Managers Get Promoted. But Never Trained

If you have ever done a job interview and interviewed to hire someone, I'd like you to stand up. I was talking to a CEO one day and I said, you know, have you ever had any training on interviewing? He goes, no, but I've interviewed 100 people. I said, maybe you've done it wrong every time. I want you to sit down only if you've had at least an hour's training, and this is not reading a book. How many of you been through some classroom training or solid training on On how to do proper job interviews, sit down if you've had at least an hour's training. Stay standing if you've not had an hour of training. The rest of you, this is the problem in your company, is all of you are hiring people without a fucking clue how to do it. But that's normal. Who here believes that business is difficult? You're the fucking reason. Maybe I shouldn't have sworn, but maybe you shouldn't be running a business without the skills. I'm sorry. With leadership skills, it's so critical when you're in what I call the death zone. I want you to stand up if your company is in the $3 million to $10 million zone. Stand up. You're in the death zone. So the death zone is where often companies start building complexity. The death zone is when we have a mid-level team of people that are trying their best, but they've never really done it before. The death zone is because we don't understand how to go out and hire the right people who have done it before. The death zone is because we're pissing away money that we didn't necessarily need to be throwing away. I see every company going through different iterations at what I call the ones and the threes. When you have $100,000 in revenue to $300,000 in revenue to $1 million in revenue. At $1 million, you're starting to hire some people. At $3 million in revenue, you've got a couple managers managing some of your people for you. At $10 million in revenue, you have a management team, but they probably never really run companies before. They're working hard, they're trying their best, they're doing a good job. Awesome. At $30 million, you've got a solid first leadership team. At $100 million, you've got people that have built companies, sold companies. They've done it before. You don't even need to tell them what to do anymore. They've done it before. The key way to get through this is to grow your people, to really spend time growing the skills and the confidence and the connections of your employees. Now, what's amazing is you're all here growing yourself. Who here has their second in command or any of their management people in a mastermind community? Stand up. Yeah, about 12, 15 of you. Okay, awesome. All of you need to get your key people into a mastermind and into some coaching. Here's why. Pretend that you're a duck, and as the CEO, you're working on strengthening your right wing. But your leadership team is your left wing. If you don't strengthen their skills, you're going to start flying in a circle. At 1-800-GOT-JUNK, when I was the COO, I was in a mastermind. Brian was in a mastermind. I had a coach. Brian had a coach. And all 7 of us on the leadership team each had an individual mentor. I was being mentored by the incoming COO at Starbucks, Greg Johnson. Greg did a 1-hour call with me every month for 2 years and did a full-day meeting with me every quarter. One quarter I would go down to Seattle, next quarter he would come up to Vancouver. We did that for 2 years and every single people— person on our leadership team had that. And, and I'm going to walk you through it. We built a skill development program where I worked on the leadership skills for all of the people in our company that managed people. That's where our growth came from. So you need to think about that. So I've heard people say, well, what if I spend time growing people in my company? What if they quit? What if they stay? and you haven't grown their skills. That's the bigger problem. We've heard of ROI, right? The return on investment. So what's the return on investing in your people? It's huge. It's 1-800-GOT-JUNK. It's Tommy Mello A1 Garage. It's Boyd Autobody. It's College Pro. The return on investing in your people is huge. But the cost of inaction, the COI, is way, way, way higher. What it's costing you to not invest in your people is way more than the cost if you invest in them and they quit. And by the way, there's 2 things that Gen Y and Gen Z want from a company more than ever before. Number one is purpose. They want to work with a company that has purpose, direction, and lives the core values. Number 2 is they want skill development because they're terrified that the world is going to put them out of a job. If you help them get more skills, more AI skills, more leadership skills, more management skills, more skills at doing— not skills doing the functional stuff. Like if they're in marketing, yeah, they need marketing skills, but they also need skills to manage projects and time and priorities and and conflict and people, right? If you give them those things, they're gonna stick. I was coaching a company in Florida called Blue Grace Logistics. They actually raised $140 million from a group called Warburg Pincus. He went to become one of the largest logistics and freight companies in North America. I coached them from 40 people up to 700. When he was about 400 people, I was coaching him on one of these leadership skills, and Bobby said, wow, this is gonna change our company. I'm like, no, it's gonna change you. What's going to change your company is teaching this skill to everyone in your organization that manages people. The ripple effects of growing your people is greater than the skill sets of a strong CEO. All right. If you're the COO of a company that does at least $2 million or greater in revenue, or you're the CEO of a company and you're in the United States or Canada, if you would like a copy of my book, The Second in Command, for free, go to cooalliance.com/book. That's cooalliance/freebook, and I will mail you a copy for free. I will even cover the shipping. Jump on that one today. These are the core 12 skills that every single person in your company that manages people needs to be good at. These are the skills you need to be good at. These are the skills your COO needs to be good at, your management team, your leadership team. I was certified in these skills in 1989, meaning I was trained in it. I went through classroom training. I listened to speakers about it. Then I had to actually show and demonstrate these skills in the field, and I got certified in performance of these skills. Here's the core skills from those 12 that I really think that the leadership team needs to be bulletproof in. Your leadership team and you and your COO needs to be good in these skills more than any other skill in the company. If you have ever done a job interview and interviewed to hire someone, I'd like you to stand up. Okay, stay standing. So all of us have done job interviews, right? Stay standing. I was— stay standing. I was talking to a CEO one day and I said, you know, have you ever had any training on interviewing? He goes, no, but I've interviewed 100 people. I said, maybe you've done it wrong every time. I want you to sit down only if you've had at least an hour's training. And this is not reading a book. How many of you been through some classroom training or solid training on how to do proper job interviews? Sit down if you've had at least an hour's training. Stay standing if you've not had an hour training. The rest of you, this is the problem in your company, is all of you are hiring people without a fucking clue how to do it. But that's normal. I want everyone to stand up if you've ever run a meeting before. Stand up if you've ever run meetings before. I've never run a meeting before. Now, if you've never had at least an hour's training on how to run meetings, how to get collaboration, how to get the youngest and earliest people in the room, how to deal with moderators and parking lots and timekeepers— if you've never had at least an hour's training on running meetings, and I'm not talking reading the book Death by Meeting— if you've never had at least an hour's training on running meetings, I want you to sit down. Or sit down if you had it. Okay, again, most of you run meetings and have no idea how to run meetings. Okay, you can all sit down for a second. See, the problem is that most of us are trying our best, but we're all like a fly trying to bang our head on the window, and we're gonna work really hard until we get out the other end of the window, and we all end up dead on the windowsill. We would never send our little kid off to play Little League baseball without teaching them the basic skills of how to hold the bat and catch the ball and toss the ball, right? Remember when our kids were going off to play sports? We always— they were incompetent as hell. But we at least practiced with them. Because if you don't practice with your kid, they come home from Little League and they say, Daddy, baseball sucks. It's like, no, Johnny, you suck at baseball. Who here believes that business is difficult? You're the fucking reason. Maybe I shouldn't have sworn, but maybe you shouldn't be running a business without the skills. You have all lost the right to say business is difficult when you're working and running a business without the basic skills to run a business. Most of your managers are coming to you saying, "I need to hire someone." No, you need to know how to manage priorities better. You need to you need to say no better. You need to know how to make decisions better. You need to align your priorities. Like no, we don't need to keep hiring. We've built all this complexity into our business because we're like kids going off to Little League without having a clue how to do the basics. I was a reference for Elon Musk and Kimbal Musk in their very first round of funding. in January of 1995 for Zip2. So I've known Elon for 31 years. Brother Kimbal worked for me in 1993 at College Pro Painters. I had to be a reference for Zip2. And the reason College Pro Painters is mentioned in the autobiography on Elon Musk, the one by Walter Isaacson, College Pro is talked about, is because the initial funding they got was Kimbal Musk's operational and leadership skills that I trained him in that he got from College Pro. They weren't going to bet on Elon because he'd never done anything. He was this crazy autistic, way out of the box thinker. But Elon had the skills to manage people, projects, time, interdependencies, conflicts. Kimbal called me that night. He goes, what did you tell them? I'm like, did I fuck up? He goes, no. We asked for $600,000 in funding. Again, January of '95. They gave us $3 million. They sold Zip2 2 and a half years later for $317 million. Cash to Compaq, the largest cash all acquisition in history at the time, because of the skill sets that they had coming into the company.