What 30 Years of Leadership Teaches You About Team Support

The hard part is you're not going to get the kids to like the grandparents unless the parents like the grandparents. That's really the truth. Right? Like, like if you're, if you don't love the management team, how can you expect your direct reports to like the management? The problem is like, we have to get you in that layer. So it's all about leading up. It's calling them on their, it's calling them on the core values. It's. And that works really well in a company that's like, you're right, we got to get this together. It works really badly when it doesn't, but if it doesn't, it means you're going to go find the right company to be in anyway. If you're just starting out in the course, here's what I recommend. First off, I try to get people to get multiple management team people in your company to go through the course at the same time. So let's say you've got four people, six people. So let's say you've got four people in your company all going through the course together. Have everyone do modules one and two this week and then watch the content, read the content, do the pre and post test and make their own notes next Monday. Have all the people that have gone through modules one and two each do a five minute book report to each other. Just what did you learn? What are you going to put in place? It drives a little bit of accountability, drives a little bit of sharing. And then Everybody do modules three and four and just do two modules per week for six weeks, is a great way to go through the 12 modules. There's only about five hours total in terms of watching and reading time to go through them so you can break it up really nicely. And to have everyone going through it at the same time, whether it's the entrepreneur, the visionary integrators, whatever they are, everyone going through the content at the same time makes a huge difference. And then what I like to do is every quarter for one year is go back and rewatch and reread the content again. Because you will go through a cycle of learning by watching it a second time, reading it a second time after you've been practicing it and using it in the field. That's usually the best practices that I tell people and how to approach the course. I pretty much put them in the order of, kind of the order of operations. The way that I would, would approach it, I would go through the modules in order. Unless you have something totally burning like, you know, you see a module and it's really attached to something you're really focusing on or struggling with and sure, watch it now. But I did kind of put them in the order that they make the most sense for me in terms of how do we grow our skills as a leader. If you've got a company that was struggling to drive learning and development for anybody, there's going to be great companies out there that are all about anything you want to keep. Because if you want to keep growing, hell yeah, it's way better. Like, I had a client years ago who I coached them for about two years. I coached his management team for about 18 months. And he would pay for any employee, any manager to go to any conference, any learning session, any coach, anything they wanted. There was never a requirement, they never had to prove it. It made sense for their job. It was all about, yes, I will invest in you. And because of that, people really were loving the company. Nobody quit, everybody was growing, everybody was excited. And his only ask was whenever you come back from the conference, when you come back from the retreat, when you finish a call with your coach, whatever it is, you have to teach something that you learned to the rest of the team. So there's this constant infusion of good energy and ideas and I think that's really powerful. So you'll find a much better company out there who believes in you. Laura, for me, and if you watch the module on one on one meetings, I talk about the fact that one on one meetings should never really be about task, follow up, that they really should be much more around growing of people, aligning of people, growing the confidence of people. And I think if you can focus your one on ones and flip your one on ones where you're not actually following up on projects at all, what you're doing is making sure that your team feels supported by you and that they're feeling like you can help grow their skills, grow their confidence, grow connections, help with mentoring, help remove obstacles. If you're there in a very. So it's more just talking about the projects. What do you need from me? How's it going? And make sure that it's feeling more like a supportive versus a following up. Right? Like I'm not going to follow up to make sure you're doing the work. I'm going to ask you how it's going and do you need anything from me? Can I help you with it? Do you need any brainstorming? Have you got it? I also would really heavily leverage video that if you can really leverage Video messages where if somebody leaves a slack message, you can reply with a 30 second loom video. Right. A lot of video messages back to people on their comments will humanize everything. That can work really well. You can also leverage just even kind of coffee chats where people just sit over coffee and do work together. And you just have like people over video just sitting. Even if we're just on video now, we're all sitting, working away. We at least feel like we're hanging out with the other people in the room. Right. There's something called Jam Group. They run online social events for companies and remote teams. They're super fun. They only cost about 25 bucks per employee, so it's really a rounding error. But it's a great way to actually get on and have some fun and do some. And you do like music trivia and bingo and escape rooms and there's all these crazy fun events. I've done a bunch of them during COVID but I've also done a bunch of them post Covid with teams and companies and it's a good way to connect. And I think lastly is just remembering that you do. If you have an in office kind of culture already, it means people do work, you know, in the same city. There's also great things that you can do. Like, you know, you can, you can rent an Airbnb out for a couple of days and just even have people go and work from the Airbnb. So people are sitting in the living room, sitting in the dining room, sitting in the, you know, family room or whatever. And Airbnbs are like ridiculously cheap if you consider that it's like 500 bucks a night for two nights. Great. Everybody shows up at the Airbnb. And it doesn't have to be like a planned meeting, it doesn't have to be a planned agenda. It's just 10 of you or the first 10 to sign up get to come and work here. And you can even have cross departmental people just coming in and just sitting in places like that. I like renting an Airbnb and just having people show up, especially if you can get, by the way, like an Airbnb with a pool. If you just do that, set up twice a month, like two days twice a month, and the Airbnb's got a pool and you bring in some food and literally make it super simple. Like not a lot of logistics and planning. Bring your laptop, show up, bring your bathing suit, have some swim, we'll bring in lunch. Other than that, we're just coming to work together. You do that. And by the way, you can even do that if your company has offices, right? And you're going to a work. It's just kind of a fun way to disconnect and have some fun and be a little bit more like Silicon Valley and a little bit less like, you know, Dell. So what I like doing is there's really two software platforms that we're going to be looking at to lead our team and to manage, you know, two objectives, right? One is you're going to be using Asana or Trello or Monday or you know, something that is your project manager, where people have all of their projects and tasks in there and you can see the status updates. And then ideally you can see whether they're green, yellow or red. So the only projects or tasks you should ever talk to them about are ones that are yellow or red. Because if they're green, they got it. There's no point in following up on projects if they're already on target, they're hitting it, they know how to do it, they got it. Asking them any question just pisses them off. Just don't follow up with people on the stuff that you know that they've already got. And then when you're gonna follow up with them, don't follow up to kind of criticize them, but follow up, say, hey, I noticed that you're off, like off pace because you showed it as yellow. Is there anything I can help you with? Is there anything you need from me? Do you want me to brainstorm with you? Like, what do you need to get back on track? Instead of saying, like, why aren't you on track? Why don't you have it right? That's kind of managing them. What you're trying to do is support them. So what I like doing is looking at your project manager to find out which projects they might want to talk about and then ask them, using situational leadership, what they need from you. The second thing is look at your metrics and dashboard and look at the metrics that they're accountable for, their business areas accountable for, and only talk about the ones that are yellow or red. There's no point in talking about the seven metrics that are all green because it's kind of redundant. So what it does is it allows you in your one on ones to talk about the stuff that they probably want to or probably need to talk about. And then, yes, you can both go through your housekeepers, right, your list of stuff that during the week you'd normally slack them and Email them. You want to put that all on a list so that when you meet with them on a Monday, you go, that was dumb. That was stupid. That took care of itself. Here, I'll ask about this one. Instead of pinging them 17 times during the week, you can kind of nail it all in the one on one. The only other thing I really like to do in the one on ones is make sure that I actually check in with them to make sure that they're doing okay. Because all of us are struggling with that human condition, right? All of us are struggling with stuff that I had a very, very, very close personal friend die three days ago, John Rulin, who wrote the book Giftology. And my world is completely blown apart. And if I was a normal employee, I wouldn't be on a call like this. I would be like taking some time off, decompressing. So if I was doing a one on one with my boss right now and all they wanted to do was talk about projects and talk about tasks and talk about metrics, I'm like, dude, you're totally missing the point. Like, I'm a human who's struggling right now. All I need is someone to let me just, I don't know, but let's go for a walk and get the hell out of here. And I think when we show up that way as a manager or as a leader with our direct reports and we really check in like, how are you? How's it going with your mom? How's it going with your family? What's going on with your brother? But really caring. And if we drop into that level of caring in that one on one, that's when they're going to all of a sudden outperform everybody in the organization because they feel like finally someone cares about them and their humanity. And I think as managers and leaders, we're often so thinking about following up on projects and we're missing the point. If we follow up on the person, they'll feel much more open about telling us about the projects they're struggling with and where they need help or what they need to bump. And then we can actually be there to support them, whether it's with more coaching or time management training or skill development or whatever, right? At the end of the day, our job is to grow people, right? Our job as a leader is to grow people and it's to grow their skills, their confidence and the connections so they can take on more responsibility, so they can get their work done and so that they can start to operate with a level of autonomy that they don't need us to be there day to day to manage them. Almost like our job as parents. Our job as a parent is to take these little kids and grow them into these adults so they can move out of the house and be their own adults so that they don't need us to be there every single day. At some point, our direct reports should not need us there anymore to do one on ones because we've grown their skills and their confidence and their connections and they can actually be self managing and self led and we can kind of give them their directions for the month or two and they're off and running and then maybe we can check in with them as people. But we don't need to be there in terms of the management day to day. Our job as a leader is to be there to support them. If they don't need that support, that's kind of cool. It means we can then take our time and our energy somewhere else. So the only time that you need to override that is if they don't feel they need the support. But they're missing objectives, they're missing deadlines, they're missing on core values. And now you need to come in and manage them and kind of realign them again. Then it's less about supporting them and it's more about supporting the organization by aligning them again. You know, one of the things I heard about being a parent is that we have to let our kids live their path. And at some point we move from becoming their parent to becoming their friend. And if we make that transition to becoming their friend, all of a sudden the door back to us is much more open. But if we keep parenting them when they no longer need parenting, they really start to shut down. And if all of a sudden we can just migrate from being less of their parent to more of their friend, then all of a sudden they're like, God, you're not such a bad human after all. It's really tough. Like my 21 year old calls me all the time about making food and he sends me pictures of his dishes and he asks me for help on stuff because I'm not parenting him anymore. That might be where you are with a couple of your direct reports is they don't, they don't need you as a mom, but they would love you as a friend. Something else to remember in terms of leading people is around Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you go back and think about Maslow's hierarchy that people need to have the kind of support. Right. The safety and security, the intimate relationships and friends. And this is a layer that if we can show up in this kind of middle layer with our team where we're not so much managing them, we're just being there and we're supporting them and we're letting them know that they, you know, can hang out and go for coffee and like, imagine if you could just go for coffee with them or hang out with them without any feeling. Like they have to constantly be reporting to you. Like my kids who just, just, they just don't want me to parent them anymore, even though I still see things they could do better. I just need to slip into being more of a friend mode and stop parenting a 21 and 23 year old. It actually kind of places you in a good zone of a leader where you've done the right thing, you've taken somebody, you've given them responsibility, you can grow them, and then you can start delegating more to them too, because they can take on more responsibility and they can take on, you know, more within the business with autonomy. I don't think I would change anything in there. I mean, I'm not married to it being the only structure. There's other conflict models out there. What I really find interesting about this conflict management model is I was taught it 35 years ago. I was taught it in 1989. What's beautiful about leadership and people is nothing really changes. It's not like I'm. It's not like it's a marketing tactic where marketing is very different from what it was five months ago, let alone five years ago, let alone five decades ago. Right. Like, stuff hasn't changed that much in terms of like human interaction and human conflict. The only thing I think that's changed more is that because of written communication, we have a lot more misunderstandings that happen which cause conflict. That in the old world where we kind of did everything more face to face or over the phone, we didn't have that happening as often. Right. So I think we have to be more cognizant that there is more conflict potentially there below the surface than we think there is now. Imagine if you write an entire email or an entire memo or a whole bunch of slack messages and you think that people are reading it carefully? No. Do you think people are putting the intonation on the correct word? No. Do you think they have the right emphasis on stuff? No. I actually sent this to a friend one time. I said happy birthday. That was what I dropped. I sent that exact message to My best friend, he came back to me and he goes, what's wrong? I'm like, nothing. Just said, happy Birthday. He goes, I know. That's all you said was Happy birthday. I'm like, dude, I was busy. I'm saying happy Birthday. I thought about you. Like, what the f. He's like, is something wrong? I'm like, no. Like, how about happy birthday? Like, what the f do you want from me? I'm saying happy birthday, but because I didn't drop like an emoji or a smiley face or he thought I was upset about some argument we had two days before, still, I'm like, no, I was actually saying happy birthday. So we have to remember that written communication is causing way more of the undercurrent of friction. And then we all have our own stories, right? So I think the key with the conflict management model isn't is it perfect or not? It gives us a framework to handle a situational conflict very simply, in a reasonably elegant way. And I think the real power is training everybody in this conflict model, training every manager and every leader and every subordinate in this model, right? You can take this content and you can teach people on your team this. But I would have every manager and every leader in your company going through it, so they learn it from Uncle Cameron so that then they can actually communicate better with each other and they trust each other, right? But no, I wouldn't change anything on the model itself, by the way. So take a look at an app called Marco Polo. It's actually video voice notes. You can actually send really quick videos back and forth, and then you actually get the human. The human side of the emotion. Because sometimes a voice note, you know, where we're walking down a street and we're moving quickly because we're trying to catch the train, and we don't realize that our voice has this sense of urgency in it versus if they see us running down the street, they're like, oh, he's just running down the street, like. Or they don't even see our smile on our face. We're like, hey, I was just calling to tell you that, like, I'm really busy right now. Like, oh, he's smiling, he's happy, right? So I think. I think if you can leverage video versus audio and audio versus text or email, you absolutely are going to win. The other one is just to race to the conflict, right? I talk about that in the model, too. The key with race to the conflict, and I don't know if I put that in there, is kind of count to 10 as well. Right? Like, it's raised to the conflict. But allow yourself to calm down a little bit so that you can go in and talk about how you were feeling. You shouldn't still be feeling the feelings as kind of strong as when you're dealing with the conflict. So if I'm going to come in, Evan, and say, hey, when you showed up late for this meeting again this week, you know, the third meeting in a row that you've been late for, I was really pissed off. I was super angry. If I can talk to you, kind of detached from that emotion, but still, you know, within an hour or two or the day of it happening, that's better than, I'm still so angry at you that I can't even think clearly and I need to race to the conflict. That's a little bit too soon. Do you remember when you were really young and your mom showed you how to pour juice or how to pour water? And, you know, she very, like, carefully gave you the. And then as you got older, she showed you how to make your bed or how to make baking, and, like, she got very hands on, and all of a sudden she moves away from that. Right. Her job was to grow your confidence and grow your skills and all of these different things. Our job as a leader is to do the same. It's to delegate more and then to grow their skills and grow their confidence at all of those tasks. So if you're worried that they're going to make mistakes, show them how to do the work and not make mistakes. Show them what finished looks like and ask them what they might do so that they don't make mistakes. Ask them how they might approach it so they don't make mistakes. Like, get them to think about, you know, how they might create things. Show them what your level of expectations are around mistakes. Like, are you looking for perfect on everything, or are you looking for very good or just good enough? You know, like, if I'm making my bed, does it have to look perfect like the military? Or does it just have to be made right? Or is it okay that I just close my door and pretend that it was made? Like, what's the level of, you know, making of a bed? We have to think about all of those things, all the projects, all of the goals, and when we delegate them to someone, explain to them what we want back, why we want that back. And then also a little bit of Parkinson's law is how little time and how little money do we want them to spend on that task or project that's part of delegation. So some of that for us is the confidence that our job is to delegate more and grow people, and that the more that we delegate and grow, we're going to be able to take on more responsibilities. Like, it's not like you'll never have stuff to do. You'll always have plenty to do. Even if all you're doing is coaching and growing people because you got everything onto their plate, that's still okay because you're growing people, growing confidence. I think the second part is to. To remember that it's not about how it gets done, it's about the fact that it gets done. And it's kind of like if you're ever dating somebody or you're married to somebody and you're in a. In a car and they're driving, you always tell them how to drive. Well, there's a parking spot, and here's a way to go. And be careful. And then you get in a taxi or an Uber. You never tell them, right? We know that they've got it. We're okay with it. We really surrender a little bit. We let them drive us. We kind of need to do the same with our employees. We need to show them where we're going, and they'll figure out how to get there. And if they get lost, then we can show up and help them. But don't give your employees the entire path if they're capable on figuring out the path on their own, because the path isn't as relevant as the destination. And I think as leaders, we need to focus more on clear destinations with clear parameters, like, don't speed, don't break the law, don't get in a car accident, but be here by this time. Do you know how to drive a car? Like, do you know how to drive a stick shift? Right. Like, you have to ask them those questions. Because I could delegate that to somebody and they've never driven a car before. Well, now I'm in trouble. But my job isn't to tell them exactly how to get there. And at the end of the day, your job is to make sure that your to do list does not have your name on it. Right? It's a list of stuff that has to get done, but not necessarily by Susanna. You're allowed to delegate all those things, and then you're allowed to continue growing people. Another test. Take your annual salary or your hourly rate and divide it by four. So let's say you make $100,000 a year. That's an hourly rate of $50 an hour, you should be delegating anything. That's a $12 task, right? If you can get it done for six bucks or ten bucks to freelancers around the world, it's not worth them paying you $50 an hour when you can pay somebody 6. So I would even delegate up to 50% of my hourly rate. So if I'm making $50 an hour, I'd be willing to pay people $25 an hour instead of me doing the work, because then I can get twice the bang for the buck. So that's a good test for you too, is taking a look at all the stuff that you're doing and saying, a, can we stop doing it? Does it need to even be done? B, can I get someone else to do it cheaper? And then can I just spend a little bit of time training them and coaching them? But delegation is what's going to supercharge anybody on a leadership team level. And this goes all the way up to the CEO. Most entrepreneurs are better at delegating because they're okay with writing the check because it's their money. They're okay with getting stuff off their plate because they own the place. They're a little bit lazy and a little bit bipolar, so they just, like, get rid of stuff that bores them. We need to learn those skills because at the end of the day, they don't necessarily want you to do the work. They just want you to make sure the work gets done. Here's the best way that I would do. I just wrote down the five core values for the COO Alliance. So the organization that I run, deliver what we promise, be open and vulnerable, show respect for everyone, grow big, act small, and have some effing fun. So the best way to build the trust of everyone else on your team is when you show up living those core values constantly. And when you thank people and praise people for living the core values as well. So when everyone else around you hears you saying, hey, Kelly, thanks for delivering what you promised, thanks for getting me that project on time yesterday, or thanks for doing this, or, Kelly, I love that you're so, like, hilarious in this meeting right now. Thank you for bringing some fun in. When you celebrate the core values and thank people and at the same time you live them, you own them, the trust is then all of a sudden implied. The problem is you don't earn their trust. You're going to take it away. They should already. Most people already show up trusting. The way you can build more of it is by living core values. And celebrating core values. I'll give an example of one of my biggest pet peeves ever is when the entrepreneur, the CEO, walks into a meeting five minutes late and they go, sorry, I'm late. You're not sorry you're late. You don't give at all. Like you actually don't care that you're late. So don't say you're sorry you're late. Show up on time. And if you actually show, like showing up on time is delivering what we promise, showing up on time is showing respect for other people. Right? That's actually living your core values. So the way that you earn trust is by just living that stuff. And the secret is to not tell them that you're living the core values. Like you don't say, hey, I'm showing up on time to deliver what I promise. But when you're celebrating everyone else doing it and they see you doing it, it becomes very implied very quickly. Anytime that we've seen a game, we've all watched this happen, the defense is running off the field and the offense is high fiving them or slapping them on the butt and the offense is coming off the field and the defense is high fiving them, just bumping, tapping them on the butt. Everybody's cheering the other person on constantly. Good play, Good job. A. We have to build that culture inside of our organizations. So what you want to do is every week at whatever meeting you have, whether it's a team meeting or a weekly meeting or a stand up or daily hubbles or whatever is get people to shout out and say thank you or praises to people who are living the core values. That's number one. You can start a slack channel where people actually praise and shout out the core values. In a slack channel. Start the practice of let's go around the room and say thank you or praise someone for something that happened in their area. Like let's make that a practice. It's all around the kind of the one minute manager catch people doing something, right. And if you build that in as a part of the culture and it's awkward for the first couple weeks, like it's oh, I don't know, Evan, good job with so and so and yeah, I guess Kelly, like, you know, like it's awkward as right? And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, I did notice. Oh wow, I just noticed that Elizabeth, did you know something really cool there? Or someone so was really happy or so and so was really respectful. Whatever it's going to be, it becomes more natural. So you just have to build, you have to build that a little bit. Kind of like riding a bicycle, right? As a little kid. At first your mom and dad are running behind you holding the seat and then they're like, pedal, go faster, go faster. All of a sudden you get used to it just becomes normal. You're going to go from this unconscious incompetence. Like right now we don't know that we all suck as a team in celebrating each other to then pointing it out going, hey, just want to point something out. We kind of suck at celebrating each other. I know we're all good humans, but we kind of suck at celebrating that. How about we try and practice it? So we're going to go to the conscious competence. Like we're going to keep thinking about it. Maybe we have a to do list or a post it note or it's up written on the whiteboard or it's part of every agenda. But we're going to practice it because it's there and because we have to. And then all of a sudden it just becomes natural. Like riding a bicycle. Now you just get on a bike and you go, you don't think about it, but when you were six, you'd get on a bike and be like, okay, start then this foot. I got to do that, right? You kind of like talk yourself through it. That's where you're still at the conscious competence or even uncon. Like. So that's all you're doing here is building the muscle, building the skill. Well, the, the hard part is you're not going to get the kids to like the grandparents unless the parents like the grandparents. That's really the truth. Right? Like, like if you're, if you don't love the management team, how can you expect your direct reports to like the management? The problem is like we have to get you in that layer. So it's all about leading up. It's calling them on their, it's calling them on the core values. And that works really well in a company that's like, you're right, we got to get this together. It works really badly when it doesn't. But if it doesn't, it means you're going to go find the right company to be in anyway. So leading up and like, and I'll give a specific example, 1989, my VP, I reported to him at College Pro Painters was being really rude and really disrespectful to one of the women in the office these days. He would have been hashtag metoo'd right out of the space. Like, it was just not. It's not cool what he was saying to her and how he was treating her. It's just really disrespectful. So I stopped in the middle of, like, an open floor office. I'm like, kevin, respect the individual. And that was one of our three core values. Deliver what you promised. Respect the individual. Pride in all you do. And I'm like, respect the individual. And I go, actually, you're not. You're breaking all three of our core values. And he looked at me and he's like, don't ever call me on the core values. And he was this big, intimidating dude, right? He's like, don't ever call me on the core values. And he walks out of the room. I'm like, I am totally getting fired. I'm 24. I'm totally getting fired right now. And 20 minutes later, he calls me into his office. I'm like, yep, here we go. I'm getting fired. And I walked into his office. I closed the door. He goes, don't ever call me on the core values in front of the leadership team. And I don't know where it came from, but my. My instant visceral response calmly was then, don't break them. And he looked at me and he's like. And he goes, ah. He goes, what do I do? How do I unwind this? What do I like? I'm like, you got to go talk to Julie and apologize, and you got to do it privately. And then you got to come back in and tell the team and you got to own this and you got to work on this, because it's not okay. And if I called Kevin right now and said, hey, can you join us on the zoom? He said, dude, I would love to, and I will tell the story. So that was when you were in a culture where people believed in the culture and culture mattered, and it was okay to make that call. And I still did something that was possibly a career limiting move. But when you do it and it's anchored on the core values, nobody can really touch you. You're not going to get your team to love management unless you love management. If you don't love management, it's an opportunity to go in and try to work with them, to show them what's not happening. And if it's. If it's just not going to happen or not going to change enough, then it's easier to go and move and go somewhere else. Right? It's like getting a divorce. It's either A failure or it's just, you know, what it was good for when it was and now it's not. We're going to go have another chapter in our life. And it's why at any company level, the most important team is the leadership team. So if you're the head of tech, right, the head of engineering or the head of IT and you're in a company, your most important business is the business. The second most important business is it. If you're the head of marketing, the most important team is the leadership team and then marketing second. So you have to be so aligned with the rest of the leadership team and only when you're perfectly aligned with them can you care about your functional business area. Second. And it's like the football player who comes off the field. Their most important team isn't the offense or the defense or the special teams. It's the Chicago Bears or the Dallas Cowboys. It's the team, not their functional area. And they all know that they're in it for the team first. And then they'll focus on their functional area second. And if the absence of that, you know, everybody kind of feels like the team isn't super aligned, the team isn't super tight. That's all. So I talked about the ones and the threes and that there's a transition from every one to every three. So one employee to three, from three to 10, from 10 to 30, from 30 to 100, from 100 to 300 or from 100,000 in revenue to 300,000 to a million to 3 million to 10 million to 30 million to 100 million. So when you're going kind of the 10 to 30, right. The 10 to 30 million tends to be like the 30 to 100 employee zone. You're going to start getting a little bit of politics creeping in as you get to the hundred employees or the 30 million. You're going to end up with some cross functional decision making where you have to actually get other departments to say yes to things, to know whether they have the resource allocation. Whereas when you're smaller, you can just make decisions because you're usually building the stuff in a vacuum. You're in a first time, you'll start hiring your first leadership team, really proven, seasoned leadership team member at every level versus when you're smaller in the 10 million kind of 30 employee zone, you tend to be the first time leaders in all the areas, the good competence. But they've never built teams, they've never built companies, they've never run P&Ls that tends to happen when you're more seasoned, more solid. You have a lot more level of P and L responsibility and autonomy happening, where the entrepreneur is no longer telling people what to do and what the plan is. They're literally just showing direction and culture and vision. And the leadership team is figuring out how to make that come true. The leadership team is figuring out strategy on how to make that come true. So you really migrate from a command and control to like a direction and vision and culture. And then the last thing that starts to happen, kind of from that 30 million to the hundred million, is you'll be hiring people that you don't. Not only do you not know their name, you don't even know what business area they work in. And this will be even true if you're like an in person. 300 people walking into the office. I'm like, I don't even know who that is. They've been here six months. Where do they work? I didn't know they were in marketing. What the F do they do? What's their name, where they come from? That was happening to me so often when we hit 248 employees. I'm like, I didn't know whether people were visitors in the office or dating somebody that worked for us or if they'd been there for six months. Which means that you're now culturally disconnected. And you have to get the leadership team to meet with people in teams and skip level meetings because you have a lot less time for one on ones and coffee chats.