Grow Your People That Grow Your Company: Secrets To Developing Leaders Featuring Cameron Herold - Genius Network Episode #167

The core of where we want to grow our leaders is the why. And what I mean by the why are the four corners of the jigsaw puzzle. This is my approach to coaching companies. Understanding our vivid vision, understanding our bhag, our big hairy, audacious goal, understanding our core purpose and our core values, and how we truly live those systems.

If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event, or want to learn more about genius, go to geniusnetwork.com Cameron Harold he's built companies and teams globally for 30 years. He's known as the CEO whisperer.

What I want to talk about is the fact that really, business is much easier than we may believe. We actually overcomplicate business. And the way we overcomplicate it is we have a lot of our employees coming to work every day without having any clue on how to actually run companies. And most of us as entrepreneurs are good at getting skill training for ourselves. But we're missing the point. What we need to do is develop our people as much as we actually develop ourselves as well. And right now, training our leaders is too random. We all know that we've got managers and leaders that have complex roles and lots of stuff on their plate and we're never really sure what to do to train them. So we read in books about putting personal development plans in place. Maybe we buy them some random books and we say, here, read this book. Or we see some video that they should be watching and we say, here, watch this video and hopefully that'll grow you. Maybe we send them off to conferences or seminars that they can actually learn from, or maybe we bring in some random consultant to help teach them. But the reality is, until you actually are a big enough company, typically 300 to 500 employees, and you have a full time training department in place, the training of our leaders is very, very random. And I know this because I've written five books. People are buying my books all the time to grow their people, but it's really not the best way to grow our leaders. So I'm going to walk you through the core systems, the core kind of methodologies that I've always used in the last 25 years of growing companies. And as Tim mentioned, these are the whispers that I make into the ears of CEOs. These are not in any of my books. These are the things that I've worked behind the scenes with. The CEO of Sprint, a monarchy in the Middle East, a number of technology companies, and it's how we've grown the brands that I'm known for building. I learned how to grow leaders at College Pro Painters. At College Pro Painters, we had to hire and train 800 franchisees every single year. So imagine training 800 entrepreneurs in two months. That's where I learned how to develop leaders. So where do we start with developing leaders? If you go back to Simon Sinek's golden circles now, Simon was on our board of directors, Our board of advisors at 1-800-got junk five years before he wrote his book Start with why, five years before his famous TEDx talk. The core of where we want to grow our leaders is the why. And what I mean by the why are the four corners of the jigsaw puzzle. This is my approach to coaching companies. The four corners of the jigsaw puzzle are the first area we have to grow all of our people. Understanding our vivid vision, understanding our bhag, our big, hairy, audacious goal, Understanding our core purpose and our core values and how we truly live those systems. So ensuring that every single person in your company is crystal clear on those things. I was doing a group coaching call with about 20 CEOs from around the world that I coach, and only four of the 20 CEOs could actually recite their company's core values, which is pretty pathetic. It means that we don't actually have a solid system. And I think of those four corners as the foundations of your business. So if you think about that golden circle idea, training all of your leaders and managers on the why you exist, your history of your company, how you got here, your culture, the missteps, the kind of what got you to where you are, the silly stories of you as a leader, Understanding how we live our core values and how we celebrate them every day, and how we live our core purpose and how we make decisions based on those things and really training people on that. And if you do it properly, once or twice, you can get it into a methodology, then you can get it on video, and then you can just show them that same video for the years to come. You don't have to have it perfect. Just get it good now, get it, get it pretty good later, and then get it really, really good. Maybe in a year or two from now, more often than not, we freeze in trying to develop learning programs because we're trying for perfect. Just try for kind of a bronze approach now, and then move to silver and then move to gold. But after we train our people on the why. Most companies only train people on the what they train them on the actual function of the job. That they're doing. What I obsess about is training leaders on the how we do what we do. So that's the soft skills, as I call it, or all the executive functioning skills to actually be a good leader in a company. So I'm going to talk a little bit about what I kind of visualize as the bronze, silver, and gold approach to training. The bronze approach is what we're doing now, just kind of sporadically throwing some shit against the wall. The silver approach, we'll walk you through today, and the gold approach, and you'll kind of leave this with understanding how to put this in place inside of your business. And I'll give you one big cheat sheet at the end that could really help supercharge your business as well. The first step of adult learning is kind of the gap. This student controls the learning environment, and unless the adult is ready to learn, they're not going to learn. So you have to create a reason for them to want to learn the systems. Adults really learn in one of three ways. Visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Visual is by watching. Auditory is by hearing. Kinesthetic is by doing and practicing. What I like to do is make sure that all of the training that I do includes all three of those areas. Because every learner does learn with some visual, some auditory, and some kinesthetic. We have a primary, but we actually will learn with all those three things. But then the next phase of learning, and what most people have never even come across, is understanding these four cycles. It's the Kolb method to learning. The first stage is the abstract conceptualization. It's when you're learning the concept of something, and then you move to active experimentation, the practicing, the role playing, the practicing. And then you migrate over to the concrete experience where you're learning from doing. And then the fourth stage is the reflective observation where you talk about what you did, what you learned, and you continually repeat the cycle. So in anything we're training our leaders on, we have to make sure that we include the three types of learning and the four stages of learning to really supercharge our learning. This is when you're going from bronze to of. Here's a book to more of like a silver approach. So take a look at these. These are what I believe are the 12 core kind of functioning skills that leaders need to be really good at. Which of these is okay to be bad at? Which skill is it okay for our leaders or managers not to be very good at? The reality is none of them. They have to be good at all of these skills or they can't function as a leader and manager inside of our business. So if you're not training your managers and leaders at situational leadership, coaching, training, delegation, meetings, interviewing, the reality is every manager does job interviews and we've never trained them how to do an interview. Every manager runs meetings, we've never trained them how to do meetings. They're all delegating. So these are all skills that if you train them and they practice them and they work at them and they talk about them and they practice them again, they can actually become very, very good at. So you need to have a system in place inside of your company to train your leaders and managers at all of these skills so they get to a good level of proficiency so that they can do well in their job. So my core process of teaching people is to start off with a pretest. The pretest creates a gap. So if I gave you a test on this content and you spent five minutes doing a pre, you know, multiple choice test or a true and false test, you would all fail the test. I would, I would rig it in such a way that, that you would all miserably fail the test. And you go, oh shit, I don't know this stuff. And then I could teach you the concept, right? I could start teaching you the abstract concepts of learning or interviewing, et cetera. And then I would have you practice it, we would role play it, we would try it out, I would watch you, I would even maybe get videos of you actually doing it. And then we could talk about it. And you could learn from watching yourself or me watching you going through whatever we're teaching you. And then you go out and you practice it on your own. You try it out in the field, you try it out in the day to day and then we can come back and talk about it again. And then you're actually doing it. You're doing the actual work, you're doing the actual whatever it was you're being trained in. And you're starting to learn from that concrete experience. And then we have a post test to see if you remember everything that you've just learned. This is kind of the silver approach when you get to the post test. But the reality is everybody can regurgitate what we've learned. The question is, can you then reflect on it and then can you take it to the next level? Can you repeat this whole process again? Can we take you through to take it to the next level? Can we get you to another level of competency almost so that you're showing that you become a 10 out of 10 on any of these skills. And then what I like to even do is certify people in these skills because the pretest shows you don't know the content, the post test shows you remember it after two or three cycles of going through this learning over the course of a month or a quarter or a year, then I certify you in the skills to see if I've actually retained it and are really good at putting this stuff in place. So that's the core process that I think about in all of these areas of growing my teams. There's even certification software that you can use, something like Talent Guard, where you can track your certifications of all of your people online so that you can see how they're actually doing with each of these different methodologies in each of these different tools. So a simple quarterly program that you could put in place. Let's say that you wanted to train all of your leaders and managers on running meetings, right? So I would start with let's give them a copy of Meeting Suck. And this is not to sell Meeting Suck, but I'm using this as a good example. Give every manager and leader the book Meeting Suck. The reality is they're all in meetings for one to two hours a day over the course of a year. If they've never been trained on how to run effective meetings, it's no wonder you say meetings suck. So month one, have them read the book Meeting Suck. Week two of that month, have them come back in and do a five minute book report. What did they like about the book? What did they learn from the book? What are they going to put in place from that book? Month two, find some video, any video, a TED Talk, a YouTube video about running highly effective meetings. Have them watch that video and then on week two of that month, have them talk about what they learned from that video, what did they like about that video? What are they going to put in place from that video? Maybe they're watching the video on running effective meetings from my course Invest in youn Leaders. And then month three of that quarter, bring in a consultant, any trainer, 1000 bucks, 1500 bucks, 600 bucks. It doesn't matter. Even if they train in person or over zoom and train them on running meetings in month three. So now you've gone from the reading, the watching, the actual practicing and role playing in a classroom session all over the course of meetings in that quarter, second quarter, let's do it with interviewing. Let's have them read example right Read Jeff Smart's book, who. So what you want to do is pick one skill per month or per quarter and use that kind of a simple process. That's a really good, simple process. It's much better than what we're doing now, which is here, read this book or here, go to that seminar. What I also like to do is think someone the other day said to me, well, what if I train all of my managers or I train all of my leaders and they leave the company? And I kind of looked at them and I said, well, what if you don't train them and they actually stay? The cost of you having managers and leaders that you haven't trained and they're running the business is much greater than you investing in your leaders and growing their skills. And maybe they do go somewhere else. So I've always been manic about growing my teams. I also think that when I'm growing people that they're almost climbing two ladders beside each other. One ladder is the skills ladder. The other ladder is the confidence ladder. And let's say that their left foot and left hand is climbing up the skills ladder and their right foot and right hand is climbing up the confidence ladder. Our job is to grow their confidence and grow their skills and grow their confidence and grow their skills and grow their confidence and grow their skills. If their confidence is ever shaking, they're never going to get the skills. But by us investing in them, by us growing them, they realize we care about them, we love them. Their job's not at stake because we're putting all this time and effort into growing them. They gain more confidence, which lets them take on more skills. So I've always believed the leaders core job is to grow people. And the more that we grow our people, the more they'll grow our brand. So I recently launched a course called Invest in youn Leaders. I'd love you all to take a look at it. It includes those 12 modules that I've just covered. It's me teaching all 12 of those modules. There's a pretest, there's videos, 41 videos that they actually watch on their own. There's written content, and there's a post test for each of those 12 modules. So it's an easy way if you want to plug that into your company. You can do that or you can take the methodology that I've just given you now. But my core message to all of us is the more that we grow our people, the more that we'll grow our brand.

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