Cameron Herold argues that productivity explodes when leaders genuinely care for employees and build strong culture. He points to Zach Morrison at Tenuity and Matt Wohl at Acceleration Partners, who both grew rapidly by tracking employee net promoter score, aligning teams around vision and values, and learning what their people actually wanted from life.
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It's about really caring about the people, you know, not just their birthday and their dog's name, but actually really knowing what's going on in their life, what are their dreams, what are their desires, what's on their bucket list. Like, how can you really care about them as a person more than anyone else cares about them? I'll go back to two of the founding members of the CEO Alliance. One is now the CEO of a company called Tenuity. They've got 1800 employees. So Zach Morrison was the founding member. He was the guy who gave me the idea for the CEO Alliance. It used to be called Elite SEM and I coached them from 40 people up to about 300. When I first started coaching Zach, one of their big goals was to get to a hundred employees. And I said, if I ever hear you give me the number of employees as a goal, I will quit. I'm not going to coach you if you don't understand the pain in the ass factor of people is not a goal to have more of. So we really worked very, very hard to build a culture where their employee net promoter score was very, very high, but that we could also then almost overload people with more work. And the reason we could give them more and get so much more productivity out of them was they were so happy working with us. So that was case study one. The second one is called Acceleration Partners. And Matt Wohl is now the CEO. He was their COO. They're at about 300 employees. Again, coach them from about 40 up to about 120. They were always a distributed company. They never had a single office space. They never had two people working out of the same place. And they worked very, very hard eight, ten years ago understanding how to actually build a strong company culture in the absence of a physical four walled office space. And I thought it was really interesting to watch a company way before COVID really obsessing about how do we make this amazing company culture. And they understood that it had nothing to do with physical space. It had to do with collaboration, alignment, with vision, really caring about the people, putting systems in place to grow the people. You know, making sure that they covered Maslow's hierarchy and that they had all five layers of Maslow's hierarchy being met within the company. Those were a couple of interesting case studies. Just really, really caring about people. And then watching this massive growth of both of those companies from the people side and also from the revenue side, leaders. So, you know, obviously there's the alignment with a vivid vision, there's alignment with core values. There's alignment with purpose, and there's clarity around roles and responsibilities and org chart communication protocols. That's all kind of normal. You know, that that's kind of the meat and potatoes. I think where companies have to get very good is being present, being very mindful of the other people they're working with. Observing body language. You don't need to meet with somebody for an hour. You can meet with them for seven minutes, but in that seven minutes, be completely focused and paying attention to the other. So you can read the body language and you can read the intonation. And then I think it's also just about slowing down a little bit to kind of have that connection that we can't run all of our zoom meetings, you know, boom, boom, in the absence of actually having that human connection. Because the reality is, if that's the only time in the week that we chat with that employee, that means the other 39 or 49 hours next week, they have no interaction with us at all. They don't see us in the hallway, they don't see us in the lunchroom. So just being mindful about that human connection. And then lastly, it's about really caring about the people, you know, not just their birthday and their dog's name, but actually really knowing what's going on in their life, what are their dreams, what are their desires, what's on their bucket list. Like, how. How can you really care about them as a person more than anyone else cares about them? And then if you're caring about their humanity that much, they're going to go through brick walls for you to build your company. And that's a very new skill. It's a very kind of millennial, like the post 2000 skill. Because prior to that, it was like, you know, we didn't blend, right? It was like, this is my office. It's my company. Get your job done. You know, we didn't blend that at all, but I think we have to blend that now and post Covid. Absolutely have to blend it. So stay ahead of the curve as a coo. This next video is packed with great leadership lessons for you. It'll really help you as you continue in your growth.
