The MUST-HAVE Skills You Need To Retain Your Employees

Gen Y and Gen Z now are obsessed with career growth. They're obsessed with leadership development. If you give them that, they're going to stay. If you don't grow them, they're going to quit. And they're going to quit within one year to two years. All of us over complicate business. We treat our kids better than we treat our leadership teams. We would never send our kid off to play Little League baseball without teaching them how to hold the bat or how to toss the ball or how to catch a ball. Because if they came home from Little League on the first day, they say, daddy, baseball sucks. It's like, no, Johnny, you suck at baseball. So we give them the tools for success. And yet in business, on every single day in business, we've got employees or managers or leaders out there doing their job without any training to do their job. I'll give you an example of this. How many of you are coos? All of you hire, interview and hire people, right? How many of you have had and put your hands up. How many of you have had at least an hour's training on interviewing and hiring? How many of you have had 10 hours of training? This is like a full day's training. How many of you have had training on how to run highly effective meetings? I'm not talking reading a book. How many of you have had training on coaching, delegation, time management? How many of you have had at least a day of training on how to do job interviews? So don't ever tell me business is hard. There's skills that you need that I'm going to talk about that if your team were good at these skills, that business is very, very simple. But right now, you're all coming home to me going, daddy, baseball sucks. Daddy, business is hard. It's not hard. Business is so simple. I got trained in this stuff in 1986 at college pro Painters Kimball Musk and Elon Musk. In January of 1995, two years after I coached and hired Kimball, I was a reference for them in their first round of funding. College Pro is mentioned in Elon's book. I was a reference for Kimball and Elon Musk in their very first round of funding for Zip2, prior to PayPal, when they were trying to raise $600,000 for their first company, an online mapping company. And I had to talk to Kleiner. It wasn't even Kleiner Perkins yet. It wasn't even called a venture capital firm. It was only called a merchant bank. And I had to explain why to back Kimball Musk with his operational experience. And I talked about the training that he had around coaching and time management and project management and interviewing and running effective meetings and situational leadership and delegation. And they wouldn't back Elon because he'd never done anything. And he dropped out of Aeronautical Engineering and they backed Kimball. And Kimbal called me that night and he said, what did you tell them? I'm like, did I up? He goes, no, they gave us 3 million bucks instead of 600,000. When you train people on the core things that they're supposed to be good at and not the functional area that they run day to day, business is simple. But you have lost the right to say that business is difficult. You lost the right to say baseball sucks when you'd actually are the one who sucks at baseball. So my story is I grew up in this city, Sudbury Candidates, where I ran my first business. I had 12 employees when I was 20 years old. My dad was my first coach. This was about a month before my dad passed away last summer. He ran his own company. Both my grandparents ran their own businesses. All we ever knew was running companies. Our dinner conversations were always about running companies. I was getting groomed at a very, very young age to be an entrepreneur. My real world MBA started at this company, College Pro Painters. The amount of training that I had on skill based stuff on running companies would blow your mind. It still blows mine to this day as to how much training I got. 30 odd years ago I joined mastermind communities like you're in with Collective Genius. I joined the Entrepreneurs Organization. I was also a member of Strategic Coach for seven years, Genius Network for seven years, five baby bathwaters, three war room events. I went to the nine or five day TED conference nine times. I've been to five Mastermind Talks events. Like I'm obsessed with learning in these kinds of groups because I grow. But I also try to make sure that my employees are in groups like this so that they can grow. You're doing a huge disservice to only grow yourself. If you've got a company that you can get your second in command into the CEO alliance, get them into the CEO alliance and grow them. If you've got employees that work for you and manage your direct roles, enroll them in a company or a group called the OP Spot. Write that one down. The OP spot is for 290 bucks a year they can be a member of an online mastermind community of just people in operations roles that you're not allowed to join. It's not for you. My role at 1-800-GOT junk was to grow people. I literally visualized myself walking around all day long with a watering can. My job was to grow people, to get results through people. Every time I had stuff on my plate, it was easier for me to sit down and do the work. I would delegate it to somebody who didn't have the skills to do it yet and I would give them the skills to do it. I was trying to become the laziest COO there was by delegating and growing people. Delegating and growing people. That's how you don't have to replace yourself as CEO is you have to delegate everything off your plate and grow the people or get people to grow the people so they can do more. Most of us don't understand the basics of how to grow people. We understand how to do real estate, how to do development, how to run real estate companies, but we don't understand the basics of how to actually grow people. Our training programs are too random, right? We're kind of like throwing money at something. It's like random acts of marketing. Most of our marketing is very random. We're just throwing marketing, hoping some of it sticks. I'll give you some systems that will really help you with your growing of people. I visualize every manager and every leader as climbing up two ladders. Picture like a 40 foot ladder, and right beside it another 40 foot ladder. If you ever climbed a ladder, when you get to the halfway point, they get kind of shaky, right? I mean, you climb up a six foot step ladder, they get kind of shaky. When you're afraid of heights like me. But when you climb up now I want you to pretend that your left hand and left foot are climbing up one ladder, and right beside it, your right hand and right foot are climbing up the other ladder. Your left ladder is skills, your right ladder is confidence. Your job is to grow their skills and then to grow their confidence and to grow their skills and to grow their confidence and to grow their skills and to grow their confidence. And if you focus that your job is to grow people so they grow up those two ladders, that's when your company wins. Because the more confidence they have, the more skills they can develop. The more that they feel good about the skills that they're getting, the more confidence they have. And you can keep delegating more to those people, regardless of the level that they're at. The amount of money that you invest in skill development and confidence development of your people will literally change your company for the better. And no matter how strong they are. No matter how good they are, people can always grow. Everyone on our leadership team at 1-800-GOT junk. Was involved in some mastermind community of some sort. Every one of them went through training programs on a quarterly basis. Every One of the 1, 800 got junk that managed people went through the 12 leadership course skills that are in a course I'm going to talk about in a second. They all went through this stuff. I'm six foot four, six, three and a half now. Everybody can grow. Like if I'm tall, I can even get better, right? If somebody who works for you now is good, imagine if they got better. Every athlete on the planet has a coach. There's not a single athlete out there on the planet today that doesn't have a mindset coach, a skills coach, a nutrition coach, a fitness coach. Like they're all getting all kinds of coaching to grow them. Our job is to get again, not just growing. You, yes, invest in yourself, but you have to invest in your people. You've got to grow your managers, you got to grow your leaders, you got to grow your COO because. Because you can replicate way more. When I was coaching a company out of Florida called Blue Grace Logistics, I'd coached them from 40 people up to 700 people over four years. They went on to become the number one company to work for in Florida. They raised $255 million from Warburg Pincush. You can look it up on just Google Bluegrace Logistics 255. You'll see the article. And I coached them from 40 people up to 700. When I was working with Bobby at about the 400 person mark, I trained him in one of the skills that's in my course. He goes, this is going to change our whole company. Like, no, it's going to change you. What's going to change your whole company is training everybody in your company on that one skill. Growing yourself as a leader is good. Growing all of your leaders is great. You talk about Jim Collins from good to great. You don't scale the company fast enough. Just growing yourself. So what kind of a training program do we need inside of our company? You don't need to have perfect. Perfect is the enemy of good. You don't need to have a gold training program. A bronze or a silver is good enough. It's going to be better than what you have now, which is just like throwing out there and hoping some of it sticks. Right? So I'm going to walk you through some of the basics that'll give You a good training program to put in place. I mentioned Simon Sinek in his golden circle. When I first met Simon, when he flew out from New York in 2004, he drew what was a cone shape. It used to be a 3D cone. If you looked at it from the top down, it looked like three circles. If you look at it from the side, it was stratified into CEO at the top, which was the why. The executive team was the how, and then the staff was the what. You looked at it from the top and it was three circles. What you need to do is train everyone in your company and certify everyone in your company that they understand and can practice and can live and demonstrate your core values, your core purpose, your BHAG, your vivid vision, which Brandon Turner talked about from BiggerPockets talked about my concept. The vivid vision. You need to be able to. They need to know the history of your company, what got you to where you are. Everyone in your company needs to be certified in your why. Regardless of if they're a frontline staff, a VP of finance, whatever they do, Everyone has to be strong and certified in your why, your DNA. It's the core of where your culture comes from. And to build an amazing business, you have to be a little bit more than a business, a little bit less than a religion. You've got to get yourself into that zone of a cult. And culture starts with why. So the what. The what we do is what most of us train people on. We train them on, like, how to deal with the landlord or how to collect the money or how to use a CRM. We train them on the how, the functional part of the job. What I want you to think about is the how is the middle, not the what. Okay? Because most of us are training them on the blue. The what. I want you to train them on the green. The 12 core skills that everyone in your company who manages people needs to be good at is these 12 core skills. This is the stuff that I trained anyone who managed people on 1-800-GOT junk. This is the stuff that I was trained in and certified in at some level back at College Pro Painters. This is the stuff that I trained Kimball Musk on back in 1993. This is the stuff that's not written about in my books. Situational leadership. So I was being mentored by the COO at Starbucks. Greg Johnson was mentoring me for two years when I was CEO at 1-800-GETJUNK. Every quarter, I'd spend a full day down in Seattle at his office. Or he would come to Vancouver and spend a full day at my office. And. And every month we did a one hour call. For two years, I was being mentored by this CEO at Starbucks. The number one leadership skill that every manager and leader gets trained in at Starbucks every quarter is situational leadership. How many of you have had training around situational leadership? This again, you think about a company that was operating in 14,300 locations the year that I was being mentored. The second last year, like a VP of finance was going through more training around that one skill every three months. It's got to be powerful, right? My dad when I was 16, said, you're never going to be smart enough to figure out business on your own. He said your R and D stands for rip off and duplicate. Find out what the best companies are doing and just do what they're doing. So I was like, okay, so Starbucks trains people on situational leadership. I will train people on situational leadership. Seems simple. Coaching. I'm not talking like coaching using the Socratic method of coaching. I'm talking about coaching your leaders and coaching your people. Because our job is not to hold them accountable and manage them. Fortune magazine asked me in 2003, how do you manage people or how do you hold your people accountable? I said, I don't. I hire accountable people. My org chart's flipped upside down where I'm there to support them, to direct them, to develop them, to cheer them on, but not to hold them accountable and manage them. Your job is to understand how to leverage coaching. Classroom teaching is simply you getting a group of people together or your CEO getting a group of people together, or a manager of a business area getting three or five or 10 people together, sometimes customers, and training them on something so they can actually get better. Running meetings. This is like running zoom meetings, running in person meetings, running phone meetings. There's actual systems in place so that your meetings don't suck. There's a famous tweet that Elon sent out probably five years ago, four or five years ago. Remember that? You've heard the tweet, but like, if you're in a meeting, stand up and leave the meeting. So I sent him a text message. I'm like, dude, I didn't say dude. I was like, elon, don't tell your people to leave meeting. Fix the root cause. Fix the first principles of if you fix the meetings, they won't be in meetings that they have to leave. Don't tell people to leave meetings. Stop running meetings. But the only way to do that that's why I wrote the book Meetings Suck is so that your employees actually understand how to run meetings that are highly effective. And it's not just an L10 meeting that Gino talks about. The L10 meeting is your weekly leadership team meeting. But that doesn't talk about how to run an annual planning meeting or a quarterly planning meeting or a financial review meeting or a business area review meeting or a one on one coaching meeting or a daily huddle or those are totally different meeting rhythms than an L tenant. And he doesn't talk about how to attend a meeting and how to participate in a meeting and how to show up in a meeting, because if you're invited, your job is to contribute, otherwise you shouldn't have been invited. He doesn't talk about how to opt out of meetings when your time is better spent somewhere else. Anyway. I can go on and on, but these are the core 12 skills that anyone who works for you needs to be trained in. Your job is to give them this skill development. And if they're trained in these skills, everything's easy. If they're not trained in these skills, everything's difficult. But you lose the right to come into this group or any other group or meet with anybody ever again and say, business is hard. If you give people the basic skills, business is really easy. Situational leadership and coaching. Two of my biggest ones, delegation. This one blows my mind as to how few people have ever been trained on delegation. Delegating means you're going to get back exactly what you expect back with the least amount of time and the least amount of money being spent. If I said to my, my assistant, hey, Brandon Turner and I are getting together for dinner, can you organize a great dinner for us? She could organize like the best steak restaurant, decant a bunch of wine, have a private room set up. What I actually meant was like ordering some healthy food and we're going to be sitting in our office cranking through some work together. But because I didn't delegate it properly, she's now organized a $500 dinner instead of like $100 or $50 dinner. But I didn't delegate it properly. So the onus is on the receiver. If you want to get back what you're thinking of getting back, you need to learn how to delegate properly. If you're frustrated that people are working on stuff or taking too long, did you tell them how little time you want them to spend on something? Most of us screw this up. Most of us say it'll only take you an hour. That's the wrong thing to say because they'll argue as to why it'll take longer. Your job is to say, I don't want you to spend any more than 30 minutes on this. If I said to my two kids who are now 23 and 20, hey, I need you to clean the house, it'll only take you an hour. Oh, no, it'll take forever. Because we'll have to do this and we'll have to do that. I'll be like, right, probably take longer than an hour. Or if I said, I have friends coming in an hour, I need you to clean the house. Do as good as you can be done in 20 minutes, they'd be done in 15. But I delegated differently. But again, train people on this, train them on time management, train people on interviewing. You can choose to be messy, you can choose to be unorganized, to be scattered, to be doing it the way you are. But then you're like the fly trying to get out the window. You're going to keep banging your head on the window until you get out the window and you end up dead on the windowsill. Or you can go, well, there's a path of least resistance. If I train my people on the core stuff, then business is all of a sudden simple. So here's my core process on actually training people on any skill. Let's say the skill is around running a meeting. I'm going to give them a pre test. The pretest is like some multiple choice questions, some true false questions, some fill in the blank questions. And if I gave you the pre test that I have for running meetings, you would all fail it. And if you fail a test, you're probably gonna go, well, what don't I know? Especially if you're no longer in school and you actually wanna know more to run your business, right? Or you wanna do more to do well in your job, or you wanna get certified in the skills so you can get promoted or get paid more. You have some incentive. But the pre test is designed to set the gap so that you wanna learn. And then I'm gonna teach them the skill. And there'll be some over video, some teaching over written, some teaching over listening, some teaching maybe over role playing or practicing. And then I'm gonna watch them try out the skill. I'll watch them planner to mock meeting, or I'll watch them host a mock meeting, or I'll watch them over video run a team meeting so I can watch and observe them and give them feedback on it. And then they'll actually let them practice it with their peers and with their teams. They'll practice that skill and then they'll actually go and do the skill in their day to day jobs and they're going to learn from doing. I talk about this in a few minutes and then I'll give them a post test. It's the same test as I gave them before, but now they're going to pass the test and they'll be like, wow, I learned stuff. I feel good. I got the dopamine rush. This is just retention though. If you learn a bunch of stuff, you practice it and you do a post test and you've learned it, it doesn't mean you've retained it, it doesn't mean you can actually put it in place, it just means you're good at remembering something. So there's a pre test and post test, but then I like to train them on the same area two or three more times so they can think about their learning and I'll go through the whole cycle again so they can relearn the content because they'll relearn it a second time, they'll relearn it a third time and then all of a sudden the learning really starts to stick. And then you can certify people in different skills and the certifications they get are how they actually can move to the next level. So I launched a course called invest in your leaders. I'm not going to pitch this thing to you, but it is absolutely irresponsible of you not to put anybody who manages people through this course. But the skills that are in that course are the 12 that were on that slide. That's what's in the course and they'll be cost you like six, seven hundred dollars a person. So here's how adults actually learn. On the bottom left hand corner, everyone who manages people learns with one of these three primary learning styles. Auditory, visual or kinesthetic. They learn from listening or reading, they learn from visual, from watching, or they learn from doing. The key is to make sure that any training that you give them covers all three of the styles because they also have a secondary and a tertiary learning style. Their primary might be auditory, but their secondary might be kinesthetic. That means you need to hit them with all three to really get the maximization of learning in. On the top right hand corner is the cycle of learning and it's why you train people on something two or three or four times over the course of a year is because they go through this cycle at the top of the circle is the abstract conceptualization. It's where they're learning about a new concept. So if I was teaching you about the concept of situational leadership, it's new to you, it's the abstract, you're learning the idea and then we're going to practice it, we're going to role play, we're going to pretend we're trying it out in our day to day. Actually, I've done these sessions for companies and I teach this in a session where they learn how to practice situational leadership. That's the act of experimentation. And then you go to the bottom of the cycle and it's called the concrete experience. That's when you learn from doing. You're learning in your day to day job. You're like, oh, it's not as easy as I thought or oh, I see how this works now. And you can kind of reflect on it, that reflective observation. You learn about your learning, you learn about what you're practicing, you remember what the speaker was talking about, and then you can go back and listen to the same speaker or a different speaker on the same subject and you learn even more. And you learn even more. It's why athletes are still getting coached. The best golfers on the planet are still getting coached on their swing, even though they're the best golfers on the planet, because they can still learn it, they can still tweak it, they can still improve it. But if you're not growing your people, then you have to replace your people. Or if you're not growing your people, then you think 7 to 10 or 12% growth is good. We did 100% revenue growth six consecutive years in a row without giving up any equity and without any debt. You can have that kind of growth when you grow your people. The first is to mind the gap. You have to get people to want to learn. The way that I get people to want to learn is they only get a promotion or they only get a pay raise if they've been certified or have gone through more skills. So even the invest in your leaders course, after they go through 12 modules, they get a LinkedIn certification badge that shows they're certified. So you should just tell people, if you don't go through this and show me your post test, I'm not giving you any more money because I don't know if you have the skills on it yet. That's one way to kind of put it in place. You can also put in place your own training programs internally. Pick any skill. Let's say you Pick meetings. You could have them read the book Meeting suck or have them read Jeff Smart's book. Who you could find a video on running effective meetings. Any random video on YouTube will do. And then you could also have them bring a consultant, any kind of a speaker. Get somebody to come in and run a session over zoom on meetings. And then you could all have all of your employees get together into a book club and then and talk about what they learned in the books and what they learned in the videos and what they learned on the speaker about meetings. And that can be your one month on meetings. Week one is read a book. Week two is watch a video. Week three is a speaker. Week four is your kind of coffee club. On discussing it all. Do one skill per month. But this has to be part of your normal regular DNA of building a company. Getting the consultants in sending your employees off to conferences. I had a client who sent all of his employees to any conference or any speaker they ever wanted to go to. His CEO is a member of the CEO alliance for three years. He sent 10 of his employees to a Vern Harnish event. He sent 20 of his employees to a Tony Robbins event. He said yes to any opportunity to grow people without trying to tie it to anything other than I want people who want to grow. That's what scales your company. He has two private jets now. His company's growing so quickly. Get mentors in place for anybody who leads people on your team, find and help them find a mentor. I had a mentor. Brian, the CEO had a mentor. Roman, our head of it, had an it. The head of Abe Books was his mentor. Our head of finance had the head of finance for Crystal Decisions and Business Objects mentoring them. The head of the call center is being mentored by WestJet, which is like the Southwest Airlines of Canada. I can tell you 20 years later who the mentors were. For each of our members of the leadership team, I would put a training budget in place, and I did this 20 years ago of at least $750. No coincidence. It's roughly about the cost of one person going through my course or 1% of their salary. My sales is 1% of everybody's salary is what you allocate for training budget for your company. So if somebody makes 100 grand a year, allocate $1,000 a year to grow them. It's a rounding error, for God's sakes. It's nothing. Right? If somebody makes 150 grand a year, allocate 1500. You can get a speaker for two grand. To come and speak, to teach 20 people, that's a huge spread. It's only like $100 per person for 20 people. You can, you can use this budget. The budget can go a long way. So somebody said to me one time, well, what if I train all of my people? What if I put them all through your course and they leave? What if you don't put them through the content and they stay? Would you rather feel like every day that business is difficult? Would you rather have your employees be frustrated that they're being managed by somebody doesn't know how to manage or being micromanaged by somebody who doesn't know how to micromanage at the right times and how to lead better? Would you rather have your employees run the business the way they are today with no skills, or would you rather give them the skills? Because the, the number two thing. There's two things that Gen Y care most about in their company. Number one is a company that is obsessed with core values and core purpose. Number two is skill development. Gen X and baby boomers didn't give a shit about growing their skills because business wasn't growing fast enough that it mattered. That's why you'll hear a baby boomer, a 60 year old, be like, I got 30 years experience. Nope, you got five years experience six times in a row in one year. Business is so substantially different now than it was a year before with the rate of adoption of technology. You know you're feeling it, right? Gen Y and Gen Z now are obsessed with career growth. They're obsessed with leadership development. If you give them that, they're going to stay. If you don't grow them, they're going to quit and they're going to quit within one year to two years. Gen X and baby Gen X would stay in companies for 5 to 10 years. Gen Y will stay in companies for 6 months to 2 years. The only way to handcuff them is to obsess about their growth, to help them, to care about them and to align with core purposes. So suffering is optional. Your R and D can stand for rip off and duplicate. Take the best systems that other people have done and put those in place.