This Happens When You Appreciate Your Team | Cameron Herold (Podcast 421)

Mine is to put a post it note up on your laptop or on your office door or have a daily reminder to go and praise people for the stuff that they're doing. Well, right? Raise their confidence. You don't need any skills to say thank you for doing a good job yesterday. Thank you for working hard on this project. Awesome job on living this core value. Fantastic work on getting that goal accomplished. If leaders would praise people twice as often as we give them more goals and more projects and show them all the stuff they need to fix. That alone is game changing.

I'll describe it for everybody listening. At the top it says two ladders and then there are two ladders. At the bottom it says grow your leaders. And one ladder is called skills and the other one is confidence. Why did you share that with me?

It's interesting. Years ago I got involved with a company called College Pro Painters. What a lot of people don't know about the company is it became the largest residential host painting company on the planet. And every year we had to hire 800 university students to become franchisees and in one month train them to hire 8,000 students to paint houses. So imagine hiring 8,800 people in a period of three to four months and training them all and then deploying them to paint $60 million in houses over the course of a summer. We had to become operationally world class at the interviewing, recruiting and the onboarding of talent. But we also had to be really good at building the skill sets of people. And what I was trained in very early on was it skills and confidence that will actually grow those people. So I started to then visualize, because it was a house painting company, as if you were climbing up two very long ladders beside each other. You ever climbed like a 24 foot or a 32 or a 40 foot ladder? You know, you get halfway up and it starts to sway a little bit and you're like, whoa, this is a little bit. Well, if you're climbing up one ladder and your left hand and left foot were climbing up one ladder and right beside it, like right, right beside that ladder, your. Your left foot and left hand were climbing up a second ladder, right? So imagine if you get halfway up and they both start to sway, you get a little nervo, right? Well, the nerves for me are if my skills are shaky, then my confidence is going to be starting to shake. If my confidence is shaky, my skills start to shake. So I started to think about what's it like when a manager or a leader or a CEO visionary integrator whatever the title is, anybody inside of a business that's growing and managing people, if their skills are shaking, their confidence shakes. If their confidence shaking, their skills are shaking. And I visualized my job is to grow people and help them climb up two ladders. That's where the idea came from.

It's a really great visual and it's not easy to get up that high. Right. So I mean, if you carry that metaphor forward, the higher you go, the more practice it takes and also the more setup it takes.

Right.

Like how you set up the ladder is pretty important too. Like you've got to set this up. Right.

I also want to tie the analogy back to something else. If anybody else has parents, you know, as a parent, you've got kids. So our job as a father or as a mother is to raise our kids well. When we have a child that's two years old, we can't get mad at them when they make a mistake because they're going to freeze. We need to cheer them on. It's like the book, the one minute manager. We need to catch them doing something right. We need to coach them to success, we need to praise them to success and that's growing their confidence, which then allows them to try something else. But if every time they fail, we get mad at them or we chastise them or we show them what they're doing wrong, our kid is going to shut down and become insecure, become not able to do anything and they're going to freeze. So yeah, the setup is how do you actually show someone that I'm going to help you climb up this ladder. I'm not going to manage you, I'm not going to hold you accountable. I'm not. And I'm going to make the coaching environment safe. I'm going to make the coaching environment fun. It's almost like a pro athlete that every day they're getting coached and mentored and they're continuing to get better at their game. They're showing up for coaching because they know they're not broken. They know it's to make them even better than they are. So. So some of the setup of the ladder, some of the setup of coaching is I'm going to be coaching you because you're great. If you weren't great, I'd be getting rid of you. Right. I'm not going to invest any time in coaching you on skills or helping to build your confidence or having an open door policy or doing one on one meetings if you're not the right person. I'm just going to fire you and bring the right person in. So some of the setup is letting your employees know that you're giving them that time and developing them because you want them inside of the company. Oh, and by the way, I'm getting coaching too. So it's often really important for the leader to show in. Part of the setup is coaching is good for all of us. I'm getting coaching on my confidence. I'm working with a mindset coach. I'm in an executive coaching program. Even me, myself Today at almost 59 years old, I'm in a group coaching program getting coached. I have a mentor who works with me on my mindset that I pay and she's been working with me over six years at 59 years old still. So if coaching is good for me, then it's clearly going to be good for you too. And that's kind of some of the setup.

Well, you went through a lot of stuff really, really fast.

This is.

Everybody hold on tight because this is the way Cameron goes. There's a lot in what you just said. So number one, you said something really fast and I want to go back to it because it's a really big deal. I'm not going to hold you accountable is something you just quickly said. Now hold on because a lot of people say, oh, no, no, no, that's not leadership. Leadership is holding people accountable and being hard on those things and being tough on, on the smart goals and being tough on the time. You're saying something a little different than that.

Correct. So what I do, and this is interesting, back in 2003, so 21 years ago, Fortune magazine came out to Vancouver to interview myself and Brian Scudamore who were building 1-800-God junk. I was the CEO, COO and Fortune magazine. Actually it was Fortune small business. Justin Martin was the author or the writer. Justin said, how do you hold your employees accountable? And I said, I don't. I hire accountable people. And he was like, whoa. And it was just something that kind of dawned on me in the moment that it's easier to not have to manage someone. It's easier to hire a self managing person. And it's kind of like Herb Kelleher from Southwest Airlines. They asked the founder of Herb Southwest, how do you get all your employees to be so happy? He said, we hire happy people. Right, Govind, you've always been happy. You've always had a smile, you've always had a good laugh. You've always been friendly. I don't have to teach you to be happy and friendly. That's your normal disposition. So if I want to have someone who's accountable, hire someone who's been accountable already in life. Hire someone who sets goals on their own in their personal life, who is tenacious in their personal life, who is, who seeks out personal growth on their own, who wants to go and find a coach to help them get better. Then you're not having to manage them day to day. You can flip the org chart upside down so that the CEO is at the bottom supporting the VPs who are supporting the managers, who are supporting the employees, who are supporting the customers. Almost like an inverted pyramid. And then I don't have to manage you. I just need to give you more skills and give you more confidence and get the heck out of your way. So that's kind of what I meant by that. I don't hold people accountable.

And you're also saying that you're guiding. So the guide rails are there of this is what we believe. This is how we're going to do things. This is our vision. This is who we are. You remind them of who they really are. Because what happens with pressure and noise is people, they can cover it up a little bit sometimes. Right. They, they try. There's this fake it till you make it thing and we want to get past that. That's not where we learn. Right?

Right. So the key is if you notice, and Gen Y and Gen Z are very good at the fake it till you make it, they're very good at showing the confidence, but they don't necessarily always have the skills. So our job as a leader is to kind of let them know that it's okay to say I suck at this. I actually want you to have the confidence to say, I'm not good at this. I don't know what I'm doing. I want to do it. I'd like to figure it out. I need your help. And that's actually a strength. And if you can show the team that that is a strength. So that's sometimes where I as a leader get vulnerable. And I'll say, you know what? I suck at this. I'm outsourcing, or I suck at this. I'm getting a mentor. What do you suck at? And if you can kind of do it in that same casual odg shucks kind of conversation and make it safe for your team, then you can actually support them and give them more skills and give them more confidence. Right. It's kind of like saying, hey, are you halfway up a ladder Is the ladder shaking? And do you have the confidence to say, I'm a little scared? And I go, hey, I've been up that ladder too. It's scary. Let me come up beside you and show you how to get up there. Let me help you out. Would you like that? They go, oh, yes. Thank you. So it's making it safe for people to say, I need your support, I need your coaching. I need your direction. I need your guidance. And I'm not getting in trouble for that. That's what you're there for.

Building on that, isn't it our job to be there at the bottom of the ladder as a spotter, giving that extra stability and confidence as they go up that skills ladder and skills as they go up the confidence ladder? I mean, being there to hold the bottom of the ladder helps them go up.

And as the confidence goes up, their skills go up. As their skills go up, their confidence goes up. As their confidence goes up, their skills go up. So it's almost like a little bit. A little bit. A little bit, a little bit. And if people could see you're going up each ladder right beside each other, a little bit at a time. And our job is to help them go up that ladder.

So let's. Let's come back just a little bit of time.

Oh, so go ahead. It all. It all ties into one core concept or mantra that I have for every leader, and it's that a leader's core job is to grow people. Right? Our job is to not do work. It's to grow people so they can do work. Entrepreneurs are better at this than most executives. Entrepreneurs are good at delegating all the stuff that we hate, right? Once we get good at delegating, we get really good at delegating. We just keep giving it to everybody else. Leaders need to do that too. Every leader, every vice president or CEOs to do list doesn't have their name on it, Right? If I think of Harley Finkelstein, who is the CEO at Shopify, back in the early days, when I met them, they had 40 employees. Harley's to do list didn't say Harley's to do list. It just said to do list. Harley got very good at delegating all the things on his to do list and growing the skills and confidence of his people so they could do even more. So he could take on even more responsibility and delegate it to people. His results were by delegating more and getting results through others and then by growing their confidence in their skills.

And when you grow the people, you can grow the list, right? And that's really what scale is. If you grow the people, you can.

Grow the list and you can buy another company. You can set bigger goals. You can scale the company to 100 million because you're constantly not trying to do the work. You're trying to get the work done by others. College pro painters and student painters were only good because we had a vision, we had core values, and we knew that if we grew people's skills and confidence, they could paint $60 million in houses. But if we were trying to paint them, like, you didn't do a lot of painting as a student painter, you hired painters to paint for you. I know how to paint a house, but I don't like painting. I used to fake it, and I was terrified up that ladder. But what I was really good at was getting the skills of people. I remember flying a guy for, you know, putting him on a train from Ottawa to Sudbury to have Campbell Robertson from. From Ottawa come out to Sudbury and train all my people. For me, I just wanted to train them and give them confidence and then be there for them. But I can't hold them accountable to do something I'm not even that good at.

Yeah, it's so true. Now, let's go back to this idea again. It was one of the things you said really quickly was it's okay to say I suck at this as a leader, and. And I'm going to even challenge you further. I think we have to say that we have to be accountable first around the things that we don't want to do. We have to show up vulnerable and say, I don't know how to do this. How do we solve this together? And that has to be where we start. Like, we can't end up that way.

So here's a great question that I'm often asked on this too. If you're really bad at, let's say it, how are you going to coach somebody who's your head of IT if you're bad at it? Well, for me to grow their skills and grow their confidence doesn't mean I have to do it. I know that they need to get better at their skills. I can get an outside consultant to coach them. I can get an outside mentor to coach them. I can put them in some IT mastermind where their skills and strength and connections can grow. I just need to help them get that, but not by me doing the work. Very similar to a mom and dad who are going to coach little Johnny to be the best baseball Player. They're not necessarily going to coach Johnny in baseball. They might teach him the very basics, but they're going to put him on a baseball team so that he gets coaching in baseball. So my job is to make sure that my team grow their skills and confidence, but not always me doing the work to teach them either. Sometimes it's putting them in the right rooms, giving them the right resources, but it's always there to grow their skills and grow their confidence. And that's where the results come from.

And that's because our responsibility is to grow people. Right?

Right. So I can say I'm bad at this and I'm going to help you get better even though I'm bad at it. I'm going to help you get better by finding you a mentor, by finding you a group. It's kind of like an entrepreneur today who puts their CEO into the CEO alliance or who signs up their people for the invest in your leaders course. Maybe I'm not good at teaching situational leadership and problem solving and project management and conflict management, but I know this course, invest in your leaders will be really good. You get in that course, I'll pay for it. Your skills will grow, your confidence will grow. My job as a leader is taken care of for today. Right. So it's not always we have to be good. We just have to help them get better.

And places like CEO alliance and others like that and when we put people like the IT people with other high level IT people, that's not normal. And like, let's also say a lot of leaders are afraid of putting their COO or their head or director, lead developer in these masterminds because they're afraid they're going to lose them. But at the same time, but if you, you know, I mean, I think people need to be in a cohort of their peers. People need. That's where they do a lot of learning. That's where they build a lot of skills and confidence, don't they?

Well, I had an entrepreneur one time who said, what if I invest in my people and I put them into the COO alliance, I put them into your invest in your leaders course. What if I invest this year and growing their skills and putting all this money in them and they quit. I said, okay, let me flip this around for you. What if you don't invest in their skills? What if you don't invest in their confidence? What if you don't invest in their connections and they stay? What if you have someone who's weaker and they still make all the mistakes for the next year, what do you think is going to cost you more having the people just stay where they are and now they don't know anybody and they're all going to do it the same way. Or you invest, like, by the way, if you invest in their skills, you invest in their confidence, they're not going anywhere else because they're more in, kind of endeared to you and they're taking on more responsibility. They're probably progressing in their career. We're nervous about it, but we're nervous for the wrong reasons.

Okay, so I like again the metaphor, the visual of one hand on the rungs of skills and the other hand and foot on the rungs of confidence. And this is, you know, this is not speed climbing that we see at the Olympics where they're just flying up the hill.

This is slow, steady, slow, steady, right?

So what happens? What have you seen? What's the downside? Cause a lot of organizations and a lot of leaders can get pretty passionate about growing people's skills and they get tough on them. They're, they're like motivational and it's bang, bang, bang. Grow your skills, grow your skills. Not working on the confidence piece. What happens if people go up one side too fast and it's not this measured approach?

Then all of a sudden your skills and confidence are too far away from each other and it starts getting shaky. And if you're on a physical ladder and your hand, your left hand and left foot are three rungs ahead of your right, all of a sudden you're stretched and you will start to shake. As an example, when I was growing 1-800-God junk, we took the company from 2 million to 106 million in revenue in six years, which meant the skills of our management team and leadership team needed to continue to grow every year too. If our skills didn't grow, they were basically all out of a job. So what we had to do was to grow their skills at the same pace as the organization was scaling. And we had to show them. And by the way, we had to hire self driven learners. We recognized that year two that I was there, that to only train people who weren't that into training was hard work. Very similar to Herb Kelleher. You can't take a grumpy person and make them happy, but you can take a happy person and make them even happier. So we had to take people that already liked to learn, already wanted to grow. They were already reading business books. Maybe they weren't reading one a day, but they were definitely into self growth, personal growth. They were more apt to continue to work on their skills because they didn't see it as a deficiency getting to average, they saw it as something that was good getting to great.

So for people who are thinking, oh no, if I just get the skills, I'm going to be able to reach and get something. It's like reaching off the edge of a ladder, right? I mean, you might be able to reach that light bulb that's way off to the side, but you're going to fall.

Well. And this is where the leader's job is to make sure that we're aligned with where the direction of the company is and we're growing people's skills in alignment with what the company needs. So I'll give a specific example. I launched this course three years ago called Invest in your leaders. And it's the 12 core skills that anyone who manages people need to be really good at. Now there's lots of other skills out there too, but if, if you're managing people, you need to be good at adapting your leadership style. You need to be good at coaching people, you gotta be good at interviewing and hiring people. You have to be good at running meetings, you better be good at managing conflict, you better be good at managing time management, managing projects. So these core 12 skills are kind of right inside the scope of the ladders of what people need to be good at now. Yes, you might really want to be good at know, leveraging some software tool or managing some, I don't know, like creative strategy thing. Like if you're, if you go too far of a reach out, it might be good, but it's not as good as the core skills that everyone needs to be good at. So I think you start with the core, almost like Simon Sinek's golden circle. If you go from the why, the how and the what we really need to train people on, on the, the center, the why, which is your core values, your core purpose, your bhag, your vivid vision, how we got to where we are. And then the how is all the leadership skills in my course, you can kind of go too far out on. Some of the training gets pretty random. It's weird. When you look at some of the training programs that some big companies in government run, you realize that their training programs have just gotten so random that nobody really cares.

Yeah. And as a result of that, you're throwing skills at people without any idea as to how they're applied. They're not aligned with the purpose of the organization. And they sort of undermine people's confidence.

Totally will. Because then they're spending time on stuff that they know intuitively they shouldn't be spending time on and they're not sure why they're doing it. So that starts to get a little frustrating for them. Right. Why am I even spending time on this kind of stuff? And then when they start to think about it even further, they realize that if I was spending time on the right things, I would actually be getting more productive, I'd be getting more success, I'd be feeling better. So our job as a leader is to make sure that our people are aligned, right. Are they working in the right direction? Do they have any skill development they need? And then can we give them any kind of a confidence boost? So it's direction, development and support.

Let's talk about it for the, you know, the average person out there, let's say a small business, they've got 20 to 50 employees or maybe 20 to 100 employees might be a bigger, bigger swath. And they're, they're trying to figure out where to get started on this. Right. Because I think a lot of people struggle at that size. Organization is to okay, who do I pick and where do I get started? What's a small action item that they could take?

Mine is, is to put a post it note up on your, on your laptop or on your office door or have a daily reminder to go and praise people for the stuff that they're doing well. Right. Raise their confidence. You don't need any skills to say thank you for doing a good job yesterday. Thank you for working hard on this project. Awesome job on living this core value. Fantastic work on getting that goal accomplished. If leaders would praise people twice as often as we give them more goals and more projects and show them all the stuff they need to fix. That alone is game changing. It's almost like if we're married, if we like you don't tell your spouse once a quarter that you love them. You tell them constantly that you love them and it's because you're telling constantly that you're loving them and you're showing them you love them and little acts of service, showing them you love them and they're feeling all that love, that you can have a big blow up fight and it doesn't destroy the marriage because you've built that foundation of trust. So inside of a company, whether it's a ten person company or a hundred person company, or even a five hundred thousand person company saying thank you, showing gratitude, praising for success, Praising on core values is huge. I remember about 15 years ago, my mentor who was being groomed as the COO at Starbucks was telling me about Howard Behar, who was the, the current CEO at Starbucks. Howard would spend two hours every single Friday handwriting thank you notes to employees and stores at Starbucks. So just focusing on catching people doing something right is game changing for every company out there and requires no skill. You don't need any skill as an entrepreneur to do that.

That's a really amazing place to start. And I remember we were talking and it's amazing that we've come to this point in this conversation as well, but we were talking offline about John Rulin. He suddenly passed away. But one of, one of the great gifts he gave the world was the value of appreciating people. And his paper napkin to us was what you appreciate, appreciates. So when you appreciate people, you automatically raise them up, you remind them a little bit of who they really are. And that was his message. I went back and listened to that following the sad news and it, it lifted me up just to hear that message because it's so powerful. Right?

I love that you said that. One of John's gifts, considering his company was called Giftology and his bestselling book is called Giftology. Jason Gaynord, a mutual friend of ours, sent a video out a few days ago that really helped me through some of how hard this has been in losing John recently, like six days or eight days ago. And it was that John is a gift to all of us.

He is, he remains a gift in the present tense.

And it doesn't take any effort as a human being to say thank you or great job or you're doing an amazing thing or this is, this is awesome. Like praise people. And it's right out of the book the One Minute Manager by Ken Hersey and Paul Blanchard or Dr. Paul Blanchard. And this was 40 years ago. They write the One Minute Manager, still to this day, probably one of the best business books ever written that catching.

People doing, catching people doing something right is such an easy, easy idea. So when you start with confidence, so the idea is small organizations doesn't cost you anything. Think about whatever KPI you have on your post it note have on on your computer something about appreciation and making sure that you, you increase the amount of appreciation that you're giving your people for doing the right things.

Right. Well, and not just for small companies. I mean, if you're the vice president in a 10,000 person company, start saying thank you more, start praising people More. Start showing appreciation more. Start celebrating the core values more. You will get way more results out of any of your direct reports if you're a 10,000 person company than if you're holding, trying to hold them accountable. It's crazy talent.

You start with confidence first.

Right?

And that's what you're saying, start with confidence first.

Well, it's easiest. Easiest. It doesn't require any skills.

Does it also improve your credibility with which when you come to them with skills?

Yeah, I think it'll increase your relationship and trust and the fact that they'll, they'll believe in you more because they like you. I'm not sure it'll change your credibility yet, but it'll definitely. They'll be more open and up to it because they feel safe, right? They're going to feel safe in anything you tell them because they know that you appreciate them and you like them. So there's something called the sandwich, right? Which is like you got to put the, the crappy stuff they have to improve on in between two slices of praise, right? The way that people do it wrong. Let's say that I'm showing up to an employee and I need to show him some of his work isn't written properly. Bad copywriting and it's common mistakes he's always making. You don't show up and say hey, good job this morning with the email that you sent out, but I need to talk to you about all the stuff you're doing wrong on this stuff. But hey, good job. On the website they feel that too scripted the sandwich can happen where you give them all the praise in the morning, you give them more praise at lunch, maybe you give them something to work on in the afternoon and you hit them pretty hard with how bad it was. And then maybe tomorrow you heavy up again on how amazing they're doing at some other stuff. Don't do it in the same five minute meeting, but be cognizant to be praising people twice as often as we're giving them more goals and more projects and more criticism. When I'm coaching somebody on skills, I make sure that this is how I coach someone around skills. I'll start off by saying, tell me three things you're doing really well and in this specific area right now. And I listen, that makes them feel safe and makes them feel good. And then I say, okay, tell me three things you can do better, right? Not that you suck at, not that you're a bad human, just three things you can do better on this specific skill area and they'll tell me, and then I'll say, okay, let me tell you some stuff. Here's three things I think you're doing well, right? So again, it creates that safe environment. They've already told me some stuff, so I start with them. Start with good, go with constructive criticism. I give them the good. I give them the constructive criticism. And then I just say, I love that you're actually growing like this. Tell me whatever you need to help. You go, I think we got this right. You kind of send them off and make them feel good. That's a really simple approach. But that, again, is right out of the book. The one minute manager from 40 years ago. Yeah.

And, you know, one of the things that I think that's really important is the narrative is when the boss or when the leader comes to speak to the team. It's not usually because you're great and you're awesome and I believe in you. It's, you screwed up. This is what went wrong. You cost the organization time, energy, and resources. And here I'm holding you accountable for it, or I'm pissed off about it. So changing that dynamic.

But now their confidence ladder is shaking. Right? All you've done is into a room and you got their confidence ladder shaking. And then you expect them to do well. No, they're going to be shaking on that ladder for the rest of the day. That didn't do any good.

And if you. If you make that the default, if that's how you show up all the time, it doesn't matter what you're saying. They're shaking anyway because they know the shake's gonna come. It's.

It's gonna. They watch. They watch you walk in the room and they're nervous. Right.

So you have to reinforce that you're there because they're great, because you're great.

And that's why I flipped the org chart upside down, is I'm there to support them and grow them and give them confidence and skills and connections. The other thing I learned this from Michael Gerber in the e myth was that people don't fail. Systems fail. So what happens if. If something goes wrong, which gives us a coachable moment? I go in and I say, what system was missing or what system was broken? Not what did you do wrong here? Which gets them shaking. What system was broken? They go, oh, I think this was broken. Cool. Do you know how to fix it? Not really. Do you want some help? That would be amazing. So it feels safe because you're not blaming a person and you're then there to support them, to fix the system or put a system in place and give them the confidence. And sometimes the system is an interviewing system or a hiring system or a coaching system, whatever it is. But that's where the leaders can really get results, is because we're showing up and creating a safe environment, creating a confidence environment, and then always working on growing people's skills. I believe people work for people, not companies. And so, sure, it's definitely on our CEO in terms of motivating them for the company. Of like, here's why this is an amazing technology, an amazing space. Here's where we see things evolving. For the next three to five years, you'll be at sort of the ground floor of that and architecting that future. I think that.