplexed when we see a couple on different ends of the political spectrum or something like that. We're like, really, you guys?

How's that?

Because there is some usefulness in tension and difference. But. But there's also got to be a match on CORE with your business partners, coworkers, your romantic partner, like, those kinds of things.

And let me say, I'll preface, because I know a lot of people get all the cultural fit and the homogeneity. Like, that's a nod. I'm a cultural fit. We're not talking about carbon copies of people, but when you're going on a mission, whether that's a living, a partnership, like, you have to have some shared values for that to work. I might want, you know, I might be. If I'm deeply religious, I might have atheist friends, but I probably don't want them in my. In my religious group on Saturday morning. Right. That is not where I want them to come in and question everything that we're doing. So again, we have different things in our lives. I think there has to be some sense of shared value. It doesn't mean people are the same. It doesn't mean they agree on everything. But around the big things, they have similar outlook.

Yes, it's interesting that. So, you know, my wife, and we've been. We're going on 29 years marriage, and we've been through many periods, you know, and often have been like, I don't think we're going to make it over 29 years, and yet we've pulled through. And I think that while we have differences, like, she really loves spontaneity, serendipity, and I like to plan things out and imagine them and then create a roadmap, like. But around, like, discovery and growth and travel and experience. Like we have way more.

And what you want for your children.

Right, Exactly. We're way more aligned than not on a lot of those things. So we have, we come at it from slightly different places. She's way more extroverted and social and I'm way more introverted and you know, but. But what we care about in the world are far more aligned.

Right? Yeah, yeah, you need some alignment there. And so that's both the individual with a company and probably an individual with a leader, you know too, if you're conflicting on a couple values. For example, I just give an example of this. Like we are a digital marketing agency. We are super fast moving. We have a core value of own it. We want people who like independence, want to make decisions, client needs decisions quickly. Someone who is super consensus building and slow and thoughtful like, like they may be great. That's not the right fit for our type of work and our style of work. I mean a nuclear power plant, like perfect, other things perfect. But it actually just doesn't fit with our business and our style of work. You know, I don't think these things are good or bad. I'm headed out on college tours again with child number two. You know, there are people that love their university that have fundamentally different value proposition. You know, large athletic city urban school or small liberal arts school. They're just different set of values for what people are looking for. And someone who loves one school and the other, they probably hate those other schools. Right. It's just so you need some alignment there.

You know, I worked with a guy years ago, Bob, at a big company and I think about Bob when we developed our core values and I'm like, you know, I really like Bob. Bob's a good human. Bob's caring, he's hard working, he's intelligent, he's all that. But Bob is not creative or critical thinking, like analysis or that kind of thing. He doesn't question much anything. But if you want somebody to grow something or to like just do something repeatedly and scale it, that kind of thing, that's Bob. And you know, I'd love to have, I'd love to count Bob as a friend in my life, but I wouldn't want him in this company. And so our value is think and ask why.

Yeah, right.

And I have Rodan's thinker as the, as the like icon for it. And you know, that's the like questioning and interrogating, inspecting, reexamining is sort of core to coaching and training. So.

Yeah, yeah, And Right. There's a job where someone wants reliability and dependability and predictability. And Bob's your guy.

Yeah. Bob ran the playbook again and again and again with team after team. He brought in new teams, he trained them in the playbook. He delivered the playbook. Boom, boom, boom, you know.

Right. And in some companies that are large, there's a whole bunch of different roles that need different things. And the smaller company where it's sort of right. There just may not be that type of role available.

Yeah. Well. And ultimately in that company, I was a little too entrepreneurial, needed to move on.

Yeah.

So before we talk about the virtual company cultures and that kind of thing which we teased at the opening, let me just give a couple shout outs. First off, to our producer, Wanda Mitchell, who gets our show ready, our guests and things out the door, and to the folks at Podfly Productions who produce our show. Technically, every week at our show notes that kind of thing. And to my friend and mentor, Verne Harnisch, the author and creator of the Scaling Up Framework, the Rockefeller Habits that came with it. And let me remind folks, if we can help you with anything, a good email for us is info scalingcoach.com you can find all our back episodes and resources and things like that@scalingcoach.com or wherever you're getting this, like it, subscribe it, share it with somebody else. If you turn on your notifications, you'll get them every week. We do at least a show every week, week after week, for years now. So there's just boatloads of good stuff there. And, and all that stuff's for free. So find all that more. So let's go to. I think what I think people are intensely interested. How do I create a rich culture with a remote team and bring all these things, elevating a team and creating a rich culture. Talk to us about what you've done and what you've discerned there.

Yeah. This goes a little bit back to my last book, how to Thrive in the Virtual Workplace. But some people might be surprised by this answer. But I think that it's the same route. So if you took 2020 and you showed me an organization, you probably coached most of these and you said, here's an organization with weak leadership, poor communication, no goals, no core values, kind of trust and communicate issues and we're going to send them all to work home, like with no notice and no training, probably not going to go very well. Give me organizational B. Super clear core values, you know, clear Northstar. Great Leaders, good autonomy, good trust, good communication. You send them all to work from home remotely with no training, it's probably going to go a little bit better. So I think the foundations are very similar. I think remote work has just exposed a lot of these cultural cracks. So for me, the definition of a great culture is three things and two modifiers. And this borrows from the scale up world. So I think you'll appreciate it. So first it's a vision. Every great company has a vision and then they have goals and targets that are the manifestation of the vision. So we want to cure blindness, great. But we want to have the number one drug on the market by 2025. Right. There's gotta be some real thing on that. Then they have in between those two, they have core values and it's in between. Because those companies get from their vision to their goals and targets by going through their values, not around it. This is the Johnson and Johnson famous Tylenol thing. It's very easy to throw out your values when it's inconvenient. You're not missing your target. That is not the hallmark of a good culture. Then there's two modifiers, I think, that sit above and below. So consistency and clarity. So people want, employees want consistent vision, consistent values, consistent goals. And they want clarity like clear vision, clear goals, and clear targets and values. So those to me are the hallmarks of a great organization. I think remote work has just again drained the water out a little bit and we see who's wearing our bathing suit in terms of kind of exposing that. And it's just made people have to go back a little more towards do we have a clear vision that gets people excited? Do we have values that tell people how they should operate without out of our sight? Because great values determine, you know, behavior. Do we have goals and targets that we hold people accountable? So it's not about inputs, but it's about, it's about outcomes. Like those whenever, when I'm, when I'm coaching or advising companies on how they can do remote better, it actually comes back to those foundational things like, hey, you're just managing butts in seat time. You don't have a dashboard with the outcomes that and red lights and green lights. And by the way, you don't have to ask people what they're doing all day if you have the right outcomes. And they're reporting into those outcomes and they're being met. So I actually find the foundations pretty similar. There's a lot of tactics. Look, we just had a discussion today Two people on our team were saying they need to have dinner every couple weeks because every time they get together it's so great. And then they get frustrated over some tactical thing. Even with all that remote work. I mean, we try to have our team together, people seeing each other. We adopted a, you can't work from anywhere. We pick specific hubs and geographical areas so that people would have connection. Our leadership team could travel, they could meet the whole organization. I think that if teams don't ever meet other people in person, I think it will be a lot easier to walk away from those teams. You will have a lot less sort of emotionally invested in those relationships.

That's a really useful thing. We got really good at doing zoom meetings and planning sessions and coaching and things like that. But we also kept doing a lot of in person things in concert with them. And some companies are just like all zoom all the time and never meeting. And that's really hard to create any connection with people working from any, not any place where they could ever connect face to face.

Yeah, I mean, we just did one of our two day off sites and you know, it's intense and there's a lot, you know, there's breaking bread and having those discussions and I think that's really important. Look, there are a lot of things I think that work better remotely. I mean, I could not wait. Like the virtual off sites were the worst things that we ever did. Like, it just doesn't. There's a guy who wrote a book on virtual working the virtual. Like they're horrible. Like I never want to do that again.

So we use a couple things for some of them, but where we're not.

Talking about two day, like full two day. Trying to replace a full two day.

I think what we're trying to do now is like half days and, and only do a couple of them a year and then the others are in person with the teams that are doing that. I do have one team that I've been working with for a couple years where they're together, but I've never met them in person. And we did quite a bit for a couple years with the Pandemic. But I think you got to get a little bit of FaceTime and Connect.

Yeah. And look, we will alternate board meetings sometime and all that stuff. But again, we change the format and we don't try to take the, the online thing and port it to the offline thing and port it to the online world. But Yeah, I think FaceTime is really important. I think getting teams together that work Together is really important. One of the big challenges for us in client service is we used to fly to a city and meet with all the clients and the team would go, well, the clients are all distributed. So we're just, we have clients we haven't met face to face. We haven't sit down and had broken bread and had dinner. And again, that just becomes more of a transactional thing than a, than a real relationship.

So how many city hubs do you have?

We have about eight kind of major, major ones globally and that's that then that sort of has a concentration of 20 plus people.

And then you like people to be able to gather. They need to be within an hour or something of that or.

Yeah, they have to be about sort of an hour. That area Also, you know, a lot of people say you can work from anywhere. I mean this would be way too much of a distraction. But you will end up breaking tons of state local labor laws. You will be mired in all sorts of things, letting people work anywhere. If you're a small business and you're not using like a peo or something like that, it can create an incredible headache. And I will tell you that most people are breaking the law around this stuff and they find out about it once they go to raise money or sell their company. And it's like the number one thing that comes up in due diligence. So ignorance is not bliss around this topic.

It can bite you later. Well, I think that's our, My son's company all works remotely and we've got a number of others that like that. But they come together for some meetings and that's a useful thing. Even if you're largely remote. Find some occasions to come together and connect. And the biggest thing for me I think is we create. There's more creativity and more serendipity and things that you didn't think you were going to do. Plus the personal bonding is. I mean, you know, I can share with you a funny object around my house or that kind of thing and we can do a little bit of that. But it's, it's not really the same as taking a walk outside on a break at an off site. That kind of thing.

Yeah, when you have to have one of those conversations or look, the reason why off sites are designed to be at sort of retreat and you sit at 10 o' clock at night and you're having a glass of wine and you're having a real discussion with someone. That's the stuff that it's really hard to replace virtually.

It seems funny that in the end we're really talking about that. The great way to have a remote company is to also come together every time.

Well, again, it just depends on the context. I think it's funny some of the stiff arm stuff by the investment bankers. Look, I'd be the first one to tell you if you're doing a $10 million pitch like you should be in the office. If it's the day before the deal closing and you're crunching a spreadsheet for 12 hours, why do you need to come into the office? Context matters. I think with a lot of these.

Things where it is it. So for more info, where should we send people? What link do you want to pimp?

Yeah, I mean everything, podcast, books, everything are all@robert glaser.com glaz.com Quick link to the new book Elevate your team is eyt book.com which is currently flashing on your screen.

Yeah, there it is. And it'll be in the show notes as well. And then Robert glaser.com is the hub for all things Robert Glaser. I want to thank you for coming on and talking with us again. I hope to see you somewhere in person again before.

Yes, thank you Bill.

Talk to you later. Bye everyone. We'll talk to you again next time. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software. Powered by alignment, 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.com Bill G One more time. Aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.