The Hidden Cost of Growing Your Business with Laura Gassner Otting

But tell me what you're doing now. Who are you working with? How are you spending your time? How you make an impact?

Yeah, well, I, you know, I just wanna talk about Wonderhell for a second. I mean, I think Wonderhell, particularly with the franchise world, is just dead on where these franchisees feel themselves because the whole idea of Wonderhell is this is amazing, it's incredible, it's wonderful that I've experienced some success, right? I decided to go off on my own. I decided I was unemployable, right? And I wanted to be my own boss and I opened up this franchise. Well, that's great. It's been successful. Maybe I could open another. Maybe I could have 5. Maybe I could, you know, expand. Maybe I could create a portfolio. And we have this amazing moment of it's so wonderful. And then also inside of that moment, we see a version of ourselves that we never even knew was possible. And inside of that version, we then get a little excited, but we get a little scared, and then we're filled with uncertainty and anxiety and imposter syndrome and doubt and envy and exhaustion and burnout. So it's wonderful, but it's hell. It's a bit of wonder hell. And everybody I know from the franchise world who who read it was like, this was me when I decided to leave the, you know, traditional employment and become a franchisee. And then it was me when I decided to open a second, and it was me when I decided to open a fourth, and it was me when I decided to open an eighth, right? Like, and it just keeps being me. And I'm like, yes, 'cause every one of us is constantly in between who we were yesterday and who we're becoming tomorrow. So I, it's such a great, idea and space to give yourself permission to be uncomfortable when you're in that, that franchise world. The work that I'm doing with the, with the workforce. So in 2019, when my last book Limitless came out, which was based around this idea that we're handed this definition of success and we pursue it, filling all the boxes. And at the same time, once it's all full, we're like, why have I done all the things right, but I still feel empty based on 20 years of doing executive search where I would recruit people who were super successful, But despite all this success, which is why I was calling them, they weren't very happy and they all called me back. I launched an assessment online at limitlessassessment.com and it's like 56 questions. It's pretty in-depth. It takes about 18 or so minutes to take. So it's a little bit of time, but the result of it helps people understand why they're not happy in their current work and what they should do to change themselves, their careers, or their workplace in order to become both successful and fulfilled. Looking back on that, started in January of 2019, I now have 10,000 results from 113 different countries since before, during, and now after the pandemic about what actually engages us in the work that we do. And so the work that I'm doing now and the impact that I'm making is really going through and it's self-taught multi-regression analysis, learning how to understand which factors are affecting the workforce. So for example, If you are a leader and you think to yourself, bad leaders bleed out good people. Fine, I get that. I know. So I'm gonna be a good leader. You become a good leader. You do the training, you get good results, you're well respected. You think you're gonna be terrific, but yet you, you still have a lot of turnover on your team. Why is that? So we looked at the results that we have from people who said, I work for somebody I respect, like I work for a good leader. And what we found was that they said, If I work for a good leader, but I feel like I have no relationship with that leader, they tell us that they are just as likely to leave that good leader as if they say they are working for a bad leader.

Wow.

That, when I get on stage and I give a keynote and I talk about this, does not matter if I'm talking to multi-level, you know, network marketing. It doesn't matter if I'm talking to people in AI, healthcare executives, franchisees. It doesn't matter. The audience says exactly what you say. Wow. Because we think as long as I'm a good leader, everything's gonna be fine. But it turns out that it really isn't just about the work we do. It's about the relationships that they're building with the, the team that we have about what actually drives them to be engaged and interested in their work.

How do you do that? I just walked out of an all-hands meeting. I've been having one-on-ones with frontline employees, and it was really driven by our brand presidents. And they said, hey, I want you to meet with the people on my team. And I'm like, okay, there's going to be an agenda. They walk in the door, they say, this is what I'm doing now. I wanted to thank you for being here. But they don't really walk in with an agenda. They just want to spend some time. And I'm like, wow, this is great. And then I can ask them questions and test things that I've heard or assumptions that I've had, ask them how they're doing, talk about their families, see what, what they're thinking about things. But it wasn't driven by me. Yes, it was driven by other people putting the people on my calendar, which is obviously a shortcoming in my leadership. How do you do it when you have a big, I mean, some leaders have 1,000 people in their company. How do they, how do they do it?

There's two ways to do it. The first way is to recognize that your people don't care about what you care about necessarily, right? Like every leader has gone in and done their all-hands state of the union meeting where they talk about all the exciting things coming down the pike for the industry, for the company, right? And every leader has walked outta that meeting feeling like, why was that not as exciting as I thought it was gonna be? Like, why was, why did it feel like I was the only one giving energy to the room? Why did it seem like everyone—

It was a smattering of applause. It was a smattering.

And everyone's eyes are glazed over. And the first time that happened to me with my company, I called my business coach afterwards and I was like, I don't understand. Like, I hit all my marks and I got the laugh lines and it was engaging. And I like, I practiced it left, right, and center. And he was like, yeah, they don't care. You're talking about all the amazing things that are gonna happen for the company. And all they're thinking is, what does this mean for me? What does this mean for my job? What does this mean for my earnings? What does this mean for the, the amount of control that I have every single day? What does this mean for me? And too few leaders make the connection from here's all the exciting things that are happening, and now here's where you come into play. Here's where we need you. Here's why you are important. Here's where you will influence what we're going to do. So the first thing is to, is to understand that, that the people on your team don't they're not excited by the same things that excite you, nor should they be, right? They're being rewarded in different ways. The second thing is that it is your job to understand what does excite them. So when I was in executive search, we used to listen for like 8 motivating factors that would get anybody excited at any time to take a new job. And they're things like, what's the mission of the organization? Am I inspired by the leader? How deep is the impact that I can make? How broad are the skills that I'm going to learn? How prestigious will this I look on my resume, where's the job located, right? So what's my commute gonna be like? What are the, what are the, what are the benefits? How much money will I make? Well, I can tell you that based on now 6 years of data, right? Going back, as I said, from January 2019, of these 8 motivating factors, 38% of people, I think it's like something like 37.6% of people say that money is the most important factor. So only about a third of people say money is the number one factor that determines their daily happiness. So for the other two-thirds of the workforce, it's something else. And it's your job as a leader to understand that. Now, what I understand and what I talk about in Limitless is that it comes down to four things. It comes down to calling, right? What is the gravitational force that gets me out of bed every single morning? Do I wanna solve a societal ill? Do I wanna build a business? Do I, am I inspired by the mission? Am I inspired by the leader? Is this part of me being part of something Bigger. Number 1, connection. Is anybody gonna notice if I don't show up for work tomorrow, right? Does my work actually matter? When I look at my email box and my list of to-dos and my calendar, are these things that matter to me or are these things that matter to somebody else? Like now that I've talked about my calling, is the work I'm doing actually connected to getting me closer to that calling? Number 3, contribution. So if connection's all about, The work contribution's really all about you. How does this work contribute to the life that you wanna live, the flexibility that you wanna have, the family that you wanna grow, the values you wanna manifest on a daily basis? And then lastly is control. How much do you have control, personal agency over the projects by to which you're assigned, the metrics by which you're measured, the amount of money that you can earn from your hustle? Do you actually have control? And what I can tell you is that since January of 2019, Calling, connection, contribution, they've maybe changed up or down like 2 to 3%. Control, 20% higher. People want more control of their own life. They want that autonomy. They want that independence. They wanna feel like, like they can actually have a little, because the world is chaotic right now. And, and, and people don't, people want less chaos in any way they can have it. And so being able to give your, your, your your people, the feeling of control is important. So if you understand what drives them, how much calling, connection, contribution they want, and then how much they can actually control getting those things, then you can actually speak their language. Because instead of just being like, oh, Jeff is unhappy, let me just throw more money at him again, right? When am I not gonna be able to afford him? He's becoming toxic. He's my right, like you become a problem. You can actually see what they care about. So maybe Jeff cares more about manifesting his values on a daily basis. So maybe you don't have to give him promotion after promotion after promotion, but maybe if your company is doing a corporate giveback, you ask him to chair that committee and then suddenly he's like, wow, this is amazing. I can live my values at work. And then suddenly he's engaged and he's happy again.

You know, I, I read Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh and he's got his perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness, and pursuit of a worthy ideal inside of that. I use that in my training and you, you've already, by the way, and, and I wanna get back to this regression analysis thing because there's, you've already, You are— the things we've talked about are in my keynotes and also in my training that I deliver to our franchise owners on who they need to be, how they show up, and building their team in the first 2 hours of training that I do. So regression analysis, you will do things differently working from the future backwards than you will by step— taking one step and putting it in front of the other. And business owners don't naturally do that. They say, okay, I've done this, what do I do? What I need to do next? And then what do I need to do next? And we have to train first-time business owners to begin with the end in mind and then to work backwards from those steps is one of the greatest things. I just built a tool for a mastermind I'm leading this weekend. And it's, you know, it's basically the— gosh, what did I call it? It's the hidden strategy.

Finder.

Okay. So if, and, and the statement is, if I wasn't doing it today and I was gonna start doing the same thing again, would I do it the same way as I'm doing it today? Or would I do it differently?

Mm-hmm.

Right. So, because we, we, we get into this path of doing things the same way over and over and over again. But if you said, this is the outcome, and now I'm gonna work backwards from that outcome and figure out how to do it in a way that would make sense in today's world. Then you come up with a different set. You realize I'm doing all these stupid things because we've always done them. So, you know, this concept of constant regression analysis. Now the, the, you know, and, and another thing I've learned in business is the better things are going, the farther out on the horizon you can look and the more you can kind of work your way backwards from there. But when things are kind of like not going well, you need to bring your gaze right in here and just focus on the, on the thing. So. Did you use regression analysis intentionally anyway in your work, or was it just saying, using the data that we found in these 10,000 records, we, this is what we've extrapolated?

I mean, to be totally frank, it was because I had a moment where everything was going wrong and I had to look very close.

Yeah.

The, the, I, I make my living flying on planes to events to give keynote speeches, and in COVID there were no there were no flights, there were no events, and there were no keynote speeches. So I was like, I wonder what I could do. And what I could do is I could teach myself how to do math, essentially. So I opened up Excel. I had found, you know, all of these results that I had from, from this. I had millions and millions of bits of data, and I was like, I wonder what I could, wonder what I could find out. So I taught myself how to do multi-level regression analysis during COVID 'cause I'm a, I'm a super nerd. But, you know, I, to, to go back to what you were saying, you know, I'm sure you're familiar with commander's intent. The, the, so for your listeners who, who, who may not know, so there's this, there's this, uh, idea in the military called commander's intent. And if the commander's intent is we are going to take the beach, right? Omaha Beach, we're gonna take the beach. And, uh, you get there and as soon as you pull up with your, with your boats, your commander gets shot and you're like, okay, well what do we do now? The commander's not here anymore. Well, there's people shooting at us from, you know, inside of the trees. I don't know how we're gonna do it, but I know the intent is We can't take the beach and we can't do it the way we wanna do it. So let's figure out something else, right? So the paratroopers come in and you take the beach that way. So the idea that you set the goal and once you start getting in the fray, all hell breaks loose, but you still know what the goal is. And if you set the goal from where you sit today and then you take one step and all hell breaks loose, well, you don't do anything unless you've already put that goal out on the horizon. That's the first piece. I think the second piece is, and you know, when I, when I wrote Wonderhell, I interviewed 100 different glass ceiling shatterers, Olympic medalists, startup unicorns, thinkers, creatives, philanthropists, everyday people, uh, like you and I. And I was very interested in understanding how in this moment where they've achieved something amazing and they saw a vision of themselves that they didn't even know was possible last week, last month, last year, they kept pushing into the discomfort and the unknown and discovered an even bigger version of themselves. I was interested in how people broke through. And one of the things that, that, that people told me is that they never really set a finite destination. They just set an intention. They set a direction that it was always, I wanna keep growing. I wanna keep learning. And I had a conversation with, with Jack Lew, who was the former Secretary of the Treasury under Obama. And I happened to know him back when he and I worked together in, in, in Bill Clinton's White House. And he said that at every step of his career, he just tried to increase his optionality. So his career is a very interesting story. He was working for Tip O'Neill, Speaker of the House, and when Tip retired, he went back to a law firm in New York City. He got on the partner track and he was— Jack was on the partner track and he was going to just work in law. And then he got a phone call from this guy, Eli Siegel, who ran the 1992 Clinton campaign. And Eli said, I'd love for you to come to D.C. and help write the legislation for the National Service Program, which became AmeriCorps. 2 million people have served in AmeriCorps. It was a phenomenal bipartisan success. But at the time, all of Jack's friends were like, what are you crazy? You're going to go to DC for this tiny little program for this that might not even get passed, that isn't going to be a big deal. Why would you do it? And Jack said, I just believe in the person who's running it, and I feel like I'll be in good hands with him. So Jack comes and he writes the legislation. The legislation gets passed. Through the process of that, he gets introduced to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton goes on to become Secretary of State for for Obama, Jack becomes the head of the Office of Management and Budget Administration, the Office of Management and Budget Administration, becomes chief of staff for Hillary Clinton at the State Department, and eventually gets appointed Secretary of the Treasury under Obama. Now, he never set out in the beginning to become a cabinet secretary, but he said, well, I don't know what all the possibility might be. So as long as each time I take a step forward, I'm increasing my optionality by doing interesting things with interesting people, interesting opportunities will arise. And so, you know, even if you're somebody who's like, I don't know what the final, like the goal is, but I don't, I also don't wanna like short shrift myself by setting the goal too low. That approach I think also helps.

When you interviewed these 100 people, was there a through line that had to do with the concept of ambition and what was their view of ambition? What was their relationship with ambition? And how was their use of ambition different than people who don't achieve as much?

For every person I interviewed, there was a through line. And that through line was that ambition is not a dirty word. That through line was that ambition is actually the energy. It's the battery, right? It's a, it's, it, it was the thing. They saw ambition as an invitation rather than this limitation, right? They didn't see it as greed, as avarice, as, right, their cravenness. They didn't see it as that. They saw it as fulfilling the promise of all of the potential that they have inside of them. And to be able to switch that voice in their head from saying like, You should be ashamed of this, but to, to feel it as this invitation allowed them to live fully into it.

I'm a big Strategic Coach fan. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the organization, Dan Sullivan, uh, Babs, um, 35, 40-year-old consultancy business where they've, I think, educated over 20,000 executives, uh, over the course of their career. And I was with him at this thing called the Genius Network, and he gave a little talk about ambition. And I'm not— I'm giving him full credit. So if you're gonna— if my team's gonna cut this, make sure you include that I gave them credit for this. I'm just telling you, you know, don't— I'm not looking— I'm not a— I'm not a content thief, right? But, um, but I— but it's so good. And, and I think— I think anybody who's a business owner should really take a look at Strategic Coach. I'm in And, you know, I, I'm still learning and curious every day, but his talk on ambition was that it's our job in life to be more ambitious every year. And at 80 years old, he's twice as ambitious as he was at 70, and he's more ambitious than he was at 55. And at 90, he's going to be more ambitious than he was at 80. Because when you're more ambitious, and I want to get back to this point of that you don't have to give everything. It's not, It, it, it's not an either or, but when you're more ambitious, what it does is it forces you to, to develop and double down on capabilities that you have to meet that ambition. And then as you develop those capabilities, you discover capabilities that you don't have that you might need. And so it's all, but you would've never developed. And as I looked, I look back through 4 different ambitions that I had in my life, and I realized that I never really achieved those ambitions fully, but it was the pursuit of those ambitions that got me to where I was that got me to the next win. And it was just, it was just an incredible thing for me. And here I am, you know, 58 years old this year, looking back and just now putting the pieces together on that simple 10-minute talk that Dan did about ambition. But the other thing about it is, is that, you know, why would he say we have a responsibility to be ambitious? Well, you could say, well, I'm not going to work that hard because it's going to impact my family, or I'm not going to do this because— no, you can— everything can be integrated. and I think you have an obligation to show the people that are closest to you and more, most important to you, the fact that you should stretch yourself and you should try for things. And does something need to come off the plate sometimes? Yes. But you know, that's maybe it's an either or in a business thing, but you, there's always room for the 4 to 5 things in your life that matter the most.

And anyway, I, I, I agree with that. And, and I would add that, you know, we think about ambition just in terms of, business, career, the bank account, but you could be ambitious to be the best, most present father possible. You can be ambitious to be, you know, I, I am ambitious to be a present daughter. When my dad had emergency hip replacement, I canceled things. I flew down to Florida. Like I, there's a, there's a, there's a great piece of work from like the either the late '70s or early '80s that is in Harvard Business Review about the fundamental state of leadership. And I write about this in, in, in Limitless also. I, I had a business coach give me this exercise and he said, I want you to think about who you are when you are your very best version of yourself. Like you are making it rain, you are crushing the deal. Like you are just, it is, you are just getting the standing ovation. He said, or maybe you're helping a loved one through a really difficult problem, or maybe you're like in the back room quietly crunching the numbers to put together the amazing proposal. It could be loud, it can be quiet, it can be public, it can be private, it could be professional, it could be personal. It doesn't matter. It just has to be you when you are the very best version of yourself. And he said, and I want you to write what that was like. I want you to talk about the clothes you were wearing, the energy you were using, the vocabulary that you were using. I want you to talk about the energy. I want you to talk about the people who were around you. And I want you to write down adjectives about who you were in that moment. He said, then I want you to paste that list on your phone, on the lock screen of, you know, if you lock screen your phone, put it on your mirror when you're brushing your teeth at night, stick it on your rearview mirror on your car. He said, I want you to look at that list. 10 times a day, every single day. And eventually the more you lean into being that person, the more that person becomes the fundamental version of you, the person who shows up not just when everything is going wrong or not just in those moments when you have to be the best version, but you become that person all the time. And what I like about that is that if you look at somebody like Serena Williams, for example, Serena doesn't just get out on the court and practice the shots she missed. She spends 98% of her time practicing the shots she got right also. So she's grooving the pattern of Serena at her best, not just going out there trying to fix what was wrong. Because, you know, if you do a presentation and you get 95% of it right, and then you spend the next 3 weeks fixing the 5% that went wrong, you're gonna get some other 5% wrong because you didn't actually groove the pattern of what you got right. So we're not practicing excellence enough. We're just kind of trying to cover our ass a lot of times. And so this process is this, this practice of who am I when I'm at my very very best and what kind of person is that? For me, I wanna be that kind of ambitious. I wanna be ambitious that I'm continuing to get better and better and better at being my best self so that each time I get to my best self, I can up the ante and become even better in some part of my life where I wanna show up as that version of myself.