High-Performance Leadership Advice in 40 Minutes | Cameron Herold (Podcast 339)

There's other projects that I'm going to kind of brainstorm and work together with him on. There's other project areas I'm going to let him just work on it on himself and come to me if he has problems. There's other areas we'll never talk about and I'll never even praise him on because he's freaking unbelievable at it. So that's a key skill for executives to understand is the four different leadership styles, how to decide what style to have and how to actually apply it in a way so that you're leading your direct reports in the way that they're striving to be led. Join me in a conversation with Neil Conlon, the host of the Press Forward and Neil Podcast. During our discussion, we'll uncover the formula for success that I've cultivated over the years, highlighting the powerful combination of focus, faith and effort. I'll reveal the pivotal role of unwavering focus in business, discuss the significance of fostering confidence within oneself and the team, and stress the necessity of relentless effort. Together, we'll explore how this formula propels predictable success by amplifying potential outcomes and why achieving near perfection in all three areas is crucial. Neil and I will navigate through the ever evolving landscape of CEOs, touching upon the adaptability of leadership styles across diverse business growth stages. We'll also dive into the integration of AI and business efficiency strategies and the indispensable role of high performance relationships in both personal and professional spheres. Join us for insights on crafting a successful career through diverse experiences, exploring my Focus Times Faith Times Effort Formula and its impact on outcomes, understanding the dynamic role of COOs across various business phases, adapting leadership styles to suit team dynamics, leveraging AI for competitive business strategies and discovering the genesis and mission of the COO Alliance.

I'm very, very excited to be sitting here today with a man that I've followed on social media and been connected to for several Excited to do this podcast today. Cameron Herald is. I don't even know where to start. He's an author of six books, he's the founder of the COO alliance, he's a father, he's a global traveler at this point. He's doing this podcast actually from Dubai and there's so much more packed into this man and I'm very, very grateful to have Cameron here today. So Cam, thank you for doing this from Dubai.

Hey Neil, you're welcome. Thanks for having me.

Like I said to you in the pre call, I'm very, very grateful that I've had so many Great humans kind of show up, really, in this, you know, journey of creating my own podcast.

I'm used to being on the other.

Side of the, of the fence, so to speak, and didn't realize, like, how much work goes into it when you're on the other side of the fence. You had a, an Instagram post this morning that I wanted to dig into a little bit. You were talking about faith, focus, and I think effort. It just landed so well with me this morning. What went into that?

So this is kind of going back. I wrote 20 years when I was the second in command, the chief operating officer for 1-800-got junk. Brian, the CEO and I came up with what we called our kind of magic formula, the formula for success. And the formula was focus times faith times effort leads to predictable success. For anybody who's listening right now, let's say that you just gave yourself a percentage grade, somewhere between 1 and 100% on how focused you were or how focused your business area was or how focused your company was over the last month or the last quarter. So you give yourself a percentage focus for, you know, were you focused on your strategy? Were you focused on the critical few things? Were you distracted by social media? Were you distracted by problems at work? Or were you able to show up and stay very focused on your plan, very focused on your goals, very focused on the critical few things, you know, very focused on those flywheel efforts that we want to be focused on. So let's say you give yourself a, I don't know, a 50% out of a hundred, you know, focus that half the time you're really focused and half the time you weren't. And then the faith number is how much faith do you have in yourself, in your skills, in your teammates, in the strategy and the plans that the company or your business areas are pulling together? How much faith and confidence do you have in all of that yourself, your team, et cetera? And let's say you give yourself, you know, a 50%. You know, at times you feel pretty good and at times you're, you know, not quite sure, you're kind of wavering. So you give yourself a 50 score there. And then on effort, it's how much effort are you really putting in? Like, are you really, really trying hard? Are you really working it? Are you kind of fluffing through your day? Are you fluffing through your week? Are you just kind of putting in the, the bare minimum or are you really, really grinding it out? And, and the effort does not mean 80 hour weeks. The effort Means that when you're working, you're really working, right? When you're folk, you know, working, you're really kind of cranking it out. So again, let's say you give yourself a 50% score there. On the surface, it would look like you're 50% of the way, but the way that it multiplies out is 0.5 times 0.5 times 0.5, that gives you a 12 and a half percent chance of success, basically 88% chance that you're going to fail. So even if you get yourself to 80% focus times 80% faith times 80% effort, that's 0, 8 times 0.8 times 0.8, that's only a 51.2% chance of success. Basically, you've got a 50, 50 shot of being success in your business or in your business area or in your job. You know, I, I would say that take all your cash and go to Vegas and put it on red or maybe black, because you kind of got the 50, 50 shot. But you've also got a 50 shot that you're going to get fired or you're going to be out of a job or you're going to kill the business or, you know, et cetera. So to really, really be successful again in business, in your role, running your company, whatever, even if you get to 90% focus times 90% faith times 90% effort, you've only got a 72.8% chance of success. To truly, truly knock the COVID off the ball, to truly become a best place to work or a best leader, or be, you know, doubling the size of your company, be radically kind of experiencing the kind of growth that we all read about. You really got to get into the realm of 98% focus times 98% faith times 98% effort, which gives you a 94% chance of success. So the video that I talked about this morning, what I talked about was people tend to be busy. They tend to get distracted with the big shiny objects. They tend to work on a lot of things, but they're not necessarily focused on the critical few things. They often get distracted by the important many things. And what I try to do is figure out what are the few things that I can really focus on to get that whole Jim Collins flywheel happening. And the more that I focus on those critical few things, the flywheel will start to show an impact. And once the flywheel is spinning, then I can add other projects. I've been teaching a lot of our members of the COO alliance recently that that kind of flywheel effort is almost like launching a satellite and getting a satellite into orbit. It takes a lot of work and energy to get the satellite up into orbit. But once it's there, the satellite travels around the earth for free. So that's what I'm trying to get companies to do today is to really apply those principles.

That makes so much sense. Talk to us a little bit about, I guess, the, the infancy of the COO alliance, because when I started to see you talk about that on social media, I actually had this moment the first time I saw you post about it where I was like, nobody decided.

To do that already.

And it's just like so amazing that like some of like, because there's all these different masterminds that are for the CEOs, there's, there's the CFO, different types of CFO groups, even the marketing and sales folks have their own little networky, different virtual things. And then when I saw you post about the COO alliance, I was like, that makes so much sense and so needed.

Well, I just launched a second one that I'll talk about in a second. So the COO alliance came about for a few reasons. First off, I've played the second in command a couple of times in a couple of companies. As I mentioned earlier, I was The COO for 1, 800, got junk. I grew them from 14 employees to 3100 employees in six years. I was from 2 million to 106 million in revenue in six years. You know, we ended up operating in 330 cities, four countries. Pretty large business that I was the second in command for. But I had nowhere to really go and learn. All of the places that I was going were filled with entrepreneurs. They were, you know, YPO or EO or Vistage or the Genius Network or Baby Bathwater Maverick. There were all kinds of groups for entrepreneurs, but there was nowhere for the second in command to go and really, really dig into the very specific areas that we have to be responsible for without getting distracted by the big shiny object CEOs who need to stay at that 30,000 foot level. So that was the first part. The second part was I was working behind the scenes coaching some very high growth, strong companies. One went on to become the number two company in the United States to work for on Glassdoor. And one of the other ones was number 12 in the United States to work for on Glassdoor. And three of my clients, their second in commands were all talking to each other behind the scenes. What happened was they, they heard me speaking about these other companies. The COO reached out and started networking with the other COOs. And they said, can we get together without our CEOs in the room? And I was like, yeah, I guess. And so I kind of threw up a one page landing page. And 25 hours later, I had 10 CEOs sign up, paying $6,700 to come and spend two and a half days together. And then literally the night before the event, I pulled together an agenda and it was all 10 of are going to present to each other, and all 10 of you are going to present a problem and get helped by the group, and then we'll have some drinks and good food together. That was basically the two and a half days. And at the end of two and a half days, nine of the 10 wanted to continue on. And that was really the Genesis for the CEO alliance. We've now got members from 17 countries. They're truly the second in command of the CEO. So some have the COO title, some have the president title. It's just they're the one who is really effectively running the company if the CEO is in the hospital for six months. Right? They're the yin and yang to that CEO. So that was the genesis. That was the reason for it. And then I recently also came out with a book called the Second in Command. And then, as you know, I've also got a podcast called the Second In Command podcast, where I've interviewed 285 COOs from all over the world, from some of the great brands, and I've never interviewed a single entrepreneur or CEO. I've only interviewed the coo.

What's the difference in the ego, like, between the CEO, right, who's always going to think they have secret sauce, or there's some magic strategy or keys of the kingdom, versus, like, anytime I've worked alongside a coo, it's all about scalable, repeatable, process, system, et cetera.

They're very different personality profiles. And I'm going to give. I'll answer the question of what's the difference with the ego? Positioning ego as a very strong good thing, right? Entrepreneurs need to have a strong sense of ego and self and faith in themselves, almost to the level of narcissism, because the rest of the world is often telling you it can't be done. And we have to have that stubborn ego presence where we say it. I'm going to show that we can, right? We. We have to have that confidence. And that's why people will follow us and often quit their job to Come and work with us, but we don't even know how we're going to do it yet. But they'll quit their job and come and work for us and help us figure it out. So I think the ego and that sense of self is very strong in the entrepreneurs with the coo. They're the ones that ask the questions like the who, what, when, where, why and how to figure out the plan to make the vision come true. So they approach projects, they approach companies, they approach ideas in a very different way. Entrepreneurs tend to say here's an idea, let's go and figure it out as we go. And CEOs tend to be the brakes to the entrepreneur's gas. Or as my sister, who's been an entrepreneur for 25 years says, Her COO is the leash to her dragon. It's the one kind of I say that our job is to save the CEO from themselves and our job is to shine the spotlight on the CEO, to make them iconic, to make them look good. But yeah, definitely approaching it from a very different personality profile. Interestingly, we've had all of our members of the CEO alliance have done the colby a profile on themselves and we've had all of their CEOs. Even though we don't work with the CEO, we've had all the CEOs do their Colby a profile as well. And most of the founder led CEOs very different from the ones who are hired to come in and run a company. But the typical entrepreneurial founder led CEOs tend to be very high quick starts, meaning they start now and they plan later. Most of the COOs tend to be high fact finders or follow throughs. So they initiate or start projects by asking lots of questions or by putting a system or a playbook or repeatable process in place. And they need to have that system in place before they start the project. So it's that real true yin and yang approach to just scaling the company and it works really well when you find the right one.

I think it's one of the most misunderstood roles and how critical it really is to the success of the companies. I remember years and years ago, the first time that somebody had shared with me that most entrepreneurs will fit into kind of the three buckets, the one being the CEO who's that visionary, the 30,000 foot dragon. I'm going to steal that one. I like that one. The financial entrepreneur who looks at the books and is P and L and looks at the CFO type. But then the critical one, the cornerstone of the Whole thing. And probably the sometimes least sexy looking one is the person who's going to operationalize and systematize all those ideas.

Yeah. And then we've got Warren Rustin who said in the fourth, the fourth box is the ones who can't stop thinking about sex and alcohol. So here's what's really interesting about what you said is Harvard actually wrote an article about 15 years ago called the misunderstood role of the COO. It was in the Harvard Business Review and they identified seven distinct types of chief operating officers. And the reason there are so many distinct types of COOs is there's equally as many distinct types of entrepreneurs or CEOs. So the COO again needs to be the yin and yang, which is the logo on the front of my second in command book. We need to be the yin and yang to the CEO. So if the CEO is really strong on three areas, the CEO needs to be strong on all the areas that entrepreneur is weak at. Or if the CEO loves to work on three areas of the business but hates meets four areas. The CEO needs to love working on the four areas that drain the CEO of energy. So you can have a very inward facing COO or very outward facing like I was with culture and brand and PR and strategy. You could have a very inward facing tech focus coo, which I was not. Brian led all of the tech side of the business. You could have somebody who's more of a change agent. Right. Somebody who's coming in as the executor, somebody coming to get things done. Sheryl Sandberg, who is the CEO at Facebook for 15 years, was really the adult in the room for the first three to five years that she was there. You know, a 26 year old Mark Zuckerberg. And Cheryl was coming in as the seasoned executive to really help Mark figure out how to build and run a company. So the role of the CEO is very different. And we're either there for a season a reason, but rarely there for the lifetime of the company because the company's needs change. And the type of COO often doesn't change with that need of the company.

Right. That muscle is very, very hard to develop. What was that like for you to develop that muscle to be like. Or maybe even now when you go into companies or even in the alliance to be like, I'm going to build a company to a certain stage and then I'm going to, I know when to tap out.

Yeah. So it's about understanding again, like when I started as the COO at 1, 800 got junk. I was a very entrepreneurial COO. I had already built two other franchise companies. So coming in to help Brian franchise 1-800-GOT junk was easy for me for the first five of the six years. And I was really more there as kind of a mentor and a partner to show him what to do and how to do it and then to say, okay, you, you handle it and finance and just let me build, you know, sales and PR and marketing and operations in the call center and like all the stuff that needed to get done once the company got big. When we started approaching the 100 million mark, Brian needed a new COO. He needed somebody who was very detail oriented. Not me. Somebody could do matrix decision making. Not me. Somebody who could slow down and be more strategic. Not me. Somebody who knew how to build a half a billion dollar company. Certainly not me. And the new COO who came in, they actually brought the former president of Starbucks in to replace me. She was running Starbucks United States. She knew how to do it all, but she was the wrong culture fit. So she got let go after a year there. They then replaced her with a really close friend of mine who I've known for 35 years. He and I started a fraternity together in Ottawa, Canada. I was president year one, he was president year two. He has been an amazing COO for the last 10 years, taking them to a half a billion dollars in revenue, really from 100 million to 500 million. But he would have been horrible. He would have been admittedly useless for the first six years because he didn't know how to build a franchise company. He wasn't entrepreneurial. So he was the right guy from the 100 million to the billion and I was the right guy from the two to the hundred. So it's just understanding the season that the company is in, the skills of the entrepreneur and really what needs to be done, and I think that's key of any company looking to bring on those executives is understanding the culture fit and what they're responsible for.

Such a powerful statement. And I think a lot of people, when they go into this entrepreneurial world, they think they're going to dip into this new. It becomes the baby, right? And you think you're going to keep that baby forever. And I think that in this space of scaling an organization, you got to know when to, when to let go and the season that you're actually in. So that's just such a powerful skill.

It's funny you just mentioned, you know, raising a, you know, a baby. Well, for anybody who's listening that has children or even for any of us as adults. We were raised by parents, and at some point our job is not to stay at home forever. Our job is to leave the house and become adults. And, you know, the season that I'm in right now with my two kids is very different from others. My kids are 20 and 22. I'm guiding them a little bit, and I'm their friends. I'm not parenting. You know, my. My oldest son at 22, just flew to LA this week to go to a course in the movie industry for the next 30 days. And he's living with two other guys in a place that I never saw and he booked on his own. And that's very different than the way that I was parenting him 15 years ago. Right. When he was five years old and couldn't do so. Yeah. The company needs to understand what the role is of that executive. And if you. If you do it properly, it's like nitroglycerin. The whole company can just really explode with growth.

Yeah. I think the parent analogy for the business is so important because I think most parents, I think some parents actually do this. If you knew that you had. I mean, I guess it's like if you had a teenager who's an athlete and you had a chance for a. For a scholarship, Right. And you could get a coach or you could get, you know, somebody to come in and be like, I'm going to take your child who's really good at lacrosse or wrestling or football or baseball, whatever it is, and we're going to give the playbook and we're going to show you the workouts and show you the temp. Like, then you're just going to be. It's just going to be a catalyst for growth for that child, no matter which way it works out.

Yeah. And by the way, you mentioned coaching. I think any executive, no matter where they are in their career or where they are in the tenure with the company, needs to continue working on your skills. You know, I think it was Ray Kroc who built McDonald's, that said when you're green, you're growing. When you're ripe, you're rotting. And I think for all of us in our roles, we need to actually be constantly looking to improve. It's the reason I launched two. Two programs. One, a course that I launched two years ago called invest in your leaders, which is the 12 core leadership skills that every manager needs to be really good at so that they can excel in their career. And it's A I can walk you through what some of those modules are, but the stuff's really not covered anywhere and it's critical. Critical skills. Once you're in a huge company, like if you're an executive at Starbucks, they typically have a good strong learning department and they're working with the executives on these skills. But when you're in a company with 50 to maybe a thousand employees, you can't really afford to have a solid, seasoned learning department there, you know, growing you. And then at best, your employees are trying to find a good book to read or a podcast to listen to. But to put them into a course program where they can self guide themselves and really get better is critical. And then I just launched about three weeks ago a program called the OP Spot. So it's theopspot.com and it's a mastermind community globally for people that work in operations, reporting to the COO. So it's for all the directors of ops, ops managers, VP operations. And we've already got over 100 members in the first three weeks and we're going to scale that out to a thousand in the first year. And it's a community just for them to share resources and information and tips to grow their skills and to grow their company as well. And I've always believed that a leader's core job is to grow people. It's do we to grow their skills and to grow their confidence. And the more that we can flip that upside down so that our job is to grow people, the more they'll focus on growing the company for us.

The OP Spot. I mean, wow. That, that, that is a well needed, kind of, I think underserved community for sure.

It's again, a community where if I stay focused on what I've always done as a leader and growing the people's skills, growing their confidence. Why isn't there a community for them? Right, there's, as you mentioned, people in marketing, they can all go to the HubSpot conferences. Unbound, they can all go off to. There's dozens and dozens and dozens of conferences and events and online mastermind communities for people in marketing and tech and finance. But there was never a place for operations and people that lead people, managers in all the business areas. If we don't grow their skills, the company stagnates or at best we just keep doing things the way we've always been doing them without any training whatsoever. I talked to a group of CEOs recently. There was about 200 CEOs and I said, how many of you in the audience have had at least an hour's training on how to do a proper job interview. And there were seven people said that they've been trained on how to do an interview. And then I said, how many of you have actually interviewed and hired people? And all 200 put their hands up. I'm like 193 of you have no idea what you're doing. And you might be doing it well, but you might have just been doing the same job interviewing for the last 10 years. Maybe that's why it's hard to find people as you have no idea what to do it. We would never send our kid off to play little league baseball without teaching them how to hold the bat or toss the ball or catch the ball. We'd give them the basics. Otherwise they'd come home from baseball practice and say, daddy, baseball sucks. It's like, no, Johnny, you suck at baseball. You know, the reason that business is so difficult, because business is actually really easy. The reason business is so difficult is almost every business leader out there has never been trained on how to lead and grow people. That's why it's hard.

What are some of the other common themes that are coming up in the Civo alliance? Especially, I guess, with, you know, all the changes going on in the, in the world right now? From a business perspective, economic perspective, what are you seeing?

One is just thinking about the business and trying to control the amount of waste, whether it's waste on people, time and money. Right. So they're not actually churning through and blowing through their resources. That's one second. One is making sure that they are leveraging AI. We were talking at one of our recent CEO alliance events and we said the only people whose jobs are at risk are the people who are not leveraging AI. Anybody who is worried about AI and learning it, they're going to be fine. Anybody who's using AI on a daily basis, their jobs are going to be fine. But anybody out there who's worried about it not learning, they'll be out of a job. Another area that people, especially in the COO world, are focusing on and thinking about is how can they build a better relationship, better communication, better level of trust with their CEO. Right. It's like a spouse that wants to go through marriage counseling if you do it early. My wife and I got married a year ago. We started doing marriage counseling that month so that we could build a high performing relationship together. We're not going to wait until we have struggles to get counseling. We're going to start Getting coaching around marriage right at the beginning. And there's a lot of COOs that are out there focusing on building better relationships, better level of communication, better levels of trust with their CEO and with members of their leadership team as well.

Let's go back to the AI thing for a minute because that's obviously a hot topic for a lot of folks. I was working with a AI startup back in 2009, 2010 was the first one I started working with and kind of saw, I think, a lot of the emotions that people are going through now, now that now with ChatGPT and several of the other ones that come out, I think I went through those emotions back in 2010, even before it was so generative as it is today. For folks who are really like, where do you think folks start with that? Because I think it's so interesting that how quickly it's evolving. And I think the smart people that are coming up with cool prompt systems building on top of AI things. Where do you think people should start at?

Well, the first starting point is realizing that AI is not ChatGPT. ChatGPT is one of a current 5040 different AI tools that are out there. There's roughly 1500 different tasks that can be performed using different types of AI. So it's photo editing, video editing, you know, speech, there's all kinds of stuff that can be done. So I think the area that people have to start is by spending about one hour a week at minimum. And this is everybody at every level of every company should play with. And I'll give you a great tool. I just dropped it in the chat called There is an AI for that. If we can share that with your listeners. If you play with that tool and look at the different tools that exist and try to find somewhere between two to five tasks a week that you can automate or optimize or, you know, hack in these different ways, just play with these different tools. So if you're a video editor, you're probably not going to use chat GPT at all. But you might use Mid Journey or you might use descript, or you might. So playing with these different tools and trying them out in your job is probably the best way to go. And then what I would have companies do is report back in kind of like the old 1980s version of the suggestion box. How about we report back in on a weekly basis the one or two things that we just use some AI tool for and how we helped our company get more efficient or how we helped ourselves get more efficient so imagine if everybody in the company played with AI and then reported back in and said, hey, here's something I did, here's something I tried, here's something I learned, and here's the tool that I used that could be a very, very powerful debrief with the rest of the company. That's how I would get started.

It's interesting, I recently was in a meeting with a casual food franchise and I thought it was really, really interesting that they were very, very focused on the, I'll call it the low hanging fruit, increasing their marketing spend, generating some new sales. And I was listening in this meeting and I was actually really surprised how I think most their senior leadership was there and nobody was really addressing this word efficiency. Like how do we get more efficient?

Yeah. The working title for my very first book, Double Double, was originally called how to Get More Done with Less People Faster. And if we're not addressing the opportunity to automate and optimize work, how to actually leverage tools that exist like AI, I think we're out of business. I heard a saying years ago that's really always struck me and it's if the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, you're out of business. So if executives are not not only embracing these tools, but proactively trying to get their employees to leverage them and embrace them, they're out of business or they're out of jobs. Now I saw an executive on a plane, this is probably going back 10 years ago, but he was literally typing with two fingers, you know, on his laptop. In my mind, I was thinking, if I was on your board, I would give you three weeks to get your typing skills to 70 words a minute or I'd fire you. Like, you cannot be productive as an executive in a company. Now we know that to be true. Today those executives are literally out of jobs. Now you look at 25 year olds that are leveraging zapier, zapier and putting all these automations in place inside of companies. 25 year olds can kick a 55 year old's ass into work today because they can leverage a tech stock and automate work and see it in a very different way. So I think companies also need to find a bunch of 25 and 30 year olds, part time freelancers, global people, whatever, to come in and help us understand AI, leverage AI, integrate AI and also find other technology tools to automate and optimize our workflows as well. But if we're thinking that we're going to keep working harder. And we're going to out hard work our competition. We're going to end up like the fly on the windowsill. Working hard is like trying to bang your head on the window and get out the other side of the window. You end up dead on the windowsill. And I think that's what's happening to a lot of companies today.

Yeah, I think that's just going to continue and I think it's going to be the new skill set is really going to become about how can you do things more efficiently versus, you know, work like the Scrooge McDuck work smarter versus harder kind of theme.

I think that the old Protestant work ethic that our grandparents told us, you know, work hard, work hard, was actually probably good for the 1970s. But now that we have automation, we have tech tools, it is about working smarter. It's about frankly finding like the to do list doesn't mean we have to do it. All the stuff that has to get done, the first thing we have to do is say, do we really need to do it right before we outsource stuff, let's really ask ourselves, do we need to do these things? Will we get a high enough ROI off the money and time that is put into those things and should we just kill them right now? That's step one. Once we decide if the things we're going to keep, then the key is not to outsource it yet, but to optimize the system. Don't outsource a bad system. Let's see if we can optimize the system to make it faster, make it leaner, make it simpler. Right? Then again, before you outsource something or before you hire somebody, let's see if you can automate it. Because if you can have a system doing it for you, that's way better, way more productive, you're going to get higher ROI than hiring or outsourcing. Then you go to outsource and then you just delegate to somebody. Right? So it's stop optimize, automate, outsource, delegate, in that order.

I want to go back to. You said something that I wrote down here in my notes as I'm building my podcast notes. You said something I haven't heard many people speak to high performance relationship. Last week I had a gentleman on the podcast. Miguel Garcia has been married for 39 years, owned eight businesses, sold three of them, had had 15 children. And hands down, he was just this beast who just, you know, was like every day 15 children had to get three meals a day, every day. So entrepreneurship became his thing like there was no other option. But he credits the whole entire old success on being in a high performance relationship and having the right partnership and the right support system in place. And the fact that you're just in the beginning of that is amazing.

Well, I think you need to have high performing relationships at all areas of your life, right? Like you really need to work on your relationship with your spouse, with yourself, with your kids, with your, with your peers that you work with, with your direct reports, with your friends. I think anybody that really works on those relationships at all levels and kind of every, every area of our life, they're the ones who are going to be able to, to get more done, right? The, the relationship with your spouse is going to make you feel better. You're charged up. You go into the day in a good way. You're, you're doing it for a reason. You get to share stuff with somebody in an exciting way. You get to share the journey because at the end of the day, none of this matters. This is just what we do to make money, right? We're all walking each other home. We're all going to die. So the time that we spend at work may as well be for a cause or, or to at least earn enough income to do the cool stuff with your spouse and your kids and yourself, right? But then at work, you need to have those high performing relationships as well. And too often I see executives really working hard, but not working on the relationship with their boss. They might bitch about their boss, they might complain about their boss, they might try to avoid their boss, but they often don't work on that relationship. They often don't. Get a marriage counselor to work with you and your boss, right? I have a woman, Dr. Patty Ann Tablin, who's speaking at our COO alliance event for this month, and she's a high performance marriage counselor for Wall street power executives. Wow. She also works with CEOs and COOs or COOs and VPs, and she helps them bridge the gap and work on communication and trust and calling them on their blind spots. And you have to continue to do that at all layers of the business. If I have really high performing relationships with each of my direct reports, they'll go through brick walls for me to grow the company. But if in any way our relationship isn't strong, our communication isn't strong, the trust isn't strong, then at best, I'm pushing rope, right? I can't get the results from them. So I think it's critical that people work on that.

In a different podcast I had this gentleman on. His name is Will Baggot, and he's a strength and conditioning coach for NFL players. Or, I'm sorry, people who are going to the NFL, just to be clear. And what's interesting is, is that he saw people who would come to him, his programs. Some of them would go off to prison, and some of them would go off to the NFL to make hundreds of millions of dollars. He said that over and over again. I asked him, I said, where is that little thin line? Where does that thin line change for you? And he was adamant about that. No matter how good the person was, how athletic the person was, how just naturally gifted the person was, it was always the differentiator between, you know, good and great or high performance was that person who could consciously seek coaching and say, like, hey, point out the thing I'm missing here. Point out the thing that I may be not paying attention to and help me fill in that gap.

And again, coaching can come from your peers. It can come from your church, it can come from your friends, it can come from your parents, can come from teachers, or it can come from, like, formal coaching programs that you might be paying somebody. But I've seen people that have come from the poorest of the poor, like super homeless, single mom raising four kids. I have a very close friend who never owned a new pair of shoes until he was 13 and never rode in a car until he was 12 or 13. Had never been to a grocery store until he was 12 or 13 because they were on food stamps. But he had a really good circle of friends that he spent time with, and they talked about what they were going to do when they were older, and they decided to try to break out of it together. And, you know, this guy's the CEO of a pretty large company with about 500 employees doing about 50 million a year. He's a YPO member. So he I kind of grew up lucky, right? I grew up with a mom and dad. They were together and middle class. My dad ran his own business, grew up in the church. And like friends and sports, I kind of had it lucky in a way, but I still had to work on those relationships as well. I think. I think it's a choice that people work on that stuff. It can start later, too. Like, I didn't go to any counseling or therapy until I was 52 years old. I went to my very first sessions with a counselor or a therapist when I was 51 years old, and I did over 50 sessions with Dr. Patty Ann Tublin when I was in my 51st year of life. And I went in deep, man. Like deep.

Some will say that's the only way to go, man.

She was not easy on me at times, but she was good.

That's fantastic.

That's fantastic.

What are some of the other places that you focus on when it comes to high performance relationships? So you've already, you know, you've already said, you know coaching, you've already said, you know, some form of therapy in some way, shape or form. What are some of the other factors?

Well, I'll go into some of the skills that I cover in my invest in your leaders course because I think that's really where I, I packaged them all because they're not in any of my six books. So if I was, I'm going to try to go off the top of my head and rattle them off. The core skills that anyone in business needs to be good at to excel in their role, whether they're a CEO or a COO or any executive or manager, situational leadership, coaching, delegation, one on one meetings, interviews, project management, time management, running effective meetings, classroom teaching, managing conflict. There's two others in there that I'm going to skip on right now that I can't grab. That's 10 at least. Those 10 core skills are so paramount and most people have never had any training in that. Like you've run meetings your whole life, right. You've run zoom meetings and in person meetings and phone calls. Have you ever had at least an hour meeting on how to run highly effective meetings?

I actually have, yes.

You're one of the few. Right. And most executives have had no training on running one on one coaching meetings, but they do run on ones they've had no training on running leadership team meetings or you know, town hall meetings or state of the unions or annual meetings or quarterly planning meetings. Like they've never. But they're doing it all the time or, or situational leadership. The ability to adapt your leadership style on a situation by situation basis so that if you're leading one person, like let's say I have a guy on my team, Jesse, who's my head of business development. There's certain projects that I will be very kind of micromanaging with him. There's other projects that I'm going to kind of brainstorm and work together with him on. There's other project areas I'm going to let him just work on it on himself and come to me if he has problems. There's other areas we'll never talk about and I'll never even praise him on because he's freaking unbelievable at it. And that's the same person who's making 300 grand a year. That I adapt my leadership style on a project by project basis. And I do that with all 13 of my direct reports. Right? I adapt my style. So that's a key skill for executives to understand is the four different leadership styles. How to decide what style to have and how to actually apply it in a way so that you're leading your direct reports in the way that they're starving to be led. Those are the kinds of skills that people need to be better at. Coaching is something we use day to day as a leader, right? Helping somebody get better in whatever they're working on, understanding when to apply praise and when to apply direct feedback and how to provide, you know, growth and feedback, how to get your subordinate or the person that's reporting to you to come up with their own areas of feedback so that they're more open to listening to you. Or delegation. That blows me away that executives have never had any training on delegating work. And we delegate work all the time. But Parkinson's, Parkinson's law says that work expands to fill the space that we give it. So if you don't delegate properly, then of course your projects take longer than you want because you're not delegating in a proper way. No different than asking an executive to, hey, Neil and I are going to grab dinner. Get dinner for us. My EA could say, you know, plan dinner. My EA could plan the best steak dinner with like, unbelievable restaurant. We could drop 500 bucks on dinner for two. But what I really meant was, like, get Chipotle delivered with, you know, ubereats and we're just going to sit at my home and, you know, have some water and grab dinner and do some work because they delegated it poorly. She overspent on budget and wasted three hours of our time having to go to where you know what I mean? So that's an area that I think executives need to be better at. That's why I launched the invest in your leaders course, is to help executives understand the key systems that they need to be more effective in their roles so that they get promoted, so they don't get fired, so that their team likes them, so they get more results and so that work gets easier.

It is fascinating to me that things like body language, delegation and a bunch of situational leadership and a bunch of other points that you made it's like that probably makes up 75% of the.

Job for a leader. It does. For anyone really leading people, it's at least 75. Because the ideal state is we're not supposed to be doing work. In an ideal state, the leader should be doing nothing other than delegating work and then growing the people's skills and confidence so they can take more off their plate. That's what really propels the growth of the organization. And as soon as the leader has the confidence that our job is to recruit and attract great people, onboard great people and delegate more to them, but the more that we're sitting doing work, the slower our company is actually going to run. Right? It needs to get done, but not by me. And then also taking. I've been working with all of our COO alliance members on this. Take a look at what your effective hourly rate is and then delegate anything below your effective hourly rate. Or as Dan Martel in his book, buy back your time, he gets even more conservative and says, take your hourly rate, divide it by four, and at least delegate everything less than that. So if you're, you know, a $240,000 a year employee, that's about $120 an hour divided by four, that's 30 bucks an hour. Why the hell are you doing any minimum wage or $25 or $30 an hour tasks? Like, why am I paying you $120 an hour to $30 an hour work? It makes no sense. My EA, who's been with me for eight years now, I got her to hire an assistant six months ago in the Philippines so we can get a lot of the admin work off Meredith's plate so that she can now have a $6 an hour person doing a lot of the admin stuff for us. Right? I don't want to be paying Meredith's 96 grand a year. I don't want to be paying her 46, 48 bucks an hour to $6 an hour tasks. It doesn't make any sense, right?

I go back to the mindset shift in that is so critical for people understand that. Because a lot of people, you know, especially with the, I guess some of the AI stuff coming on, it becomes about, why are you taking away the things from me that I used to do or focus on?

You can rage against that, but it's coming in fast and furious. So I would say learn to embrace it. Learn to embrace those tools. Because again, the only executives that are going to be in trouble because of AI are the ones that don't embrace AI. The executives and leaders that embrace AI are going to become indispensable, Right? They're going to be the ones that are supercharging the company. We'd never ever chance getting rid of them. My grandfather, let's. Let's say your grandfather and my grandfather, or great grandfathers, you know, wrote us a letter 100 years ago. Advice to Neil and advice to Cameron. Their advice would have been be a really good farmer, be really good at raising animals, and be really fast at riding horses so you can get from point A to point B. None of that advice is relevant today. We have grocery stores and Uber Eats and I got a car that drives me, like, as best as their advice would have been 100 years ago. It's completely useless today. Well, these layers of technology that we can use to, to take and scale our companies make everything we do in the way we do it completely irrelevant. And we can hold onto the past and get really good at farming and, you know, raising animals and riding horses, or we can adapt. I say adapt or die.

Yeah. And the cycles at which this is now moving is so different. I happen to have both of my grandfathers still alive.

Okay.

And. And my one grandfather on my mom's side every year on his birthday, I asked him, tell me a story. Tell me something about when you were like, little that, like, you recall so we can talk about it. And I think it was his last maybe two birthdays ago. I said, you know, tell me. Tell me something that blows your mind about the world today. And he told me this story about. He's like. He's like. I remember growing up in, you know, grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He's this little old Sicilian, Italian Brooklyn guy. He's like, I remember my having a birthday party and my dad took me to the bowling alley and we were bowling. And when you would bowl back then, little poor, er, because everybody's poor, then poor, er, kids would climb out of the rafters and reset up the pins and then roll the, roll the ball back to you. And he's. And he goes, now I can bowl on my iPad.

It's insane. My grandfather rode a horse and buggy to Christmas dinners. And his first telephone number was 27. The village that he was in, he had the number. I still have his little ruler with his phone number. 27. That's ridiculous. But, like, there were only probably 50 telephones in the whole village in the first place, right?

And I think why it's important is I think a lot of people disconnect from like how, I mean, like if that took the, the bowling alley, right, the, the phone number 27 down to, you know, now mobile phones now voice the phone call 13 years ago, 12 years ago, you know, to the big classic ones are you would never think about putting your children in a car with strangers or you would never think about giving somebody a room in your house. And now Airbnb and Uber, you know, and that whole world has just shifted. What is possible. Totally.

Yeah. The speed of change is very, very relevant and very on time. And I think, again to your point, listening in on any of these executive meetings, if teams are not talking about this on a weekly basis, I think they're definitely in trouble. Like, I have a note, I'm talking to my leadership team in an hour and one of my notes that I'm going to be talking to them is related to this and it's AI use case in each of your areas and sharing AI updates on a weekly basis. I'm, I'm literally going to be talking about that today. I used AI this morning just for fun and I did 20 emails. I had chat GPT write 20 mid size and 21, you know, one sentence emails about the op spot. And it was like a five minute task for me. And then I spent about 10 minutes, you know, making them actually perfect because it had a couple things slightly off. But to come up with 20 emails over the course of total elapsed time for me was an hour. I could have never done that an hour before. Now I send them off to my email guy and I challenge him to start using ChatGPT. I just wanted to try it and see, but then I can say, okay, here's what I did, here's what I tried, here's what I was successful at. Now you go do it right and start doing this all the time.

Well, you know, one final question here. In your experience in, in the alliance and, and, and the things you're seeing, what do you think are some of the things that are on the horizon that are really exciting for you?

Well, for me or for my clients? I think for, for my clients what's exciting is the ability for them to connect with a global group of COOs. Right. We've got members of the CEO alliance from 17 countries. Wow. We launched, we launched the op spot three weeks ago and we've got members, over 101 members already and we've got them from seven countries in the first three weeks. I think there's a huge opportunity for them to learn from each other. The amount of differences and similarities that people in these operations roles are seeing and learning from a global perspective is huge. The ability to hire people in Eastern Europe and Latin America that you can outsource to that have very, very strong functional depth at a fraction of the cost in the United States and Canada is extraordinarily huge. I think anybody that is like, I'm only going to hire people in the US Or Canada, you're out of a job. Like, you're out your business. Like, we need to, to adapt or die. So I'm really fascinated by that global perspective that's happening for all companies. And the ability to attract talent and retain talent and leverage talent and learn from talent all over the world, I think is really cool. For me, it's. My wife and I, we're just living our bucket list life. We've both created bucket lists that we share publicly with about 101 different things that we want to do and cross off. Last week we were hiking in Uganda with gorillas, and next week we're driving in Western Europe, hitting six countries by Porsche with 12 other couples each driving their own Porsche. And we're doing, you know, a different castle every night. And just, we're literally chewing through our bucket list. So that's kind of what I'm focusing on.

I love that. That's fantastic. Yeah. I'm watching your, your social media and having you post something very business savvy, very businesslike for a couple posts, and then the next thing you know, you're on a, a boat or doing a photo shoot or in Uganda is pretty amazing.

Yeah, well, we're. I think it's, it's lifestyle by design. Right. We're. My, my wife is, as she calls it, the captain of our bucket list life. I'll drop our bucket list into the chat if you want to share it or you want to read it. But we're just trying to inspire others and then also live our best lives. And we, we both realize that at the end of the day, none of this matters. This is just what we're doing to make money. We may as well have fun along the journey because we're all just walking each other home.

Yeah, I love that. What a great quote to wrap up here with. We're all just walking each other home.

Be the change you want to see in the world. Right. If you want people to be open and honest, you got to be open and honest.

Okay?

You want people to be accountable, you better be accountable. You know, you want people to care, you better care.

Right.

And they have to sense that it's not self centric. You've got to stay true to yourself and just be that example. It makes.