The speaker argues we overestimate our abilities and need constant learning through mastermind groups and people who know more than us. He uses scorecards to rate roles like COO across eight core areas, tracking improvement over time. A CEO client, Sebastian Tondor, focuses each quarter on one targeted skill to build expertise.
Chapters
We are not as smart as we think we are. I think we kind of wake up in the morning in most of us in our careers, working hard and driving hard and feeling successful, you know, getting accolades, winning awards, speaking on stages, writing books. And then the reality is we're not so smart. And I realized years ago in one of the mastermind groups that I was in, that if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. So over the last number of years, I've spent a lot of time and money on putting myself in rooms where I'm not smart. Smartest person in the room. And by the way, I'd love in the comments just to drop in, you know, what mastermind groups you're in, what books you're learning from, how you're working on continuing to grow. Because as Ray Kroc, you know, from McDonald's, said, When you're green, you're growing. When you're ripe, you're dead. I think all of us are still growing. And so I started joining mastermind groups to work on my skills and devouring business podcasts. And, you know, I plugged myself into four different. Five different mastermind communities over the last probably 10 years. And I'm really deep into them. And I go to these groups and, you know, sometimes I'm a mentor in residence, sometimes I'm an active participant, Sometimes I'm the smartest guy or the dumbest guy in the room. I mean, often the dumbest guy, more times than not the dumbest guy. It's amazing the amount of smart people out there that I can still learn from. So one of the groups that I've been in for seven years is called Strategic Coach, and Dan Sullivan created something called a scorecard. And I'm going to be releasing a few different digital scorecards to. To rate ourselves against the norm or against a good benchmark. And if I think about, as an example, coos, right, if we've got second in commands for your company, where do they stack up against themselves? Where do they stack up against others? Where do they stack up against as good as they could be? You know, let's say Sheryl Sandberg, who's kind of the queen bee of second in commands right now, the CEO for Facebook, she probably scores, you know, 100% on, you know, any comparisons of herself against other COOs. You know, maybe I score it like 80%, and maybe somebody scores at 50. But the key is to rate ourselves constantly against ourselves and to drive towards getting better. And that kind of Constant improvement. So I'm going to be launching a scorecard later today where you can actually rate your COO against themselves or they can rate themselves as well and kind of get a score on eight different areas as to how they stand out. And the way that I use these scores is to set a benchmark for myself and a way for me to constantly improve. So if I consider that we're going to rate ourselves against eight core areas, how can I get better in each of those eight areas and how can I constantly become, you know, either world class or working on my skills at those? So that's the purpose of the scorecard. I'll drop the link down in the comments later, but the general idea is to constantly be trying to get better. So years ago, back in 2003, when I was the second in command for 1-800-got junk, we were not quite at the pinnacle of our growth, but definitely growing quite quickly. We'd just been on Oprah that year and I remember when we'd been on Oprah that the whole company was super excited and I really had no interest in reading or in watching the episode right away because I knew that, you know, we really had a business to build. You know, that year we ranked for the first time the number one company to work for in British Columbia. It took me a couple days to even bother reading the article because I was always working to get ourselves better. So part of growth is to keep working on yourself, keep working on your skills, keep working on yourself, but also to remember that you'll never get there, you'll never get to that horizon. And if you're only going to be happy when you get to the horizon, you're never going to be happy. So it's about that constant improvement and trying to improve, but also to reflect and look at how far you've grown and how, how far you've come in your careers, in your growth. So that's the purpose of me launching these scorecards. We actually have all of our second in commands at the COO alliance fill out a scorecard and they rate themselves against themselves at every single event. And by doing that, when they rate themselves against themselves at every event, it also really tries or focuses their learning and helps them continue to focus their learning and their growth. So pretty powerful idea about rating yourself, grading yourself, and then applying your learning towards that. I was also thinking earlier about a CEO that I used to coach from Geneva in Switzerland, Sebastian Tondor. And Sebastian would rate himself and find an area that he wanted to get better in and learn at. And then that quarter, he would read as much as he could about that specific business area. So let's say, as an example, that he wanted to get better at quarterly planning. He'd be reading books on quarterly planning. He would find podcast episodes about quarterly planning. He would read Harvard Business Review articles about quarterly planning. And then let's say next month, he was doing some big interviews. He wanted to get better at interviewing. He would read books on interviewing, watch videos on interviewing, you know, participate in masterminds, and question people about interviewing. So for yourself, it's to remember that every day you get back in the morning and you're back to a 0 out of 10. And our goal is to get smarter and better at what we do, but also to connect with the people that already know how to do what we don't know how to do. Because at the end of the day, it's not always a how do I do this problem. It's often a who can do it? Or who can teach me how to do it? Or who can I outsource this to as well? So consider that in your learning as well. Hopefully, that's helpful for all of you. And again, drop in the comments where you've been learning, where you've been growing, what mastermind groups you're a part of, and how you rate yourself to continually work on yourself and work on getting better.
