Two Business Leaders More Important that Musk & Jobs

Look, everybody knows about Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, but there are two leaders that are even more important that you need to know about, and they're critical. The lesson from them is critical to your success of your business. Scaling your business. Hey, everybody. I'm Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of this Scaling Up Business podcast. We bring our show to you every week with something new that we've learned from a client or a guru, a speaker, an authority, a CEO, sharing stories about successfully growing and scaling their companies. So what does it take to grow and scale your company? What's missing? That's everything that comes on the show, like it. Subscribe, turn on your notifications wherever you get this. So you could also go to scalingcoach.com and@scalingcoach.com we've got monthly workshops and other kinds of programs where you can sort of dive deeper. But this show comes to you every week, and there's more than 600 of these shows now. So there's a huge back catalog to help you get your strategy dialed in to. To upgrade your team, to attract and retain people, to dial in your execution, to optimize the cash and ultimately get the value up in the company. All right, listen back to my story. You know, I've got a client, lots of clients that do this well, and lots of clients that struggle with this lesson. But we've all studied, we've heard about, we've admired the entrepreneurial genius of people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, right? And there's one person that had a huge role in Steve Jobs success, right? Steve Jobs. Extraordinary accomplishments in growing both the category personal computing and the company Apple to what it is today. An unbelievable genius. An interesting figure, right? There's biographies about him, movies. There's a lot written and said and studied about who he was as a leader. Maybe not dad of the year, maybe not the easiest person to be around, but I've had people on our show talking about working with him in the past. We've had Guy Kawasaki, we've had Tony Lillios. We've had others who worked on the Apple team talking about the extraordinary experience and privilege of working with such a demanding character like Steve Jobs. But here's the thing. People like us strive to be like a Steve Jobs. Visionary, strategic, entrepreneurial, to grow and create something, to make a dent in the universe. Except Steve Job never would have accomplished what he would have accomplished without a guy like Tim Cook. Tim Cook is boring. Tim Cook isn't particularly visionary. Tim Cook has a lot of very quirky boring kinds of things. But people like Steve grow their companies in partnership with guys like Tim Cook. If Steve hadn't passed away, you might even know who Tim Cook was and is. Tim Cook leads the company today. He's done remarkably well growing the company on from what it is. And Tim Cook is nothing without Steve Jobs having created something for him to grow and expand. So there's a certain kind of a leader we know and focus on and we think about. And many of this audience, people like you and I are a lot more like the core characteristics of a guy like Steve Jobs than we are like Tim Cook. But you and I need people like Tim Cook to grow our companies. Elon Musk, same thing. Elon Musk has acquired, grown, developed a whole range of companies. And one of the most remarkable ones out there is SpaceX, which is transforming human beings relationship with space. By creating reusable rockets, by transforming the way we relate to space development, space launching, it's transforming it. Now. Elon Musk has become an extraordinarily complicated and controversial human being. But his entrepreneurial genius is undeniable. And yet who gets things done day in and day out, who builds all of the things that Elon pushes on and challenges, is Gwynne Shotwell. And most people have no idea, have never heard of, have never thought about Gwynne Shotwell. It's not a secret who she is. She's just not the same sort of controversial character person who's gonna make all the noise and get all the attention like Elon Musk is. She is the steady hand that keeps things together, that keeps the team calmed down, that gets the rockets launched day in and day out. So Elon Musk and Steve Jobs are both driving figures with a great deal of ego. And something that wants to be expressed in the world, doesn't always make them the nicest people to be around. The easiest, most uncontroversial characters. But in both cases they rely on someone like Tim Cook or Gwynne Shotwell. So true. With one of my clients that comes to mind right now, actually many of them, but one that comes to mind, really, really strong character, able to see changes in trends in the world and respond to them rapidly and redeploy hundreds and even up to a thousand employees to redirect company resources onto things and, you know, has grown his company to a bajillion dollars. So strong, dominant, big ego, big smart, has some vision, very strategic. But there's another guy at the company that actually has kept things running for decades. And this Guy is like Gwynne Shotwell and Tim Cook. He's a little bit boring. He's not exciting. He needs time to think about things. So big CEO has an idea, sees an opportunity in the market, boom, is ready to take action, to take command and to get started on things. And the other guy's like, wait a minute, I'm deliberative. I need to think about things, I need to then build consensus, I need to rally the troops, I need to make something happen here. And there's always a tension between these kinds of people. The best CEOs of the best run companies have this mix. So you've got to have somebody to conduct the orchestra. You've got to have somebody to orchestrate, to conduct the whole thing, to keep everybody in particular, not just the systems. The systems are the easy part. It's the human beings that require coordination. So coordinating all of the people and conducting them and keeping them, like keeping the music of your business sweet, is a critical thing. So you need somebody like that. You need somebody who's an operator, who's not quite so much an ego, who's willing to be supportive, who's willing to do the same things on a regular basis, who has probably better people skills than you and I do. That's the kind of person we're talking about here. So the a couple things that are useful to think about and remember with this kind of a person, right? Where are they going to come from? How do you develop them? How do you work with them? Like, well, first let's think about who they are. So they are consistent people. They're not necessarily charismatic. They value consistency over everything else. They may take pride in being a little bit boring or what occurs for you, like boring you and I. They may have fewer hobbies, they may be more focused, they may say less outlandish kinds of things. They are consistent and reliable, quote unquote boring. And they're probably very careful not to over promise. They want to think more. Whereas a lot of the entrepreneurial types that we see in the world, and you and I are probably just like them. We hear a thing, we're like, yes, we'll do that, we'll make that happen. Or I can see this thing, I'm going to do it without any idea of how we're going to get it done. We're just willing to say yes and go. And we have pretty good confidence that there's some way that we could do that. Or we're willing to just fake it, lie about it. Right? People have said Forever fake it till you make it. For some of you that's a mantra, right? So they're careful not to over promise. And the key thing though is that having a person like you and me, entrepreneurial, passionate, strategic, visionary, whatever it is for you, you see the future and a way to go through it. You need people like this to keep the team together, to do the consistent day to day kinds of things. So that's the kind of person you're looking for. They are in many ways opposite you. They're not unintelligent, they are not unable to see the future, they are not unable to step up or whatever, all these kinds of things. They just do it from a different place. So they want to think about it, they want to plan it, they want to coordinate the team. They're willing for things to be a little bit routine. They don't get as bored easily and need to go start a new hobby or blow something up. They, they have that kind of quality to them. So there could be a temptation to just go hire that person from outside. Hire a headhunter firm and find your CEO, your director of operations, your second in command, your number two, whatever you want to call them. And that's a dangerous, dangerous move. It does work sometimes, but it is really challenging to get that right. So you're very much. Your second choice is bringing in an outside person. It's much better to bring in an inside person. I'll talk to you about how to bring in an outside person in just a minute. But first of all, if we can find and develop someone inside the company to step up to elevate, it's much better, much easier. It starts with appreciating people and their qualities that you probably don't appreciate today. We use the Gallup strengths tools to understand ourselves and the people around us and to see how we're complementary. I think it's a great place to start. Start to notice the people on your team who maybe are a little bit boring by your assessment or just different in some way and not. And you don't maybe understand them as well. Look for those kinds of people that get things done consistently and who work with the team. So the team leadership kinds of skills and the consistency, those are probably the biggest areas to look for in your team and then have a conversation with them about developing themselves, stepping up to more like see if could appreciate and develop people that are already around you. You don't have to give them a lofty title, but you can give them increases in pay equity stakes, start to increase their titles over time and have them be really responsible. Have them be your second in command and take if you can do that, that's the best thing to do. If you have to go outside for the company, the best thing to do is to hire carefully, not just for the specific quality qualities that you need, the skills and the particular industry expertise, but hire a great deal for company fit and then see if you can bring them in on a project interim sub basis and move them up. Don't go right for headhunter and try to go right to hire COO at every size company I've seen that run into trouble. Either somebody comes in and they want to remake things in their view of what they say has worked and they want unmake things that you've built on so they will make changes without regard to the character, the history, the DNA, the values of the company in line with something that they've seen before. They'll be too big a contrast to what you've done in the past. So there's a lot of ways that that could go wrong. Bring in a big person right at the top level and saying okay, I'm giving everything and then just dropping all accountability on them, just abdicating all your duties and saying it's them now call Tom and let's see what happens. Right. So that doesn't work if you have to go outside, bring somebody in maybe on either project or a little bit lower level and then graduate them up in a couple steps to this second in command kind of role. So you can bring them in on a particular project, overhaul these operations or implement a process or deploy an ERP system or something like that. If that goes well. Right. Then they could step into more and you could bring them in with that candid conversation between you, maybe not yet public to the whole company that you're hoping that they'll step into the fullest role that you imagine, but you could start that conversation. So that's the key thing is if I can bring them in either interim or a special project and then move them up within it, that can make the whole thing and then make sure that you are really hiring for the the as much the company fit and values as anything else. All right, so there's your idea. This kind of role is very critical to your success in scaling the company and in getting. It's not about cloning you, it's about finding somebody to compliment you in that second in command, head of operations, operations manager, director. You could go COO president, but just be careful with title inflation and then if you can develop them within, even better. If you get if there's something you appreciate, find and develop within, great. If you have to bring them in from outside, bring them in maybe a little bit lower special status and then start to move them into the role that you need. And imagine that's kind of the critical things. I know it's worked for me, for my clients. When we get it right, I hope it makes a difference. It works for you as well. Love to hear how it's going, what you've done, what you haven't done. Like share some feedback with us, Send us an email comment here. Like whatever works for you. Love to hear what's working. See if we can help you in any way. Have you want more info on all these kinds of things? Attend one of our monthly workshops. That's a great place to get started. ScalingCoach.com is where you go and find out about the monthly workshop. Sign up, spend a little bit. We'll talk about scaling up overall and then of course like subscribe. Turn on your notifications here. Go through all the 600 plus back catalog of shows. Hope that's helpful for you. Big shout out and thanks to my friend and mentor Verne Harnish and to the folks at Store on who get our show prepared produced every week. We'll talk to you again next time. Until then, keep scaling.

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