Michael Hyatt: Leadership and Productivity Expert, NYT Best-Selling Author, and Founder of Full Focus

Here's something remarkable and not in a good way. Disengaged employees cost US companies almost $1.9 trillion a year. That's a lot of zeros. Why? Because when teams lack the right skills, productivity declines, turnover increases, and strategies stagnate. But it doesn't have to be that way. At Project Management Institute, home of the PMP and globally recognized certifications, your people can learn to collaborate, deliver on time, and actually get things the cost of not upskilling way higher than the investment Project Management Institute. Find the answers@pmi.org Guy Kawasaki here.

I want to recommend a podcast. It's called Female Startup Club. It's hosted by Dune Roisin and is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. If you're looking for a new podcast, Startup Club shares tips, tactics and strategies from some of the world's most successful female founders, entrepreneurs, and women in business. It covers topics like who should be your first hire and how to build a great community. Listen to Female Startup Club wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is the Remarkable People Podcast. I'm I am on a mission to make you remarkable. Today's guest will further you along that path. Michael Hyatt has built multiple companies over the years, including a $250 million book publisher as well as a leadership development consultancy called Michael Hyatt and company. This organization has grown over 60% year over year. For the past four years it has been featured in the Inc. 5000 list of the Fastest Growing Companies in America and and Inc. S Best Workplaces list. He's also the author of several New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today best selling books including Living Best Year Ever. Free to Focus, the Vision Driven Leader and Win at Work and Succeed at Life. He has been married for over 40 years to his wife Gail, has five daughters with her, and has nine grandchildren. In this interview, he answers three questions that many have been pondering. First, how do you achieve focus? Second, what do you need to succeed in 2022? Third, how can a company change resignation to renovation? Plus, there's a special bonus question that he Can a father be happier than his least happy daughter? If you're a leader, want to be a leader, or you're a father with a daughter? This episode is for you. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. And now here is the remarkable Michael Hyatt. At this point in your life, what do you consider your calling, your reason to exist?

That's a great question and I would say that it's to help people get what I call the double win, which is winning at work and succeeding at life. The history of that is that back in the early 2000s, I was a hard charging executive in a publicly held company, and I had just been given responsibility for one of our least profitable divisions. In fact, out of 14 divisions, it was the least profitable of all. And so I decided I was going to roll up my sleeves and dive in and do my very best to turn it around. And so the CEO said, how long is it going to take you? And I said, I think I can do it in three years. Of course, I was just pulling the number out of the air. I didn't have a clue. I went back with a vision that I'd put onto paper and just shared it with my team. They got excited about it. Long story short, we were able to turn that division around and go from number 14 to number one in about 18 months. I got the biggest bonus check I'd ever gotten in my life. It was more than my annual salary. I went home and by the way, I had sacrificed nights, weekends on the road, constantly, wasn't eating very well, all that stuff. So I went home. I expected my wife to be thrilled, and I bounced in. I showed her this big bonus check. Yeah. And she kind of had a little bit of a half smile and said to me, you know, we need to talk. And I said, okay. And I kind of knew, like, I was getting taken to the doghouse. But we went into the den, we sat down, and she began to tear up just a little bit. And she said, you know, I love you and I'm so grateful for all you do for our family, but I gotta be honest, you are never home and something needs to change. And she said, worse than that, your five daughters, who, by the way, at that time, they were all teenagers. She said, they desperately need you on the scene. And then she began to cry and she said, I feel like a single mom. Well, that wasn't exactly what I was going for. I realized that something had to change. And so I really have dedicated the last 20 years of my life to figuring out, you know, how can you build a wildly successful business? Because I don't want to give up on that. I'm very ambitious, but not sacrificing your health or your most important relationships. So I've more or less figured that out. Sometimes it's three steps forward, two steps back. But my goal in life and what I do with all my clients is try to help them achieve that double win.

And. But you're no longer CEO, right? Haven't you passed the reins on?

Yeah. So in that company, I became the CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, which at the Time was the seventh largest publisher in the country. We sold it to HarperCollins in 2011, and I used that opportunity to leave and to set up my own business. And so I did. Michael Hyde and company. And so that was in the spring of 2011, and a year ago, this January, this very month, I made my oldest daughter the CEO of our company. So we have, I don't know, 65 employees, about 600 coaching clients, and she took the reins, and she's doing phenomenal. So I've actually stepped down as CEO from two different companies.

And Are you just playing with your grandchildren now, or are you.

No, she put me to work. She's running the company and leading the company and doing all the visionaries and organizing the executive team and doing all that kind of stuff. I get to do the fun stuff that I love, which is create content and to present it. I was mentioning to you earlier, I just got off a webinar. I love that interaction, interacting with the clients and creating content. But I essentially report to her now, and I'm only working six hours a day for four days a week.

So here's the first question that you may say I don't want to answer.

Okay. Okay.

So I'm curious. Why does she go by the name Megan Hyatt Miller? Why doesn't she just say Megan Miller? No one will know she's your daughter. Because knowing that she's your daughter, some people may react negatively. Right. It's nepotism, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah. To be honest, I've never really thought of that. I think if you were to ask her, she'd probably say she's proud of the name. A lot of women hyphenate their name like that. And a lot of people knew her as Megan Hyatt before she got married. But I think for anybody who's met her or interacted with her, what they say is, you're really better than your dad.

I was gonna say I got that impression, but now.

Yeah, I get that a lot.

So do you have any recommendations for people who are trying to step out or step back at this time in their life now that you've done it twice?

Actually, I do. And literally, this was what the webinar was about that I did today. It was called Walk Away and Watch It Grow. And so I have this theory, and the theory is that you can actually achieve more by doing Less. The problem is most of us have too much time, and as a result, we spend a lot of time in low leverage, low impact kind of activities that don't really move the business forward. When we constrain ourselves, then all of a sudden we're forced to make decisions about priorities and what's really important. But I would say that if you're thinking about just having more free time or not having a business that's so dependent upon you or wanting to retire, whatever it is, I think the first thing to do, and this is something I did four years ago, and that was I got really specific about when the date of that transition was going to be. In fact, I announced it to our entire employee workforce, but I announced it for January 1, 2022. I'll come back to that in a minute. So then I said, okay, now what has to transpire for Megan to be equipped to be able to lead the company? Well, because I've kind of gotten addicted to the cash flow. I like the income, so I want the company to continue to do well. And so I, you know, I came up with a list of things that she needed to grow into. And she was, of course, enormously creative and collaborative and worked on that with me. But here's the thing, guy, that I had to figure out. And I had a bad transition from my predecessor at Thomas Nelson, because when he handed the baton to me, and he had been my mentor, my advocate, the board voted unanimously to elect me to this position. We were a publicly held company. And the day after he flipped out, he walked into our CFO's office. He'd been the CEO for 47 years. And he said, if I'm not the CEO, who am I? His work was so tied up with his identity that he couldn't differentiate the two. And when the work went away, his identity went away. And he spent the next two years trying to unseat me and giving me all kinds of grief. He's dead now, so I can tell the story, but convenient for me, but. But at any rate, it was an amazing experience. But I realized he didn't have something he was going to. And I think for anybody that wants to step away from their business or out of their business, the focus can't be totally backward, like what you're leaving. You've got to create a vision for what you're going toward. And so Dan Sullivan, a strategic coach, says, you've got to always make your future bigger and better than your past. And so that's what I did. I had to Literally go on a retreat and just kind of say, okay, if I step away, what's that going to make possible? And to get really clear on that. And so that's made it easy. I haven't been tempted to meddle in the business or to give her any grief. I just stay out of it because I got other stuff that I'm doing that's really important to me.

This is the second section of stuff you may say I don't want to answer.

So far, so good.

Clearly, with a background with Thomas Nelson, largest Christian publisher, etc. What's your current opinion of Christianity in America vis a vis Trumpism, vaccination, stolen election, all that kind of stuff. Where are you on all that?

Okay, this is what I should take a pass on.

Okay, well.

Oh, okay.

I was ready to. I was ready to say, okay, and.

I'll probably get into trouble. I have a unique vantage point because if you take the three major branches of Christianity would be Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism. So I started out as a Protestant, but I became Eastern Orthodox about 37 years ago. So I'm a little bit in it, but a little bit on the sidelines. I think I have a unique perspective to it. I would say that today people are more spiritually motivated, more spiritually interested than ever before. However, that doesn't always manifest itself in traditional frameworks like we're used to. I think churches that have exclusively tried to cater to the culture and just adopt what Neil Postman saw, the entertainment metaphor, everything is valued for its entertainment value. I think when Christianity gets evaluated in that framework, where its only value is if it's entertaining, I think it goes in bad places. And I also think when Christianity gets wrapped up in politics, it's never a good thing. Certainly, like anybody else, I have my opinions and get wrapped up in it, but I don't think I really serve anybody else. I've never convinced anybody by debating with them on politics or even on religion. So for me, it's just, you know, I want to do my best to live the life I know I'm supposed to live and speak what I need to speak. But if other people find that attractive, great. I would say, too, that in my work, in the content, like I write business books, and they're hardcore business books, I might mention my faith occasionally, but I never want anyone that reads it to feel like they're on the outside looking in. I never want to exclude anyone. So I want to make it something that might help clarify something or help people think through something. But Never something that would become an obstacle. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. I have a similar attitude. I don't hold myself out as, oh, look at Guy. He's a Christian and a business person. Isn't that a wonderful thing?

He's.

He's like, hit the bullseye twice. I'm more the Charles Barkley theory of, I'm not a role model. Go look at Michael Hyatt.

No, I'm not either. But I just hate it when people's charisma gets ahead of their character. And I think one of the things that we've seen in American Christianity is a lot of stellar falls from grace. Big mega church pastors and others because of these wonderful tools and the Internet and what platforms make possible. They rose to unbelievable heights, but oftentimes they didn't have the character to support that, and the whole thing collapsed upon itself. And I think that ends up leaving a lot of people disillusioned. And God forbid that I would ever do that. I'd hate to be in that position.

Well, when you start believing that as a pastor, you need a private jet, I would say that's a pretty good sign. Things are going off the rail there.

Clues to look for that'd be worse.

Back on track here.

So.

I see a lot of your work is about adequate sleep and rest and restoration. So I want to know your bedtime routine. Do you sleep with the iPhone in the room? Do you turn it off? What do you do?

Well, first of all, I sleep great. And I track it like a hawk because I know that when I'm really well rested, I'm much more productive, I'm much more focused, I'm much more energetic. And I think that the energy that I bring to my team is, like, one of the most important things that I can bring to the team. It's not fair to them for me to show up tired. To quote Dan Sullivan again, he says, do you notice that the more tired you are, the dumber everybody else gets? Yeah. Well, it might be you. I do wear an aura ring, and so that, you know, I look at my stats literally first thing I do in the morning, you know, and I'm kind of an achiever on the strength finder. So I like getting a score. So I get a score and I sleep great. But it's intentional. So a couple things I do. Number one, I typically go to bed at the same time each night. So I aim for 8:45, and usually I'm in bed and I can go to sleep really fast. I'm usually asleep by 9:00', clock, I get up at 4:45. But part of that evening routine is my iPhone is in the room and I don't know if those cell phone waves are scrambling my brain. They probably are, but it's in the room with me. But I've got blackout curtains. There's no light in the room whatsoever. I have a noisemaker. I turn the temperature down to where it's pretty chilly and I have to have a weighted blanket on top of me. But that's pretty much it. I try to get eight hours sleep a night. I read after last year's Super Bowl, I was doing some research on Tom Brady and he said the number one thing he tries to do for his health and for his performance is he sleeps nine hours a night. I couldn't do that much, but I could do eight.

And do you wake up in the middle of the night and ever check your fall?

Never. But I do wake up in the middle of the night. I usually wake up once in the middle of the night and I can usually go back to sleep pretty quickly. Not always, you know, if there's something on my mind. But I don't get up and do any work. I mean, rarely. I've probably done it before, but very rarely.

Next question. So everybody's anticipating the great, or more than anticipating it's happening, the great resignation. So here's a softball question for you. How do we change resignation to renovation boom?

Just did a podcast on that. As you probably know, if you think it's about money, if you're a business owner or a business leader, just say, well, we just got to pay more. If we pay people more money, they'll stick around. I don't think that's true. And I think the research bears that out. I think what people are desperate for, especially with collapse or at least the downturn of the American family, for the loss of sense of community and particularly for the isolation that we've all gone through for the last two years. I think what people are desperate for is a sense of meaning. They want to know that they're contributing to something that matters, that they're not just wasting their life on a hamster wheel that doesn't go anywhere. And so I think as business owners, as business leaders, it's imperative that we have a very clear purpose for why our business exists. It can't be about us. It's gotta be about other people. And it's gotta be in some way we gotta be adding value to other people's lives. If you can do that. And if you can bring that message back to your team over and over again, whether it's taking those customer support letters for people write in and talk about how you transform their life or whatever and share that with the team, I can tell you we have very low turnover. We've been on the INC list of the best places to work the last couple of years. And I really think it has to do with people having a sense of meaning and purpose. And the good news is, if you're a business owner, that doesn't cost you anything. It costs you some mental work. It costs you some time spent in reflection, but it's free.

Otherwise, you sound like Daniel Pink.

He's good.

He is good. Yes. I just had him on. So what if somebody out there is thinking, yeah, sure, Michael, for 65 people, I can help them have purpose. But what happens if you have 6,000 or 60,000 people?

I think it goes back. And you know this guy because you wrote a book on it, but it goes back to vision. And I think that it's imperative that you sell the vision. First of all, most leaders spend too much time on strategy and too little time on vision, even for great big companies. And I think that vision is the thing that's compelling. That's what pulls us into the future. And I remember back in the Great Recession, I was the CEO of Thomas Nelson, and that hit our industry in a hard way in the publishing business because we had not only the Great Recession, but we had the whole shift from traditional print media to electronic media. There was also the marketing shift from traditional marketing, which we knew and understood, to social media. And so we hit these kind of three tsunamis that upended our business. And it was really tough. And my executive coach at the time, she said, Michael, you have got to preach the vision. You just got to camp on that and talk about it till you're sick and tired. I said, well, I am sick and tired. I'm tired of talking about the vision. I feel like I'm repeating myself. And she said, good, you're half done now keep doing it. And the problem is, it's like Andy Stanley, who's a pastor in Atlanta, he says, vision leaks. And I think that's true. You know, it's like people are walking around with a bucket and you fill it up with vision, but it leaks, so you got to keep refilling it. So in our company, we're actually doing this on Friday of this week. We start off the year with vision casting. So we will share our newly revised three year vision Our annual goals, all the new product introductions we're doing this year, all that stuff. So it'll be infused with vision, but it's not a one and done thing. Then every quarter we get together for a full day of reviewing the previous quarter, previewing what's coming, and then we do team training. But we always read through what I call our vision script. I wrote a book on this too, called the Vision Driven Leader. So we read through the vision script. We do that every quarter, and then every time we have an opportunity. And the more successful you are, the more opportunities show up at your doorstep. The problem is most of those are distractions masquerading as opportunities. But the only way you know is to compare them against the vision. And obviously you've got the choice to say, oh, we didn't consider that. Let's add that to the vision. But more often than not you go, hey, that's outside the scope of what we really feel called to do.

What is the vision of your company?

Well, it's three to five pages, and so it's broken into four parts. And one of the problems I have with traditional recommendations on vision is people recommend a vision statement, which functions more like a motto. And it's not robust enough to really direct the work, because once you get a vision in place, and I'll come back to your question here in a second, but vision's like the first part, then you got to get the team aligned around the vision. So once you know the destination, you've got to get everybody rowing in the same direction so that there's not sideways energy. Then you're in a position to really execute and to execute with a minimum of resources, because you're not wasting resources through misalignment or through people heading toward different destinations. So when we talk about coming up with a vision script, we talk about, first of all, what's the three to five year vision for your team? Who's going to be on the team? In other words, what kinds of people? In our case, and we added this, this last couple of years, you know, a diversity component of that. What's really our vision for diversity in our company right now, 30% of our company, people of color, we'd like to get that to about 50% again, if for no other reason. I think you can make a total argument that companies that are more diverse are more innovative, that they have better ideas, that they have a better return on earnings. But you can also argue that diversity has a lot of other benefits. It needs to reflect the complexity of the market you're trying to serve. And for a lot of companies, that doesn't happen. So the team is important, then the product. This will be the second part of the vision script. What are the products or the services that we envision three to five years from now? What is our marketing and our sales look like? How do we acquire customers and move them through the funnel three to five years from now? And then finally, what's the impact, you know, what are our operating results or any other metrics that are important? We put those in there as well.

Going back to this resignation to renovation, it looks like we're going to be in a hybrid world. And first of all, do you think that's a good thing or a bad thing or just a necessary evil? And obviously I want to know why for whatever reason, or I want to know why for whatever answer you give. So what do you think of this upcoming hybrid world?

I think it's all good. You know, I've worked in the. In the world like you have, where I had a corporate job and I had a 40 minute commute each way and I had to be there every single day. And a lot of times I was there till late in the evening. And then all of a sudden I started this business where initially it was all remote, so we were way ahead of our time, like a lot of scrappy young entrepreneurial online companies do. And we were remote. And I loved it. I kept thinking, what's the downside of this? What's the downside of this? Well, we did discover a downside as we grew. There's also huge value in face to face. There's just something that is, as much as it helps to be able to see your smiling face on the other end of the screen and be able to interact with you and catch the nuances that aren't communicated verbally, like your expressions and the tone of your voice and all that. It's still not the same as being in the same room with Guy and having this interaction face to face. It's probably 80% of it, but that last 20% is important. So I think for hybrid companies, for companies that want to do hybrid, I think you got to look at the upside, but you also got to look at the downside and you got to mitigate the downside. So the upside is obviously you don't have to have these big old office spaces. Before the pandemic hit, we decided we were going to build a much bigger office, 20,000 square foot office. And we were like literally set to ink the deal then the pandemic hit and we said, we better wait and see what happens now. We're not on that track anymore. We don't need that kind of office space. But we still want to get together because there's a missing component. There's that water cooler chatter, the ideas that are passed in the hallway, that unless you make time and opportunity for that in some way, I do think you miss some innovation, you miss some communication, that you have to be just more deliberate when you're doing that in a remote environment.

I understand the theory that people are spending two hours less commuting, say at a maximum, two hours less commuting.

Yep.

And you would think, so now they have two hours back in their lives. They can be with their kids, they can be with their family, they can let the contractor in, all that good stuff. But I think that one of the things that has come with virtual meetings and virtual existence in a hybrid is that the expectation for an international company is that you are on far more meetings. So you may have gained two hours in commuting, but you may have given back back two hours. And now you're on the Hong Kong sales call, the Delhi sales call, the Munich sales call, and the New York sales call, and the California sales call. So what do we do about that?

We have too many meetings. I wrote a book on this too called no fail Meetings. But I feel like one of the things that a lot of weak leaders do is they default to meetings. And I'm not opposed to meetings. I think meetings are a wonderful opportunity for collaboration. But I think when leaders are afraid to make a decision and they're outsourcing their thinking as cover for having to make the decision themselves, that's not a good use of a meeting for disseminating information that could have been disseminated on Slack or via email or some other way. That's not good either. So I think we've got to be really clear, really intentional about the meetings that we're having. And we got to constantly be asking ourselves, and I think this question will never become obsolete because the future is changing so fast, is, do we need to rethink this, how we're doing this? Do we need to completely rethink this? I can tell you another story. Back In March of 2020, when the pandemic first hit, we have a lot of young families in our company, young kids. Suddenly they had no childcare, they had no school. Mom and dad were trying to juggle a ton of different things, trying to keep it all working. And so we said As a result of that, we're going to go to a six hour workday so that people have time for the rest of their life. But I set it up as an experiment. So this was back, I was still the CEO of the company and I said, so here's what we're going to do. We're going to try this for two weeks and then we're going to get together, the executive team is going to get back together and say, have we maintained our productivity? Are our financial objectives still within reach? Are we still making progress like we want to against that two weeks, all good. Couldn't tell any difference, honestly. And so then we said, okay, we're going to do it through the summer. So that was through the summer of 2020. And so we got through the summer, we said, oh my gosh, like we're killing it. We've been more productive than ever. And I think people, because they had a constrained time, they were forced to prioritize and focus on their most important activities. So in the fall of 2020, we said, okay, this is now becoming permanent policy. So six hour workday. I work four days a week, six hours a day. Most everybody in the company works five days a week, six hours a day. And I know a lot of companies have gone to a four day work week. It doesn't really matter. The same kind of thing applies. But I think that you got to constantly be reinventing yourself. And of course, that made recruitment of new employees holy smoke. When we have an opening for a job, we'll typically get a minimum of 100 candidates apply, sometimes 200, 300 candidates supply.

And with this six hour theory, aren't those people getting back maybe four hours? Because there's two hours less of work and two hours less of commuting. That's four hours back.

That's right. It's awesome. You started by asking, what do I consider my calling at this stage of life? And I referred to the double win. This enables us to ensure that our people get that double win so they've got time to kill it at work. We pay above market, we want them to be making their bonuses and all the other things. But on top of that, we want them to have a life. We want their marriages to flourish, we want their relationship with their children to flourish. We want to be able for them to be able to contribute to their local community. This makes that possible where the normal workload doesn't. And as a result of that, we feel like they end up being even more committed to us. It'd be really hard for somebody to leave and find that someplace else. And so that's exactly what we hope for. Up next on Remarkable People. You know, the best way to focus is you've got to start with a plan. If you don't have a plan, essentially what you're doing is you're defaulting to everybody else's plan. Somebody else has a plan for your life, right? Somebody else has priorities for you. So if you don't have your own priorities in your own plan, you're going to be susceptible to working their plan. I like my plan better.

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So I basically said, if you're going to pack a suitcase to get through the journey that's called 2022. There's a few things you need and I would say the first thing to do because life is a marathon and this year will feel like a marathon. And I feel like every year during the pandemic has felt like a marathon. I would go ahead and first decide the time you're going to take off. Rest and rejuvenation are more important than most people know. If you want to be performing at an Olympic level, if you want to be bringing your best to your work, to your family, to the people you love, you got to take time off. Otherwise you're going to burn out or worse, blow up. So I would literally get on the calendar and just mark certain days that are going to be off. I'm not going to work on weekends, for example, or I'm not going to work during this period of time. I'm going to put my vacations, I'm going to take the company holidays I'm going to take all the company vacation that I get. Since I started this company, I take a 30 day sabbatical every summer. And I did that for a lot of different reasons. But it forces me to run the business in a certain way or did force me to run the business when I was running it. So that'd be the first thing. Second thing, and I won't give you all these, but the second thing I would say is make sure you have a set of goals for this year. Goals are what move us forward. But not every goal is a goal. Goals need to be set up in a certain way. A goal well conceived as a goal half achieved. And so we have a framework that we teach called the Smarter Framework, which we built on GE's model. But to have goals that, you know, have deadlines that are very specific and measurable and exciting and relevant to your life and business, you know, all that's important. And then the other thing I would say for those who are listening, who are business owners, this is like one of the best pieces of advice I could give you. And one of the things we teach in our coaching program called Business Accelerator is to have a 16 week rolling cash flow forecast so that, you know, week by week and it's got to be updated weekly, week by week, what your cash inflows are and your cash outflows so that if there's trouble on the horizon, you still got some Runway to solve the problem before. You pick up the phone on a Tuesday to call in payroll and you go, crap, I don't even have enough money in my bank account to make payroll. That's one of the worst feelings as a business owner. So this keeps you out of that kind of trouble.

Could you just mention what you consider good goals? Is it a number? Is it a, is it net income? Is it gross margin, Is it new product delivery?

What.

What kind of goal is a good goal?

I think it's going to be different depending on where you are in the season of your business and what's happening in your business currently. I think for most business owners, most business leaders, most, there's gonna be a revenue growth that depends on the business. Because as we all know in tech companies sometimes and other companies like Amazon, profits not that important initially. It may be if you're in a tech startup and you're running a SaaS business, that the number of monthly subscribers you have is kind of the multiple that's gonna inform the valuation that your company gets. Whatever's gonna be important to the owners of the company or to the future owners. That needs to be a goal. If you do nothing else, you better deliver that. And then there's some other goals, you know, that are around that. So it could be anything, depending again on where you're at in the life cycle of your business. For example, we're in the process of developing a software product right now. And so that is a goal, a company wide goal, because it's going to take everybody's attention to make it happen and bring it into reality.

What is the best development path to become a great leader?

Oh man, you're asking some really good questions. It's like you do this for a living. I would say that great leadership starts with great self awareness. And part of what happens for leaders is that wherever they go, they leave awake. You know, you leave a meeting and people are impacted emotionally and intellectually. They're either left more energized or less energized. They're left feeling better about themselves, they're left feeling diminished, they're left feeling like they can conquer the world or they're left feeling like they're idiots and can't do anything right. And again, during the Great Recession, this is so funny. We had sold the company to private equity and we sold at the top of the bubble. I mean, we got unbelievable valuation on the company. But then the recession hit and of course then the numbers didn't work because nobody ran a recession scenario. And so we had to end up laying off 20% of our staff. And our revenues fell by 20% in the first year. And it was very, very traumatic. But I remember the private equity guys saying to us, what is wrong with you guys? And I mean, they didn't say this quite this bald, but how I heard it was, what are you idiots doing? And I finally said to him at one time, I said, hey, the same knuckleheads are running the company now that were the same geniuses that you bought the company from a year ago. We were flying high and had seven years of continuous quarter by quarter earnings improvements. Our stock had gone through the roof. But now all of a sudden we're in the middle of the recession and it felt like we couldn't do anything right. Their leadership, their presence in our board meetings. During that time, I would bring in the entire executive team. We had a quarter, we're in the middle of the recession. We crushed it. We beat our numbers. We had a really good quarter. So I was letting the executives talk about the job that they had done the previous quarter, giving them an opportunity to shine and all that. And I mean, it got shut off in about five minutes. The chairman of our board said, yeah, yeah, yeah, we know the good stuff, but we want to focus on what didn't work. And I mean, you could just hear the air go out of the room. And my team left and so I had to get them together after the meeting and get them kind of all pumped back up. But that's what leadership does if it's not self aware. You know, having an executive coach is hugely helpful because you can have somebody speak into your life. Here's another funny story about an executive coach. I was sitting in a meeting at Thomas Nelson where we were doing our financial reviews, which we did every month at the end of the month. And so she pulled me aside about 10 o' clock in the morning after I'd heard a couple of our general managers go through their divisional performance. And she said, are you pissed off? And I said no. What do you mean? She said, are you sure you're not angry or having a bad day? And I said no. And she said, well, you might want to let your face know it because you're sitting in this meeting frowning and you're intimidating the heck out of the people you're trying to lead. Well, that was a moment of self awareness. I wasn't aware that I wasn't smiling, that I was looking hostile. Leaders have got to have that.

What if you're a young person, 20, 25, even 30, and you're listening to this and you want to be a leader? You got any concrete steps for the young person?

Yeah. Start by being a great follower.

Which means what?

It means that you got to be a person who learns how to listen carefully to the outcomes that your boss or somebody else wants. And then you've got to exceed their expectations. So this here's the fast way to advance through the ranks. Every boss has a set of expectations. If you miss those expectations, you create disappointment. If you hit those expectations, you get to keep your job. If you exceed them, you create wow. And if you exceed them by a lot of, you create a lot of wow. And that's where you get advanced in your career. So always aim to go that second mile to do a little bit more to beat the numbers significantly, because that's how you build a reputation and a career.

Is this the same answer to how to get noticed in a busy world?

I don't know. I wrote that book Platform. That was the first book I wrote after I started this company. And I think one of the things I've learned since then is large platforms can create problems for a lot of young leaders who get, as I said earlier, a bigger platform, more charisma, more platform than they have the character to sustain. But yeah, I do think when it comes to getting noticed in a noisy world, you've got to always aim for wow. And so One of the eight values of our company at Michael Hyde & Company is relentless. Wow. And so that's something we're always trying to achieve. We always want to wow our clients, our customers. I take that attitude towards my employees. I'm always trying to wow them. And certainly we don't always do that. Sometimes we disappoint people, sometimes we just satisfy them, but our goal is always to.

Wow. You touched on this very briefly before, and I want to revisit it. So the question is, how do I do a no fail.

Meeting? First of all, I would start by asking, is this meeting worth having? Is there any other way we can do it? Probably 50% of the meetings you think you need to call could be canceled right there. Second, create an agenda. I will not take a meeting with somebody that doesn't have an agenda. And the reason for that is not so much for me, although I like to know, but for them, I don't want them to waste their time or my time. And I want them to think through the topic. And when you write things down, they become clear thoughts, disentangle themselves. Somebody once said, passing over the lips and through pencil tips. And I think having a written agenda and insisting on that discipline in your organization is really important because it takes less time. And by the way, if you don't have a purpose for the meeting and an agenda, how do you know when the meeting's over? Right, because there's a lot of meetings that we might plan for an hour, but if we can accomplish the objective and get through the agenda in 30 minutes, great. Let's give back that extra 30 minutes to everybody. And then I would say another thing. There's just a couple things. One, we always start meetings with our wins. You know, I think that leaders, a lot of times, if they're not careful, like the example I was giving you at the private equity board, you know, smart people tend to see the things that are wrong very quickly. And the problem is that doesn't encourage anybody. You know, anybody can see that stuff and point it out, but to focus on your wins. And I did learn this from Dan Sullivan, that builds your confidence. And when you feel confident, you feel like you can do anything. So we always start with Wins, I mean, literally every meeting. Okay, what were the wins since the last time we met? We're going to get into the problems. We're going to be honest about that. We're not sugarcoating anything, we're not being Pollyanna, but we want to start with the wins. Then the other thing I would say, the last thing I would say is keep track. You don't have to keep copious minutes of who said what when, but you do need to take inventory of the commitments that people are making. And that needs to be the second thing in the follow up meeting that you cover. So you cover wins in the next meeting and then you say, okay, last time we were together, guy, you said you were going to do this. Sally, you said you were going to do this. How'd you do? Did you get those things accomplished? And that creates a culture of.

Accountability. Foreign, You are the king of focus. So let's talk about how people can achieve focus in addition to buying your planner. But generally speaking, how do people achieve.

Focus? First we've got to recognize that it's a banishing commodity, that the people that can focus, it's kind of like a superpower today. It's something we took for granted in the past, but now we live in a blizzard of distractions. So it's everything from social media to Netflix to all those things, plus all the interruptions that we get just from. Yeah. With working with people. And so I think that, you know, the best way to focus is you've got to start with a plan. If you don't have a plan, essentially what you're doing is you're defaulting to everybody else's plan. Somebody else has a plan for your life. Right. Somebody else has priorities for you. So if you don't have your own priorities in your own plan, you're going to be susceptible to working their plan. I like my plan better. So one of the things we teach and one of the things the full focus planner allows for is we say to people, identify your big three for the day. So when I wrote my book Free to Focus, we surveyed all of our customers at the time and we said, number one, do you use some kind of task management system? Yes or no? If they said no, we didn't ask them anything else. If they said yes, we said, on average for any given day, how many to do's or how many tasks do you have to complete? Well, the average came back at 15. If you just take Parkinson's Law, 20% of the effort drives 80% of the results. 20% of 15 is 3. Not all tasks are created equal. Some tasks really advance you towards your goals and towards your important products. Some tasks don't. They might be busy work. They might just be errands. There may be things that need to be done, but they're not mission critical. So identify your big three for each day. And that, for a lot of our clients and for me personally, has been a game changer. Like, I've already completed my big three for today. Everything else is, you know, is just gravy. And here's the difference guy. When you have a list of 15 tasks in your heart of heart that you don't have much of a chance of actually accomplishing them. So you get up in the morning, you feel overwhelmed, you'll get this to do list, and you go, oh, no way I can get this done. And you don't. Even if you get 7 of 15 done, there's still 8 left undone. You go to bed defeated. And when you repeat that cycle of overwhelmed defeat. Overwhelmed defeat, Overwhelmed defeat, what does that do? Especially if you're a leader, what does that do to the energy you bring to your team? You become Eeyore. But instead, if you've got three things that are important and you can really accomplish those and nail those, then you have this underlying current of confidence and energy that you bring to everybody and belief in everybody. And so that's a keystone concept for the planner and for how we do.

Productivity. But in this hybrid world, if you have a list of these tasks, 15, and one of them is mail the remarkable tablet to Michael, I wouldn't say that's in the top three, but that stuff has to be done. So how do you balance mailing the box to Michael with do the research for the next interview? Which is much more important than mailing the box to Michael? But it's got to be done. The box has got to go. What do you do.

Then? I'm not sure what you did, but thank you for sending the remarkable. I think, you know, one thing that leaders sometimes do poorly. They all know they need to do this, but they do it poorly is delegation. Okay, so we could get to the question of, what about the people that don't have somebody to delegate to? I've written some articles on that, but I think that a lot of times leaders hesitate to delegate because they don't have a clear view of what they do. Well, I have a concept called the Freedom compass. And due north is what I call the desire zone. And this is where your passion and your proficiency come Together. This is that place where you feel confident, where you're feeling like you're making a contribution, where you actually drive the best results for the organization you're in. That's the desire zone. The exact opposite. There's four zones, but I'll just give you two. The bottom one is called. What is it called? The drudgery zone. Yeah. And it's where you have no passion and no proficiency. Like, for me, mailing a box like that would be in my drudgery zone because I'd have to figure out, how do I go to UPS and down. I got to fill out this form and all that stuff is just makes my eyes glaze over. Or booking my own travel or managing my own schedule. I've got an assistant that does that. But leaders don't typically delegate. They hesitate because they got this sentence in their head that says, if I want something done right, I got to do it myself. Right? And that's not true. My executive assistant, Jim, is so much better than I am at the things he's great at. And so we have a division of labor. Some leaders, they don't hesitate, they abdicate. They just do a dump and run. And they're expecting their assistant or the person they're delegating to to read their mind. And most people are very poor mind readers. Nobody can read your mind. Not your wife, not your girlfriend, not your boyfriend. Definitely not the people on your team. The third mistake leaders make when it comes to delegation. So it's abdicate, hesitate, and then suffocate. They micromanage and they're just all over that other person, which is totally discouraging. You need to be very clear about the outcomes. Like in your case, you could say to an executive assistant, I want Michael to have this before the podcast so he can be wowed and so I can soften him up for this.

Interview. That's the outcome that never occurred to me.

Michael. And how you get it there and how you make that happen is up to the person. So I leave broad latitude. I'm not going to micromanage that stuff. I don't care how you get it done. I don't care what strategy you employ, as long as it's ethical and doesn't land either one of us in jail. But if you can do that, just get the outcome and I'm.

Good. You'll be so proud of me because about three weeks ago, I gave my assistant Madison Nismer, the drop in surfing queen of Santa Cruz. I gave her the boxes, I gave her the Tablets. I gave her the cases for the tablets. I gave her the pencils. You got socks too.

Right? I did. Thank you very much as.

Well. Gave her the socks. I pre printed the postage and I gave her all that. I said, all right, you just send this to these people and I don't need to be involved. And there we.

Go. Perfect. Okay.

Perfect. She's going to be listening to.

This. Oh, not proud of you. I'm going to give you a gold star on that. Here's the cool thing. Things that are in my drudgery zone are in my assistant Jim's desire zone. Like he geeks out managing my appointments, confirming it, making sure everything's buttoned up, I've got agendas, all that kind of stuff. He's phenomenal at that. If you left that to me, it'd be a disaster. So we compliment each other. But again, another mistake that leaders make is they try to hire a clone. What you need is a compliment. You need somebody that offsets your weaknesses, that enhances your strengths and is not a clone. One of you is enough. One of you is.

Enough. More than enough. There's a woman named Peg Fitzpatrick who works on this, who does all the marketing, and there's a guy named Jeff C. With his assistant Shannon Hernandez, who does all the design of the sound. I think my most important role in this podcast is the background research in order to create questions that bring out the remarkableness of my guests. That's where the money is for.

Me. So what can I tell you? That's something you can never delegate and something that you are outstanding at. You know, it's clear to me, and honestly, this rarely happens. I do tons of podcast interviews, and it's extremely rare for somebody like you to be as well versed in my work and to ask me questions that are just like, on the money. Thank you. Kudos. You're my new.

Hero. Should aim higher, but okay. So I love this concept of the Full Focus Planner, which. That's your trademark here. For those of you who are listening, it's all about this. How do you focus as a leader? So now let's suppose that Joe Biden calls you up and says, hey, I listened to guys podcasts about full focus. And Michael, I need some help, man. I don't know, you know, am I fixing the infrastructure? Am I fixing voting rights? Am I trying to make sure the midterms work well? Also, Michael, help me focus. What should I do? And you say.

Joe. I would say, joe, let's get crystal clear on what you want to see happen by the end of this next year. Then let's chunk that down into goals by quarter, and then let's. Every day, or actually every week, we're going to come up with weekly objectives. And this happens in the full focus planner. What are my big three for the week? The three projects, they don't have to be related to a goal, but they got to be something really important. And then every day, what are the three things that I can do to move the ball down the field in the accomplishment of one of those goals or one of those important projects? And we're going to do that every day. We're going to do it for 250 days. We will complete 750 important actions all related to a goal or an important project. And I'll bet we can get your agenda done, or at least a large part of.

It. Well. And you'll be the secretary of focus. How's.

That? We should have.

That. Okay. Okay, so the last question. Is work life balance really possible, or is that a concept that consultants throw out in the.

Air? Yeah, well, I know it's been trendy the last few years to just kind of laugh it off and say, you know, there's no such thing as balance, But I think it depends on how you define it. So when we talk about balance, we're not talking about giving equal time to every category or domain of life. For most of us, we're going to spend most of our waking hours at work. But what work life balance is, is it means that we're giving the appropriate amount of time to each of those domains. Not the same, not the equal, but the appropriate amount of time. So just for example, I'm going to work, when it's all said and done, six hours today. I don't need to spend six hours in the gym. Six hours in the gym. Now I'm saying I don't need to spend six hours in the.

Gym. Oh, I was gonna say, my God, you'd be.

Ripped. Yeah, I'd be ripped. You can tell just looking at me. I don't spend.

That. Go fight Mike.

Tyson. I. I need to spend about 45 minutes either doing cardio or strength training today, which I do. And that's the appropriate amount of attention. Does that mean I'm out of work life balance? No, I'm in balance. I'm in balance because I'm giving the appropriate amount of time. My daughters, my. My grown daughters, I don't spend six hours a day with them. I try to take each one of them on a Date every week on a rotating basis. So I work through all five and five weeks and then we start over again. That's an appropriate amount. And we. They all live close, so we spend a lot of other time, weekends and so forth, together. But it's an appropriate amount of time. It just means that you're giving attention to something other than work. And that's the problem with most people is they're spending all their time thinking, reading, doing work, and there's so much.

More. Perfect. But I'm gonna have one more question. So I just learned that you had. I actually knew that because I do such research. You have five daughters. So I have a theory that a father cannot be any happier than his least happy.

Daughter. I think there's a lot of truth to that. I've heard that before. Isn't that something Confucius said? But yeah, I think that's true. I mean, you kind of think, well, I'm going to get the girls raised, I'm going to get my kids raised and then I won't have to worry anymore. But truth is, you do worry. You are concerned about them. And two of my daughters work in the company and that's awesome. And all of them live within about 20 minutes. All my grandkids live within two minutes. So that's pretty awesome. But yeah, I'm more empathetic than I've ever been. And so when they hurt, I.

Hurt. So that's Michael Hyatt. He's on a mission to help you focus and to become a better leader. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable, people. My thanks to Jeff C, Peg Fitzpatrick and Shannon Hernandez. Plus Madison Drop in Queen of Santa Cruz Nismer, Luis Magana and Alexis Nishimura. Last but not least, my thanks to Buzz Brueggeman. He introduced me to Michael Hyatt and made this interview possible. Until next time, I hope the tide, wind and waves are in your favor. Mahalo and aloha. This is remarkable, people.