How To Get The Most Out of Your Employees | Cameron Herold (Podcast 321)

Most of us, as companies, train our employees on what we train them on what we do. We train them on our how to run our business and what our product is and how to work with our customers and how to use our internal software. That's the what we do. Where we're really missing is training them on the why we do what we do. And where I obsess about is the how we do what we do. In this episode, I reveal strategies to supercharge your team's growth and transform your meetings into productive sessions. You will learn the art of situational leadership, how to build a training budget, and why praising your team is crucial. You will discover the key to effective meetings and how to hire accountable individuals. By the end of this podcast, I'll be more than ready to supercharge my team's growth and productivity.

G', day, my friend. Look at you.

Taki. How are you?

I'm so great. I just wanted to say, firstly, welcome back, and secondly, a little bit of gratitude for what we did together last time. Because you were here maybe a year, year and a half ago, and we talked Viv vision, vivid vision is amazing. For those of you guys who don't know Cameron, I mean, in a sec you can tell a little bit of your story, but right now, I don't know everything that you used to do, but I know that right now you run this incredible coaching program called the COO alliance, which is like, the only. I think, as far as I know, it's the only coaching program. If it's not the only, it's certainly the best coaching program for second in charges for the founder and the team. Do you want to kind of talk about why it matters?

I have a book coming out about it called the Second in Command, coming out in January. And I was the second in command for a company called 1-800-GOTJUNK. Um, but I had also twice before that, been the second in command for two other businesses that we grew to over a hundred million as well. So I had done it a couple of times. And I'm very entrepreneurial. I always have been, and I've run my own companies. But I've recognized this other need for these people that were really running the business for the entrepreneurs. And they're very different. They're very different DNA. They have a very different personality profile. If you think of, you know, Colby profiles or disc profiles, they're just completely different profiles from their entrepreneurial counterpart. So we were sending these coos off to all these events like YPO and EO and Vistage and Genius Network and Boardroom and Maverick and all these amazing places for entrepreneurs to go learn, but their COOs don't fit in that group. And then there were groups for marketers and engineers and lawyers, but there was no group for the second in command of real companies. So we put in place a $5 million floor. Yeah, we've got members now from 17 countries. You know, you know, Dan Martell, Dan COO is a member now from the SAS Academy. Um, we've got. So we've got just as a really cool, eclectic group, our largest members, about a billion and a half in revenue. And to qualify, you need to do at least 5 million just to get in the door.

Amazing. So we were chatting a month or two ago about this session we're about to embark upon, and we had. We brainstormed a few options. And you said that there's this thing that you've been doing lately with your clients, which is like an internal leadership development system, sort of.

Is that. Yeah, yeah. And I'm going to talk about kind of the genesis of this and. And where I learned about this. But my obsession in business since 1989 has been to grow people. And I was groomed this way by a mentor. He was the founder of a company called College Pro Painters, which I helped scale. College Pro is the world's largest residential house painting company. And I'm going to talk a little bit about that. But when Greg was grooming me there, he kept telling me that my core job was to grow people, not to do stuff. My job was to delegate that stuff to people and if they couldn't do it, to grow their skills and then give them more and grow their. It wasn't to do things, it was. So I've always visualized myself as this leader in charge of growing people. And I get frust frustrated watching these companies where the entrepreneur is growing themselves. And then they're saying it's really, really hard to get things done. And like, well, you're not growing any of your team. And the business keeps getting bigger. So every day it's harder and harder for them to do the job. And I'll talk a little bit about where we're screwing that up. So that's been my recent obsession for the last probably 18 months with clients. But for the last 33 years, it's just always been the way I've operated. And I just realized people weren't.

Yeah, a hundred percent. Let's do this. I'm going to take a step back and let you drive. I can't think without a pen. So while you chat, I'm going to be kind of taking a bunch of notes every now and again. I might share some notes, if you're okay with it. From time to time, I might pop in and ask the group a question or a clarifying thing just to make sure I'm on track. But let's have as much fun as they'll let us and then a little bit more so we feel like we're getting away with something.

So what I've been focusing on is this concept that I've been thinking about is two ladders. And to grow our people, they'll grow our company. And the reality is, I think as business owners, we often overcomplicate business. You know, we would never send our kid off to learn how to play tennis to his first tennis lesson without at least teaching him how to hold the racket and maybe hit a ball. We give them the basics, right? We'd never send them off to Little league baseball without teaching them how to hold the bat and throw the ball or catch the ball or even cricket, how to, like, bowl. You know, you teach the kid the basics, otherwise they come home at the end of the day and they go, daddy, baseball sucks. It's like, no, Johnny, you suck at baseball. And I think that's the way I've been thinking about a lot of us in business as well. As Taki mentioned, I've done a lot in my past. I've written five books. My sixth one is coming out in January, called the Second in Command. One of my books appeared in Richard Branson's Necker Island. It was actually in his library on Necker. I've had dozens of my friends have been to Necker before the hurricane kind of blew it off the bookshelf into the ocean. I don't think Richard actually ever read the book, but it is actually true that it was spotted in his library. I want you to now probably didn't because. Not because he read it. It was probably a friend of mine, Yannick Silver, that put it there and said he spotted it in the library. I want you to keep your mind open that maybe I'm right. Maybe some of those ideas will work in your business. So really show up with our dumb hats on today and say, we don't know any of this. And I'm willing to just listen to Cameron kind of go on and see how I can apply these systems into my business. So to start us off, I'm going to read a list of 12 things that happen in Our business day to day. I'd like you to keep count and just write down how many of these 12 things or count on your fingers or whatever. How many of these 12 things right now are frustrating to you in your business today? Do your employees, do your managers, do they know how to adapt their leadership style on a situational basis? Or even to be more frank, have you ever trained your leadership team and managers on the actual concept called situational leadership? So if that's a no, count one on your fingers for no, you're not doing that. Have you got managers or leaders in your company who coach other people? If you do, you can count that as a two. Do you have managers who teach people things? Maybe three or four people at a time, either in a classroom or over zoom? Are they teaching them skills or things in the business or ways to be better as leaders, or maybe ways to use your product or your service? So are any of your team ever in a classroom training situation? Again, you can count three. Do any of your managers or leaders delegate tasks or projects to their direct reports? Or do you delegate projects to to your direct reports? Do any of you hold meetings, whether it's over the phone or in person or in zoom? Or do any of your managers hold meetings where they invite other people to attend? Or do any of your employees show up at meetings? So clearly you're all counting that as a yes. Do any of your managers or leadership team conduct job interviews where they interview potential people to join your company? Do any of your employees feel like they're overwhelmed with email? Or do you feel like they don't reply to emails or things get lost with Slack or email or sms? You know, are they overwhelmed with a lot of that? Do they struggle with getting done fast enough for you? Do you feel like, you know, the work is expanding? Almost like Parkinson's law where work expands to build a space that we we give it? Or do you feel like your team is very productive and really efficient with their time management? Do you feel like your employees are completely aligned with your vision or not? So this is your counting, if they're not aligned with your vision, if they can't read your mind, if they're not truly following that vivid vision idea? Do any of your managers or leaders struggle with conflict? Do you find that they're arguing or not getting along, or there's politics in the workplace, that kind of thing? Do any of them run one on one meetings where they're actually coaching Any direct reports, you know, where they're coaching people on a one on One basis on a weekly basis. And then lastly, do any of them have to manage projects ongoing? So rolling out projects with multiple steps. So just write down how many of those you actually have them doing. So most of you struggle with or at least have some opportunity to learn how to get better in these areas. And that's what we're going to talk about today is how to get better at these core what I call the executive functioning skills. So my background, I grew up in a small town up in northern Canada and I was groomed to be an entrepreneur. My dad passed away in September, but he was my mentor, he was my, my kind of cheerleader. He was the guy who got me into entrepreneurship and trained my sister and my brother and I to all be entrepreneurs, which is really all we've ever done other than the time where I was kind of in those second in command roles. But again, very entrepreneurial. I ended up doing a talk that's on the main TED website. It's about let's raise kids, be entrepreneurs. It's had over 2 million views now. And it's really kind of my story of how I was groomed to be an entrepreneur. But you know, 20 years ago or 30 years ago, being entrepreneurship was not like it was today. It was very different. We were kind of vilified and, and I, I was groomed to be that. So I was trained on the skills to be an entrepreneur even though I had the DNA to be an entrepreneur as well. My real world MBA came at this company here, College Pro Painters, which I'll talk about in a little bit as well. But again, at College Pro Painters I went through tons of training programs on how to run the franchise, how to actually then coach franchisees, train franchisees, hire them. Kimball Musk was one of my hires. I hired Elon's brother Kimball back in 1993 and his brother Peter Reeve, sorry, his Cousin who built SolarCity were both employees of mine. Again, it was because College Pro Painters gave us the training to actually run businesses. So that became very formative in me and started my mindset around growing people. I joined mastermind communities like the Entrepreneurs Organization or Boardroom. I was a member of EO for five years. I was a member of Genius Network for seven years. I was a member of Mastermind Talks for five years and Baby Bathwater and all of these organizations where I knew that if I grew my skills I could scale up the organization because of the Entrepreneurs Organization. That's where I met Brian from 1-800-Got Junk. As you know, I came in as the second in command at 1-800-Got Junk, and we built that company up together. Had I not been in that mastermind community or surrounding myself with these people, I wouldn't have had the confidence or the skills to necessarily go up to that next level. My kind of passion and my focus at 1-800-GOT junk was really around growing people. I helped take the company from 14 employees to 3,100 employees in just under six and a half years. And it was because of my focus and obsession of growing people that we went from 2 million to 106 million in revenue as well. So I've always really been kind of focused and obsessed around growing people. At College Pro Painters, every year we had to go out and get 800 new franchisees. We had three months to find 800 franchisees on board them, sign franchise agreements with them, and train them to run their own business. And then in one month, we had to train those 800 franchisees to go out and hire 8,000 university students to be painters. And then in the next four months, we painted $64 million in houses. 8,800 people would quit on August 31st. 60 of us at the head office would get drunk and the 30 of us, the top of the company, me included, would wake up September 2nd and we would do it again. So Every year for four years, I built an 8,800 person company off of a team of 50 or 60. I was really good at kind of growing people to get there at 1-800-got junk. We grew the company up into 330 franchisees that we had to train. And they had over 3,000 painters and navigators out in the field that we trained. We built learning management systems, we had LMS systems, internal videos, we had training manuals, we had certification programs. All stuff that I'll talk about today. And then even now in what I do, I've got CEOs pay me $4,300 an hour to give them coaching advice. They sign up for a one year contract for 78 grand. They get one call with me a month for 90 minutes and they're paying me that kind of value. So I've again, my world has been growing people and it stays kind of my where I am today. I think that most businesses don't get it right. We don't focus on the basics. We don't focus on the nuts and bolts of what training really is because most of us don't really understand what it is. So I'm going to walk you through some different aspects of the Core things that we need to train our people in and then how to actually build that internally as well. Right now, training is too random. It's kind of all over the place, right? It's stuff that you might be learning on your computer. It's your personal development plan. It's, you know, a manager tossing a book on some employee's desk and saying, here, read this. Maybe it's a video link that we send them saying, watch that. You know, maybe it's a seminar that we send them off to or a consultant that we bring in, or it might even be a training department that we've built internally that isn't necessarily focusing on growing the people in the right areas or in the right way. So a lot of our. It's kind of random acts of training. It's almost like a lot of our random acts of marketing. We need to get much more focused in the way that we train and grow our people. And I'm going to walk you through some of my methodologies on that. So I visualize every leader, every one of your managers, everyone on your leadership team, and even you as climbing up two ladders. And I kind of see them as their left hand and their left foot is climbing up the skills ladder, and their right hand and their right foot is climbing up the confidence ladder. And our job is to grow their skills and grow their confidence and grow their skills and grow their confidence. And if one of the ladders is shaky, they start holding on and they can't go up the other ladder. So we have to remember that our job is to always grow their confidence and grow their skills. And growing their skills gives them confidence, and giving them confidence allows them to take on more, which grows their skills. That's really what our core job is. So the first area we have to focus on, as I mentioned, is skills, right? What are the skills that we're going to get into and how do we focus? And the second area is that confidence. And I really need you to remember those two things. I don't think any of us as leaders do a good enough job at coaching and growing the confidence of our people. And we often try to give them the skills in areas that don't give us enough leverage as well. A leader's core job is to grow people. I'm 6 foot 4 and I'm standing beside this giant. So just remember that analogy that no matter how big you are, again, I'm six foot four. People can always be grown into something much bigger, no matter how good you are as a leader today, or how good one of your managers are. If they're not driven and wanting to continue to grow as a person, I would get them out of the organization because even the best athletes on the world have coaches. Sheryl Sandberg, who was one of the best COOs probably in history, was constantly working on her leadership skills. The core 40 people running Starbucks globally, 40 people at their C level and senior VP level all go through training every quarter on situational leadership and coaching. So when the some of the best of the best are still getting coached, if you have any employees that don't want to grow, I think you want to get those people out of the organization because our job is to always grow people and if we grow them, they'll grow the business. So what you need to ask yourself is, is what level of training program do you really need internally at your company? And what level of training are you really willing to pay for in terms of time and money or people hours to make it happen? I kind of think of it as everything is bronze, silver or gold. For most of us, bronze is just okay and it's good enough. Don't worry about getting to silver, don't worry about getting to gold yet. You certainly don't need to have a gold level training program like General Electric has with their Six Sigma or the Starbucks program or even the program I' built at 1-800-got junk. It's overkill for where most of you are. It's overkill for most businesses. But if we can get to bronze or silver, that's pretty damn good. Because most of us today don't even hit the podium with the training that we're applying right now. So Simon Sinek, who wrote the book Start with why, Simon was actually on our board of advisors four years before his book Start with why even came out. He flew out to Vancouver to meet Brian and I to see if what we were building was real. Introduced us to this concept of the golden circle. Right? We've all seen this, the why, how and the what. I think that most of us as companies train our employees on what we train them on what we do. We train them on our how to run our business and what our product is and how to work with our customers and how to use our internal software. That's the what we do. Where we're really missing is training them on the why we do what we do. And where I obsess about is the how we do what we do. So the why we do what we do is really stuff around training all the employees and Making sure that they are trained on your core history of the company, kind of how you got here, all of the crazy stories from inception, the hero's journey, all the ups and downs to where you are today. They're trained about your core purpose, they're trained about your core values, they're trained about your vivid vision, they're trained about kind of anything that is the cultural side, that's kind of the why you do what you do, your bhag. And it's making sure that you, as the CEO should do those training videos so that you get them done, you get them scripted, you get them recorded, and the employees can then watch all of those videos. And then you don't have to keep actually showing up to train the new person who shows up tomorrow when you just ran the session yesterday. So get those training sessions on video so that everybody can be relearning it. I'll also talk a little bit later about why you want to do a pretest before they go through this and a post test afterwards and even a retention test three months later. The basic bronze level is you getting your core values, core purpose, bhag, the history, your vivid vision, everything into video to inspire so that you can do it once and then for the rest of your life. These employees can all be ingrained in this. The how we do what we do is what I'm going to focus on today. The middle section, that middle. And I think that's where the real leverage comes from because it supports the what we do as well. So the 12 core skills that I'm talking about are these ones. Situational leadership, coaching, classroom training, meetings, one on one coaching, time management, interviewing, delegation, conflict management, email management, project management, and executing against your vivid vision. If your managers and leaders are really, really strong in these areas, your business will scale. If your managers and leaders are not strong in these areas, it's why you're feeling the frustration you're feeling today. It's why you're feeling like you're constantly hurting cats. It's why you're feeling like you're having to hold people accountable instead of hiring accountable people. You know, I had a CEO recently say to me, oh, it takes about 90 days after I hired someone to know if they're the right person. I'm like, that's because you suck at interviewing. You would never get married and say, well, I need to get married and see how it goes for three months and then I'll know if it's my right spouse. No, you do all that in the dating Period, before you decide to actually go to the marriage. So I want you to think about these core skills and ask yourself, what's the best way to get these deeply ingrained in your organization? And I'll give you a couple tips around this as to how you can either build this out internally or some of the kind of ways you can sidestep that and maybe even do it at an accelerated, easier pace as well. So each skill has a negative and positive to it. The positive is how it will really help your organization if your people are truly trained in this skill. And the negative is what's happening to your business today if they're not trained in this skill. So I'm going to go through each of the 12 very briefly just to kind of illustrate the point and show you how important these are in your organization today. So situational leadership. This is how a manager has to adapt their style of leadership based on two things. The person that they're managing on that specific project, how strong is their skill at that project, and what's their commitment level on that project. And each of the projects on their plate require a different style of leadership, whether it's very direct or more of problem solving or more coaching or more kind of a delegation where you're just there in a supportive role. And if your managers don't know how to adapt using this very simple model of situational leadership, they're really missing out. Now you can follow the model developed by Dr. Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard. It's covered in the one minute manager. I give a bit of a crash course, a more entrepreneurial version that I've included in my course. Invest in your leaders. But either way, you need to actually make sure this is the most important skill for every manager and leader. And if you guys have not been exposed to this, you're massively missing out. Again, this is the core skill that at Starbucks head office, the top 40 people in Starbucks worldwide get retrained on situational leadership every single quarter because they believe this is the core skill that's allowing them to scale every aspect of an organization. Coaching, right? Think about this for a second in terms of do people know how to use a Socratic method? Do your managers know how to to inspire? Do they know how to break down a project with one of their direct reports and grow them? Do they know how to inspire confidence in that direct report? Do they know how to step back and observe instead of actually getting over involved? Or are they micromanaging? And if you have any of your people who are struggling in their role, it's probably because their manager doesn't really know how to coach them. And if you haven't been trained on how to coach, you can either approach it in one of two ways. You can either be a player, coach someone who's really good in that role, who can train somebody in what they're really good at, or if you're a really good coach, and I've actually been certified in coaching, you can actually coach people on stuff that you might only be competent in. If you're really good at coaching, you can coach people on what you're competent in. If you're really amazing at something, you can possibly coach people on the one thing you're amazing app. The big opportunity is for us to train all of our managers and leaders in coaching so that they can actually coach all of our employees on the 10 to 15 different areas of the business they're involved in, not just on one specific thing. So it's really something to think about. Delegation, right? If you've ever had managers or yourself frustrated with the work that you get back isn't what you were looking for, or a project that you delegated takes too long or goes over budget, or employees are kind of bewildered and have to come back three times to ask for more, you know, information, that's because you suck at delegation. And there's some very, very easy systems that you can put in place. But every manager probably delegates at least one thing a day to every one of their direct reports. And if they've never been trained or given a simple system for delegation, then that's where some of the frustration in your business has been. You can see where we're kind of going with this, right? Each of these skills is very powerful if you have it, and it's causing you a lot of problems if you don't. And I see most of us as entrepreneurs, like flies trying to get out a window. We're going to keep banging our head on the window, but if we would just and turn right and go out the door right here, there's an easier path. Most of us are making it hard on ourselves one on one coaching. Here's one is really interesting. I was talking to a CEO in the CEO alliance the other day and he said he was really excited to get all of his one on one meetings off his plate, his direct reports. We're now going to start doing all their one on ones. And I said, well, two questions here. Number one, have you ever been trained on how to do one on one meetings? He said, no. And I said, you're now delegating them to your direct reports and they're now going to do one on one meetings. Who's training them? He goes, well, I guess I will. I'm like, no, but you've never even been trained on how to do them, so how can you train them on how to do them? And he scratched his head and he's like, holy, how am I supposed to do one on one meetings? And as soon as I talk to him about what a solid one on one meeting. A solid wise. I used to call goal setting and review a really good 30 minute meeting where you're working on delegation, support, coaching, applying situational leadership. I'm breaking down problems for them, making sure that the manager doesn't feel like they're being managed, but they're being supported. That's when you serve a turbocharged organization. He realized he had no idea how to delegate them, let alone how to actually do them. So we worked on putting that deep into his organization as well. Time management, I mean, oh my God. If you haven't been trained or if your managers. And by the way, if you go and ask your managers, have you been trained on time management? They haven't. They don't know how to take down a project or all of their complex projects, break them down into all the tasks that need to get done, letter their tasks into A's and B's, numerically order all the A's so it's a 1, a 2, a 3, etc, and do the same with the B's. How do you put a time block on all of the A's so you know how many hours or minutes each is going to take? How many minutes each of the B's are going to take. Delegating 80% of your B's and then putting your A's actually into the calendar for the time blocks. I just rattled that system off to you in one minute and most of you have never heard of it, nor do you use a system like that. And for sure your managers are struggling with getting done because they don't know how to manage time. So what you're hearing is I need more people. No, you don't need more people. You need to teach the people you have how to get more done with less people faster. It's by teaching them time management, by teaching them delegation, by teaching them coaching and situational leadership, et cetera, that you supercharge the organization. So think about interviewing for a second as a classic skill that managers need. If you have not trained your Managers on how to do interviews, right? And just think about that like, have you actually gone through training? And I don't mean have you interviewed people, I mean have you had someone teach you how to do open ended questions, closed ended questions, utilize the pregnant pause? Have you been trained in how to review a resume and analyze a resume against the scorecard? Do you know how to interview for cultural traits and behavioral traits and skillset? Do you know how to use torque and reference checks? Do you know how to sell or reverse the sell in the interview process so that you're selling without even having to talk? Do you know how to set up the room in the environment? Those are all things that if you don't do properly, you're going to be able to attract more A players into the organization and you're going to be able to know for sure if somebody's an A or a B or merely pulling the wool over your eyes. If you don't know how to interview, then at best your interview becomes the 90 days after you hire people, which is why your turnover is so high in the first three to six months is because most of our managers have never been trained. So it's a core, core skill. It astounds me how management teams and companies don't train every single person who manages anyone on how to do interviews. It's critical conflict. You know, this happens in our workplace all the time and it's even accelerated now because of the amount of written communication that happens in the workplace. The amount of written communication causing conflict from Slack and email messages and SMS is huge. But to teach people how to actually handle conflict in a very safe environment using a model or a couple of different models can be huge. So just ask yourself, if there's conflict between people in the workplace, do they pull out a physical model and work through the model together or just, you know, does politics get into place? Are you, are they going to HR and having HR solve the problems for you or are you having to get involved? If it's going well, they actually utilize a model. And then as Pat Lencioni talks about five dysfunctions of a team, you have good, healthy conflict that is driving the organization forward if meetings are run well. Elon Musk sent out a tweet about three years ago and he said to his employees, if you're in a terrible meeting, stand up and leave the meeting. So I sent him a text and I said, no, tell your employees to learn how to run meetings, fix the meetings, and they won't be in the shitty meetings that they have to walk out of anymore because if you fix the root cause of the problem, meetings don't suck at all. We often just suck at running meetings. But most of our managers are taking too long to cover things. Or they have too many people showing up at a meeting and they don't know how to turn people away. Or they bring seven people to a meeting, but only three people talk. Four people that are showing up are wondering why they're there because they're never kind of brought out into the discussion at all. So there's systems in place on what meetings to run and how to run them. The question is, have you trained your employees in that or not? Email management or now we're into like the Slack and SMS management as well. Do you have a system in place to manage the business to Inbox Zero? So at the end of every day, your physical inbox in your email is just as empty as your mailbox is at your house. So think about that for a second. If you go to your mailbox at your house, you don't sort through it and leave all the letters in the mailbox. You take them and as you're walking towards the kitchen, you grab the stuff that's going into the garbage. You put your magazines in a pile for later, you pull the two bills aside, you deal with those once every two weeks, and you open the one piece of mail that is right away. It's like, deal with it, drag it, delegate it, or delete. So there's systems around Inbox Zero that are really powerful. And again, I don't care whose systems use either mine that I learned from Starbucks, or, you know, getting things done or whatever systems you're using, the key is have you trained people to use these tools or the tools managing their lives? And if you go and look at any of your employees inboxes right now, or even better, ask your top 10 employees to send you a screenshot of their inbox in the email. It will scare the shit out of you. You. And if yours has more than 10 or 15 emails in it today, you're not managing the business as well as you could be as well. But there's huge opportunities there. Classroom teaching is anytime any of your leaders or managers teach two or three or more people on any area of your business, and are they using things like the abstract conceptualization, the active experimentation, the concrete experience, reflective observation? Are they covering the kinesthetic and auditory and visual sides of learning? And do you have a simple system in place to get them better at this? Or are they merely Standing up in front of a room, kind of wasting time with students sitting there wondering why they're back in grade four again. So there's systems again that can be very helpful. Project management really, really does seems to do well in IT companies. A lot of SaaS businesses because they really, it's a core competency of theirs. But most other businesses that aren't really heavily reliant on building out any of the tech stack usually suck at project management. And that's really about how do we get more shit done with less people faster, how do we not allow project create, how do we make sure that projects don't expand in terms of the amount of time that they take or amount of budget that they cost? And how do we not kind of let projects become these big hairy things that maybe we waste all this time on, but we don't really get results from. So there's opportunities to train your teams around that as well. And then lastly it's around executing against your vision. You know, if you're ever wondering why you feel like you're herding cats, it's because your vivid vision isn't really, really strong. My core process that I use to, to train people is I first recognize that I have to set a gap. They have to want to learn or they're just going to kind of close their ears and close their eyes and say, you know, they're not ready. So for every module or anything I'm going to teach someone, I give them a pre test and I rig it in my favor where for sure they're going to fail the test. No matter how smart they are, they're going to write this test and they're just not going to do very well in it. So that opens them up to, well, maybe there's something I can learn. So then you teach the them. After you teach them, you watch them doing it. After you watch them doing it, you practice it, you let them practice it and then they actually are doing it and doing it. I'm going to talk about each of these in a little bit more detail. After doing it, you do a post test to make sure that they remember what they've been trained. That's kind of like a bronze level of training right there. What I've covered, right? Pre test, teach them, watch them, practice them do it and post test, which is more than most of you are doing today, but it's kind of bronze level of a training program. After you let them reflect on it, then you want to go back and repeat the process again. You go Back through and retrain. So it's like duragi, demonstrate, observe, redemonstrate, assign a goal, give them a task and inspect. You go through the drag, you go through the drag, you go through the drag, and then you can actually certify them in the task. Now you're at more of like a silver level of training where you actually have certification models for each of the skills you're teaching them in. And then you can kind of take it to the next level, which I'm not really going to cover today. So I have an easy path for all of you. You can take a look at something. Invest in your leaders. It's a course that I launched about two years ago and I've got clients from around 17 countries are putting their managers through 12 modules. They actually are the 12 modules that we were just covering. So you can take a look at that. What I want you to understand though, is how your leaders in your company actually learn. So if you're going to build out something internally for yourself, you have to make sure that it covers the visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Visual means that there has to be some ability for them to watch some content, watch some others, watch a demonstration. Because many people learn from visual. A lot of people learn on auditory, which is actually reading or listening. And then the third part is the doing. People are learning from doing, from role playing, from practicing, doing worksheets, etc. So whatever program you put into your organization for any of these skills or any other skills, make sure that you cover those three styles of learning. So you're going to teach people the concept or the abstract conceptualization of a new idea of a new thing you're going to teach them. And then they move to trying it out and practicing it, which is the active experimentation. And when they're in that trying it out, they're kind of a little bit of learning by doing, right? Learning with, playing with it. They're learning by, by saying something into a mirror or role playing with another person. So you build that into whatever training program you build for people. And then the concrete experience is where you have them actually practicing and using the skill in their day to day. They're going to be learning from doing that, taking notes down as they're doing it. And then when you sit and talk to them afterwards, that's the reflective observation component. And then you can reintroduce the skill. So what I like doing is introduce the skill with a book, have them go through the whole cycle, then I can introduce the skill with a video Again, they can go through the whole cycle. Then I can introduce the skill again with maybe a consultant coming in. They can go through the whole cycle. So they could be doing a book and a video and a, a consultant just around interviewing. And that can become part of whatever you start building at your organization, you know, for any, any different skill area you want to teach people in. The key is to make sure that if you're building your own, that you incorporate all of these styles in, otherwise your learning is going to fall flat. Now this is something I took from Starbucks. I actually have their entire leadership training program from Starbucks. I'm not going to share it with you, but I have every single page because my mentor was being groomed as the CEO at Starbucks. So you can build a, you know, a real detailed program like they have, where they have, you know, books and readings and activities and workshops for every single skill area of the business. And often this is done when your company's at about 250 or more people, where you have a training department or a learning department or a really strong HR department that has some competencies. Here at 1, 800 got junk. We had six full time people in our training department because we had 3,100 employees system wide. So what this was one of the eight business areas I ran was our training department. And we built out our own videos and our own manuals and our own field training and our certification models and our own train the trainer models and our own workbooks and worksheets. You can do that as well in your company as well. It's a lot of work. So I recommend that you also look for, you know, putting books in your organization or even chapters of books. You know, you don't have to have them read the entire darn book. You can give them a chapter of some book that you like or you can give them a TED Talk to watch, or you can bring in some, some coaching and get people to work with them. You can send some of your employees off to conferences, very specific conferences that are going to help them grow and dedicate some money towards that. You can find mentors for some of your key employees. We had all six members of our leadership team at 1 8th under God Junk. Each had a formal mentor in place so that they could get grown. You know, I was being groomed by the COO at Starbucks. Our head of IT was being groomed by the head of IT for Abe Books. Our head of finance was being groomed by the head of finance for business Objects. So we all had mentors that were really there to grow us and grow our skills and grow our confidence. So if you're building out an internal training program for your company, sure that you include some aspect of that, you can use software that exists like something like Talent Guard. If you're putting in place certification models like I've built at college, pro painters and 1-800-God junk where you certify employees in certain skills and if they demonstrate a competency, they might get a bronze in the skill or maybe they get to silver with their seven or eight out of ten. If they're really proficient at something, they get a nine or a ten. And then you can use the certifications as a way for them to get jobs, job promotions or pay raises. And you hold people to wanting to get certified in skills, otherwise they can't get more money. And by the way, if you, if you build this proper model, which is more like a gold level training program, so you're training them, you're teaching them all this stuff, they're getting certified in these skills and they want to get certified because that's the only way they can get paid more. It's like a viral loop inside of your organization which propels your company forward. I suggest that you have a training budget in place. I suggest that you have have 1% of their annual wage or a minimum of $750 per person. But I suggest 1% of their annual wage. So if somebody, the $150,000 employee, spend $1500 a year on growing them. And by the way, if you're not willing to spend $750 to grow a person's skills for the year, you should probably fire them because the output that they get off of you growing them is probably a hundred X off of that 750. If you're worried about your employees, you know, I had people say, well, what if I paid for their training and they leave? What if you don't pay for their training and they stay? Let that one sink in for a second, right? What if you have all these employees and you don't train them? What's the negative impact that's having on your business every day versus investing $750 or 1% of their income, whatever's greater and really growing them. If they leave and go somewhere else, that's okay because it's worse off if you don't grow them and they stay. I believe that suffering is optional and that your R and D should stand for RIPP off and duplicates. There's companies out there that have created great Training programs. Just plug your employees into those or grab the good training material that's out there that you need to get better at and train them in that. I have mentioned my course to you a bunch of times. If you want to buy any seats for any of your members, if you use this promo code, it's Cameron H10. It'll give you 10% off each of them. So it's normally $757 per employee. Whatever. 10% off that gets you like 670 bucks. You can supercharge their growth.

If you think about the, the 12 core skills that we went through right at the start, these 12 kind of executive function skills, which one is the first one that you would teach situational leadership?

I actually did them in the order that I would recommend. The course that I even laid out is done. Yeah. On purpose. Because you know, you have to understand situational leadership to actually do coaching. Right. So if you really understand situational leadership, then you can apply it on a day to day basis in your coaching. And when you're coaching people, then you're doing, you know, a bit of the classroom teaching and a bit of the, you know, one on one coaching and a bit of the, you know, delegation. And you're helping them with time management and project management. So I kind of tried to think about it. For me anyway, it gave me a framework for, to visualize the madness.

Two things I would love to dig into. One is situational leadership, because you've got a twist on it. And the second is maybe a deep dive into the four stages of, of the training program. That kind of loop you drew. But if we could start with situational.

Leadership, Everybody write down the name of one of your direct reports and write down three to four different projects that are on that person's plate. Okay. So it could be Chris and, and Chris has to do project one, write it down. Project two, project three, project four, what each of those projects are after. They've written down all these projects. Yep. Now, now I want you to think about on a scale of 0, 1 or 2, what's their skill level on doing with that project? Are they no Skill, which is 0? Are they some skill, which is 1 or are they high skill? Is that 2 0, 1 or 2 skill? As an example, if you've never been trained in situational leadership, it doesn't matter how smart you are, your skill is zero. Right. It's not a reflection on us as a person. It's. This is a way that we're going to adapt a style to something so, zero, one or two points. I'm not good at it. I'm kind of good at it or I'm really good at it. Now, the second thing I want you to think about is their commitment to working on that actual project. Are they really excited about it? That's two. Are they, you know, kind of into it? That's a one. Are they not into working on it at all? That's zero. And commitment can actually change because of overwhelm. Maybe they're new and they don't want to screw up. Maybe they have too much on their plate. They don't have time for it. Maybe they're just really, really busy. Or maybe they just don't like it. Right? Maybe it drains them of energy. So think about what's their commitment level and put that down for each 0, 1 or 2. And then for each project, you're going to add up their total points. So for project one, they either have a total of 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4 points. For project two, the same thing. 0, 1, 2, 3 Or 4. For project three, 0, 1, 2, 3 OR 4. And just for fun, write down what the total point value is for your three or four projects. So maybe you go like 1, 0, 2 or 1 3, 3 or 3, 4, 2. All right, so here's what's really interesting when you think about this. The number is going to tell you what style of leadership leadership you need to give that person on a situational leadership basis. So here's, here's how I kind of use this model. Now I say on their commitment level, do they have 0, 1 or 2 points? And on their skill level, 0, 1 or 2 points. And that tells me what style 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4 to use. If they have a total point value of 0, I'm going to give the project to someone else. If they have a total point value of one, I'm going to tell them exactly how to do the project. Step by step. I'm going to literally micromanage the shit out of them because it's what they want want. It's exactly what they need. If they have a total point value of 2, I'm going to give them the step by step. I'm going to give them the plan, but I'm going to explain why we do it that way, how I came up with that methodology, ask them to see if they think anything's missing. But I kind of explain the why behind the what. If they have a total of three points on the project, I'm going to get them to Come up with the plan and make sure that they understand that I'm there. If they need their help, I've got a total open door to support them on it. I'm going to cheer them on while they're going through it. If they have a total point value of 4, I'm going to delegate the project. I'm not going to follow up, I'm not going to cheer them on. I'm not even going to have to bring it up again because I know they're going to knock the COVID out of the park off the ball. And it's kind of like if I cheer somebody on when they have four points, it's almost like me saying to Taki, hey Taki, good job running your coaching program. He's like, dude, I'm amazing at running a coaching program. Like it's almost patronizing, right? Or saying like, you know, when you've got a one year old child, you cheer them on for walking, but you don't cheer on your 14 year old for walking, talking. And you teach your 2 year old how to pour a glass of juice very differently from how you teach your 12 year old how to do something right. That's kind of a crash course. That, by the way, is like 24 or 25 hours of training condensed down to about three minutes. But that's why I had to change the model because I think they really overcomplicated it and they used all these behavioral scientists for it. The way I use this model is I look at Asana or Basecamp or Monday or Trello, whatever you use for project management. And I put the point value beside every project. So if I see Kelly is working on this project, I know how to lead her on that project and I know Kelly's working on this project. And I teach my employees the skill so they can come to me and say s to me on this. I'm like, it fast forwards the whole.

Conversation just to make it really clear for everybody and land this piece of the plane. Pick one of the projects, you've got their total score. Figure out what that person needs right now. Now, do they need to be removed from the project? Do they need to be told step by step how to do it? Do they need to be coached? Do they need to be supported and problem solved? Or do they need to just be let go? Can you just pick your first project and type in what you're going to do? D 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4.

And this is the kind of thing that this requires, you know, practice. So I've given you the concept, right? The abstract conceptualization. So now you get to go practice it and try it, and you can work together in breakouts, and you can talk to your team about it, and then you can actually use it day to day. You can try it in a sauna and try it in basecamp, work through it, and then you can sit down, which is the concrete experience. And then you can make notes on what's going well and what's not going well. And then you can come back and watch this again. Or you can go through the module on the course and go have your employees go through the module on the course and you relearn the concept again and you work through it again. And then you can read the book the One Minute Manager, which is all grounded in situational leadership, and you can go through it again. Again. That's how you go through the adult learning model of the abstract conceptualization, active experimentation, concrete experience, reflective observation. And this is why I say it's. It's so hard for so many companies to build their own training program because you don't have the competency that internally to do all this, or it'll take you years to build it versus, you know, put every employee through. Through the course and, you know, you're done. Simple. At least that gets you to bronze or silver, right?

Silver is a total win. So you've been working with. With hundreds of companies for, well, hundreds. Hundreds and hundreds of companies doing this sort of stuff for years and years and years. What's the number one thing that you think business owners should stop doing when it comes to developing their team like this? Well, like, we talk a lot about what we need to start doing. What's the, like, what's the one thing you. You just go, stop that?

Well, it's kind of like, stop not doing something.

It's not doing it. Stop not starting.

It's. I don't think I've found a single leader today that works hard enough at praising people and thanking people for what they're doing, what they're doing well for people, the effort they're putting in for living, the core values for. For trying. We don't work hard enough at raising their confidence level. When was the last time, Taki, you're married, right? When was the last time you told your wife. Do you tell your wife like that you love her? Once a quarter, Once a.

Once every six months, sometimes even more. I once famously got in trouble for saying, well, I told you I love you when we get married. And I just figured if Anything changed, I'd let you know that didn't go down that road.

No. You probably tell your spouse you love her multiple times a day because we're always, we're always deposit. And I don't think owners, I don't think entrepreneurs thank our employees or tell them what we're happy with. We give them another task, we give them another project, we show them what's broken. Oh, they know I love them. They've been here for four years. They're happy. Like, no they don't because all you've done for the last 21 days is show them a new project. A new. You haven't said thanks for getting that project done. Thanks for getting that project done. Thanks for nailing that project. All you're doing is piling more. And I think most of us as leaders, bring it on. Preach it, preach it, keep it. I just, I just, I really think that most, most leaders really suck at that. And I think it's sad.

I appreciate that a lot. By the way, the preacher was from.

My wife who's like, yes, make sure that's great.

I'd love to just spend a couple of minutes and do maybe five questions in five minutes. Cameron, if that's okay with you. Sachin says do you have a time budget for training? So you've talked about a percentage of cash. What's the time budget? Like how much time should a leader or a team member spend in this training process?

Well, it depends, right? Because we only have three inputs in our business. We have people, we have time and we have money. And the key is how do you get the highest return off of those three investments? So a leader can spend a lot of time in it, or you could spend two minutes and sign up seven employees to this course and tell the seven employees to each do two modules a week and do a five minute book record on Monday day. And you spent no time. You know there's, or you could develop all this yourself. You could spend all the time online looking for like. So that's a huge question. Right? When I was 16, my dad said, look, you're never going to be the smartest guy to figure this out. Just do what the best people are doing. Your R D has to stand for rip off and duplicate. So for me I just take a good system and I put it in place versus trying to figure it all out for myself. And, and is it perfect? I don't know. But it's way better than what we've got. And if I just plug them into X, then I can go and work on y. Right, Yep, agreed. But I do think that you should be put. Your employees should be spending 2 to 5% of their time at minimum on a monthly basis, weekly basis on growing their skills. Like one hour a week is not, there's not a ton of time to grow their skill set. Right. It's Stephen Covey, Sharpen the saw.

Sarah from the Workshop Whisperer has typed in. How do we make our meetings more effective? Obviously it'll depend on what kind of meeting. So Sarah, if you've got a specific meeting, let us know. To keep people focused on actions rather than just talking and going through the motions. In other words, how do we make meetings?

Yeah, I talk about this both in the course, in the meeting section of the course and in the book Meeting Stock. So every meeting has to start with the purpose, outcome and agenda. Right? The one sentence, why are we having the meeting? What are the three outcomes we're hoping for from the meeting and what's the agenda? Agenda from the meeting. So what are we covering? In what order are we covering all of these things and how many minutes are we going to spend on each agenda item? That's the starting point. So agenda, you know, if we're going to be talking about X X, it's three minutes talking about why it's 17 minutes. Okay? They @ least know. Now for each agenda item you have to tell them what the style is that we're using. It's either info share and that's one person sharing information either top down, bottom up or lateral. It could be your 5 minute updates or the CEO sharing or employees talking about something. That's info share, no discussion, no debate. Or there's a creative discussion where you're going to throw a bunch of against the wall. You're going to share ideas, share opinions, you know, share resources, collaborate, maybe have some good debate. Or there's consensus decision where we're actually going to talk. We're going to share, we're going to look at data and we're going to make a decision on something and we're all going to agree on that decision. That has to be assigned to every agenda item so people know we're not even talking about this. It's not a f cking discussion. This is like a unilateral thing or this is a discussion. That's what happens in meetings. That's why people go, they don't have the purpose, they don't have the agenda. The next thing is book all of your meetings for half the time. You first think about booking them for. So it's like having a quickie. You can get it done in less time if you need to. The key is to think about your meeting the same way. If you're gonna have an hour meeting, book it for 30 minutes, right? If you're gonna get together for a full day, book it for four hours. And then try to follow this agenda with, you know, the basics of a moderator, a timekeeper, and a parking lot so you can get shit done. The last part is you only invite people to the meeting if you want them to speak, and if you don't want them to speak, don't invite them to the meeting. But your job as the person calling the meeting has to be to get the quiet people to speak. Otherwise they get steamrolled by the high dominance, the high expressives. So good.

All right, time out, team. That was a quick smackdown on meetings. Cameron, I'm sort of picking up the vibe that maybe you've done this once or twice. What did you get out of that.

Little meeting, by the way? And I haven't spoken on this stuff. It's just. This is the stuff. This is how you grow companies is really being. I've been certified in this, right? Like, I've actually had so much training on how to run meetings and then been certified in a model that I could write a book on it.

How can we get staff to take more ownership and responsibility of their tasks, really?

To hire people that are accountable, right? Hire people that already deliver on their promises. It's kind of like they asked Herb Kelleher from Southwest Airlines, how do you get all your employees to be so happy? We hire happy people. Like, so how do we. How do we. How do we get our employee, you know, how do we get employees to deliver on their promises or to get their stuff done on time? You hire people that do that. You make sure that you interview against that. You make sure that you set clear expectations in your job postings. Like, I like job postings that scare 50% of the candidates away so they'll never apply. Because then the A players are like, oh, my God, that's where I want to work. Like, I want to work for a culture that this hardcore. I want in because then I know that I'm not going to be working with any C players. You make it really, really blatantly obvious in the job posting that if they're not accountable and they don't deliver on their promises, they're going to get fired and it's going to hurt their career moves. You make sure that you incorporate it into torque. And in your reference checks, you make sure that you really grill them in the interview process to find out where they've missed on expectations. And if they're missing half now, you also find out how they time block and how they break down their projects so they understand. Like often people don't get their stuff done on time for a few reasons. They're either overwhelmed, they don't know how to manage time, they don't know how to manage their projects. You know, they're bad at saying no, or they, they, they let work expand. Right. So you just kind of ask a lot of questions around those things as to how and get them to show it to you. Get like, show me your calendar. You say you manage your time this way. Show me your calendar. Oh, you don't really, you know how to manage your time, but you don't really managed that way. Again, like, none of these systems are my systems. I, I've just taken the best systems from companies that have done shit and I just, I just. That's why every company I've built grows so fast.

I love it, dude. Super helpful, mate. Thank you so much for sharing your, your time, your smarts today. Cameron, I appreciate you a ton. That was really, really fun, really useful. I'm looking forward to bumping into you in the States next time we're over.

Thanks everybody. Bye, guys. Thank you. Close your eyes. Today is 2012. I want you to lean out into the future and imagine and we're all walking around Hawaii and you started describing his company and they're like, what the hell are you talking about? This is 2009. But he literally got 500 people to move themselves into the future. I've had other people have done draw shop videos of their vivid vision where they've created a draw shop.