Brutally Honest Business Leadership Advice in 27 Mins

If Michael Bloomberg can sit on the floor with all of his employees, maybe we can as well. If Sam Walton, who built Walmart, never had a private office, maybe you can get rid of yours as well and you'll be blown away by what happens in this space. I want to give you the core meetings that all of our organizations need to actually grow properly. So if you think about where you're going, which is your vision, and then you have the people who are going to help us create that, we need to actually give them the meeting rhythms to help support them. And in that job, ongoing. So meetings are critical for that point. The first meeting that we all need in growing our company is our annual and quarterly retreats. Your annual retreat should start three months prior to the start of your calendar year. So in September, you should take your team off site, your leadership team for one to two days. And in that one to two day period, there's a little bit of skill development, a little bit of alignment, revisiting the vivid vision, talking about your SWOT analysis and then setting your core goals and objectives for the next year, your revenue, profit, customer, employee and strategic initiatives for the next year, and really getting everybody back in alignment. And then every quarter, having each business area go off site for a day, getting some skill development, revisiting the vivid vision, taking a look at where they're going for the next quarter, and making sure that each business area knows the core objectives that they have to support the annual goals. So I like actually getting each business area to commit in writing to the top three or top five things that they're going to do each quarter. So marketing would tell you the top three or five things marketing will get done and they'd rank them in order of impact, and then finance would tell you the five things they're going to get done and in order of impact. And each business area can then see what everybody's working on. So before you actually get too far down the path, everyone knows what interrelationships there's going to be in the projects. And I like using something like Asana or Basecamp to actually control all the project management inside the organization. So regardless of whether people are remote or internal, they can all see what everyone's working on and how they're all related. And then I also get each employee to write down the top five things that they're going to do that quarter and make sure that their five things are aligned with what the business area they work for is doing and where the company is going. So that same process, that same Meeting rhythm. Every single month is critical. I want to put time in your calendars for strategy. Think about Rockefeller 100 years ago had a pulse, a regular meeting pulse where every week he and his leadership team would talk about stuff at least a year out on the calendar. I figured Rockefeller was a billionaire 100 years ago. Maybe we should take some of that. So that's a pulse that I put in place for all of my organizations. Think about strategy for a second. What if interest rates rise really quickly? Have we had that discussion? I had dinner with a guy who sits on the Federal Reserve Bank a couple years ago, and he said that we're going to have recession for about four more years and then the interest rates are going to go to three to four times the current prime rate. Well, we don't really think we're in a recession right now. But if you go and actually ask the average consumer that's out there, they're struggling, they're not spending. The only reason companies have really been profitable is because we've been cutting back. But we're kind of coming into this bit of an uncomfortable period. But what if interest rates do go up by three times? What if they do go to 10, 11%? What would that do to your business? Or what would happen if, you know, the Asian continued to buy up into our marketplace? Or what would happen if baby boomers all of a sudden were out of a job? Or at the TED conference about a month ago, when I was at TED again for the week, we talked about what's happening with the autonomous vehicles that are coming down the path. Think about what's happening now with vehicles that are going to drive themselves around. There won't be any auto body shops anymore because there won't be any car accidents. There won't be anyone selling into the auto body shops because they won't have any car accidents. There won't be any car insurance industry or car insurance companies or people working for those companies. There won't be any bus drivers or taxi drivers or limo drivers or Uber drivers. They'll all be driven by these vehicles that drive themselves. So all those people will be out of jobs. There won't be any delivery vans or delivery vehicle drivers. Those things will all drive themselves. So what happens to all those families that. Those are the jobs that these people have. Where do we absorb those? That's a huge sucking downdraft on our economy that's coming in about five to seven years. Are you having those discussions with your employees to find out how do you actually exist in a business where 20% of the workforce won't have those kinds of jobs. That's strategy. So think about the what ifs in terms of the negatives and the positives and having a regular pulse in your schedule to discuss those. I like having what I call a weekly action review. Our war meeting. Our war meeting is a weekly meeting where the leadership team meets for 90 minutes Monday from 11 o' clock until 12:30. And for the first 30 minutes, we do our five minute updates. Each person, what's going well, what's not going well, what are we working on for the next week and where are we stuck? Very similar to what you do in a Vistage group. At the next 30 minutes, we review our dashboards, we look at our KPIs and our metrics and we share those numbers with each other. And then we talk about how to actually move some of those numbers forward, what specifically we're going to do to move some of those key indicators forward. And then the last 30 minutes, we take an area someone is stuck and we do a bit of a presentation on it and we help unstick them as a group. That regular pulse, again, very similar to what we do in our Vistage groups. So do you have that kind of a weekly leadership team meeting? And then I like having each employee commit in writing to the top three or top five things they're going to get done over the next week. And when they write down what they're going to get done, it has to be measurable. There has to be a dollar sign, a number sign or a percentage sign in each of those five things. And when you then recap on your prior week, you say if you hit or missed and you can't say that, you kind of got it done. I was coaching the CEO the other day and asked how they were doing. He's like, well, we kind of got it done. I'm like, so you missed? He goes, no, we're almost there. I'm like, you missed. It's like the Vancouver Canucks almost won the Stanley Cup. Again, like never, right? You either get over the high jump bar or you don't. But you don't kind of hit a goal you missed, or you hit and force that kind of rigor and that kind of confronting the brutal facts into your organization. So every week everybody commits in writing to the top three or top five things are going to get done. I have a weekly coaching meeting in place. I learned this at College Pro painters where the CEO coached the VPs, who coached the general managers, who coached the franchisees our org chart was upside down. The CEO is at the bottom supporting the VPs, supporting the but our coaching meeting is a balance of three things. Our one on one coaching meeting is a balance of direction, development and support. The direction is making sure that what people are working on is the right stuff. Don't assume that people are picking the right things to work on on a daily or weekly basis. And as the CEO, you only have three resources, people, time and money. So you want to apply those resources in the right way. So as your team working on the right things. The skill development is the second part. So direction development is the skill development and using situational leadership. It's knowing whether on specific projects they need mentoring or help or assistance or problem solving and giving them some of that skill development and your time in that area to support them. And then the last area is support. So direction, development and support. And the support is emotional support in their lives and in their personal lives and in their business lives. It's actually really caring about them as humans and stopping to take pause to find out how they are and to make sure that they're okay. When we really truly care about our employees, that's when they go through brick walls for us. And then every day, having all of your core employees write down their top three or top five things they're going to get done today. Basically at the end of the day, make a list of the top five things you have to do tomorrow and put in the order of impact and then start working on item one. It's a huge powerful tool that Obama credits is one of the two things that he did to actually win the first election. I'm not a big Obama fan, but he credits it Mary Kay Ash credits how she grew. Mary Kay Cosmetics was using the same system and the same system was covered in Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. It was originally the top six, but it was the story of Charles Schwab and Ivy Lee. And then every day is having a pulse or a huddle meeting, a daily huddle, a seven minute all company stand up meeting. And you have it at about 11 o' clock or 2 o', clock, which are the first points in the day when the energy level drops is 11 o'. Clock. The second point is at about 2 o'. Clock. And your daily huddle is when the whole company gets together and you share good news. You go through any of the missing systems, you talk about the key numbers and then one department will give their departmental updates. And as your company scales and gets too big for the whole company to come in. You can start running it by business units or business areas. But when Dell does it and Goldman cell does it, UPS does it, 1-800-got junk has run daily huddle every day for 14 years. We started when we had 23 employees at the head office. They now have about 260 at the head office. But that daily pulse is like running a football huddle. So everyone goes out and knows what they're working on. And that pulse drives the energy and the communication in the group. So those are the core meetings that we need inside of our organization and you can do those remotely. I've talked to CEOs from around the world that actually have no full time employees in an office. I talked to a guy who was doing 960 million in revenue. All of his employees were remote. Start thinking about what could you do and how could you grow your organization if you didn't have full time employees showing up every day? And if we obsessed more about taking care of them and aligning them and communicating with them instead of are they showing up 9 to 5? So let's talk about culture again. Take a look at your environment inside your organization. So think about the space that we're actually letting our employees come into on a daily basis. Start taking a look at what a great culture might look like. You want to start thinking about the best companies to work for. And I'm not saying necessarily put lava lamps out there, but maybe go for a tour of some of the Vistage members who rank as the best companies to work for in Colorado. Maybe go out and go and tour Zappos and see what it looks like. We had 30 to 35 business people coming to Vancouver every Friday for tours at 1-800-got junk for four and a half years while I was the chief operating officer. People from all over the world coming in for tours because they read so much about our culture. Simon read about me in Fortune magazine in 2003 before anyone had ever heard of Simon. And he flew from New York to find out what our culture was like, to see if our WHY was truly as strong as he'd heard it was. This is way before he wrote the book Start with why. He literally flew from New York to Vancouver to see 1-800-got- junk. That's how you actually know what a culture is, is by getting out of your office and going and absorbing it and seeing it and really understanding what's out there. I had a CEO one time years ago put their hand up and he said, you know, there's no good employees in this city to hire anymore. It's just unemployment's too low, there's no good employees. I said, that's garbage. You're probably an average company and great employees aren't going to come and work for an average company. So you have to decide, are you going to be Google or are you going to be Microsoft? And if you're going to be Google, you have to go out and find out what Google's really look like. I worked in the Google Chelsea office with one of my clients about six months ago running their strategic planning meeting. We didn't want to leave. Like you literally get sucked into this culture. So go to the different offices around and see what it looks like. We had people coming in and saying they didn't understand why we were so stupid to have 60,000 square feet for our office and spread it over three floors of a class A building and give our call center the views of the ocean. They're like, that should be where your leadership team is like, no. When I grew up, the thing I didn't like, we had a really good family. But what I didn't like was that when my dad came home at 5:30, he was like, out of my chair. So I'd go sit in my mom's chair. Nope, out of my chair. I'm like, how did it end up that my dad got the best chair? That's not a family, that's like a dictatorship. If you really think everyone is nice, then treat everybody the same. Give everybody the same views, give everybody the same chair, give everybody glass walls. But stop this crap from the 1970s where we have the big corner offices and the big wood desk and the impotent ties and we say that we're all important, we're not. And that's why companies are changing and they're, they're, they're changing around this stuff. Think about that. There's a company called Canvas Pop where you can actually take photos or have your employees take photos, run a photo contest and then take the photos and upload them to Canvas Pop and you print them out and they'll literally ship the artwork to you at your office, stretched and hung and ready to hang up on the wall. Amazing way to actually build culture is take photos that your employees have taken and make that your company artwork instead of what grandma hung up. Or you can use some of your company logos, company artwork, and use those stretched and hung on canvas as well. It's not very expensive. This is a company in Toronto that has what they call A can you imagine Wall. They took their vivid vision and then they asked their employees, what can you see in the Future? So the CEO's job is to write the vivid vision, but the rest of the employees and suppliers and customers ask them what they can see in the future and put those things up on the wall to really further inspire. You can do it in your lunchroom, you can do it in the lobbies. But this is the way that you inspire is by having this as your boardroom wall. This is your meeting rooms wall. So that when you're sitting in these meetings, you're dreaming about the future, but you're executing on today instead of looking at beige. This is a client who I coached about seven years ago. He was doing 3 million in revenue and he wanted to build an amazing company and sell for $50 million. He was doing three at the time. So I started coaching John about his company culture. He took his workstations and brought them down to 42 inches high. He would bake cookies in the morning and bring them into work and hand them out to employees. He did cool stuff with the carpeting. He set his workstations on weird angles so that it didn't feel like cube farms and open up discussion with people. We helped execute 16 different acquisitions that he did over the period of five years. Took the company to 32 million, wanted to sell for 50 and ended up selling for 107 million. I'd introduced him to him and M and a firm he sold for 107 million, 100 million cash and a note for seven. And he was able to walk away on day one. And they bought his company because the culture was so strong and the alignment was so strong and the systems were so strong. But they didn't walk around with, you know, the old signs from the 70s of success. Their success was how much the employees cared about them and how much the employees were aligned. I've seen a lot of great companies go and furnish their places with Ikea furniture. It works just fine. You don't have to go out and spend thousands and thousands of dollars on high end workstations. Most employees will never complain about their workstation, but they'll complain about their chairs. So years ago I was in Boulder visiting an old employee of mine, Kimball. So Kimbal Musk is from Boulder. Kimball worked for me in 1993 back at college Pro Painters. Kimbal is Elon's brother. He was showing me some of his stuff and I just finished coming from a tour of Tesla. All I could see was this Herman Miller Aeron chairs everywhere. And I said, well, it looks like you're spending all your money. And he goes, what do you mean? And I go, well, there's Herman Miller Aeron chairs. And he goes, yeah, but have you seen the desks? So I went back out and walked around the company and every desk was a white fold up table from Costco. But every employee had a MacBook. Every employee had a wireless headset. Every employee had a Herman Miller Aeron chair. Because no one complains about their desk, they complain about the chair. And his average workstation cost was about a third of what most of us spend. People don't come to work because they care about work. They come to work because they have to make money to do the stuff they care about. So you want to give them that environment. But I've seen people in companies where they won't allow an employee to put a photo up. You have to let the employees create their own space. This is Red Bull's head office. They have a slide going from the second floor down to the first. They have a ping pong table. They've decided to kind of make this part of their culture. But don't forget that culture is not about the slide. It's not about the free lunch. When we read these articles, we're missing the point. The great companies to work for, it's not because of their perks. It starts first with the vision that they have of where they're going and their core values that are so strong that they're willing people to fire people who break them. You think about Google's mission that they're on right now is to democratize the world's information. One of their core values is don't be evil. When they were hiring Eric Schmidt to come in as the CEO, they were talking to him about culture and they're saying, like, what do you do for fun? It's about 12 years ago. He's like, well, I build these robots and I take them out into the desert. We roam around. They're like, you what? You build robots and take them out into the desert? But what you don't know is that the Larry Page and Sergey Brin were actually intrigued by that. And they said, whereabouts in the desert do you take these robots? And he goes, that's a festival. You wouldn't know the name of it. And they said, would it happen to be Burning Man? And he goes, that's exactly where I take them to as Burning Man. This was back in 2000, before any of us had really heard. I'VE been to Burning man five times. But. But they literally hired Eric Schmidt. Yes, he had the skills. They wouldn't hire anyone who didn't have the skills, but they hired him because he culturally, was vibrating like they were vibrating. His core values were so similar to theirs. Larry and Sergey have gone to Burning Man 15 times. When you understand what that is and what it's about and what people are there for, you get it. You're part of that tribe. That's where culture starts, is that vision that's shared and the culture that's shared and the core values that are shared. And then it's getting rid of the. That work for you. It's getting rid of those cancers. Remember, if you went to a doctor and the doctor said you had a tumor, what would you do? You would blast the hell out of it right away. Like, you would get it removed. You get Right. So why do we not do that with those employees that are in there? Don't misunderstand the articles about culture. It's not about the free lunch that comes way later. It's vision and core values and people and then the environment to work in. And then you give them the perks. Otherwise, you're just going to have an office filled with jerks who get free lunch and have a slide. But that doesn't make a great company to work for. You have to get rid of your private offices. You have to go and sit out on the floor with all your employees. I took a tour of 12 CEOs from Vancouver down to tour SpaceX about four years ago. And I got Elon to give us a private tour and do a Q and A with us. He did his little tour and gave us the whole thing. We had amazing time. But then we realized he doesn't have a private office. He sits on the floor with everybody else. The guy who built PayPal with Peter Thiel and Tesla and SpaceX and his first company, Zip2, that he sold for 370 million to Compaq, sits on the floor with everybody else because he's connected to everybody else. My last 18 months at 1-800-got junk. Not only did we never have private offices for Anybody, my last 18 months as the chief operating officer, I didn't have a desk. I sat down at a chair when someone was away on one of the five weeks vacation we gave them, and I'd plug in. I'd worked with it for a couple days. I'd sit in marketing for a few days. I'd sit in Biz Dev for a few Days I just sat where there were empty seats and then I was completely plugged in to the organization. The last area related to culture is around communication. If you think back to your company's leadership team page and you can't remember the bios as being engaging for your own company, maybe you should give this a shot. If you have photos up there that are stiff and boring, you're pushing people away. The point of this page is to communicate. So communicating the people the way that they want to be communicated to, not in what you think is important. You would never walk up to somebody at a cocktail party and go, hi, I've got my university degree in science. We're like, really? Ooh, who are you? Why would you do that? I'm a stiff guy. But that's what we do. Look for these kinds of meeting opportunities to have face to face engagement and have these team meetings. Don't look at meetings as being a waste of time. Run them more productively. Run them in half the time you first think about booking them for. But be engaging and have the face to face time with your employees. I read a book years ago called the Dream Manager by a guy named Matthew Kelly. He talks about a woman named Mary from Cincinnati who is a Vistage member. Mary's company and the true story called the Dream Manager. Her company is a janitorial business. She cleans toilets. She had 400% employee turnover in this big company. So you'd hire like a couple hundred people and like they're all quitting, right? She couldn't keep people and she tried paying more and doing everything and she couldn't get the employee turnover to really get below 200%. So she decided to sit down with her employees and ask them what she needed to do to stop the employee turnover. And what they said was, if you really cared about us as humans, if you cared about our dreams, our insecurities, our passions, our joys, if you knew what our bucket list was and helped us make those happen, we, we'd go through brick walls for you. So Mary put in place this program called the 101 Dream Goals. Basically, in the first week an employee joins her, she has them spend 20 minutes writing their bucket list. A list of all the things they want to do before they die, places they want to go, things they want to learn, anything. She would help them build all these things out. She then hired a full time person whose job was to be a dream manager. And the dream manager's job was to help the employees one on one in groups, whatever to get stuff crossed off their bucket list. And they didn't attach any of this to the company. They just attached it to truly caring about the human that was working with you. The dream manager's job was to help people get stuff done on their bucket list. I had a guy who worked for me, Jeff Coyle, who on his 101 dream goals, he wanted to sit behind the Vancouver Canucks bench and watch the pre game skate and watch the Canucks game play. So I just called Mike Johnson, one of the assistant coaches. He and I had been trading ideas on growing companies. I was helping the Canuckson culture and he was helping us build a sports culture inside of 1-800-got-JUNK. And I asked him if he could have Jeff Coyle come out to the game. He's like, for sure. So he's how's Thursday? I said great. So Jeff goes down to the game a couple hours before, watches the pregame skate. At the end of the second period, one of the players wives hands him an envelope. Jeff opens the envelope and reads the letter and it says at the end of the game, come down to gate number six and we have a surprise for you. So he's all excited. He thinks he's going to get like a, the signed jersey and a stick from the game. And he goes down to gate number six at the end of the game. He phones me the following morning at about 7:30, 8:00 clock in the morning and he's hammered. Hey Gary baby, what's up buddy? I'm like who is this? It's. And I think he passed out. 2 o' clock that afternoon Jeff came into work and I'm like, what happened to you? You look horrible. He's like, dude, at the end of the game I went down to gate number six and there was a stretch limo outside and they told me to get into the car. And when I got into the car there were five of the Canucks sitting waiting for me. And we went to each of their bars that night and it was me and five players and I was their guest of honor. He goes, dude, I will go through brick walls for you for last night. I had to fire Jeff about three years later for stuff unrelated. He's used me as a reference twice. He the last seven years Jeff would still go through brick walls for me because I cared more about him as a human than I did about the company. And I could give you dozens and dozens and dozens of these stories. This whole idea of this dream program is really powerful. You have to be curious though. You have to really Care about your employees passions. You have to really care about them as people. And to know their dog's name or their birthday, that's like saying, I'm going to have a coffee shop and play jazz. All coffee shops play jazz. Like, I know their dog's name. Really? Do you know their fears? Do you know their insecurity? Do you know that they don't haven't talked to their dad for seven years and they're dying to? Do you know that they're like terrified of getting on stage or they're worried about getting out of debt? Like, do you know who they are? When you care about that, that's when your company grows. And that's the difference between awesome organizations and just business. We don't have an obligation to be great employers. We have an opportunity to be great employers. One of the most impactful books I ever read was Atlas Shrugged. And what I really understood from it was entrepreneurs and CEOs. Just because we're profit centric will actually create a great company. Because we know that if we have a great company, no one will quit. We don't need the government to say, treat people well. We do that out of greed alone. But what if we could actually do it because we cared? What if you could go back to your company and really truly care tomorrow about your employees? Not because of profit, not because of revenue, not because of a goal, but because you actually somehow connected with that opportunity. If you can take the idea of the management by walking around and actually go and spend time with your employees and really connect with them, that's when you can really shift the business community. That's when you can really shift what's happening in their lives. That's where your revenue and profits will shift. Don't shoot the messenger. When your employees come to you with a problem or a conflict or something that's going wrong. God gave us two ears and one mouth. Let's use them in that ratio. Let's listen twice as much as we talk. Think about that when they come to you because all they want to know is that you've heard what they're saying and you're taking it into consideration. But don't. Yeah, but them. Rockefeller used to take time to go for a walk every day. He would literally just go for a walk and he'd go past people and say, hey, do you want to come with me? Like, I'm not hitting on you, just want to come for a walk. Not hitting on you either. Just like, what are we going to talk about? Nothing. Just going for a walk. And what he did with this action of going for a walk every day or having a nap every day was just to show people that they were allowed to just take time, to just relax, that we didn't have to be this big stressful ball of goals all the time. That maybe it was okay to just breathe. We had a booze ferry. And the booze ferry's job every Friday at 3 o' clock was to walk around the company with a cooler on wheels and hand out a drink to everybody while they were sitting at their desk. Because we all know by 3 o' clock on Friday you don't want to be there anyway. So we may as well bring you a drink so you can get through the last couple hours of your work. Look for opportunities to celebrate everything. Celebrate every success, every goal, every random act of kindness. I don't want you to ever have another going away party. That's the one thing I don't want you to celebrate. Here's why they're leaving. You won't get any leverage out of it. So what I want to do is figure out how much money do you normally spend on a going away party. Let's say it's 500 bucks. Bring that 500 bucks forward to day one. And on day one, when they show up at the company, have a whiteboard at the door that says welcome to 1-800-got-JUNK and have balloons and streamers and have their computer set up on their desk working, have Outlook sitting, working, have their business cards sitting on their desk with their email address and their phone extension and everything actually working. And then introduce them to all the employees and give them a one pager or a two pager, kind of like your company Yelp and show them where the best lunch places are and the best places to get your hair done and the best spas and the free parking spots and the cool beer places and the $7 lunches that'll take them six months to figure out on their own. But now, day one, you get them up to speed really quickly. And then just before lunch that first day, have them take 20 minutes to write down their bucket list and take 20 minutes to write down as many things that they want to do before they die. Because at lunch that day, they're going to read their bucket list to their team and their team is going to read out each of their bucket lists. So everybody is constantly sharing their passions and joys. And at the end of the day when they go home, there will give you a gift basket at the front door. And in the gift basket will be a gift certificate for dinner for two to their favorite restaurant. And they can't quite figure out how you knew where their favorite restaurant was. But in the first interview, one of the questions we ask every candidate is, where's the one restaurant in town that you would want to go back to before you die? And we make a note of that in case we hire them, because that's the way we want to finish their first day, is give them a gift certificate to go to the favorite place that they would want to go to. And on the second day when they show up at work, we go. By the way, we don't have going away parties. We did that yesterday. But that's how you welcome people in. But that is a choice. It's to be Google or to be Microsoft. And it's your choice of whether you want to be beige. Our role as the chief energizing officer is to stir the Kool Aid. Our role is drop by drop by drop to build that awesome culture. Our job is to go into the organization every single day and figure out how.