The Playbook for Leaders and Organizations: A Better Way to Grow with Robert Glazer

Welcome to beyond you'd why podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually help you discover and then live your why. You see, we believe that knowing your why, that driving force behind every decision you make and every action you take, is the essential first step to really knowing yourself. It allows you to move forward faster and have a bigger impact. If you're already a fan of the show, then you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys and then we introduce you to somebody with that why so you can see how their why has played out in their life. This show will be more powerful for you if you've already discovered your why. If you still need to do that, head over to whyinstitute.com and discover your why today. It'll only take you about five minutes. Now let's meet today's guest.

Welcome to beyond your why podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually helping you discover and then live your why. So if you're a regular listener, you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys and then we bring on somebody with that why so you can see how their why has played out in their life. And so this week we're going to be talking about the why of Better way. So if this is your why, then you are the ultimate innovator and you are constantly seeking better ways to do everything. You find yourself wanting to improve virtually anything by finding a way to make it better. You also desire to share. You also have a desire to share your improvement with the world. You constantly ask yourself questions like what if we tried this differently? What if we did this another way? How can we make this better? You contribute to the world with better processes and systems while operating under the motto I'm often pleased but never satisfied. You are excellent at associating, which means that you are adept at taking ideas or systems from one industry or discipline and applying them to another, always with the ultimate goal of improving something. So today I've got a great guest for you. His name is Robert Glaser and I've had him on before, but we're going to dive into a deeper area. His new book he is the founder and Chairman of the Board of Acceleration Partners, a global partner marketing agency and the recipient of numerous industry and company culture awards, including Glassdoor's Employees Choice Awards two years in a row. He is the author of the inspirational newsletter Friday Forward and the Number one Wall Street Journal, USA Today and international best selling author of five books Elevate Friday how to Thrive in the Virtual Workplace. Moving to Outcomes and Performance Partnerships. He is a sought after speaker by companies and organizations around the world and he is the host of the Elevate podcast. Robert, welcome to the podcast.

Gary, thanks for, thanks for having me back. And I think we had a little better way demo in our 20 minute getting ready to start the conversation.

I know. So if the rest of you had been with us before we started this, it is now 20 minutes after when.

She was supposed to start because that's on brand.

As my kids would say, we just can't stop ourselves. So you have a new book that recently came out. Yeah, tell us about it. Why did you write what's It About?

I sort of wrote the business sequel to my book Elevate. And in Elevate I talked about these themes of building capacity as sort of a personal and leadership development strategy and how much I had benefited from that. And you know, as I sort of discovered that personal strategy, my business was growing over the years. We were hitting some growth challenges and I had this kind of serendipitous moment where I realized that the challenges my business were very similar to some of the personal things I looked at is actually the. The same framework was the solution. And so over the years we had been a pretty high growth company but without a lot of the capital. And I'd say that this sort of steroid era of growth we've seen the last five or ten years and so elevate your team is really, I think a playbook for the leader that's looking at growth has kind of become a almost a bad word today. People are really tired. They've seen a lot of kind of the collapsing of things that were high growth. But things grow, particularly when better way people are involved. But I think we need to get back to growth. Frankly that's better. Like this book is actually a better way of manifestation. Like how do you grow your business by growing your team and your leaders so you have them growing along with the business. Like if you mentioned sort of alignment, lot of businesses, here's the growth line of people are drowning, you know, under the growth, not on a surfboard and doing it. So I sort of take those same elements of capacity and kind of walk through what we learned along the way. And again, I think what this new better playbook can be for leaders and organizations.

So let's talk about what were some of the growth challenges that you were experiencing and when did they come about? Was there like a tipping point to these challenges coming along?

Yeah, these different points of inflection. There's this chart like the valley of death. I think it's 5, 1 million in revenue and 5 million ribbon and 10 and, and the reason is a lot of what got you there won't get you there. So, you know, we had had coaches say, hey, every time you double your business, which for us was about every two to three years, you break kind of half your people and half your processes. And I, it's not really how I wanted to build the business. And the problem was similar to your why thing. I like frameworks and taxonomies. And I was like, well, I can't. Why can't I figure out who's going to become a great leader, grow in the organization and who's going to be one of our best people and kind of totally hit a wall. And eventually I realized it was the people that could build their capacity and that we could help, that we could help people build their capacity so that they could try to grow at the same level of the organization and focus on that growth holistically and they could benefit from the outside of work from things like getting better at self awareness and understanding who they are and their why and prioritization and their values and just good routines and habits and, and we would get a better person in the workforce for that. So it really was a lot about getting people ready for the jobs of tomorrow, not just training them to be better kind of robots for the job that they were, that they were doing today. And that's where we got into the core value work and a lot of the why work. Because it was kind of like, hey, we need you to be a great leader in this organization. To do that, we need you to understand yourself and you are different from this person or different this person. But you are, you are going to lead from this, you know, and this is where a lot of our work intersects. You're going to lead from this whether you are, have a conscious awareness of it or not, right? You're either going to run it or it's going to run you.

Interesting, because I've been having this same kind of conversation with my team in terms of whether you are ready or not or whether you want to or not. You are going to be a leader. I mean, it's coming your way. There's no real way around it because as we continue to grow, people are going to come to you and say, hey, how did you do that? Can you, can you spend some time with us and show us what all you did and you're going to be in that position of leadership. So when you talk about that with your team, is it. Was it the people or was it the processes that you used that caused those growth challenges?

I think it was both. And it was understanding. Having to understand why someone who was so good at leg A could struggle so much at leg B, or even someone who maybe didn't struggle and then sort of became a superstar. One of the metaphors I share in the book is, like, even when I started really leading for the first time at ap, and it's very natural. So I think a new leader. What's a new leader going to do? Well, one lot of places they're not really trained. Unless you work at a large, huge organization, there's not this advanced leadership training. We actually have it now because we think it's so important. But you're very likely to gravitate towards best practices that other leaders that you had liked. And, and if you're also like me, you're very. This is just kind of like parenting and childhood, too. You're very likely to consciously try to avoid things that you really hated that some of the worst leaders did. So in both of those things, they're not yours. But I think this is very common of Leadership 101. So I'm going to take a bunch of these things. I'm going to try to not do these things, and I have my own stories around that. And you're going to take a couple trips around the.

The, the track in your, in your leadership coat, your Technicolor dream coat, and you're gonna be like, yeah, some of this just doesn't. It's not me. Even if I liked it when Gary did it, it's not me. And either you kind of live with that dissonance and you try to be other people, or at some point you care enough about leadership and you want to be a great leader, or Jim Collins definition of sort of a level four, level five leader. And you kind of take all the coat, you strip it down, and you look in a mirror and you're like, who am I? Like, what. What do I actually value? How does this impact my behavior? I, you know, I. This is, you know, we'll talk a little bit about the intersection of core values and trust. But one of the things, Sorry, core value and why. I didn't bury the lead there. But just as an example, when we've done this, core values work with people and we determine that one of their values is trust. Having done your work and the why work, I. I know to ask the question, hey, you know, Gary, like I'm not. Here's what I'll say. I'm not gonna. It seems like I'm hearing deep things about trust here and I'm not gonna ask you what it was, but some point in your lifetime was your trust violated, like in, in a bad way. And either they will. Tears will roll out of their eyes or there'll be an ashen face. And I sort of have my answer. But what we realized was, well, how was that showing up in leadership? Well, the people on their team, they had a couple of them who had. And they didn't realize this before this, they were acting accordance to this without. So it's like driving the, the machine with no one, you know, giving you the operating manual. And they, they. So how, how would this come about? Well, we talk about some of the people on their team. Well, tell me about Stacy. Well, Stacy is like a little bit late to meetings and you know, a couple times I couldn't find her at 4 o' clock in the afternoon and she missed some deadlines. And so we're like, is Stacy dead to you? No, Stacey's not dead to me. Well, describe. Well then they go on to describe that Stacey is in this proverbial jail and is not getting out and the key has been thrown out. Right. Stacey is not someone that this leader can trust and that trust for them. And this goes right to the why work is, is threatening. Like Stacy is a threat because people that can't. But this leader like did not even realize that all these people were in jail and, and they took this and the other things when they were really willing to do the work, went back and said, hey, just so you know, trust is really important to me. It's one of my values or it's my why. And I actually like, I give a lot of trust right away, but when it's broken, it's really, you know, it's not coming back. And here are the things that you can do or not do to sort of earn trust in my team. Totally change the. And I can, you know, switch this to, you know, someone self awareness. They realize, wow, core value was a real self awareness for them. Why when we got into it, they had a parent who was unbelievably self aware and not self aware and embarrassed them for most of their childhood. And so anyone on their team displayed self awareness, they were, they jumped all over it and sort of suffocated them. So this, and again, this intersection, I think, you know, leaders willing to do this work realizing that this is the authentic base from which they're leading from and woe to their team and say look this is who I am. This is what being on my team is like and I'm going to give you the playbook that and you know you can decide whether that works for you or not in some cases.

So as a leader.

When you figure out, figure yourself out.

Yeah.

Whether that's well including core values and your why and other strengths and.

Right. And and communication styles and all this stuff. Yeah.

Do you recommend that the leader then go and articulate that to their team?

A hundred percent. Because again they're, they're, they're leading from that anyway whether they've been able to articulate it or not. Right. The trust person had thrown these two people in jail locked up the key and they weren't getting out. Right. They just, they just didn't know it and the person didn't know it. But like when you ask them to articulate how they're working with them. So I, I have 100% think that both when you're members of a leadership team and making sure you understand those core things because we come at things from different orientation and you're just being honest with people. These are the things that are important to me as a leader. And look, if you're 22 and you're starting out or otherwise maybe some of these things will change for you in ways by the time you're in your 40s these are like really hardly baked in for you. And so this is how you're going to pay. This is what you're going to react to. This is what you're going to get mad about. This is when you're going to be in flow. This is when you're going to explicitly or implicitly reward people when they're aligned with these things. So do you want to guess? Do you want them to guess or just want to tell them the answer? I mean I'm very direct with people around hey I'm better way person like you want to work on something where it's new and exciting and it's fun every day. One of my core values and I long term orientation all these things. This is why you will like working for me and this is why you will hate working for me. And they're basically one in the same.

Yeah it us better way people are can be a challenge. Right. I mean we shiny penny want to move fast. Rarely satisfied.

Often was it often often Please never satisfy. That always resonated with me yeah.

And that can be a challenge. So how does your team, let's go to your company then when you articulate who you are to your team, they're going to resonate with parts of it and other parts they're not going to resonate with. Or I don't want to say resonate, but maybe let's say they just don't even agree with.

Right? Yeah, but, but they could get better at managing it. Right. And they can get better at managing up. So I mean, I encourage one thing that people on my team will learn to do, and this is something I've learned in coaching people around the y. We can talk about this. It's a sort of meta adjustment. I always say.

They will sort of say to me, hey, look, you've given us a lot of things to do and we are worried that not all of them will get done. And so which is the priority and which is the most important? So what, what, what they will realize and I need to realize, and this is what I coach, that if I try to make everything better, I won't actually accomplish my goal. Nothing will get better because we'll have a hundred unfinished projects. When I am coaching people that I know are m make sense why on their leadership struggles, I, I, I say, look, you have to change your reward center from you solving the problems to a team of people that are solving problems. I, you actually have to change your meta definition of what fulfills your make sense bucket from again, the same thing I would say to me from, you know, not you have to, I have to trick myself. I have to trick myself. I can't make everything better or I actually won't make anything better. That makes sense. People are all micromanagers. They're all problem solvers. Everyone comes to them. They're really bad at delegation. And so I say, look, this is this. You have to look at this differently. You have to be like, I have this team of problem solvers and that is what's fulfilling to me. Not that I am everyone's problem solver.

You know, I say that another way as well, which is a little bit of chocolate is good. Yeah, too much chocolate, not so good unless you're a chocoholic, but a little better way is good. Too much better way not so good.

Exhausting for everyone. And, and I just did this. So in starting one of these conversations, I was given the person's 360 strengths. Areas for improvement. Problems, challenges. First thing I say, give me your core values, give me your why, give me your strength, Finders they send it all back to me. We look at it, I'm like, can you see that most of these problems and area for improvement are actually an over. You're past 100 degrees on your strength wire value. They've gone to me. The weakness is when you overuse your strength. Having looked at it a bunch of times.

Yeah. When we are working with teams and each person gets to stand up and say their simple yos out loud. This is, I believe that I'll give my own. I believe that success happens when we find a better way and share it. How I do that is by making things clear and understandable. And ultimately what I bring are simple solutions. The other team members get to see me for the strengths that I have. But then when you ask the rest of the team, okay, what happens if Gary, who has the why a better way, is too strong in his better way? What do you see as a possible thing that could happen?

Yeah.

And then it becomes very obvious. But it's that way with every one of the nine whys. It's not just better way, it's make sense as every single one. A little bit of chocolate's good. Too much chocolate's not.

Yeah. Which is the, also the summary I was saying this weekend of every health study comes out. Right. Little bit of it good for you. Too much of it bad for you. I mean, there was a ridiculous. The problem is so much clickbait is a thing I read around caffeine, you know, the horrible. Whatever. Caffeine and something like that. And then I, I, I, I look in and I was like, actually, I've been reading studies that couple cups of coffee are good for you. And it turns out this guy goes to his doctor and he's having 14 espressos a day and his heart's coming out of his chest. Look at how coarse you are. Fourteen espressos, like, like on what planet do you think that's healthy for you? So. Yeah, exactly.

Or wine. Yeah, anything. Right.

A little. One little.

Half a glass or a glass of wine a night. No big deal.

Yeah, Half a glass an hour.

Yeah, yeah, same thing. So define for our listeners what a core value is.

So I can almost define this in analogy. So let's imagine, because we talk a lot about values, but I don't think that people have a definition they agree on. So let's imagine you have a race car and it's going through a tunnel, right. And we, we, we turn off the lights of, of the tunnel. The really expensive car. I'm going to drive that car through, it's going to hit the right side of the wall. You're going to hear.

I'm gonna pull it off to the middle. I'm gonna drift to the other side. I'm gonna drift back. The car's probably gonna make it through the tunnel. As long as there's nothing else in there. But it's gonna look like crap, and it's gonna be pretty beat up. Our core values are these guardrails. Like, we know it again, go from like feels like kryptonite to flow sort of on other side. When you're talking to someone whose values are aligned or, you know, one of the best ways to identify a core value is to think about the antithesis and having a discussion with that person. And I'll make up an avatar. And most people have a, like, visceral reaction. I'm like, okay, you're talking to this person. How does it feel? So now you turn on the lights in that tunnel, and now you both see the wall, but you also see that yellow line before the wall, and you kind of stay in the middle. So the core values are the things that are most important to you. They're the things that have been true. They're sort of your guiding, you know, principles in your. In your life. And again, they've probably been true since childhood. And I found, you know, why intersects heavily with usually the dominant core value, but there's usually three or four. And they're sort of thesis statements that you really believe in and that you sort of live in accordance with. And when you are in discord, it feels pretty crappy, right? So if you have a core value of generosity or giving or otherwise, you know, and I said to someone who I can clearly tell that's like a value of theirs, or. And I'm like, okay, so you're at a party and you're talking to the trust fund baby who's complaining about everything and that they don't control. And like, just their face again, because if it. If it's a core value, when it's violated, it feels really bad, right? So it should feel like kryptonite. For me, again, one of those values is sort of better way. And I'm sure the same for you. My kryptonite is that person at the party is like, oh, it's been like that forever. We can't possibly fix that. We can't possibly improve that. You shouldn't even touch that. It's fine. Like, those are fighting words, right? Like, those are, those are, those are. But they're different fighting words for me than, than for somewhere else. So some people have like three or four core values. They tend to be hierarchical and these are sort of the guideposts and like an organization.

They should really be used to make decisions. And if they're well stated, then they're really clear when you're doing it or not doing it. So one of my core values is long term orientation, right? That is just something I've always done since I was younger and you know, I've, I've struggled in the last year or so in our business because it's been impossible to operate from a long term orientation. Like it's like quarter to quarter in this world and economy these days because it's a totally different problem every quarter. It's like whack a mole. And I'm usually like totally focused on the next year. But this is a time in business where if you focus on the next year, you might be out of business in this year. Right. You can't look that far forward. You know, for me, another one, respectful authenticity is just something that's always been, it ties to a lot of our policies at Acceleration Partners. It's something that's kind of always been true to me. I'm, I'm the person you reach out to if you want to know the truth. I, I think a lot of people tell people what they want to hear. So I'm very direct and I try to always be respectful but also be authentic. And again, that's a very unique thing to me and it shows up in our two weeks notice pro. It shows up in a lot of things in our, in our workplace that were sort of cultivated out of that value.

Respectful authenticity, which is interesting. I don't often hear that one. I don't know if I've ever heard that one as a value.

Well, that's that then. Then, then it meets my definition of a good core value because it shouldn't like a company thing, it shouldn't be something everyone else should can say. You know, I work with people on this. I try to come up with things that are very specific, that they understand what they mean, they understand if they're doing it. And again, it's not something like integrity. I. Respectful authenticity. It's very clear whether I'm doing it, I'm not doing it. You know, it's, it's good, it's bad, it's otherwise. So I think that's the, that's one of the definitions of a good core value.

So are the core values of the leader than the core values of the company or their individual core values and then company core values.

So it's a great question, I think in founder led companies and, and, and before I answer that, let me just, I'll finish with. Let me give you my five so find a better way and share it. Self reliance. I have been super independent. It has a whole set of problems in it since I was little. Respectful, authenticity, long term orientation and health and fatality. Like these are things that I kind of believe in and are important to me, to my core. To your last question, I think a founder led company, their DNA is going to be a lot around the values of the company like we are. We have a value of excel and improve. We attract a lot of people who are high learners and want to get better. But company core values are different because they need to represent a collective.

Agreement that the people in that organization, you know, when you get to 10 or 20 or have enough say, look, these are the things that we all agree upon and are sort of the best DNA of all of us. Personal core values are different but, but they should be aligned, right? This is the name of the game. Like your personal core value. It's not a surprise that most people in our organization have some personal core value around learning, improvement, get better or other. It wouldn't be surprised if they join a company that's very focused on those things. So you don't have to be perfectly aligned. You just cannot be diametrically opposed or that's not going to work. I talk about this notion with core values of the big three and that is your relationship, your community and your vocation of the company that you work. I think those things have a very low level of success when there isn't core values alignment like and, and in a relationship, to me, people confuse this between do we like all the same things and are we the same or otherwise? No. Like my wife and I are very different. Different hobbies, different things. But when it comes to the really big important things in our marriage and our family or other eyes, we're on the same page. If we weren't. It's really hard when you think about a community and you understand willpower and stuff that like if you are an atheist, you probably don't want to live in a religious community. If you don't drink, you probably don't want to have a bunch of friends who go out drinking every night. Right. The community kind of needs to reflect the things that are important to you. I think a lot of people, you know or either makes it really easy or really hard. So those are. I call those the big three. And my next book is sort of a parable about someone navigating those big three around where you have to have alignment. So is there direct alignment between personal and company? No. Should you have pretty good dotted lines? I think yes. If the. If the company core values are true. By the way, some company's core values are not there stated on the wall. Core values, whatever they reward, how people behave, whether they're rewarding it implicitly or explicitly and people are doing it, that's the actual values of the organization.

You know what seems challenging about core values for me at least, is that it's not an exact science.

Nope.

And that's hard because when am I there? You know what I mean? When did I. When can we stop and say boop, this is it. Okay, we got it.

Yeah. So it's interesting, you know, when you explain to me how you got to the why archetypes. We've started to look at some of the core values and I think we're starting to come up with some. Some repeated themes. But having done this work and it doesn't. Right. It makes it not as. As scalable, but people are a little bit different. It's kind of like a DNA fingerprint. But I can see. I got it when. I can just see when I'm going back or doing the coaching and doing the final polishing with some people and we and I. And you read something back to them like, does that sound like you? And there's a look on their face that just tells you like you got it and locked in. And we're definitely starting to see some archetypes. And maybe we'll find that there's 20 or there's five or there's nine or there's otherwise. But what's a little bit different, I think from. From the why is. It's actually the combination, I think that makes you really unique is that each. Each one of like, similar to a. It's. That's the one thing that's similar. It's a totally different process than a company because it's about you. But they always say with the company, like, you know, you shouldn't hear that thing a lot. And then you should never hear all three or four. Right. That's what makes it different. If you're using generic things that anyone could say that it doesn't. These things. I have what's called the validator when it's. And one of the validation tests is. Could I use it to make a decision. Is it a rubric decision making thing? Like for me, is this a decision that somehow is going to impact my health and vitality? Respectful authenticity, long term orientation. Like I am safe when I make decisions within my values and probably not outside of that. And could I objectively rate myself on it? Like when we company core values are good core values. When you could sit down and say Gary, you know, here's specifically where you really owned it and didn't own it. Or else we're just talking about some opaque thing that doesn't have any meaning. So if I want to do a personal report card of last month, I could say my health and fatality sucked. I was injured and I, you know, I felt it like I couldn't run. I just not where I wanted to be. I didn't sleep. Like I got to work on some long term things. I was happy about that. You know, I, I had a few opportunities to, to find a better way and now I can think of one of the, like I, I could actually look and I, it's, to me, this is like when was I in the center lane and when I was I outside of that center lane of the tunnel.

I'm curious now that we're having this. See the path that you're on and have been on for a long time is so similar to the path that I was on when I was focused on. And you're focused on core values.

Yeah.

And the question was asked of me one day.

You know, how do you, how can you scale this? Because if it requires me, when I was helping people discover their why just asking them question after question after question to get to it. And then same thing that I would say is your eyes would light up and you would just see this expression on their face and you knew you were there.

Yeah.

But it would be, it'll be interesting to figure out how many different core values there are.

Yeah. And we're definitely looking at pattern. I just added that to a sequence. Some of the ones we've seen the most. I'm also looking at how to use AI and ChatGPT to take all the inputs and the syntax and say here are all the things I want you to scan against. Here are all the answers to the questions. Come back and provide a synthesis of things that might be whatever, using these rules. And, and we're playing around with that a little bit too. But I, I think there might be. Not dissimilar to you. Some, some people like the wording they steal. I like you Know, they, they, they're like, oh, I like, you know that one that you have. I, I encourage a lot of people. They start with one of integrity. And I was like, Look, I've heard 10 different versions of integrity. I like authenticity a little more. But then what's your modifier on? Mine's respectfully authentic. Right. What, what is, what is it about authenticity to you or otherwise? Again, I, it, it is a little bit different. So, yeah, we, we, we. We may get there. We're still early, early in the process, but I've definitely seen a couple. One of them is this version of kind of Excel and improve or continuous improvement, or people who are just like, since they were little, it's it, right. It probably ties to better. Like it was about somehow improving.

Well, that's the key that I found. Well, first of all, I was doing a workshop with like, 50 lawyers, and I spent 14 hours on stage helping them all discover their why.

14 hours on stage with a lawyer sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but.

Yeah, yeah, it kind of was. But halfway through the day, one of the lawyers, this gal raised her hand. She says, hey, Gary, how many whys are there? I had never even thought of it until she asked me that question. And luckily she did, because that got me on the vest. So the same thing I would. It'll be interesting to see how many different core values are there. But the other thing that became obvious was if you and I go out for a hamburger and you, your hamburger's terrible. And I say, hey, Bob, how's your hamburger? And you say, gary, my hamburger sucks. And I say, well, it sounds like you don't like it very much. You would say, no, that's not what I said. I said, my hamburger sucks. So if I don't use the words that you use, you are going to feel like I heard you right. And that's the scenario that happened with the why. So all the whys, the names and all the definitions, those are the actual things those people said. So it'll be interesting as, like you just said, respectful authenticity. That really resonates with me. Integrity too big.

I don't, doesn't I, I, I, it would be hard for people to believe, but I, I've heard seven different definitions of integrity. Like, there's telling the truth, there's doing what you say. They're saying that what they do, there's living your reality. There's, you know, there's all kind. And by the way, there's cultural implications, right? Turning in your brother for a crime would be considered integral in some cultures. Not turning in your brother for a client. So good. Would be considered integral. Right. So it's complicated.

I'm gonna. It's gonna be interesting to see where you end up with it because what you and I have been talking about for the listeners is how the two intersect. How does Y intersect with core values? So I'd love your perspective on that because you know a ton more about core values than I do, but you also know a ton about the whys. So you're more of an expert on that than I am.

I think that the why is almost always related to one of someone's most dominant core values. And again, this sort of purposefully architected thing. I would then say that the difference in the. One of the things that some of the. The why you know, is some of the other values are going to come out of these experiences and these formative experiences and things that have kind of shaped you along the way. And then the combination of them is super helpful because that's the one thing about values. Instead of rules, you can take four or five values and it can produce, hun. You know, if. If you do to. To the fifth, it can produce in combination hundreds of guideposts instead of rules. There are organizations that try to list every rule in the world, and then there's some, like my friend, great Gary Ridge, that says, here are five organizational core values, and if you ever make a decision under one or more of these values, there, you're safe. Well, that's really interesting. Right. So I think there are combinations of these things. I think there's hierarchies of them. I've heard some people say, like, you know, you know, core values are actually in conflict. And so I actually, they need to really think about which is hierarchical. So something like always tell people the truth and never cause any harm. Right, Right. Well, then you have a real discussion, and there's a clear one where if they had to break one of them, they would break one before the other. Right. That the only person to cause harm is if you would never lie to someone or someone else would say, you know what? I. In that case, I dull the truth a little bit because it's really important to me not to cause harm to other people. So I think that's. There may even be a how in there. But I think it gives a little latitude for these other things that are. They come from experiences, they clearly come from parents. You know, they come from other things. And. And it lets people have sort of a. A combination to navigate around as almost a, a rule book.

One of the things that you, and before we got on, you and I were talking about Joel Weldon who's a speaker coach and one of the things he always talks to me about is if you're going to use a word, you have to start with the definition of the word. And that's what's hard for, at least for me about the word values.

Yeah, it is thrown around in society like and, and it's the crap we can't say ass, bleep, you know, that you see up on all these companies walls or otherwise. So this is where again people get confused. I'll just use some organizational nomenclature because I think it helps. Look at yourself like and, and this is where again companies have, you know, we've have a Dilbert mockery around it. It's not what's on the wall, it's what you actually reward implicitly or explicitly. This is like, this is what religion is good at. This with every organization are the values of the behaviors and stuff, the norms that you reward so that people want to do them right. And, and, and so for yourself. It, it is those guidelines. It's almost more of the hard coding than the soft coding. Like what? Like I, I go outside of that bucket and I'm the one, I'm not thrown out of the organization. Like I'm the one who feels the pain. Like I, you put me or on an assembly line, you know, and, and, and have to do the same thing every day. You put me in a situation where I have to, you know, lie to people or tell them things that they want to hear all day and where I have to be unhealthy or otherwise. Like you're just like throwing me out of my operating system. Pretty much.

So have you found that there's a certain number of core values that if you go past that number for your organization, it's too watered down.

Yeah, I, I look, I like three. We used to have six and I had a mnemonic. I had to remember them and then someone really convinced me organizations I think should not have more than three. If you really want people to, to know it, be able to recite it. Otherwise I think three is the magic number. May maybe four, five, six. It starts to be too much. And when you actually look at them and some personal core values you find that they're really one is contained within the other. It's just a lower level principle, not a higher level principle. So I think the same for individuals. I think three to four is really, if you want it to be accessible, if you want it to be a rubric that's like you can use. Like you'd need to. Not now because I'm a better weight person. I had five, but, but I, I think for most people three to four, so that they know it, they could write it on their desk. They could be like, this feels crappy, this decision. Let me think about this. Oh, this is really, you know, I don't like I'm being asked to really look. I wish I had it in me sometimes to take advantage of short term scenarios and make a ton of money off them. It's just not my DNA. Like every time I am suspicious of every short term thing. Like I just have a very long. I married my high school girlfriend. Like I very long term orientation around things and that is just my default mindset. And I'm not, I'm just not. I'm a little bit of fish out of water when I'm forced to play out of that.

So let's go back, let's take that back to elevate your team, your book. So what are they going to learn? What is the audience going to learn in elevate your team now that we've gotten a little deeper into two core values.

Yeah. So this is. In elevate your team, this is very much. We've been spending a lot of time in what I would call the spiritual capacity section of the book. But we're going to talk about the spiritual, intellectual, physical and emotional capacities and how you leverage those within an organization. So how do you help people figure out who they are? We talk about the why, their values, their strengths, all the things that make them them so that they can be an authentic leader. An intellectual capacity is very much. How do you build a learning culture, a culture that is about learning and feedback and improvement and where everyone's trying to not just do more, but make the operating system better. How do we know how to do something better and faster and easier than yesterday? Because we haven't trained on it. Right. It's. It's really about learning physical capacity. You know, the work from home phenomenon has really destroyed some of the remaining walls between work and home. And how do we, how do we restore some of these barriers and have people actually rest and relax and honor the 8020 rule and come to work with better physical mental capacity? Because. Because it's better for them outside of work and it's better for them inside at work. It just, it just is. The data is pretty clear, you know, the people that are who get regularly get less than five hours of sleep a night. And if they're on your team, it. There is cognitive equivalent to being drunk. So would you encourage people to come to the office drunk? No. Do you celebrate people who come to the office of five hours sleep? Probably some, some. Some companies and the data on this stuff's pretty bad. So. And then last emotional capacity. So this is. How do you have psychological safety? Well, part of psychological safety is taking all the stuff that we learned about ourselves and sharing it with other people so that we kind of open up this known window about ourselves. Something called the Johari window concept. Kind of what's known to yourself and what's known to other people. And how do you shift the locus of control within an organization? Constant leaders drive this, whether it's something that's internal or external. We've always seen the sales teams. Right. They've never. And the book goes into tactics in each of those sections around again a team or organization. But we've all seen the sales team. They've never lost a deal. That was their fault. Right. It was. The competitor screwed them. The person, this, the other. Like that is something that is fostered by leadership that focuses on external locus of control versus a team that said, look, we don't talk about. When we talk about why we lost a deal. You're not even allowed to discuss external factors like what did we do wrong? What was wrong with our pit. The competitor beat us. How did they beat us? Well, they were faster, their price was better. Right. We called the client and we asked them how we could have done better and we listened quietly for five minutes. Right. Totally different construct for an organization that has just high emotional capacity. Ones that are blame everything else. I've never met a high performance team that has a habit of kind of blaming everyone else. And, and usually those organizations don't have psychological safety. In order to have the discussion that says here's what we screwed up on this deal.

Have you got like a.

A definite, not a definition but image in your head of or even in the book of the best teams have this.

Yeah, well, the, the, the, the image that I use sometimes that the best teams have these four elements that are constantly building like four quadrants and the ball is getting bigger and has more mass and it rolls down the hill faster. Right. When one of these things is totally out of whack, when you have a team that diminished physical capacity, when you know no one's learning and you're making the same mistakes, when no one trusts each Other like this ball is going to fly all over the room. So I think that is my element. Like show me a team where people are encouraged to understand their personal strengths, attributes, leadership style. Where it is constantly about learning, feedback, improvement, getting better, how to, again, how to, how to inside and outside of work, what a good morning routine look like, what are healthy, these things where people are, their mental and physical health is sort of top of mind for leaders and you know, not trying to encourage 120 hour work weeks. And when you have an environment that's psychologically safe, focuses on things that control fundamentally healthy relationships amongst the people. Those are going to be two very different performing organizations.

So one more time, what were the four elements? There's the emotional, physical, spirit, spiritual.

And they go in order because to me they're interrelated but they go in order because spiritual you got to figure it out to make sure you're climbing the right mountain, you know, in the first place. So spiritual, which is your core values, your strengths, the things you're good at, you know, to you intellectual, which is, think of that as the operating system. How do you learn, plan execute with discipline. Like the kind of once you know what you want to do, how do you do it? Physical capacity is our sort of health, mental and physical well being and then emotional capacity is both are the quality of our relationships and sort of how we relate to things that we don't control.

So emotional capacity was fourth.

Fourth because if you think about the order and the order comes from personal, which is I first need to figure out what I actually want to be doing, then I'm going to go out and acquire the skills and everything to get better on that. I need to make sure along that journey that my physical and mental well being is taken care of. And then those are all internal, right? That's the difference. Now when I jump into the external world, I need to focus on the relationships that add to what I want to do, the relationships that are detracting from what I want to do. And I've got to really focus on.

Consciously on what I control and don't control. So if it was a sports car, Spiritual would be designing it on paper fit, Intellectual would be building it, Physical would be putting it on the test track. But things don't, they work differently in the real world. So emotional is okay. Now I'm taking my car out there, but there's other drivers at 200 miles an hour and now does it perform above or below spec? When I'm scared to death that there are other drivers and they're honking kind of all that stuff. So that's, that's why I think the order. And again the first three are things that inherently are more about you and that you control. The fourth moves into the. The kind of world around you.

So Robert, if there's people that are listening that want to learn more about what you're doing, find your book, connect with you.

Yeah.

You know, get your Friday Forward.

Weekly blog. What's the best way for them to connect with you?

Yeah, they can go to Robert Glazer G L A Z R dot com. I've got everything there. You can sign up for Friday Forward. Got the books, newsletter, podcast and the courses on there if they're interested in, in, in the core value work. I just re released the course. There's a self guided version and then there's a version that comes with coaching for the first time until, until we have that test that maybe one day. So that's@corevaluescourse.com or you can link to it from the main Robert Glaser webpage.

Tell everybody about Friday Forward because all of us get a lot of stuff, a lot of junk in our email.

Yeah.

And, and everybody. Well, at least I pick out the few out of all the hundreds that I get that I'm actually going to read and yours is one of them. I thoroughly enjoy it and I don't know how you do it and how you pick your topics, but maybe talk a little bit about what that is.

ADD I think is. It's like I've never, ideas have never been a problem for me. Like I today I wrote down six potential topics and I was like oh my God, I like have 50 deep at this point. Like I could do two a day. Friday Forward just started as sort of a better way of manifestation to my team when we were 30 or 40 people. It was a kind of Friday note around getting better improvement. I didn't actually have the word capacity building at the time. I didn't, didn't have the vernacular. I didn't realize the pattern. But the stories all fell into either stories of spiritual, intellectual, physical, emotional capacity which when I tried to publish a compilation and someone said but we don't publish compilations. What's the story behind these stories? I spent a year looking. I was like oh, this is the consistency on this. So I shared it with a bunch of people every week. I thought it was a good way to stay in touch with a remote work team. I didn't necessarily know if people were reading them. I did Start to get a lot of notes. Hey, this was super helpful. I did this. I loved that. I shared this with my wife. I shared this with, you know, my husband. I shared this with a colleague.

Eventually added some people to the list and opened it up and was like, oh, if other people like these things. I shared it with a couple of their CEOs after telling them that it was a really helpful activity and they were like, can we just forward this to our company every week rather than write our own? I was kind of encouraging them to do. One wrote his own and still does and the other sounds like. So I threw a couple hundred friends on the list. I waited for the like I put it on a newsletter list but I made it really like look like just a regular email. I just was managing requests via BCC and it took off. People kept sharing it. I renamed it Friday Forward. I'd wake up a couple of years later and there's 100,000 people in 60 countries open running this thing every Friday morning. And yeah, I've been writing it for six or seven years every week now. It's become sort of a foundational habit for me and it's kind of how I think about things. I think, I think one of the big dangers of AI and some of the stuff for us, I think writing is thinking at some point and I don't not totally clear what my thought is until I hash it out for a little bit. And I think all this stuff can be really helpful but to the extent that we're going to stop thinking, we're going to be in trouble. So yeah, it's, it's, it's going strong I think in different forms. There's probably 200,000 people that get it each week because I know some people get it once and put it to their whole Internet every week. So it's really short, only takes a few minutes to read. There's always kind of interesting and different topics so people can, they can look at Google Friday Forward or go to robert glaser.com and easy to join for free.

Yeah. Did you know that that's how before we got on the call, I mentioned Earl Nightingale and Earl Nightingale is the one who started the whole. He was like the first person ever to start the self help business. Yeah, this is exactly how he started it.

Just in a little note newsletter to this sales team.

He couldn't be at a meeting so wrote a. He actually recorded a album that he sent to the sales team and that one album got reproduced.

Oh, he had, he had all these Tapes. Yeah yeah.

Album called the Strangest secret to a million people. Just word of mouth kind of like yours has over the course of time and then that became all the rest of what we know now to be self help industry but very similar to you.

So yeah look you so solve your own problems and that's really what Friday Forward is. It's me thinking about a critical issue every week and, and probably going through my why stack of then presenting it in a way that's easy for people to understand and actionable. And I, I think the, the what other people say is take complicated subjects and hopefully make them pretty easy to.

Go make it actionable because your why is better way. I remember your how how you do that is by making sense out of the complex and challenging. Then ultimately what you bring is a way to contribute, add value, have an impact in people's lives. That is exactly what Friday Forward is.

It is. It is. And that is why I I talked in core values when I was trying to decide whether to continue it and it wasn't making money or otherwise. I looked against it, against all of my values. Again, does this is this long term orientation? Is this promoting health and vitality? Is it respectful authenticity? Is it find it like I was like oh, it meets all of those like that's a, that's a should keep doing thing. Even though I don't know what it is. It doesn't make any money. It seems like a distraction. But that single newsletter has done more for my career than that email, than probably anything else that I did for my business. Ironically, I and I always tell people like I would go to industry conferences and I wrote a ton of content in our industry about affiliate and partner marketing and no one at a conference, we were at a party would ever say boy I love that listicle you did last week on the 10 things of affiliate marketing. But everyone would always say that Friday forward a month ago. So it's just interesting I think on, on sort of how you try to connect and create value. These are people would say well this is not content. But, but tons of people in our industry were signed up for this, agreeing to read something from me every week. And then when they wanted to do business in our space that you know, they are much more likely to, to, to to reach out.

So last question for you. What's the best piece of advice you've ever given or the best piece of advice you've ever gotten?

I think the best piece of advice I've ever received is the premise of sort of and, and Originally from Derek Sivers, I heard it was kind of hell yeah or no.

As a test of if you don't really want to do something, then it's kind of a no. I think the things that I've generally agreed to that are a moderate yes, I end up being disappointed by or frustrated with. So particularly when you have a lot of things like is this, is it a hell yeah or no? And that's a great hiring test too, to make sure you just don't hire from, you know, momentum and not someone who's going to make your team better.

Best advice I'd given other than trying to, trying to align to your values, I think, and, and this is, I would say for people in their, in their 20s, I, I would just focus on learning. I would get around people like the best people you can learn from. You see that these pockets of great leaders grew out of certain leadership cultures and companies. I see a lot of people jumping around. They want thousand dollars more. They want the title. I think in your 30s, you under 30, you're perpetually underpaid. But the thing that will make the most difference later on is to get great teachers, great mentors and great learning. And don't focus on the money or the title or anything like that. Focus on what you can learn and that will pay huge dividends in your, as you start to get paid appropriately in your 30s and 40s.

I love it. That's great. Robert, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. For those of you that are listening, Robert and I are going to do some more things together. You know, we're very much aligned in core values and, and why. So in the next couple of months, we'll be doing more and more things together that we'll be letting everybody know. So I'm excited about that.

Great. And I'm looking forward to seeing you. We found out we're going to be in the same place in two days.

So what are the odds of that? But thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for having me and look forward to seeing you. And as we, as you said, as we discuss this stuff and the overlap, more of your people and continue this conversation.

Sounds great.

I really hope you enjoyed today's episode and that through today's guest, you heard how important it is to know your why and how impactful it can be in your life and the lives of those around you. Be sure to head over to whyinstitute.com and discover your why today. Remember, the more you know about yourself, the more you'll know about others. I'm Dr. Gary Sanchez, and I'll see you on the next episode.