Stop Arguing to Be Right, Do This Instead!

So if you ever get in that situation where you're having friction either over vision or over a particular project, or you know that you need to get a little bit more aligned, I think it's best to sit back and think about how can you present your case for the good of the organization and not arguing to be right, just arguing to be heard. So one of the things that happens when you're a second command in an organization is you really have to stay aligned with the vision of, of the CEO and where they're taking the organization. Sometimes that's the vision for the company over the long term. Sometimes that's the vision for just a particular project or even the vision for a particular business area. I remember at one point where Brian and I were kind of a little bit unaligned on part of the organization, and I really wanted to focus the organization around opening up some corporate locations. And I felt that for a couple of reasons. One, I felt it was really important for us as an early stage franchisor to be able to prove that the systems worked. And if we were running a corporate location and we ran it by the book, we followed the manual perfectly. We kind of had that proof of concept. The second thing I really wanted to push on was why are we giving away all that profitability when the franchisees are making 18 to 22% net profit? I just saw that we could probably hire a general manager if the systems really worked well, put a GM in place, coach them like a normal franchisee, and we would have that yield of that additional net profit. And so Brian and I just had to meet on that a few times. He finally saw where I was going in that direction and we kind of marched off and tried it out. And it did work. In those early days, it actually proved a point. We were even able to open some corporate locations in markets where franchisees said it could never be done. And that showed us that we could actually franchise pretty much anywhere. So if you ever get in that situation where you're having friction either over vision or over a particular project, or you know that you need to get a little bit more aligned, I think it's best to sit back and think about how can you present your case for the good of the organization and not arguing to be right, just arguing to be heard. So what I'll often do is show up and say, look, I want to present something to you. This is what I'm seeing, this is what I'm feeling, this is what I'm thinking. Here's kind of the bottom line or the facts. I'll show the data, I'll show what I'm feeling and then I'll put it kind of in an executive summary where maybe even on a half page of paper so that the CEO understands and they can ask questions later. And they also know, because I'm setting it up this way, that hey, I want to present something to you and I'm not arguing to be right. I just want you to hear my thoughts out and then we can talk about it and we'll go through kind of the who, what when we're wine together. I think you can think back to a time when the CEO in an organization had a very different thought to what I did in this case. I was opening up the west coast of the United States for college pro painters and I saw that all of the professional contractors on the west coast were using sprayers. And the CEO said do not give a sprayer to any of those 20 year olds painting houses. They'll destroy the property, they'll destroy the cars nearby. They're just going to cause a catastrophe. And I had to kind of really, really struggle with that. How am I actually going to price this out with 200 painters across two different states and compete against the pros? But I had to go with the CEO's direction and I had to sit and actually figure out how to go in that direction. And because that direction was solid and I was lined up behind it, we figured out how to sell against it. What we decided to do was sell the old fashioned product, kind of the brush and roll that was done 50 years ago before these newfangled sprayers that just put a thin coat of paint on. So we learned how to sell against the pros. We were actually coming in probably 20% more expensive, but we definitely aligned with the CEO's direction and we didn't have any catastrophes over the course of the summer. One of the biggest mistakes I've ever heard from a CEO was a member of our CEO alliance a few years ago and they talked to me about how the CEO was taking some time away from the organization and they decided to just let the team run the business like they'd always be running it. But the CEO used to have some oversight and it wasn't necessarily micromanaging, but they saw things that the leadership team weren't necessarily seeing. One of the things that they used to see was stuff related to cash flow. They just had a better handle in understanding the cash flow and budgeting and, you know, the expenses and what was happening inside of the business. And what happened over the six week period when the CEO was gone is stuff did kind of get a little bit out of whack. The company did get into a little bit of a stretch and a little bit of panic started to sink in. And when the CEO came back, they really had to fight some pretty quick fires. So it's time when I think you're going to take time away from the organization at any level is really to inspect what you expect or trust but verify. I think both of those lessons are really important to have inside of any organization. Years ago I heard a concept of the two hour mindset and really it's around the fact that the way I was taught it was if you had maybe your spouse in the hospital and they were going through life threatening surgery, or you had parents that you had to take care of and you really were only left with two hours a day to work in the business, or to run the business, or to do your job, what would you do in those two hours a day? You'd probably get rid of all of the miscellaneous things, you'd probably get rid of all the extraneous stuff, you'd probably get all the busy work off your plate and you'd work on those critical few areas. Well, if you would only be working on those critical few areas two hours a day, what would happen to the business if you worked on those two or three things all of the time, what would happen to the business with the results, with the revenue, with the growth happiness of the employees or customers if you were so hyper focused on the critical few things versus the important many? And I think that's where that two hour mindset can be a really good exercise that you can work through. A friend of mine, Dan Martell, we've been friends now for around 14 years. We've been a part of a number of different mastermind communities Together we have two, we have a very similar idea. Dan wrote a book called buyback your time. And I've always followed a system that Dan Sullivan from Strategic coach created years ago called the activity inventory, which I think the buyback your time is actually based a little bit about this activity inventory idea. The basic idea here is to take a look at all of the things on your plate, take a look at all of the tasks that you have to work on and take a look at the hourly rate that you would pay someone to do that work. Right. If you've got somebody doing a $15 an hour task or a $30 an hour task or a $50 an hour task, maybe it's even $100 an hour task. But what's your time worth as the CEO? Let's say that as the CEO of the organization, you're doing a million dollars in the bottom line. That effectively works out to $500 an hour times 40 hours a week, which equates to $1 million a year. So if your time is really $500 an hour, if that's really what your time is worth, why are you doing a $20 an hour task? Right. If I was your board, I was on your board of advisors, and I found out we're paying you effectively $500 an hour, I'd lose my mind. If you were doing $20 an hour work, in fact, if you were the CEO of the company and you were paying somebody $200 an hour and they were doing $40 an hour work, you'd lose your mind. So why do we do it? I think what happens is we end up getting busy. So Dan has this concept of taking your effective hourly rate. And what I love is he cuts it in four. He takes your $500 an hour divided by four, that's $125 an hour. Or if you're $120,000 person, that's $60 an hour divided by four, that're $15 an hour. Take a look then, that very conservative fashion at any task that is less than your effective hourly rate divided by four. And get that off your plate. Either stop doing it, delegate it, outsource it, or automate it, but there's no way that you should be doing it. I'm even a little bit less conservative than that. I really do approach my effective hourly rate. If I'm really worth $1,000 or $2,000 an hour, why am I doing $200 an hour work foreign? There's a really interesting law that really applies in business, and it's called Parkinson's Law. Parkinson's law says that work expands to fill the space that we give it or stuff expands to fill the space that we give it. So if you're delegating a project to someone, if you don't give them a very constricted amount of time, they're just going to take more time to do it. They're going to think about it longer, they're going to research it more, they're going to try to make it more perfect. They're going to get more people's opinions. They'll start committees and work groups and put cover pages on everything, create slide decks. But if you say, I need this result in 15 minutes. They don't have time for all that stuff. They'll get the work done in less time. So I'll give you a very specific example of this. Let's say that I said to a group of people, we need to sit down and talk about a, you know, sales meeting that we're having next week. But I want to actually have the meeting in 20 minutes and I want to come out with this result. The people might not think that's enough time, but they certainly would stick to that 20 minutes worth of time. So if I'm delegating a project to you, I'm not going to tell you how long I think it's going to take. I tell you how little time I want you to spend. And the corollary to that is how about money? So if I'm actually going to delegate a project to you, I'm going to tell you how little money I want you to spend on that project. I'm not going to give you this huge open container and let you go out and spend thousands of dollars. A good example of that one is if I asked my assistant to organize a dinner for Dan Martell and I. Maybe we're going to have a working dinner. Organize a really great dinner for Dan and I. She might think, oh, steak, restaurant, bottles of wine, make it really nice, corner table, super special. But Dan and I don't drink and we want a working dinner. We just want some really healthy food and we kind of want to be in bed by 8 o'. Clock. So maybe just order something off doordash and have it delivered to our home for 80 bucks. And if I gave her an $80 container, a $50 container, she could make it happen. But because I didn't give her a price container, she turned this into a three hour dinner that's going to cost me 5, 600 bucks because she's already decanted the wine and it's sitting waiting for me. So I didn't delegate it correctly. My assistant and my teams can't read my mind when I delegate. I give them the little amount of time I want them to spend and the little amount of money I want them to spend. And I show them what the result is that I'm looking to get back from them. And then it's critically important to make sure that they have the skills and the confidence to actually deliver that project. One of the critical things that happens when people are delegating projects to their team, even if they delegate with a little amount of time and a little amount of money they want spent, they don't actually sit back and think, do my people that I'm delegating this to have the skills and the confidence to actually do the work, Are they actually capable of doing that work? Are they overwhelmed? Do they have too much on their plate? Are they scared of screwing it up? Do they need some help or some resources or maybe need some of my time? And if you delegate projects to people and apply situational leadership to it, where you think about how much time you can spend with them, how much coaching they might need, how much help they might need with the planning, maybe some cheering on or the open door policy to come and get feedback as they're working on it, people are going to be much more successful at getting their work done and they're going to be able to deliver back to you the result that you're looking for in the time that you want it done. So the onus is on the receiver to make sure that if you're delegating projects that you're delegating to people that can do the work and give it back to you. There was an article written about 17 years ago. It was called the Misunderstood Role of the CEO. And the roles that the CEO play in an organization are really tied to the needs of the CEO at that particular time. So what will happen, and I'll give an example specifically from my past when I was the COO at 1-800-got- junk, Brian really didn't know how to franchise the organization. So I came in almost like mentor to teach Brian what had to happen. Brian really needed someone to divide and conquer, to take over all the parts of the organization he wasn't good at so that he could focus on the stuff he was amazing at, like the finance and the IT side of the business. So my role was really more of a partner or the other half and certainly very, very strong in that mentoring side of the organization. Years later, Brian is still the CEO of that organization, but the CEO that is there now is really more there executing the business, probably more in a growth or a global expansion kind of a role. He's not there in a mentor role at all. In fact, by the time that Eric came into 1-800-got- junk, Brian knew so much about franchising that he didn't need anyone to teach him anymore because he'd been a franchisor for about 15 years. So that role that he was looking for was very different. And I think that's what's often hard for CEOs when they're looking to bring a CEO into the company is they need to explore themselves first. They need to understand themselves as the CEO, what their weaknesses are, what their strengths are, what they're looking for, what kind of a role they need that certain person to play and for how long they need them to be able to play that type of role. So one of the concepts that comes out in the CEO world is the adult in the room. And I'm going to give a very kind of specific example of the adults in the room. It was starting about 16 or 17 years ago when Sheryl Sandberg walked into Facebook. Sheryl Sandberg was the adult in the room. She was about 35 years old. And the 23 year old Mark Zuckerberg was the CEO at Facebook. He'd never done anything before. He'd never built an organization, he'd never really built teams, he'd never done cross matrix decision making, he'd never run a P and L, he'd never built up the tech stack. All of this was so new to him. He was certainly genius, he was certainly a visionary, but he needed that adult in the room that could come in and say, okay, here's how you actually do stuff. And someone who actually could help the person grow with some of the wisdom of leadership. You know, one of the things that frustrates me is the 60 year old that says they have 40 years experience. They often don't have 40 years of experience. They maybe have five years of experience eight times in a row, but they definitely have 40 years of seeing it happen. And there is some wisdom that comes with time of just seeing things happen so often and being able to observe that that's often what the adult in the room type role is for that CEO to play. It's usually with a young founding CEO. It's often in the technology sector where you have someone with a very strong tech space who never really built a company in the first place. Something I'm pretty excited about coming up is we have an event happening in Vancouver, Canada in March of 2025 and we'll have 60cos from all over North America congregating in Vancouver for two and a half days. The reason I'm really excited about this and it's actually tied to something I heard a CEO mention to me this morning. The CEO said the only time he ever wants an employee going to an event is if they can generate revenue. I'm like, wow, you are so massively missing the point. If you send your CEO to an event like this, they're going to build their skills, they're going to build their confidence and they're going to build their connections. And it's those three things that are going to get you a quantum leap in your organization in terms of revenue growth, gross margin or profit growth. Growth in your customer engagement, your employee engagement. And yes, you'll probably even get sales from that as well. But if a COO shows up at an event like that in Vancouver and they're only looking for revenue, they're really missing the opportunity to connect with others, to shed that imposter syndrome and to gain skills that they're going to be able to come back so that you can actually scale the organization. And kind of way I always look at it is you're going to get more done with less people faster. So showing up at those events, sending your people to events really grows the organization in ways you can't even imagine. We actually promise everybody attending our events they're going to get a 10x guarantee. Normally they get more like 100x guarantee, meaning that if they spend the $6,000 to come to an event, we promise they're going to get at least $60,000 in savings or $60,000 in revenue. Ideas, more often than not, they're coming out with about 600 to $1 million worth of ideas for the organization. So it's a quantum leap when you send people to events like the CEO alliance events. What I like the CEOs to do is anytime they're learning something is to walk back into the room with their CEO and debrief. Very similar to the way the CEO is often coming to the team with all their random ideas. Right? The CEO is reading a book, they come up with six ideas, they meet with people and they delegate it. Our job is to turn the tables on the CEO and say, hey, I was just at an event. Maybe you were at the two hour monthly mastermind call for a CEO alliance. Or you come back from a two and a half day in person CEO connect event for the CEO alliance. You might have 10 or 15 big ideas for your organization. Sit down with the CEO and say, hey, I just want to debrief with you and show you what I learned. Here was idea number one and here's how much money I think it'll save or make the organization, and here's why. Here's idea number two and here's how much money I think it'll save or make the organization and here's why. And if you can actually present your ideas with a cost saving or a revenue generating idea, or you can show how it's going to make your employees happier or your customers happier. You're showing the ROI for your ideas and then that allows the CEO to kind of catch up with you, much like you need to do when they're delegating a project to you. So that's the best practice that I always try to do is debrief and attach your ideas to an ROI opportunity for your organization. So I was recently asked how much time a COO should spend in personal development. I think it goes back to that whole concept of working on the business versus in the business. Sometimes people think personal development is a cost or an expense or it's time away from work. Whereas the reality is our job is to get results through others. Our job is to delegate and grow people and let them do the work. If we're doing that properly, we should have the free time to think, to strategize, to learn. So the personal development that you're doing becomes very circular because you're taking these ideas that you're learning in your personal development, but you're growing the rest of the team. So you're replicating and getting almost like that butterfly effect inside the organization. So if you're doing that properly, if you're learning and you're teaching, then a COO should be spending as much time as possible, right? If all of your time was spent learning and teaching and delegating and growing people and doing no work, your organization would go to the moon. So the question isn't how much time should they spend, but are they learning stuff and do they know how to teach it to others? A couple of the core modules in my Invest in youn Leaders course teach executives how to actually train people, how to do classroom teaching, how to run one on one coaching calls or one on one coaching meetings. And, and we can deploy that information deep across your organization. That's where your growth really happens. One of the big things that happens when you move from a director to a vice president, from a vice president to a C suite role, is you start to recognize that your job isn't to do work. Your job is to get results through others. So it's by stepping away from the day to day and saying, here's the list of things that have to get done. And I was talking to a COO about this recently at one of our events and I said, you know your to do list. If you look at your to do list, it doesn't have your name on it. It's just A list of things that need to get done. So your job with your to do list is to think about who can I delegate that to and then how can I grow their skills and how can I grow their confidence so they can do that work? The work is not to be done by you. There's not a single organization in the world that has ever scaled with the CEO continuing to do all the work. So one of the mindset shifts that has to happen, and it's usually an imposter syndrome, is, you know, what am I going to do if I delegate everything on my plate? Trust me, if you can delegate everything on your plate and have everybody doing it for you, you're going to elevate yourself to be more strategic, to be more, more P and L responsibility, to be taking more projects off the CEO, to be figuring out how to grow the company even faster. So don't worry about what you'll have left on your plate. You'll be one of the more successful executives if you can delegate everything except genius and then look to bring more into your plate, that is inside of your wheelhouse. One of the best practices I saw recently was one of the companies that has got about 26 of their employees going through the invest in your leaders course. And I asked them, like, how are you doing this? Why are you putting so many people through it? And what's your process for getting all 26 people through the 12 modules of the invest in your leaders course? They said what they're doing is taking people in in cohorts. So they get five to seven new people in their company, they sign them all up at the same time, and then they do two modules per week. Now it only takes six total hours to go through all 12 modules of the course. Right? To go through all 12 sections. It only six hours of total time. So it's like 30 hours to an hour a week. They have all six or seven people go through the first two modules. And then on Monday over lunch, sometimes over Zoom, sometimes in person, they do a five minute book report and they talk about what they liked from those two modules and what they're going to put in place from those two modules. And just by sharing that and committing to each other, it kind of reinforces some of that information. Week two, they do modules three and four, and then on Monday they do a five minute book report. So over the course of six weeks, they go through all 12 modules and then over the next six weeks of that first quarter on their own, they go through all 12 modules again. And what happens by going through it a second time is they've learned the information, they're practicing the information, they're thinking about the information. When they watch it a second time, it starts to reinforce some of what they've been trying and learning and they see it from a different perspective. So they now have their people going through it three times over the course of 12 months to be kind of certified in each of those skills. I thought it was a really ingenious way to have your management team going through the Invest in your Leaders course. They have their entire leadership team going through it and they have everyone in their company that manages people going through all 12 modules. So I think they've actually figured out or cracked the code on how to get the best value out of the Invest in youn Leaders course. So to come to our in person events you need to have two things. You need to do at least 5 million or greater in revenue to come to an in person event. Just to be a co alliance member and part of our annual program you only need to do 2 million in revenue. But to come to the in person it's capped at 60 people and you have to do at least 5 million to qualify. Just go to cooalliance.com and all the information is there. Send us a quick email and we can get you on a call to learn more.