Effective Leadership | Cleveland Guardians Exec VP of Sales and Marketing, Brian Barren (Podcast 43)

Ensuring that you put people in a position to be successful, you never quite feel like you're ready for that next role you're preparing. You may be 80% of the way there. And the company had a tendency to pull you, to stretch you, and do it in a pretty responsible way. So as you turned as a senior leader to develop those around you, oftentimes you would do the same thing. You would promote people, move people along where they may not quite feel like they're ready to get into that role, but you put them in there, they have the raw skills, knowledge and experience to be an effective leader. You kind of give them that pull or that push over the edge to make sure that they do that. That would be at the top of the list.

Brian Barron joined the Indians, the Cleveland Indians in January of 2014 as executive vice President of Sales and Marketing. Part of his time with the Indians, Barron spent 24 years at Procter and Gamble. During his tenure at P and G, he had opportunity to lead multifunctional business teams across over a dozen of P&G's billion dollar brands, as well as lead customer business development teams such as Walmart and Kroger. Baron graduated from Princeton University in 1989, where he spent four years with Mark Shapiro as a teammate. On graduation, he served as a tank commander in the U.S. army. Brian now oversees the entire business operation for the Cleveland Indians and has been a catalyst for strong growth and sustainability of the brand. O', Brien, welcome to the second grand podcast.

Thank you. Excited to be here?

Yeah. You and I are about the same age. I think I'm a year older than you, I guess. I graduated in 88, so. Same era, I guess. Was P and G where you started right out of college?

Yes. Started at Proctor and Gamble in the summer of 1989 in Philadelphia.

That's really cool.

I.

That was. I think Procter and Gamble is probably the brand that I most wanted to work with. Graduating university, I ended up, I was, was running my own business called College Pro Painters at the time and I ended up going full time with the head office instead of going in with png. And I'd always been enamored with that company. So I'm, I want to hear your story. What was it like? What did you learn? What do you, what did you kind of take with you? Because that was probably, I think in its day, maybe one of four or five of the best companies on the planet to work for for business skills.

Sure. It was tremendous experience and I really enjoyed my, my time with Procter and Gamble. It's interesting because P and G has a great reputation and developing leaders. A lot of that is a combination of formal training curriculum within Procter and Gamble. Then you learn quite a bit on the job. So over the course of my 24 years, had an opportunity to almost be an entrepreneur and start over several times through the course of my time at P and G. So for me, there were a couple of things that I found with a lot of universal transferability to Major League Baseball at P&G. Three big buckets of business acumen, work process, and people development. And when I say business acumen, it's really what is your strategy? What are you trying to get done? Work process standpoint, it's much more, how do you go about doing that? And on the people front, P and G was notorious for training and developing and promoting from within. So it was incumbent upon leadership to develop the people around them. In many instances, make. Make sure you're developing people that are better than you so you can continually learn from them as you're looking for ways to grow the business profitably.

Is it true that the only way you can actually get into a senior role at P and G is to have come from within? Like, they don't hire from the outside very rarely.

So through acquisitions. There were folks that came in at more senior levels. But that has generally been the way that P and G has gone about things, which is promote from within.

Pretty amazing. So if you think back then to the leadership development and developing people, what would maybe be in the top two or three leadership skills that you learned there that you would carry with you today?

I think from at the top of the list would be ensuring that you put people in a position to be successful. One of the things I learned over the years at P and G from other leaders and then found myself in a position to do with folks within the organization. You never quite feel like you're ready for that next role you're preparing. You may be 80% of the way there. And the company had a tendency to pull you, to stretch you and do it in a pretty responsible way. So as you turned as a senior leader to develop those around you, oftentimes you would do the same thing. You would promote people, move people along where they may not quite feel like they're ready to get into that role. But you put them in there, they have the raw skills, knowledge and experience to be an effective leader. You kind of give them that pull or that push over the edge to make sure that they do that. That would be at the top of the list. One of the things that was really great, P and G was a lot of the learning was codified, a lot of emphasis on writing things down. Certain parts of the world, certain pockets of the business, there may be a tendency at times, and I certainly found within Major League Baseball, a handshake and a pat on the back, and we'll work through this together. Business is a culture of written word. One of the things that I learned over the years at Proctor and Gamble was the importance of capturing things in writing, constantly ensuring clear expectations when I came to major decisions by having things codified or written down. Third thing and final thing was from a work process standpoint, the best process is always the right one. The next best one is the wrong one, and the worst thing you can have is not having a process. As I came into certainly the business side of Major League Baseball, we had a lot of institutional knowledge, a lot of things that were in people's heads so we could begin to learn and ensure that process is the best one. Where we found it may not be the best one, Replace it with something that we would codify, write down, and then once we had a process, you could always look for ways to improve upon it.

When you talk about the codification of systems, is that how you trained people as well then? Was it to go through some kind of standard system and train them? How did you know the people at P and G were trained? How do you know that they were kind of up to speed on a skill?

Typically at P and G, you had some, some macro work processes that were pretty standard within a region or in some instances across the world. You know, for example, the innovation process at Procter and Gamble was a standard process across the world. The execution of that made look and feel slightly differently in one region versus another. But the work process itself was consistent, lots of acronyms. So, you know, as you would work your way through a process, make sure you were talking about the same thing. It was a great way to create common knowledge. As I got to the Endian's, you know, one of the big pieces of learning for me was assess, just learn, listen and learn from folks and try and pull out of the organization. What's our process for doing a specific task. I would spend a lot of time with the individuals at all levels within the organization trying to learn from them. I would take lots of notes and oftentimes find if we were working on a process and I talked to a half a dozen people, there may be five steps in the process and each one of them had four similar steps. Tendency was to focus on the one thing that they did as an individual that was a little bit different than others. And the learning for us over time was drive that inconsistency or that variance out of the process, find the best process and teach and train the organization to follow that religiously.

What was it like to leave a culture after 24 years? I think you said you were at P and G and then to move over to the Cleveland Indians. How hard was it to make that transition for you and how did you make that transition?

So it's interesting. I had an opportunity almost by coincidence. Mark Shapiro, who was here with the Indians at the time and in the role as the president overseeing business and baseball, was a college football classmate and teammate of mine back in 2010. Mark was about to assume responsibility for the business operation in addition to his responsibilities for baseball. He ended up at a. At a game, the vice chairman from Proctor and Gamble, for whom I happened to be reporting at the time, as an outcome of their discussion. Mark was an avid learner, always looking for better ways, innovative ways to do things. And as he was assuming responsibility for the business operations, he had read and learned that Procter and Gamble Campbell had a pretty good reputation for brand building. So he wanted to partner with P and G and the vice chairman at the time, a gentleman by the name of Rob Steele, agreed with him and G signed a bilateral confidentiality agreement. And I was assigned as a leader to work closely with the Indians and share best practices back and forth. Procter and Gamble was very interested in fast cycle time decision making in baseball operations. In particular data and information. There were more statistics than you can, you know, shake a stick at. You have to be able to synthesize a lot of data and information and make decisions very quickly on the personnel front. P and G wanted to learn those things from the Indians. And conversely, what the Indians were looking for from P and G was how do you approach running a business? How do you approach setting strategy, thinking through work processes, getting clear set of metrics and the development of people to execute against those priorities.

How long did you and P and G and Cleveland Indians, how long did they work together like that?

So we did that for almost four years. So by the time I came here In January of 2014, I had had an opportunity, along with a handful of other leaders at Procter and Gamble to work with Indians senior leadership, got a ch and to better assess what the culture was like, what the Indians were trying to get done. Many of the challenges that you face in a smaller market in Major League Baseball. So I had a bit of a running start, if you will, and knew many of the challenges that we would face organizationally operating as a smaller market team in Major League Baseball.

Wow, what a huge win for the Cleveland Indians to be able to bring you on board in that way as well. That transition for four years prior to even starting day one is really powerful. I had a great opportunity back in around 2003. I was building 1-800-got- junk here in Vancouver as the chief operation operating officer. And we had the Vancouver Canucks, who were doing amazing at the time and had a fantastic company culture as a team. And Mike Johnson, the assistant coach, and I were doing the same thing. Very similar, but for about six months where we were trying to learn about the sports culture inside of the Vancouver Canucks. And then they wanted to learn about some of the operational best practices of building a great culture and how to bring that into a sports team. It was kind of cool. I can't imagine four years must have been amazing. So, culturally, how does the team culture differ inside of the head office from what's on the field? Or do they. Is it. Is it together? Walk us through that.

It's much more similar from how we go about doing work here in Cleveland than different. And when I say that there's a culture of learning and growth within the Indians organization where as an individual and as. As a team, constantly looking for ways to learn from one another, one of the things that baseball is as a sport certainly provides. It's a very humbling game. You can have tremendous success and one at bat and the next one, you know, tremendous failure. You can go through a streak where you're not having much success on the field or you are regardless, you've got to constantly find ways to hit the reset button and focus on what' out in front of you. Learning from whatever your. Your pitfalls may have been or your successes, and constantly looking for ways to get better as an individual on a team and persevere through times of adversity.

How do you take that learning that you know it's okay and always strive? How do you take that into the business world? Because I often hear of companies that have really big goals and they're really pushing, and then, I don't know, they miss a quarter or they miss a number or they were too aggressive on a budget. I'm thinking of one client of mine that just raised a lot of money from a tier one investment bank, you know, well over 100 million that they raised and the VC really pushed them to set a big goal and they missed that goal and the team was struggling culturally. How would you coach the team on? You're not saying it's okay to miss, but to get them reset for the next quarter, the next year, what would you do to kind of turn them around if you were to live coach them on that or do something?

That's a great question. One of the benefits of being a small family owned business, which is what? A Major League Baseball team. Even in the large markets, relatively speaking, coming from a place like Procter and Gamble, where the company was divesting brands that were less than a half a billion doll dollars in net outside sales. For the most part, baseball teams are small businesses. They happen to have big footprints in local marketplaces. But virtually every team, with maybe the exception of the Toronto Blue Jays, who are owned by a publicly traded company, they're owned and operated by privately held owners. You're not really subject to those quarterly earnings like you are in a publicly traded company. One of the positive things about not being subject to quarterly earnings is you're not really as worried about we've got to score some runs or put some points on the board very quickly in order to show progress next quarter or there be a material impact on, on our stock price, our market capitalization. The flip side of that is you want to bring the operational discipline to an organization to be very focused against a clear set of objectives, goals, priorities and, and metrics to track your progress along the way. So you can bring a lot of the positive attributes that come from being accountable organizationally. Whether you liked it or not. You would walk out of, you know, any office at Procter and Gambler, you'd see a stock ticker out in front of you. You had a very public scorecard and a way by which you could benchmark how well you were doing versus your competitors. Bringing some of those things organizationally into our business operations has been very helpful for us the last couple of years as far as setting very clear objectives and goals that go with those objectives, plans to deliver against those goals, and then metrics to track our progress along the way.

I want to talk a little bit about that company culture as well and just understand how you're developing it and what you're going to be turning it into or evolving it. Talk about that culture and how hard was it to go from, I guess you had had again the running start of the four years, but how hard was it to go from that big corporate environment into the family business and what Would you kind of suggest to people if they're doing that or making that leap?

It was because I had a little bit of a running start, you know, a couple of years to learn and listen to the leadership, the ownership of the Indians. I had an opportunity to figure out do some of the same values and operating principles apply within living Indians baseball club as, as those that I had kind of grown up with Procter and Gamble. And the answer was yes. The beauty of being inside a smaller organ is we focus a lot on controlling the controllables. I'm a big believer you can't really dial up a culture. You can't order an organization to believe certain things. It's either going to be innate and it's going to come from within in the organization by having a very clear set of priorities and a way by which you go about doing your work, from which a culture will naturally start to evolve. You know, for, for us in Cleveland, you know, there's the embracing the reality of a marketplace within which you're operating. Again, it's not trying to, to make excuses, handicap yourself, but it's making sure you understand exactly what the marketplace is within which you're trying to compete. Stack up. So coming up here a few years ago, I worked with a handful of, of our leaders to better understand what I call the broader business socioeconomic environment. There were a couple of things that kind of stood out. Cleveland is, is one of 20 Major League Baseball markets that have NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball teams. You know, the, the big three, if you will. Of those 20, Cleveland is the smallest. It's highly likely next 25, 30 years, Cleveland will continue to be the smallest of those that house Major League Baseball, NFL and NBA franchises. Cleveland's the only city in Major League Baseball that's in the bottom for three key socioeconomic factors. Household population, employment, or rather unemployment and income. As you look at trying to run any type of a local business, if you look at those mechanical levers that are going to drive local revenue, you know, how many people do you have with how much disposable income and how many occasions do you have for them to spend on your product or service? For the Indians, back in 2014, just trying to assess the reality of the current state, there were three business metrics in Major League Baseball. Paid attendance, revenue. And if you took your revenue and divided it by your paid attendance, a dollar per cap, if you will, an in process measure, believe it was in the bottom three of the bottom three in Major League Baseball. So of the 30 teams in Major League Baseball. That was the reality of the marketplace at the time. One of the things we tried to do was say what would be a stretching but realistic objective for us as a business team. And we landed on getting to the middle of the pack in Major League Baseball. And we, we track the league does a nice job of grouping you in logical clusters of similar size markets. So there are seven markets that the Indians are part of a benchmarking team. Baltimore, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Tampa Bay and Milwaukee. So Cleveland being the seventh. A lot of markets that are similar from a population, an income standpoint, an employment standpoint. As we set the objective of get to the middle and lead our peer group, we put a very specific quantitative number up against that. We want to be 15th in Major League Baseball on those metrics. Paid attendance, revenue dollar per cap in five years. We want to lead our peer group in five years. Why five years better than five months? You have to go through a season and it afforded an opportunity to put something out there that was not so far out on the horizon that it wasn't relevant, but it was far enough away that enabled you to get a little bit of space to start to put plans in place to work very specifically against objectives and goals. And that's, that's something we've been trying to do for the last couple of years.

Who sets those goals when you're setting them as an organization? Is it, is it leadership top down or is it leadership team making them together? How do you guys go about setting goals?

We go about it from both top down and bottom up. So we'll sit with, with ownership and with our baseball operations team to try and figure out what type of revenue would we need to be generating to have a team payroll in a certain range? And to the extent team payrolls are no guarantee, but there's a pretty strong correlation between team payroll and your ability to win BAS games. We will take a combination of, I'll say top down from ownership and baseball operations leadership and then bottom up working with each one of the revenue generating product segments. And then looking at our single largest variable expense is actually staffing a ballpark for 81 home games a year. We'll try and look at those things to build what we call a local controllable revenue and margin glide path over time. And to the extent we can open up operating margin and flexibility for our ownership and our baseball operations team, the intent from a productivity standpoint would be take any of those, the operating margin expansion and reinvest it into the most competitive baseball team.

That you can possibly field that story that we've all heard is true then, that it really is up to the payroll of the team. If you can't pay it, you're just not going to get there.

It's very challenging because no hard salary cap in Major League Baseball, you can get tremendous disparity. So for example, the disparity between, let's say the bottom three teams in Major League Baseball had a had a team payroll around 80 million DOL last year. The Boston Red Sox up towards at the top of Major League Baseball. The gap in baseball between the Red Sox and the bottom three, it's about 20% bigger than the salary cap in the NBA. So it's just the NBA and the NFL. It's not better or worse, but there's a tendency to talk about the gap to the cap. You know, where is the team's current team payroll? What kind of a gap do they have to get to the salary cap? You don't really have those discussions in Major League Baseball. You've got such wide variance between lower team payrolls and big market team payrolls. There is a revenue sharing mod. It creates a different set of conditions within which you need to operate.

Somebody asked me once about culture and they were just saying, does everybody have to be the same inside of a company culture? So the curiosity I would have in the sport business is, does everyone have to be a fan of baseball? Like, does everyone who works for the Cleveland Indians have to love baseball? Is that part of core of what you do? Or are there anybody who worked there that's like, yeah, I'm not so much a baseball fan, but I happen to love finance or, you know, you don't.

Really have to love baseball. I do think that two attributes that we look for consistently weight both across our baseball operations and our business operations is we look for people that want to learn and grow as individuals, and then we look for people who put the team in front of themselves. So very collaborative people. We have a very methodical interviewing process where we'll try and tease out the ability to work in teams and to collaborate. And if given a choice, would you have a tendency to put yourself ahead of a team or is the team's goal more important than the individual?

Yeah, I've been trying to get people to understand the leadership team level, that the leadership team's most important team is the leader leadership team, and then their functional area that they run second is their secondary team. It's like the, you've got your offensive team or defensive team or you've got your pitching staff, but they're. You've got that one team, right?

Yeah. Interesting.

You talked about the, the learning culture. We were talking at one of the COO alliance events the other day. One of the COOs that was there said we were talking about about how the leader's job is to grow people. And we've really got to have that growth oriented mindset of always growing our team and growing our team and growing our team. Always look for ways to grow them. And somebody put their hand up and said, well how about just hiring people that like to grow on their own? Wouldn't that make it easier? And it sounds like you guys identified that as well. Walk us through how you identify people that are already into learning and like to learn and what that means, I guess to the company.

You know, some of the things that we try and do in the interview process to tease out attributes that are important to us. Took a little bit of page out of some of the learning over the years with Procter and Gamble. I'll say Indianized. It made it relevant to what we're trying to get done Here we'll look for a combination of. Describe an instance where you may have actually found failed at a specific task. What was that task? What were you trying to get done? What happened? And depending upon how you would define the yardsticks of success, why did you come up short? And importantly, what did you learn from that? Oftentimes it's very easy to talk about a success. When you talk about failure, it's a little bit more challenging to talk about it and to be self aware enough to admit where you personally may have fallen short within a specific task. The great thing about the question is, is at the end of it, sometimes you like to ask that's a terrific example. Can you give me another one? And it's actually less important that you have another example. It's more important that you actually have a response. Successes are tend to be a little easier to talk about versus failures. And that humility is something that we look for. We try not to repeat mistakes, but we're very open and understand that we're going to make them.

Yeah, I like that you're noticing two things there. One is you're finding that they've actually been able to see the lessons from their failure. So they're learning from that. The second part is the introspection that they're able to blame themselves for their own contribution to the problem and they don't blame an external factor. You talked about Indianizing and I call it R and D rip off and duplicate. You know, you take the best systems in the world and you R and D those. Where do you learn? Where are you continuing to grow? I mean you've obviously been in a growth oriented organization like, like P and G. Where do you continue to grow today?

It's a combination for some of our, our senior leaders very intentionally and this really goes back to Mark Shapiro, his right hand person at the time, a gentleman by the name of Andrew Miller that he took with him to Toronto. They actively look that had experience outside of the baseball industry and then brought them in. At the time it was a combination of where do we need a different infusion of talent as well as where we want to build that capability in the future. We have a dozen folks in those functional areas of leadership on our business lead team. Over half of those folks have more experience outside of Major League Baseball to look at a dilemma or a problem. And we get the benefit of several different points of view from different industries. We can actually work through something on much faster cycle time. Here's something, something that we faced in concept, you know, in, in a retail environment 10 years ago. Here's how we approach that. Here's what ended up happening, what worked and what didn't work. So we use a combination of that and then we try and work with a handful of, of key partners in and around the Cleveland marketplace. KeyBank is a, is literally walking distance from Progressive Field where the Indians play. We have a terrific partnership where we help provide some training for some of their key leaders as part of the their ongoing curriculum and they actually also do the same thing with and for us so we can expose our folks to how they go about doing some things. They're a very well run regional bank within the United States and as, as we continue to learn, they're literally right in our backyard. We can take things and find our counterparts there, bounce ideas off of them, learn faster. Here's what we're faced with. We're thinking about attacking it this way. What are your thoughts and cheats feedback. And we can bring that outside in by being very intentional and methodical in that process.

What's something that you failed at? Maybe I guess even while you're at the Cleveland Indians, something that you dropped the ball on or screwed up or failed at. And then what did you learn from it?

I've got plenty of examples of things that I failed at with the Cleveland Indians. One thing that was great learning for me and particular my first season here, you've been fortunate the Indians have been 500 or better, you know, since, since I'd gotten here and for a few years prior to that. But in 2014, we were right around, you know, a 500 team. We were not competing for the postseason or to win our division. So as you would start to see attendance drop or as you had an initial plan, here's what we think we're going to be able to do for a certain home stand or series. And our actuals were coming in well below that. My tendency was to troubleshoot, you know, what's the gap closing plan right now, short term, like in the next week, in the next month, what are we going to do to help close that gap? It's not that you can't do anything, but there really are two factors that we talk about. Control what you can control. These are not really controllables. Weather and team performance. Performance, you know, team performance was okay. We were not intending to win our division and go into the postseason, but we also struggled in my first year. So when, when you get unusual weather patterns coming off of Lake Erie, you may get rain in the suburbs, but it's sunny downtown or it's raining downtown and sunny in the suburbs, you can't really control the weather. And that, that has a, it does have an impact, particularly on single game attendance. What's the weather out and, and people's judgment of that is typically look out the window and what they see drives their short term behavior set. Trying to not troubleshoot that, build a plan and then stick to your plan or, you know, single game. We typically have a promotional calendar where there are giveaway items and dollar hot dogs and we try and do those on the weekends to make our bigger games naturally on the weekends, make them bigger versus, you know, shooting for a weeknight game and trying to figure out, you know, what could we do creative way, Tuesday or Wednesday night, maybe at the end of the school year. The answer is not much because kids are still in school and it really doesn't matter so much what you do in situations like that. So for me, it was a lot of learning, learning that through that first year. The bias to action I think was a positive thing. But taking immediate action on some things, taking a step back and being checked into the boards by some folks here in Cleveland saying, hold on, you'll learn. As we go through this, it's not that we're not going to try and do some of those things, but in a limited resource environment, we can't pivot resource to go work on something like that. This weekend. So that was great learning for me.

I wouldn't have even thought through that the way that you did or learned as well. My tendency would have been to have jumped on it right away and tried to fix it right away. But it is a longer term game that you're playing as well. Multi year season. It's a multi year business as well. And that's part of the culture. What's been hard for you on the culture side and on the people side of the business internally.

And I think one of the hardest things for us and in the near term we have had a lot of success the last couple of years. The good news is whether it's on or off the field, you will fall flat on your face more than once and you have an opportunity to learn from that. While we haven't had the broad significant rebuild, you know, in the last couple of years where you will have that your product on the field is going to impact what's, what's happening. Certainly from a paid attendance standpoint point, staying focused on learning from lessons. When you're having some success, there's a tendency at times that, you know, well, let's not worry about that. You know, we still hit our number and there may have been factors that frankly were out of our control that enabled that. At the top of that list would be strong team performance. In 2016, the Indians benefited from a combination of strong team performance. Pretty good weather once we got into the summer months in particular. And again, you can't really control in the summer. Summer you're going to have, you know, families have more time. Weekends tend to see a significant increase in your crowds. Parents aren't worried about getting the children to bed because you've got school or you have a game or a school activity. There tends to be a little bit more time to do things in the summer months. And when you've got the tailwinds of tremendous, you know, decent weather and strong team performance, they tend to cover up a lot of mistakes. We try and pull those things out, put a spotlight on them and learn from them whether the team's playing well or not playing well.

I heard years of Google to build an amazing business, it has to be slightly more than a business and slightly less than a religion. It's gotta be kind of in that zone of a cult. And I think P and G was definitely a cult, right? In a good way.

Yes.

You know, College Pro Painters, 1, 800, got junk. Any Google like these companies are cults. What part of that culture do you bring into the Cleveland Indians with you.

One of the things that we stress a lot is the importance of being competitive. And we very intentionally choose the word compete versus when we choose it for a couple of reasons. To, to compete. It's really all about the preparation that you go through. Put yourself in a position to be hanging around at the end of whatever it is that you're competing to try and accomplish, whether that be trying to get a corporate partnership deal done to, you know, sell a large group, close out a concessions deal, or to win a baseball game. So eating is something we really emphasize and stress. It tends to resonate pretty well. One of the interesting things that I've. I've seen and experienced the last couple of years is our workforce in general. General, it tends to skew much younger. Obviously, baseball players tend to be younger. So from an on the field perspective, you generally have a much younger workforce, if you will. Off the field, we tend to. We tend to have younger people that want to get into sports. And organizationally, at a point in time, we tend to have younger. And then a handful of older people might be on the old end of the equation right now, and you're trying to find that balance in between. So talking about the need to be competitive, to prepare yourself to compete, to hang around, to be in a position, possibly win something at the end is something that resonates very, very much so with the younger workforce.

Talk about, about Gen Y for a second. What's it like working with that Gen Y demographic? I mean, I think they get a little bit of a bad rap. What do you notice with Gen Y? What's good about them?

What.

What do you find us, the struggle and. And how do you leverage the best of ny?

My learning has been there are a couple of myths and a few realities. You know, here would be an example of what I would describe as a myth. This is the trophy generation, where you get a participation trophy. If you just show up, you know, we're going to pat you on the way to go. My experience has been this generation is every bit as competitive as generations that were in front of them, if you will. A tendency for, you know, those of us in the 50 plus group to talk about walking uphill to school barefoot with the wind in our face. And it was so much tougher back then. There are a lot of excellent, tremendous stories about perseverance and overcoming adversity. It tends to transcend generations.

Yeah.

So the first myth was, you know, for me, this concept of this is the participation. Give them a trophy and pat them on the back not so much. This is a very highly competitive group of people. They may show up a little bit differently. Some of them like to actually get some feedback along the way. And I do think that's another thing that's a little bit different, perhaps with an older generation, where we'll sit down once a month or once a quarter and we'll review your work plan and tell you whether you're doing well, you're on track, or you're off track. My learning with younger folks is they like feedback and they like it in real time. What am I doing well? Where can I improve? That eliminates what I call surprises. Either wow, I had no idea you thought that positively, or I had no idea that you actually were not pleased with the work that was coming out of me or my team. And that's something that as leaders, we tried to really drive home, which is in touch with your people. The best way to do that is meet with them one on one. Meet with them as a team. Look for ways to get candid, transparent feedback so you can learn and grow as a leader and we can get better as a team. The last thing I would say is my learning over the years is diverse. Diversity is a force multiplier. There's a tendency at times to think of diversity, you know, in more myopic ways, whether it's ethnicity or gender. Experience is something comes with time. It's not our fault that we're older, so we by default will have more experience from lots of different situations. Your ability to share the learning, both the good and the bad, with others so that hopefully you don't repeat the same mistakes, but you can learn faster when you find yourself in a challenging situation is something that I found all generations are very interested in doing.

I wrote a book called Meetings Suck recently and one of the things I covered in the book Meeting Suck was if you're going to have people come to a meeting, you need to actually get them to contribute and hear them out. So how do you get the quieter, analytical and amiable people that are a part of all of our cultures? How do you get them to contribute? What do you do to get them to. To share their voice over sometimes the louder voices of the dominant expressives who are kind of speaking over everyone?

It's hard, but one of the things we try to do is encourage, you know, teamwork is in. It's a contact sport. You've got to be engaged and involved. You want to avoid that fear based calling on someone, pointing to them, hey, what do you think? Think Julie what do you think? And Andy and pull it out of them and try and create an environment where before we move on, we'd be interested in hearing the point of view of a couple other folks in the room that may not have shared theirs up to this point where it's, it's less. I'm looking for a dissenting or I'm looking for, you know, something that's reinforcing. It's just we're looking for participation over time, helping folks understand that we're going to get better as a team. When people do actively share, even if it is, I don't need to repeat everything that person just said. I agree with it. That's fantastic. It shows that you're listening, you're engaged and you're, you're part of the, the process.

Let's go with a parting one. So if you were to give, you know, your 21 year old self starting out at P and G, some business advice that you wish you'd known at 21 that, that you'd only really listen to yourself, what would that one kind of big word of advice be that you could have given your earlier self that you now know to be true?

Don't be afraid to take calculated risk. And those are very intentional words. I didn't say don't be afraid to take chances. Yeah, I'm a big believer that chances have a much wider, you know, it's a bigger gamble. Calculated risk is a little bit different. You're not just going to throw caution to the wind and go in a whim, let's go this way or let's go that way. But don't be afraid to think through something and take a shot at a different way of doing something or pressing on, on something where we may not have the success that we had hoped up to this point. But let's not give up yet. Let's push through this a little bit more. And don't be afraid to take that calculated risk. The worst thing that's going to happen is you're going to fail and you're going to learn from that. The sooner you fail and learn, the faster you can probably put a plan in place to, to correct that. If you're too cautious, you're probably not going to accomplish anything of significance.

That's awesome. Brian Behr, I'm the president of the Cleveland Indians Base Club. Thanks very much for sharing with us today on the Second in Command podcast.

I think that the diversity of operator in there is what makes the community so strong. We have so many different types of businesses, so many different sizes, different industries. We have operators at all stages of their career. It's the meeting of the minds and the diversity of that community that is what's creating such exceptional conversations already.