Brad Sugars Leadership Vs Management | Business Systems Summit

Welcome back to the Business Systems Summit. In this session I'm extremely excited and honored to introduce one of the earliest influencers I had when I got started in business. His name is Brad Sugars. He runs a company called Action Coach which got started in 1994. It's grown significantly to where it is today. Now Entrepreneur magazine ranks it as the number one leading business coaching franchise in the world. It operates in over 54 countries, has more than 1000 offices and they're coaching more than 1500 businesses every single week. Now I first came across Brad's work in the early 2000s when I attended one of his workshops called the Billionaire in Training. It was here in Australia, up on the Gold coast and it was all about buying, building and selling businesses. Now what I loved about it was the systematic approach that it took. And you'll very much see that influence in all of the work that we do, particularly here at System Hub. Now he's an internationally recognized businessman, he's asked to speak all around the world. So sometimes it can be hard to lock him down for some one on one time. But we've been fortunate to have Brad make some time available to pre record this session for the summit. So it's with great pleasure that I get to welcome Brad Sugars to the Business Systems Summit.

Hi, I'm Brad Sugars and welcome to this live video. Today we're learning about management and leadership. And I want to say that leadership is one of the biggest problems in business now. Not because leadership is bad, but because there is a lack of management leading to the leadership. Now let me explain that for you. See ultimately leadership is something that everyone is studying. They've read the books, they've been to the seminars. If you go on Amazon or you go on any bookstore, there's a massive segment of books on leadership, but there's very few books on management. Now the challenge with that. Well in fact if we think back, the last best selling book on management was probably the 1 minute manager back in either when was that the late 80s or sorry, late 70s I think it was, or early 80s. Now if we take a look at why management has disappeared and how management, the lack of it and the leadership. Well actually first let's define what the two of them are. See, management is about creating competent, productive people. Management is about productive people that have a level of competence that know what they're doing, they know how they're doing their job. So if, if a company has people that don't know what they're doing, there's a Lack of competency or there's a lack of productivity going on, that's a management problem. Okay, now flip that over and say, all right, leadership. Leadership is about creating passionate, focused people. So if the people in the organization lack passion and lack that motivation to do their job and they're not focused on where they need to be going, then that's a leadership issue. So let's define the two separately. Now, the challenge that confronts most business people today is that, well, the business has been really well built from a leadership perspective. But because of the lack of management, we've got people that aren't good at their job and they're not that productive. But we're getting them passionate and excited, and we're not getting the results we want to get. So how do we get the results we want to get in business? Well, it's not actually that complex. We've got to have good management. We've got to have good leadership. Now, does every person need to be both? Not necessarily. But there are definite management traits that we want to be built into every leader, and there's definite leadership traits we want to build into every manager. So I suggest that we learn both key skill sets so that we can actually do this. Now, if we think back when management. Well, in fact, let's look at most companies today. If someone gets promoted to be a manager in a company, what level of training do they get as management training? In this day and age, the relative. The amount of management training or the lack of management training for most people actually out there in business is extraordinarily high. Now, why is it that people don't get management training in companies? Well, I think that management got a bad rap somewhere in the, maybe in the 90s or early 2000s where people said, well, you don't need to manage your people, you need to lead them. And it was kind of like leadership said management was a bad thing. But hang on a second. We've got to have competent, productive people if we want to get the job done in any business. So we do need to learn management skills. We need to understand what those management skills are and how they work, and then we need to understand leadership as well. So today we're going to focus in on both leadership and management. So management is where we start, though, because if we see negative behaviors in an organization, normally it's a lack of management. So if I see things like people playing, you know, they're in denial about how good they are, they think they're better than they are, or their lack of responsibility These people are blaming others. There's no team cohesiveness. You know, a lot of these things are basically around lack of management, for want of a better term. I know sometimes we say it's bad management, but the reality is most people are quite lazy managers. They give someone a task and then they don't even agree a time frame or a schedule or a, a plan to get it done by. So let's take a look at how we become good managers as well as how we actually operate as good leaders. So the five main points of management I want to talk about today, Number one, do they know their job? Do they actually know what their job is? If you were to sit down with your top 10 employees and say to them, listen, write a list of what you think your job is. Write down the top five things, the top 10 things you think your job is, and at the same time you, you're writing your list of what you think their job is. See, most employees don't actually know what is required of them. They don't know specifically what is required of them. Their job description is too vague and there's no reality around what they're doing, why they're doing it. So if I look to the basics of the start of management, it starts with a really good job description where people know what is expected of them, know how they're supposed to do it, and know why they're supposed to supposed to do it. Now let's take a look at actually building. Well, for majority of employment positions, I want to use checklists and systemization. See, someone said to me the other week, well Brad, you know, my staff aren't doing a great job. And I said, good, show me the checklist they're supposed to follow. And of course there's no checklist for them to follow. So therefore how can they be doing a good job? You know, give your people checklists, give them systems so that they can be competent at the job that they they're doing and get actual results for you in the business. If you want good management, you need people to know what their job is, what they're expected to do, at what level they're expected to do it. Like what is the performance standard of that job, the time frame it should be done in, and an agreed time. See, when you're a manager and you give someone a job and you don't agree a time frame of when they need to finish that job, that's just lazy management. I know some people say, but Brad, that's like money micromanaging. Yes, Some employees need micromanaging until you've built their competence, until you've built their ability to do it, you won't have to do it forever. But this is part of the training or the coaching or the managing and mentoring of these people so that they actually become good at their job and productive at their job. So firstly, make sure they know what their job is, give them checklists, give them a great job description, agree what their job is and do that. Secondly, and I believe this is something that every person in every business should do, whether you're the owner or the janitor, you should have a daily list at the end of every single day of what you've got to achieve the next day. If you want higher productivity out of your people, literally, make sure before they leave the office, before they leave the warehouse, wherever they work, they've written a list of what needs to be done and what needs to be achieved tomorrow. If you're not doing that, your productivity is much lower. We've found about a 30% increase in productivity with employees once we start doing that. Now, as a manager, you can see that list. We get them to leave it on their desk or hang it on their, on their locker or wherever it is on their clipboard. As a manager, you can take a look at that list. Now, the daily list is one thing, and of course you want them to learn how to prioritize it, and you want to learn how to make sure they put it in a time frame and they diarize it for the next day. But at least start with the list. Don't worry too much. I mean, think about it this way. The last time you went away for a period of time, whether it was a holiday, vacation, whatever, whatever it was, you made a list of what needed to be done before you went away. You got the list done, and hey, presto, thing, checklists, lists work very well as part of management. And if you want to manage people better, definitely have them knowing their job, but you also know what you're doing with them. Now, that daily list then becomes a weekly list. Now, why do we want that to become a weekly list? Well, very simply put, we're going to have two meetings with all of our employees. See, I want you to get away from being a reactive manager and start learning how to be a proactive manager. See, reactive management started with that whole open door policy. Oh, my door is always open. You can always come and ask me a question. So what ends up happening is they end up coming at any time of the day and asking you stupid Little questions and you give them an answer. Now answering them is one of the biggest things that most managers have to stop. If you're going to train someone to do something, you've got to stop answering them and you've got to start asking them questions. Questions are a major part of the tool of a good manager. So a good manager will ask their employee questions and get the answer from the employee. So it makes them think, it makes them understand what they need to do. And that's really a lot of what you need to be working on, is making sure those employees know their job, know what they should be doing, but making certain that they're putting it into a list, into a checklist so they can follow it and do that stuff. Now on a Friday, we also get our employees to do a list of what has to be done the next week. And here's where the two meetings come in. One meeting is a team meeting. It's with you with your direct reports. And most people have about eight direct reports. More than that, it's too hard. You spend most of your time managing less than that. You're not managing enough people to warrant being paid as a manager, I guess. So on the Monday morning you have a WIP meeting with people, the work in progress. If you've got eight people on your team, all of them sit around the desk, you've got their list from Friday, you go through everyone's list of what needs to be done and achieved this week and you communicate. See, part of management, part of competency, part of building productive people is they know where they fit in to the whole scheme of things. So if you're having a talk with people and Mary's got a job and Bob and Mary have to work together, then in that Monday morning meeting, you're communicating together with them, you're setting time frames, you're setting standards by which jobs will be done, you're making good notes on theirs. So you, you as their manager can help manage them doing those productive tasks. That meeting now, when you first start doing that, I mean, it's going to probably take you an hour, two hours, when you get good at it, it'll take you about 35, 40 minutes with your direct reports, once they've learned how to do it, once you've learned how to do it. Now the second meeting you can have with every employee each week is a one on one meeting, usually done on a Thursday. Again, when you first start out, it'll probably take an hour. Eventually you'll get down to about 20. Now there's three things you're going to talk about in that meeting. Number one, their list. You're going to go over their projects, what they're working on, the tasks they're doing, everything that they're making happen. And then the second thing you're going to talk about in that meeting is you're actually going to sit down with them and go over their key performance indicators. Now I'll get to. Well, let's deal with that right now. The third major thing of management is measurement. Okay, So I just want to touch on it and then I'll come back to it in a minute. You, you measure two things with employees. Number one, their activities and number two, their performance. So you have key activity indicators, what is their activity that they must do every day, day in and day out to whatever standard. And then you have key performance indicators which is the result of those activities. So that's what we should be looking at and we call it six by six in our organisation where we have six activities and six performances that we measure with each person. Now that's the second thing you're going to talk about in that Thursday meeting. I'll come back to the measurement in a moment, so don't panic that I haven't given you enough detail on that one. The third thing you're going to talk about in that meeting is where they're at with what they're doing now. If, let's say during the week they messed something up, you don't try and coach them in the moment they messed it up, you don't try and educate them. The moment they messed it up in the moment they messed it up, all you want to do is get it fixed and get it to the customer or get it fixed and, and get it completed. So instead of when something goes wrong, asking the stupid question of why did this go wrong? To which you can only get people giving you excuses or blaming someone else, we ask questions along the lines of, okay, what are the three things we need to do to get this out to the customer in the next 10 minutes? Notice there's three parts to that question. There's a time frame, next 10 minutes, there's a detail orientation. What are the three things? And it's forward moving. It's not what went wrong, it's hey, we need to know what we got to do to get this to the customer. So it's that type of management questioning. See, these are some of the basic management training that people just don't get anymore. And this is one of the killers of Management or lack of management is that people just aren't trained in this stuff. And if they're not trained in it, then it's very difficult for them to get results. Now, in that meeting where it's one on one, if they did have a problem during the week, you sit down with them in the meeting and ask them about about it. Not at the exact moment it went wrong. You ask them about it in the meeting and say, okay, is this a training issue? Do we need more training? Is there a system that's missing? Or is it just you being stupid and not really thinking about what was going on? Because in most cases they'll be happy to admit that they just made a mistake in that environment. But if you brought it up when they first did it, not gonna bring that. They're just not gonna be happy about that. So make sure they know their job. Make sure you've got daily lists, week lists, so you can have your meeting every, every Monday with the team and every Thursday with them individually so that you are managing them. Now here's the challenge with that Thursday meeting. Stop answering all their questions during the week. Stop it. When people come to you and ask you a question, you say, great, bring it to the meeting. If someone emails you with a new idea, great, bring it to the meeting. You've got to get to the point where you get them to bring it to the meeting. Now, sometimes there are things they ask you which do need an urgent answer. Again, stop answering them. Start using questions. If someone says, should we do this? You say, well, what do you think? What would be the benefits of doing that? What would be the benefits of doing this? Lead them to make a good decision. I know it's hard in the beginning because it would be easier for you to just give them the answer, but it's a problem with giving the answer. You build someone who's entirely reliant on you as a manager. And every time they need something, they keep coming to you. So you're not building them as a person. You got to coach them and educate them by using questions so they become better at their job, not worse at their job. So make sure that's a part of what you do. Next thing we need.