Interview with Eric Stone

Welcome to One Sharp Sword cutting through to what Matters Most with your host, Dr. P. Dr. Wayne Purnell, the breakthrough success coach and your powerful presence mentor. Welcome to One Sharp Sword cutting through to what Matters Most. I'm your host, Dr. P. Dr. Wayne Purnell, the exponential success coach and the president of Dynamic Leader Incorporated. I have today with me someone who spent 20, what is it, 26 years. Yeah, 26 years at Enterprise Rent a Car where he became the regional vice president. But also more important than that, really, really began to influence and develop a framework for culture. He made a difference with employees through his connections and now his focus is on helping others to build their culture. I want to be able to talk about how to balance flexibility and accountability throughout our conversation today. Eric Stone, welcome to One Sharp Sword.

Well, thank you for having me. I'm excited to have this conversation. I've been looking forward to it and can't wait to get it started.

Well, it started. Here we are. You didn't wake up one day and go, you know what? I'm going to affect corporate culture. That's my route, right? It's like that's or you didn't wake up one day and go, you know what? Enterprise rental car, I can't think of anything finer like. So let's back up the clock. What got you to what you're doing now? What do you, what happened? How'd you get here?

So I would say, Wayne, it all started so growing up, my father was a textile salesman and I used to eavesdrop after he'd come from a long road trip and share stories with my mother about all the ups and downs of his day, talking about his clients, his bosses or whatever it was, and slowly got addicted to this business thing. My mother was a teacher and she was always about coaching and developing and the care factor, really that heart centered kind of human centric leadership. And I took the love of my father's business and the coaching and development of my mother and continued to start my own little odd jobs businesses. Growing up, just like any little entrepreneur, tried my best to do a variety of different things and made a decision to stay and go to college for business, which made sense. It's what I loved. I didn't know specifically what business, but I really enjoyed leadership specifically. It was from the framework of watching the UCLA Bruins and John Wooden and his pyramid of success to maybe a movie that inspired me, whether it was the rise and fall of Gordon Gekko in Wall street to the movie Miracles and that concept in the early 80s of the US Olympic team. And you know, how do you get a group of individuals together to achieve this uncommon thing and go to college, graduate and like you said, since while the Boston Red Sox weren't hiring for a general manager at the time, so I couldn't do that one. And lucky enough I land on a company called Enterprise. I had no idea, I wish I could say I had this elaborate story of why I chose them. And 26 plus years later I started out as an Entry Level, Level 1 of 4 in a location and throughout the years was able to eventually climb that corporate ladder to eventually lead several different regions. My last stop was the southern New England region and was able to influence instead of being one in four, I was able to then start influencing a few hundred employees and fell in love and continued to fall in love with leadership development specifically and what makes those high performing regions. Why were we so fortunate in the Enterprise world to be one of the top perform. And I used to get asked all the time in these interviews, Wayne, Eric, what are you guys doing to create this high performance culture? Which inspired me, little did I know to eventually share my message instead of with a few hundred employees is to write a book about creating this high performance culture to share my message of impact hopefully with tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of individuals. And that's a little bit of the backdrop of what got me in from a passion to then fortunate to find a company and, and then an ability to have great mentors and now trying to continue to share the, the knowledge.

That's huge. It's a great, it's a great. How did you get here background. That's, that's perfect. I have your book jumpstart your workplace culture by Eric Stone. Eric D. Stone. It sounds like a kind of a movie star actually. So that's awesome.

That's good to know.

I'll take it. Yeah. Action hero Eric Stone. My questions, I have a lot of questions around high performance culture. I think it's amazing when you are in a company and you work yourself through the different rungs. You know, you said you started at entry level and over the course of two and a half decades plus worked your way to regional vice president, which is pretty darn good. And you impacted 4 and then 40 and then 400 and, and so on. It's, it's an incredible journey. Did you know you were gathering these like lessons along the way? Like this is how to do it. This is, this is what worked, you know.

So yeah, you know, the biggest thing actually as I went through My corporate career was most of behind most of the time. A lot of the time it was the things that weren't happening that really shaped who I wanted to become. And so if I wasn't getting something, I promised myself that I am going to ensure that someday as I continue to climb the ladder, that my team is going to not have to go through that or I'm going to do my best to create an environment and experiences that will be a little bit different, as well as certainly sharing all of the amazing experiences and amazing mentors. And then what ended up happening is I'm a very structured type of person and so I would kind of create my own little roadmap. Little did I know this roadmap, once I felt the team and I had had something special, would become something else, it was really a roadmap for others to follow and share. And so my goal and talk about in the book is creating culture carriers. Can't do it myself. And so how do I create others who can carry this message out? And so I don't think I ever had an intention of really endgame right now being the book, but I was big on that roadmap.

I guess what I'd love to uncover a little bit is what are some of the tidbits that you got? Because it's like, well, I learned this, I learned so much along the way. And, and so I'm going to push in you a little bit and go like what, you know, what were some of the, what were some of the key things? And as you create culture carriers, those are, you know, culture begins from the top and it requires others to have that buy in so that they're embodying it. That's the culture carrier. What are the tidbits of the leadership that you took and gained? And you know, you talk about things that weren't happening and you want to make sure it was easy. I mean, one of the things for leadership is to create less friction. That's one of the things like leaders job is to make it easy for their team members to do what they need to do. What are some of the other tidbits that you had along the way?

Well, I think the things like you mentioned, it's a great question, like what specifically was it? Well, there were a couple of things along the road that I knew would be extremely helpful. For example, time management. You look at it and I always noticed we'd hire some really talented people and they all wanted to do really well. The problem is they never felt they had the right amount of time to be able to be successful in leadership. And so one of the takeaways I took from opportunistic time management skills is to develop behaviors that would allow my team to practice what I used to call these four Ds of, you know, delegate, defer, do. And I believe the other one is delete. You know, it was what can we do to help? To your point? Avoid the noise, avoid the distraction. I used to call it the distraction catcher. And what we would do is help people get organized within their confines of the walls that they run. So that was just one small thing. It went as important as the hiring process. You know, what are the true questions and how can you coach people to be great at the hiring process? What are those behavioral questions that we might want to consider? How do we truly look for attitude, effort, and coachability in those character qualities? And so I would have and teach the interview process. Okay, so now I got the great candidate. I'm teaching them some of the time management techniques and tactics. Then you go into the five things that are going to help people become successful within a month and backfill a calendar that allows me to take my key priorities and get everyone within an organization to be able to do those things. Then it's learning. Well, it's great. We have one training. But how do we keep these behaviors really intertwined throughout our journey? And so it can't just stop once. And so adding some of the training that I felt might have been missing, that I could have been using, it might have been something in the sales aspect of certain personality styles that I needed my team to understand that I wasn't potentially getting. Putting that into the framework of the training. From the training, you take it and put it in the framework of the review process. From the review process, you have this ability to communicate through an amplification process. So everybody in your organization, from new hire to the person who's about to retire, gets it. And so there were a lot of just these behavioral things that I wanted to instill that either I had and I was okay at, or I knew that might have been missing. Those are just a few small things that would probably very relatively to the workplace right now.

So here's, here's what's amazing to me, Eric, is, you know, I've been doing organization development in one form or another, leadership development in one form or another for the past 40 years. And what's amazing to me is that you just sort of took for granted. It sounds like the idea that training was going to happen Right. Here's this thing, here's this outcome. They need to be trained to get this outcome. We're going to put it on the calendar and then we're going to review it. Yeah, in my experience, about 0% of people think that way. My, my experience with leaders is they should just figure out how to do their job and well, if they need training, you know, they should go to hr and, and it is so rare to see or hear that like that. It. We, we want a particular outcome, we know we need to train to get there. We're actually going to put it on the calendar and we're going to check in along the way. Wow. Like, it's so basic and it's so essential and it's, you know what happens in my, from my perspective, it's sort of like missing one of the key lessons as you're learning algebra and then nothing else makes sense after that key lesson. And this is huge. So that's why I'm, I'm hitting it so hard. Like, you know what's huge?

I'll tell you when. The other thing, again, it's the simplification of. So not only did we want to. If we saw an opportunity on time management, but the other thing that is a lost start is an effective meeting. And how many organizations actually teach their team how to have an effective meeting? I think the stat is 25% of leadership has been taught on how to have an effective meeting. And so if you're trying to change this organizational culture, transform something, and you don't have the right training information, but you are now struggling to allow your team to have settings along the path. It becomes really, really difficult. It just falls. So these initiatives have to be tucked away in meetings where I am teaching you how to run it. So the stuff gets held and locked. You're holding hands, you're in sync. So the initiative, I teach the meeting, the meeting gets delivered to the team. The team's beliefs, maybe they change a little bit for the better. Beliefs lead to behaviors. Great behaviors lead to really good outcomes usually. And that was. It was the catalyst to the execution. Was this special training culture, or culture in general. You are listening to one sharp sword cutting through to what matters most. With your host, Dr. Wayne Purnell. You know you are bigger than the life you are leading. It really is time to attend to that thing you've wanted to do or have but you've been putting off. It's time to step into that dream. You've parked for someday. It's time to claim True. Well, being both personally and professionally without giving up the success that got you here, it's time to check out Dr. Purnell's signature small group retreat, the Exponential Success Summit. Explore exponential successsummit.com Seats are extremely limited, as this is a very special small group event. Www.exponentialsuccesssummit.com

how do you help leaders define what a culture is? Because that's. It's one of the most interesting things. You know, if you go to any leader and you go, is your vision defined? And do you. Do you understand what your culture is? Most leaders will go, yeah, of course I do. And then when you ask them to actually define what the vision is, where they're headed, what matters to them, and how their employees would talk about the vision and. Or the culture, there's a gap and a big pause. And so how do you help leaders? Because for me, that's one of the key things. I'm. I'm actually working on a big program due to come out later at the end of this year called Building a Culture of Caring, which is one of the reasons I wanted you here, because your thoughts on this are so in sync and so needed right now that I really wanted people to hear like, this is what matters in any organization. And by the way, it matters even if your organization is your family. It's sort of like these are. These are things that are transferable anywhere. And so defining your values, I think defining what the culture is, that's the starting place. How do you approach that?

Yeah, well, usually there's a few things when I will work with an organization, step one, or what are the three to five key priorities? And it's very funny how those are quite different with the more you talk about. The definition, really, for me is when you have them take or when you ask them and say, what is your gap between the values and the behaviors in action? Really, it's about values in action. But what is that gap? And how do you presently make sure that through the lifeline of an employee that they're aware? What happens is everybody, everybody has the values listed. They just don't always live them. And they also don't know the three behaviors under each value that truly show how to behave? And I'll give you a quick story that'll maybe even go into this question as well. I was working with an organization who is struggling with customer service. So they just, you know, they just hit this flatlining piece. And so one of the values was, of course, customer service is everything. You know, it's the most important thing we all have. And it's. But it wasn't shaping into the field. So there are brick and mortar stores. It just wasn't resonating. And so as we looked for what are the behaviors that might be missing within the training program, what are the skills and knowledge gap that are not presently existing, There was this opportunity on experience. As we drilled down, we found a story called Johnny the Bagger. It's in the book, Wayne, that you'll have a chance to witness. But it was a story about this young man named Johnny the bagger who was in a crowd of his teammates. And a consultant came in and gave this inspiring speech and said, each and every one of you can make a difference by creating a special experience, a memorable moment, putting your personal signature on every interaction. And out of all the employees, Johnny was the one who called her a month later and said, you know what? I really didn't think I could do much in the beginning. After all, I'm just a bagger. And Johnny shared that he also was proudly informing that he has down syndrome. And he said, but I had an idea and I sat down with my dad and I came up with. I wanted to put a thought of the day in everyone's groceries. So when I finished bagging, I would give them that thought of the day and say, thank you. Well, month later, after he does this action, store manager is triaging and noticing Johnny's line is the longest line by far, all the way down the frozen food section. And they're nervous because they're like, we need more cash. Cash registers open. We need more employees. Until he hears one of the guests of the store say, don't worry about it. I'm waiting for Johnny's thought of the day. Well, 10 people down in the frozen food section, another customer says, I used to come to your store every week. I now come every time I'm in the area just because I want to get Johnny's thought of the day. And so all of a sudden, this store was getting transformed by what Johnny was doing. But it didn't stop there. A month later gets a call, the store manager calls the consultant, says, you're now not going to believe our entire store is now transformed. Now our flower floral department, every time there's a unused corsage or broken flower that's handy around, that team goes walks around and pins it on a young child or elderly individual and thanks them for their business. Long story short, everything changes. People are coming back. All because Johnny chose to make that decision. So what do you do with that information? How do you get that behavior? They then use that as a new hire video that every employee goes through. They then share it, not just with new hires, with every level of employee to demonstrate that yes, customer service is one of our strong values and they're everything. But here's a behavior of what we want. They don't. You don't stop there though. It's now in the training. It's part of the review process. Under the other column in customer service, they added the Johnny the Bagger moment. But it doesn't stop there. You have to recognize. So what do they do? They create a Johnny the Bagger story. Every week would get you. Each store would submit, you know, their story of the week of how their employee created the Johnny the Bagger moment. It gets brought up all the way up to senior leadership. They vote and you get nominated to come to a special dinner. Those are some of the knowledge gaps in training. How you take something, change the behaviors of measure it, rank it, talk about it, reward it, communicate it, and great things happen.

Amazing. It's a great story. It's a great story. Yeah. Amazing. I have some questions for you. Given, given where we're headed. I want to talk about what you see in terms of the remote workforce. I don't know if you can hear my cat, she is trying to chime in. I've learned not to lock her out because otherwise what you hear is. Yeah, so, so a couple of things. One, how do you define workplace culture? Like how would you define it? And then two, so this is, this is a two part question, given where we're headed and where we've been. I mean, the pandemic taught us a lot. Now as we're coming back into creating a new normal, whatever that is, we're struggling. We in the business world, there are struggles for the hybrid workplace and leaders of the hybrid workplace. So can you talk about how would you define a workplace culture? And as we head to hybrid, what are some of the challenges and how do you make sure that the culture carriers are actually in their remote sites, you know, working from home?

So I'm going to give you the shortest definition ever. Values in action. At the end of the day, that's my definition of culture. Very simplified now as corporations, organizations have to make unique decisions now with this flexibility debate, you know, well, there's a few issues going on or opportunities. You have five generations within the workplace. You have Gen Z, you have millennials, you have Gen X, the boomers and the silent generation with all of their own values and what's important to them and how they want to get to places. And then you have this, as you were mentioning, this flexibility debate of what do we do with in person, remote and hybrid and what has ended up happening, of course, with these unique challenges, it has created a drop in engagement. When engagement drops, especially according to the gallops of the world, so do many of the business outcomes. And so I always stick and I do a talk and it is cross generational, crosses ethnic lines, crosses every possible thing. And it's so simple. But it would be wherever you are in person, remote hybrid is living five factors of engagement. No matter where you are, there are these five simple factors that still need to be in place. So the first is a relationship with your manager and but that has to be through every level of your organization. It can't just be me to senior leadership. And so what does your organization do wherever you are working to create that strong relationship and you should have three things under each factor. The second is just clearly communicating your goals and expectations. Same thing has to happen remote in person or wherever you are. What are those three things that you and your organization do? Training and development? What is the information equipment to get the desired outcome of the job? What are the things that you have in place, remote, in person or hybrid? How are you personally and professionally developing individuals? They can't just be great and better at work professionally. How do you help personal development as well? And then lastly is of course, how do you recognize. Well, I really would say recognize effort, reward, excellence. And what do you do to create a top performance reward system? And so it is harder, of course we would all agree, we've all been victim. You have to be unbelievably disciplined to be at home. I'm not saying it's better or worse, though I do have, I guess my opinions on it. But you have to be incredibly disciplined. If you're at home, you better have talk about equipment. You better have the right equipment and set up to draw lines between home and work. The interesting stat with Gallup that I recently read was while engagement is slightly higher with those who work from home or hybrid, those who have felt more anger and stress the prior day is significantly higher. And it's because of the lack of social connection as we would probably intuitively feel. And that is the biggest challenge. When you are not in person, you lose not only the water cooler talk but but some of the innocent banters that are going back and forth. And so you have to find creative ways to gamify these virtual meetings or settings or opportunities, especially as senior leadership. When I look at it and say, God, if this happened when I was a executive with Enterprise, I would have been so much better because I would have been able to manage from afar, even easier because I wasn't using all of these Microsoft Teams and Zoom technology to be omnipresent, to not have to travel to wherever I needed to travel, to be part of some special meeting or training. But I think the big continuous challenges is how do you somehow create that continuous engagement when they're not right in front of you? It's like you wouldn't go to a wedding, Wayne, and you wouldn't, you wouldn't go virtual, you know?

Right. So how do you create that continuous engagement? You know what, what are some of the tips that you would have for, for, for doing that? I, I ran an organization of 120 people and I put two days on my calendar, which doesn't seem like a lot per month. It's still significant for somebody who's running an organization where I would call it Day on the Floor. I would step out of my suit or sport jacket, I'd be wearing jeans and a T shirt and I would hit the floor and, and you know, do what was known as managing by wandering around. For me, I called it DOTF Day on the Floor. It was a healthcare organization and I had my line staff, my line employees putting me to work for me. That's how I created engagement and got a sense of like what's going on for real. Are there other tips that you have for how do you create, like you said, daily engagement, continuous engagement. How do you create that?

Yeah, so I think the, and I don't want to say the easiest thing, but I know if I'm leading a variety of employees and they might be spread over the country and they, or they might be spread over the state, wherever it may be. Is it isn't that hard to set aside time certain buckets where for example, my VP of sales is still going to have some time weekly to interact and go over a reflection of the prior week and maybe what they're going to be doing in the upcoming week. I can still do what I used to call a 30 minutes of fame with a variety of employees where it's just set in the calendar and it's me and you, Wayne, instead of being in person, it's this. I mean, we still have a great conversation doing this. Your audience still listens to podcasts and are not there. So I mean, you know, you can still do it slightly harder and you have to make time. I would. One thing I would be doing if I couldn't do a new hire lunch. I used to do that all the time with any new hire that joined us. I'd get groups of five and learn about them. I can still do that. Coffee talk. I can still do that. Friday rotation of five employees, and each one shares a little bit about their experience. There's a bunch of different settings in addition to being in the field and operating.

This is huge. And it. It almost sounded like a throwaway. And I want to make sure that it's really clear. When leaders gather five employees for a zoom meeting, usually, and it takes effort to not like to break this as a pattern. Usually the employees show up and just sort of look and wait. And it's like what we used to call an inflate my balloon moment. I'm here. You tell me, okay, leader, what is it? What you said was, in a group, the leader gathers five new employees and learns a little bit about them. That means that they're sharing. It means they're engaging. And I think. I just think it's, again, one of those very basic things that needs to be highlighted. Leadership isn't about talking at. Yeah, leadership is really about engagement. It really makes such a difference to learn about the other people that you're working with.

You know, Wayne, I used to have something called the leadership kind of think tank, and we would meet in person, but if we didn't meet in person, we would have the similar settings where we're asking them to come prepare to your point. And it would be a group of managers who would strategically set us up for the upcoming year. And what are those things that I'm missing? What are those things that we need to do better? How are we doing and what can we do better? Just because I'm not in person doesn't mean I can't be effective. It is. We gotta be honest, it's a touch harder. My joke before was, when you go to a wedding, you don't go virtually. I mean, you go. And it's going to be a different experience. And so you're going to do some trial and error and find out what I always said with my team, what works for you and your team. But the more relatable and omnipresent you can become. And that's what these platforms allow us to do. Not only be in the field, but also virtually connected, the more relatable, approachable. They use the term psychological safety. People feel they can be who they are, ask difficult questions, not just a safe space, but creating a brave place. And so I think we're still learning, but I think those are some basic things. But remember, if I asked you, Wayne, how do you lose weight or get in shape, you're going to say, you know what, Eric? I got to eat better. I got to work out a little bit more consistent, and maybe some good sleep. That's not the hard part. Everyone knows that. It's actually the execution, which is why I was such a proponent of workplace culture, because it was the catalyst to all this execution and it broke through. And the point of culture is not during the good times. The point of culture is during the rise hockey times. It is the shock absorber. I use a lot of car analogies because that's what I use for my metaphor in the book. It's a road trip, but it becomes the shock absorber that allows people to get through those difficult times. And so to me, as I've mentioned, that catalyst to execution.

That's awesome. I want to mention the book again. Jumpstart your workplace culture. You do car analogies. There are jumpstart cables on a cup of coffee for those listening who can't see the COVID So I will tell you that I got mine on Amazon and it's available wherever books are sold. Jumpstart your workplace culture. A roadmap for igniting high performance. Quick question. How's that for a little, you know, a little plug for you?

You are good.

All right, here's a question for you. You've done the work. You've got people engaged. You're, you know, they're talking more and you feel like you and know your team members. How do you measure workplace culture?

Yeah, the million dollar question. I, I would say the easiest thing that I know a lot of. Well, let me take one step back. One of the other things I really wanted to put through this book is when I was doing either my own experiences or interviewing people as I was writing it, I would always ask these C suite individuals, how do you measure culture? And then you'd hear crickets. You know, they couldn't really define it. You know. Well, you know, we kind of. And so I think the goal.

Seem happier. Right. It's like there's the scene, the, the. That word. Well, they seem happier. They seem more engaged. They seem. It's like our productivity went up. Okay. Is it. Is it causal or correlational? Yeah.

So I, I think the gold standard that I think a lot of people. But it is only a piece of workplace culture is you have to have a way, as you've mentioned, to talk about engagement. Whether you use Gallup or another organization, you have to have to be able to get information that at least lets me know where I stand. And Gallup will put you against people within your same sector. And it's something to start with. It's only to start with. I think that's one piece. What I talk about in the book is this six point inspection. It's three qualitative things and three quantitative things. And I go heavy on weighting engagement and the satisfaction and the experience that's given. You know, great engaged employees tend to give great experiences. And so I use those two as huge, two double weighted cats categories. And then using the ethics and values of an organization, how do we ensure people understand, like we were talking about, what are our values, but what are the behaviors that allow us to execute these values? And so, and then there's the quantitative is. Well, I do have to take my sales figures and I do have to take my retention numbers and I might have to take, depending on what you're working on, my growth, whatever that might be. And you put these things together and you. I created a little bit of a scale. So I use these three qualitative and three quantitative things. It is a way to at least create a baseline of where organizations do. At the very least, start with engagement and then build into some things that you're comfortable. But at the very least, you should be doing that perfect.

It's really great engagement, experience, the ethics and values, how they play out, and then the quantitative pieces of sales, retention and growth. Love it. I'm taking notes as you're talking. This is, this is really great. What? You know, I feel like we've covered so much and I guess I'm curious, is there something that you were hoping to talk about that we haven't hit yet?

You know, I would. There's a couple small things. I mean, I think one is just when people are looking for an approach. So hey, geez, where do start? What do I do? What I ended up doing is creating something called the hourglass approach. And as you'd imagine, the name hourglass has the word O u R hour. And it's a way to bring everybody kind of together versus the eyeglass, which would be I, which is me and you. I've been wearing glasses since I was about 7, so not the eyeglass piece. And then since this is actually audio and video, I'll actually try to see if I can pop it up as we go here. I'm going to try to get a visual for the background. Let's see if my old bones can create this. And if it distracts people, I'll have to kind of get out of the way a little bit. And if you look at this hourglass, you'll see the, the top part of the hourglass is really the pulling. It's called the discovery. But you know, the basic thing is you have to talk to your employees, clients, customers, shareholders, board members, and you're pulling information from them to get good data, to get a good place to start. And as you orchestrate, which is the next part, as the hourglass comes out, you're now taking all this information and really trying to formulate and roll out what were our key priorities. That's where the sand goes through. The clarity of your plan has to be right where the sand goes through. Now, as the hourglass goes out, you're going to see a big thing that says training. And really that is the reinforcement section that we talked a little bit about earlier is how do I get it to every level of my employee, from new hire to the person about to retire, how do I include it, as we talked about in reviews and checkpoints? And then the assessment is where the sand lays at the bottom, where at some point you've got to come up with a method that measures the health of your organization. Now, you'll notice two big pillars on each side. And one is mission, vision and values, which are your guiding principles. And to the other side are policies and procedures that are made up in order to execute the plan. And those are going to help you make your decision making process. And if you can use something as simple as the hourglass approach, as you're dissecting your organization and trying to transform it or take it to another level, it's a good place to start. Now, right when you think you have it, new technology comes in, the pandemic happens to hit, and you take the hourglass and you kind of turn it over and find out where I have to start from. But it usually comes from always having a setting to talk to employees, customers, clients, stakeholders, board members, or whoever that is. So that is one simple approach that might be helpful to those in the audience who want to at least say, hey, is there a kind of a methodology to the madness here? The other is, where I think people go wrong is communication. I mean, it was the second factor. But you have to understand in your organization, when I'm going to amplify the message, it's the ABCs when I'm going to amplify the message to my team. So new technology, as we were talking about some new sales process, whatever it might be, the Johnny the Badger moment, what are you going to do and amplify that message to everybody? You've got to understand when to buffer it and be that distraction catcher, the one who takes this confusing policy and procedure and uses this first thinking principle that Elon Musk actually talks about questioning how things used to be and why are they that way and truncating it and bringing it to make it more digestible. You're taking that 15 page memo document and it becomes a five sentence piece. And they're brilliant at doing those things, avoiding the misleading and confusing. And then the C is conveying, they are experts at just passing on the information as it needs to go. Your ESPN did you knows, you know those facts that are, you know, something's coming up. It's a friendly reminder of when you do the B and C, Wayne, your amplify gets squared now everything resonates. I, I avoid the quote unquote. We've heard it all the time. It's the flavor of the week. They're always bringing in new and you know, by doing the ABC process and as you do that and communicate, I think it would be helpful. Those are just two side ones, but great.

No, I appreciate your framework so, so much. They, they are part of the B and C. That's, you know, what you've done is you've made it, you've condensed it, you've made it simple and you're able to convey it in a way that makes so much sense with the frameworks. Just incredible. I worked with a company that was going through a major transition, had 2,000 employees that were going to be displaced, which is all fancy words for we don't know where they're going. Right. So that company that I work for didn't really have a great communication plan. They'll figure it out. HR will tell them. Yeah, really, like, really. And so the message, like part of my role was we need to find the message. Who's the messenger? What's the medium for the message? How, how is it going to be conveyed? Is it in a meeting? Is it in a memo, is it in a, you know, all hands telephone recording? Is it a zoom thing? And then something that most people don't think about is how often. Because you've got to convey it more than what? Well, we told them that we made the grand announcement. It's gotta be repeated.

You know, Wayne, it's interesting. I do a talk on engaging your workplace and under the clear communication of expectations and goals. I do exactly what you just said. I start with amplify, you know, and the fact that only 60% of people know what is expected of them. But I go into the amplify and I use the how often and in what setting. It's. It's my first talking point of what are you trying to do to communicate what setting, how often. So you're right on.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're right on. That's. It's fantastic. And it's something that is very often overlooked. What I love to do is to bridge from business to. To home. Because everything we've talked about here, what would happen if you sat down with your. Your partner, if you have one, or with your entire family, doesn't matter their ages, and said, hey, what can we do better? Where do you want to see. Where do you want to see us go this year? Like, what would make the end of this year look really successful? Like to be able to. To capture that and. And to build towards it. Everything you do then goes toward creating a really successful outcome.

God, you're. I'm so on the. So everything I would try to coach, train and develop. I always wanted to say, don't just keep it at your workplace. Bring it home. So time management would be the best example. Don't be great at time management at work. Go bring that home. And we used to call it, it's your own fight, you know, when we would go financials, don't just be great at your financials here. Be great at your financials at home. I have 11 nieces and nephews. I have three kids. And it's funny, you know, Uncle Eric tends to be someone that they might reach out to for some career advice at times.

Yeah.

And so I think you're so right of. Especially with 2024. Well, this will air, I think maybe in February or later. But 2024 just hit what are those things that we're trying to do personally. And I created. You'll love this. I should send it to you. We created 21 principles to guide my kids someday if their dad is not around, which hopefully won't be for a long, long time. But it was things that I want them to understand that are really important. 21 is a lot. It's actually out of character for me, but with my kids, I didn't want to leave anything out. And so for me, I'm starting to build these family things. The 21 personal things that will guide you. What is our.

Can you think the top three off that list. Do you know them?

You know what's annoying? I usually have it first one family first. Okay, so. And it defines what I mean. So each one kind of like we talked about having a behavior, what it means. The other was personal brand. So kind of who they are reflects everything. You know, consistency over intensity is one of them. It's not about doing it for three weeks. It's about consistently death by a thousand paper cuts. But I'll actually, you know what I'll do is I'll try to send it to you. I'd love to try. I'll send it to you. And those are some of the things at home that I try to build in that create a foundation of what does it mean to be what I call a stone? I'll give you another corny thing I did. I just did something called the power of five. Created a little story for my family. And we have five, so three kids. My wife, myself and I wanted to talk about each of them, but a significant piece in each. So each one is mentioned with its own little, you know, paragraph. But the whole point is about the power of family, the power of five. The people who will always have your back because your circle shrinks in life as we know when we get old, you know, what used to be wide becomes littler and littler. And the people, in my opinion, who truly want your successes and your best interests is that family, no matter what happens, they're there for you. If done right, not perfect.

So perfect. I think it's so important to have a message that is one of live congruently be you have values. Let other people know what they are. That's at work, that's at home. If your personal values happen to align with the company values. Yeah, you right. It's like that's. That's really important. Share them. Let other people know what they are so that people can line up behind you or choose not to based on who you are.

Yeah, it's kind of, hey, geez. Hopefully I get my kids to someday say, hey, what would dad do?

Yeah, exactly.

So whether I'm not available on a phone call. And again, probably. What great organizations do, they get their people through, think and you know, hey, what would dad do? He's busy, he's on vacation, he's wherever he is. What would he do? And then maybe they have those 21 principles and they constantly review them. I constantly recall them just like I do with my goals.

Beautiful.

Every week they get recalled. You got to constantly talk about it.

So Eric, how do people find you? I assume you're on LinkedIn and I don't think we're connected yet. So let's make that happen.

We got.

So how do people find you and learn more about your, your business?

And so I think, yeah, easiest way is probably the best platform for me that I'll look at the most is LinkedIn. Though my daughter has actually got me to have a social media Instagram account. So clearpath Ventures underscore would be an Instagram way to follow some of the stuff I might put out. You can always go to send me an email@ericlearpathventures.com and those are probably the easiest ways to follow and see what I'm up to.

Very good. All right. On social, ClearPathVentures underscore eric@clearpathventures.com Perfect. There you go. Thank you. That's great.

It was, it was a pleasure. I appreciate it. Thanks for the mention of the book. I'm hoping you really enjoy it and can spread the word. You can be one of my culture carriers. Wayne of the book.

There you go. I, you know, I will work my way through it. And there it is. Jumpstart your workplace culture. Find that wherever books are sold. Eric Stone. Eric, thank you so much for joining me.

It was a pleasure. Thank you.

This is one sharp sword cutting through to what matters most. My guest today, Eric Stone, the author of jumpstart your workplace culture and an amazing consultant for businesses around the world. Awesome. Thank you for being here for joining us. I'm Dr. Wayne Purnell, Dr. P. The Exponential success coach and the president of dynamic Leader. We will see you here next time. Please like this episode, Please share this episode and please leave a comment that helps others find it. Thanks so much. Thank you for listening to one sharp sword cutting through to what matters most with your host, Dr. P. Dr. Pull, Dr. Wayne Purnell, the breakthrough success coach and your powerful presence mentioned.