Episode 024: Fleet Success Show LIVE from Las Vegas! 1

Welcome to the Fleet Success Show, a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success. Let's get into the show.

All right. Welcome back to another episode of the Fleet Success Show. We are coming to you live from RTA Connect 2021 in Las Vegas. Joined not only by my co-host Jeff Jenkins.

Yeah.

Steve Salzgiver.

Hey there.

We have a live audience. Yeah, this is, this is a little bit surreal, I'm gonna be honest with you.

Yeah, well, the good news is nobody looks hungover after last night, so that's awesome.

Last night we had a lot of fun last night, uh, so we wanted to thank everybody for coming in, listen to our live episode. This is going to be episode number 24, I believe, and crossing the, crossing the downloads marks. We love what you guys are doing. We're thankful for all of our listeners and everybody who's, you know, submitting ideas. If you have ideas or have questions you want us to answer on the podcast, email podcast@rtafleet.com and we'll be happy to read your comments, read your reviews. You know, love the love that we're getting on social media. So anytime you can share that with your friends, it's great to see that.

Can I just say something? Because it was pretty cool when we went to NAFSA and people walked up and been like, oh, you guys do that Fleet Success Show, right?

It became more famous than the software.

Yeah.

Oh, you're not the RTA guys, you're the Fleet Success Show guys.

It was kind of cool though, because it was awesome. Jeff Jenkins, you're on that podcast, right? Yes, I am. That's right. You want me to swear for you? What do you want me to sign?

Come on, I'll do both. I think we actually had somebody want their autograph.

We did.

We did.

We did. Yeah, we actually did.

We've got a super fan out there. Drew Morrow, you're listening. I know you are. We love you.

Here's your shout out, Drew. Your autographed copy is coming soon.

It is.

All right, so today we picked the topic and we're going to talk a little bit about high performance culture, which is really, you know, for us, we talk about how do you get the best out of your people? How do you get people aligned? How do you get everybody rowing? In the same direction. One of the things Steve talked about in his keynote this morning was around goal setting and things like OKRs, BHAGs. There's so many acronyms that just get thrown around, so we wanted to take some time, kind of walk through what some of those concepts are. How do you get your people aligned behind a mission and an objective so that you can go out and perform? How do you hold people accountable? What are the cadences that go on with meetings and reports? Reporting. So we wanted to talk through some of those things. One of the ways that we do goal setting at RTA is we use a system called OKRs. It's very common in technology industries and, you know, businesses as a whole are starting to adopt OKRs because they are a really nice framework. OKRs, what that stands for is Objectives and Key Results, which is you start with an objective which is supposed to be kind of inspirational, it's very vague, a little bit, you know, there's some passion and emotional language behind it. And then the key results are the specific measures on how we are going to measure something. So for example, an objective might be Operation Fleet Success is what actually— it's one of our OKRs this trimester. We are trying to launch this fleet success initiative. So we have the objective Operation Fleet Success and then the key results are how we measure. Did we do that or not? One of our key results is did we publish our book? By a certain date, I think by the end of November.

Yep.

You know, that it was sent to the publisher. We have another objective to hold RTA Connect 2021 and have it be a success. Sometimes you can get a little bit more of the outputs versus outcomes. I love that you cited that book in your keynote today. And the idea with the key results is you really want to tie it to a business impact, you know, a business outcome. So for us, when we looked at RTA Connect, it was, well, what if it's not just that we hold it Maybe our key result should actually be that we held it and we got a 9 out of 10 rating or a 4.9 rating on the reviews. So we did a good job with it, that it wasn't enough just to hold it, but that we actually did well. So I think you get more specific, you actually get really clear about what it is we're doing, why we're doing it, and the objective kind of gives you the reason why. I love when we say things like complete Operation Fleet Success so that the category gets launched, the category is created, and you give it a so that, which gives it a little bit of why behind it. Why is this important? Why does it matter? Who does it impact? You know, why is this critical right now? So those are just some of the ideas that we have.

Yeah. And when you are setting those as well, just keep in mind there has to be an end date to what you're setting and there needs to be a measurable outcome. right? Because if all we said was, hey, let's just, you know, have a successful Connect 2021, whose opinion are we going off of, right? Well, I think it was successful, right? I had 3 drinks last night.

It was awesome.

It's successful, but that's not a measurement, right? By this date, we've got this many positive reviews on it. Great, we've hit that.

A lot of times I like you measure the downstream impact of that, you know, with the book specifically. It's not that we shipped it to the publisher, it's that we have reviews. With the Fleet Success Scorecard, we said, you know, that it's not just that we released it, but that we have had 10 daily active users, which means that not only do we have to release it, but we have to have adoption. So it kind of goes another step further. You were going to say something?

I'm just going to say a lot of those are like the SMART goals some of you might have known, you know, where they're time-bound, measurable, and That's what OKRs are. You have typically 3 to 5 that go with your objective and you try to accomplish those 3. And the thing, the difference about OKRs that I've noticed with other ones is that you set a really high lofty goal and sometimes you don't make it, you know, and that's okay. You know, I mean, it's, it's your goal is to, to push yourself to try and make it, you know. And when we were talking about that John Doerr book and we read that, what Matters Most.

Yeah, so that's where it came from, right? Is John Doerr, you know, was one of the— used to work for Sun Microsystems, then Oracle, and then was doing a lot of consulting as a VC, as a venture capitalist. And so, you know, one day he got invited with Intel— no, he was— he worked at Intel. Yeah, totally screwed that up. Yeah, so he worked at Intel and one day got invited to speak to this young startup company working out in the Bay Area named Google. And taught them the principles of OKRs when they were just a fledgling little tiny startup.

Yep.

And this principle of reaching for the stars and aiming high, hitting moonshot type missions. And their goal when they talked about setting their goals was 70%. We want to set a goal so high that we're— if we hit 70%, we're happy with it. The other principle that he gave to it was we need more red. Which means we need more failures. We need to set objectives so high that we're not meeting them. Because the idea is that if you aim for the stars and you hit the moon, then at least you got further than if you just aim for the sky. And so they would constantly say that as if they're looking at their OKRs and their dashboard and they're looking at their key results. How are we doing? Oh, everything's green. Okay, we're sandbagging and we need to push ourselves. And that's why OKRs have been adopted so much as a high-performance culture. Push is because it really pushes organizations that adopt them, really push themselves to improve and get better and focus on what matters most.

Well, that's, and that's the metric. If you're not failing 40% of the time, then you're not pushing yourself hard enough, essentially.

So there was a good book, and we've read this book, Measure What Matters. He has a whole site, whatmatters.com, and he walks you through the ABCs of OKRs. Highly recommend that. I actually give that to some of my people to teach them the principles of OKRs. And that's been, it's been pretty helpful. He's got some good material on there about what a good OKR looks like, what a bad one looks like. His book, he has guest chapters from Bono and U2 when they launched their ONE Foundation. They've got, you know, guest articles from the founders of Intuit and QuickBooks, just tons of who's who in business and tech. So it's a pretty good read. But I really like their website a lot because it's got a lot better resources.

That could be applicable to fleet. I know it's not traditionally a fleet metric.

Well, isn't that what we're doing at Fleet Success?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Taking all this stuff that you guys have never gotten because it's been neglected.

Yeah.

Here, why aren't we doing more of this stuff? It makes sense over here. It totally makes sense here too.

Well, I think I've used about everything to set goals in my career. So I mean, this is just another one of those things, those tools that you have out there. But it's simple. The OKR process is a lot simpler. But I can tell you, when your organization is aligned from top to bottom, you just start sailing. I mean, it's awesome to work in that kind of an environment where things are really clicking. When you have all of your, I remember probably the best example for me was at Coca-Cola. We're a beverage company worldwide, but we would have, they had 6 main pillars like our fleet success pillars. They had the 6 Ps, you know, planet, productivity. They had all these different things. And we would align all of our goals to that. And every one of us as an individual employee had an IPO, which I talked about a little bit today, an individual performance objective. And that aligned clear to the CEO from top to bottom. And so when I went home at the end of the day, I knew how I contributed to the company's success. And it was kind of awesome. And I tell this story, when I left Coca-Cola, I was sitting in a movie, AMC theater in Phoenix, and those little Coke characters came on before the movie and I started having tears come out of my eyes. Well, that's an intentional culture. When that stuff happens and you're so emotionally ingrained in that success, you know it. Yeah. Yeah, and that's what we're trying to do here. The same thing. I mean, I get up in the morning just thinking humble, hungry, and smart. I've had dreams about that, about our culture. So that's a good thing.

Yeah, we talk about setting OKRs, right? And I don't know, I guess we can make it a little interactive, but I know everyone's been somewhere, right, where you get your goals or your objectives, your OKRs from management, and you look at 'em and you're like, What the hell? Right? How are we going to get that? How are we going to achieve that?

Who came up with this idea?

Yeah. This isn't even relatable to what we do, right? We've all seen that. So one of the things about OKRs is, are you talking to the frontline people also about those objectives, about those key results you want to have happen? So an example I'll give is I was talking to my group about how many new deals are we going to put in in these next few months until the end of the year. Because that's one of our key results is, hey, how many new deals are we putting in? And so I ask for opinions on what we can do. What did we do last time? Oh, well, it was less than 100. We'd like 79. Okay, well, this time, should we do something close to the same? That's pathetic. We should go higher. But we discussed it, and we had a conversation about, hey, what should that goal be? Because they've all got to buy into that as well in order to be able to be held accountable. To what those numbers are, right? If I would have said, hey, the goal and the objective is 500 new deals until the end of the year, everyone would have one, probably crapped their pants and then said it's never gonna happen, so why even try?

Yep.

Right? But we discussed it. And then I also said, keep in mind too, guys, when you set goals and you set objectives, down the road, you also wanna continue to beat that objective and that goal as well. So if we set this too high where it's completely unachievable, Remember that come next quarter, next trimester, however you measure, your boss, your boss's bosses aren't gonna accept that, hey, we're gonna go for the exact same amount. You've always gotta keep working towards that progression.

Keep improving. Well, and that's the idea behind the 70% is it's just enough stretch. You know, is that there's just enough stretch that it's still, you might have a 50/50 shot at hitting it. It's reasonable enough. It's attainable, but it's not a guarantee. You know, you look at that and say, okay, this is going to be tough. We're going to have to change how we're doing things to get to where we want to go. I've got a favorite saying is that what got you here will not get you there. You know, the things that got you to where your business is at today and where your fleet is at today are not going to be the things that get you to where your fleet needs to be tomorrow. Another quote I said, and I think I posted this in Teams a little bit ago, is that your operation is perfectly designed to deliver the results you get today. It's perfectly designed. In order to move that and become the results that you want, it means you have to change the operation. OKRs are a great way to kind of get out of business as usual and stretch yourself and push yourself. You were hitting on something, and I want to, you know, kind of clarify it a little bit for listeners. When we're looking at OKRs, the strength of OKRs really comes from alignment. When a company sets their OKRs, usually you will have a corporate OKR, and that'll be the first one. That's the first level of OKR. They set the vision. Where's the broad direction that we're trying to go? Then you can either cascade it down. But the best objectives are once we've set the corporate direction, and maybe we have a departmental goal, that it comes from the bottom up, that the frontline employees actually set personal OKRs to— they look at the North Star of the company. They align with that and say, okay, this is personally what I think I can do to move the needle. How do we get the ball down the field? We're all trying to score a touchdown. What's my role? You know, am I a wide receiver? Am I an offensive lineman? What's my role? How can I help get the ball down the field? If I'm in Fleet, how do we help, you know, whatever the overall company objectives are? If we have no company objectives, then let's see if we can get some of that clarity, use the stakeholder satisfaction, do some interviews, get some of that clarity from our higher-ups. What is most important? What are you expecting from me? And then let's save some internal OKRs and goals around how we're going to go meet those and how we're going to measure did we deliver on our promise.

That's how you can align the goals by— I'm just thinking what you're saying that about preventive maintenance. Say you have a problem with preventive maintenance, you know, who's involved in the preventive maintenance process besides the manager, the supervisor, scheduling, the mechanics are involved in that, right? So what— sit down with them and ask them what they can do to help achieve the goal that you're trying to get to. You know, if you're at 50% and you want to get to 60 the next year and then 70 the next year and then 80 and then 90, map that out. You know, sit down with those guys and say, you know, what do you need to do to help us achieve that? You know, and they have great ideas, you know, and plus it puts the ownership back on them. That's the key point of all this.

Yeah.

And we talk about it a lot. We put that on the back of these shirts about ownership and accountability, you know, 'cause that's a key thing to being successful. So if a person feels they have ownership, they will continue to follow through on it.

Yeah.

And they have to be a part of the process to feel that ownership, right? And that's part of what you're doing is you're making sure everyone is a part of the process. No one likes being dictated that, hey, you have to hit X. And you have zero opinion about that.

Well, and that goes to what we always talk about with the 5 dysfunctions of a team that, you know, number 1 is, you know, do we have trust? But the other 3 are just as important, which is do we have conflict? Did people weigh in so they could buy in? Did we get really clear about what the commitment was? So there's no ambiguity. And then at the end of the day, are we measuring it and then holding people accountable? Like, hey, Jeff, you said we were going to deliver, you know, 79 deals this quarter. What happened? You know, where are we at? And it's not just at the end of the quarter, but it's weekly, monthly, breaking it down. Okay, what do we need to change? What do we need to tweak? Is this off track, on track? And you constantly have these, you know, we call them a weekly tactical, but we do a weekly meeting reviewing the metrics from our OKRs. So they're always getting reviewed and they're always top of mind so they don't get forgotten. A lot of times we've seen, and John Doerr talks about this in his book, is that people will go through this whole process and, you know, And maybe you guys have done this before, you've set a goal and then it gets put on a paper or something and then it just kind of gets set off to the side. And then what happens? Life, right? Like life gets in the way and, you know, business as usual stops you from working on that goal. But if you include that, like we do as part of our weekly tactical, that drives our agenda. How are we doing? Oh, our NPS score is coming down. All right, well, let's talk about that. Or maybe we just need to schedule some time to talk about that so we can really dive in deep on it. But we're constantly, it's constantly present, it's front of mind, and we don't forget about them.

You know, and one thing about a high-performing culture is you have to have conflict. You know, and a lot of people don't want conflict. They don't embrace conflict. They don't like conflict. But there is good conflict, you know, and we've learned it's okay to be called to task in a meeting. It's okay to be asked, why didn't you follow up? You know, because that's ownership, that's accountability. And we go through that every week. You know, well, why is that metric not moving the right direction? Why didn't you follow up on that assignment?

You had that assignment that you were supposed to do. You said you were gonna do it, you didn't do it, what happened?

Yeah.

Well, you know, we got busy, we had this other thing. Okay, well this week let's make sure we set some time aside so we get that done. Yep, we're on it, right? And nobody wants to come to that meeting and be the one that didn't follow through and do their assignment.

Exactly.

It's not negative or punitive or fear-based, but it's definitely— there's some peer pressure because you know your team is depending on you to deliver.

Well, you don't come the second time unprepared.

Definitely don't come the second time. First time, like, it's all right. Life happens. We get it. But the second time, no, you said you were going to do it. And I think that's what's awesome about OKRs is it really does dovetail with this intentional culture piece as well, is that with OKRs in place, It helps you reinforce all those things that we talked about. It helps you reinforce what is most important. Are you setting the vision? You're setting the vision. What is the thing that we're going to hold each other accountable to? What's the alignment? I love that it's— everybody has an OKR. You talked about IPOs and individual— what'd you call it?

Performance objective.

Performance objective.

Thank you.

You talk about that, and that's exactly what the OKR method is. And everybody knows the score. How do I know when I go home at the end of the day, did I move the needle on that key result? And that's how I know, am I doing a good job? We've talked about employee engagement before, and I think you guys both read that book. But what are the 3 things that we talk about that drive miserable jobs? People who are miserable in their jobs, there's 3 things they have in common: anonymity, irrelevance, in measurement.

Yeah, right.

If they don't feel like they matter, they're anonymous. Yeah, then, you know, that's why we do one-on-ones, is, you know, you have to know your people, you have to care about them.

For those of you that attended the stakeholder satisfaction, that was my biggest point, you know, one-on-ones, engaging with employees.

Irrelevance. And I love that's what OKRs really helps with that too, because I know as a low-level employee, frontline employee, I know exactly how my job is impacting that top line OKR. I know exactly how they tie, how they correlate, and why that OKR, the top line, isn't going to happen unless I do my part. I have to make that block downfield, otherwise the running back is not getting free to hit the end zone. I have to do it. And that alignment gets created there. And the last one is a measurement, which is they know the score. They know how to keep track at the end of the day, are they doing a good job or not?

I went to a company where we didn't have any goals. We didn't have any— there's no OKRs, there was nothing, and nobody knew how they were performing, right? The owner, he kept all the financials to himself. He didn't share it with anybody. I was his COO and he didn't even share with me the financials. So it was hard to run an operation when you don't understand that stuff. But I got there and I'm like, okay, well, what's our goal for customer service? Do we have loads per day? Do we have an on-time service? Well, no, we just basically just wait for customers to call us. Okay, we're not soliciting? No, we're just waiting for someone to call us and offer us a load. On the driver management side? Are you measuring revenue per truck? Are you ever measuring miles per week? Or what do you— nothing, you know, just we come in, we work Monday through Friday, and we leave, and that's the end of it. It's like, okay, so where do, where do we start? But everybody was pretty like miserable. It was just, hey, I'm just coming to work and just like going through the motions. And it's because there was no one-on-ones, right? So everybody kind of felt like they had that anonymity to where they just came in and did their job and They just moved on. They didn't have any way to know if they were doing good, if they were doing bad. There was no career progression. So everything you talk about when you want to say, hey, why do people leave? I mean, this company, the only reason these people stayed is because it was in a small town and there was really nowhere else to go work. And so they felt like they were trapped because they didn't want to leave from where they were from and where they lived. But everybody was just so slothful about how they went about things because there was nothing to go for.

That's why sports is such a good analogy to some of this stuff, because an 11-man football team or soccer team, either way, if one person's not doing their job, they're not gonna win. You know, and that's how you have to almost look at this. I tried to explain that a little bit this morning is if you don't have everybody on the same page, you got people kicking the ball at the wrong goal, you know, or you got people on the competitor's team, you know? And so you really have to make sure you're aligned from top to bottom, bottom up, Top down.

I thought that, uh, that graphic you shared was eye-opening from Covey, you know, that if you take these percentages of people who are disengaged or don't know what they're doing and you put that into a sports perspective, that 4 out of 11 of, you know, if you had 11 people on your soccer field, 4 out of 11 of them wouldn't even know which goal was theirs. How crazy is that? And we operate our businesses thinking that things will get better with only 4 40% of the workforce.

Well, just like what Jeff said, I mean, I've been at businesses too where there's no strategic plan from the top. Right. How do you align to the top when you have no plan?

There's nothing to align to.

Yeah.

So what happens there is you don't have the alignment, and so now all of a sudden you've got people rowing in different directions.

That's right.

And, you know, if you've ever rowed a boat or rowed a canoe or, you know, rowed crew or whatever, you know that if you have people rowing in different directions or at different speeds, Every time somebody's oar goes into the water at the wrong time, it creates drag.

Yeah.

And so then that creates the boat zigzagging every which way, or worse yet, as you're rowing against each other and you just don't move.

Yeah, either that or you're rowing in a circle.

So that's why alignment is so critical, is everybody looks and they know one team, one score, that this is where we're trying to go as a company, this is where we're going as a fleet department, and how we're supporting the overall mission and objective of team.

And you can help if you're in a city and they don't have a big strategic plan. I mean, that's— you can start planting seeds, you know, to do that. I mean, there's got to be something out there somewhere.

Well, you don't even have to go by your, your city. You can do your own department level OKRs. No one's saying, you know what I'm saying, right? You have to align them totally to the city. If you don't have something, set them yourself. You run a department, you set that for yourselves and say, hey, this is where we need to improve and this is what we're going to set and we're going to put in place. Because what'll happen is then you'll get alignment with your team you'll start to see improvement. And then everybody else in these other departments will probably look over and go, what's going on over there?

Exactly.

It creates a rallying point, right? It does. You look at the medieval days and rally to the king. You're creating that moment like, hey, everybody rally to this. And I love that about setting the vision. That's why we talk about it as intentional culture. Dave Ramsey always talks about, hey, the train is going this way. Everybody on board or get off. And if you're not okay with this direction, you're going to be fighting me the whole way. That's what intentional culture supported by OKRs helps you reinforce.

We're saying OKR a lot, but that could be KPIs, that could be BHAGs.

It could be SMART goals.

SMART goals. I mean, whatever mechanism or tool you use to set goals and objectives.

Stephen Covey has 4DX, 4 Disciplines of Execution. We like OKRs just because it's really clean and simple. It's built for alignment. And we've been using it now, a version of it, for probably the last 2 years, and we've liked it so far. The tooling's been tough. We finally found a tool we really like called 15Five.

That is a lot better.

I love that thing.

Me too.

But because— and the reason why it works so well is because it's built around this weekly cadence. Every week, the employees all get a survey and it says, hey, how was your week this week? Scale of 1 to 5. What was good? What was bad? What are you struggling with right now? And it's just basically a little questionnaire. And then it asks them, how did you do against your goals? And so every Friday they're checking in and updating the status of their goals, and it's keeping it right in the front of their mind. Oh yeah, that's right. I said that was important. Then it asks them, what do you want to work on next week? Like, what are the specific tasks?

I especially like that part.

Or the outputs that help you kind of organize and think at the end of the week, you're actually already proactively planning for the week coming up.

And that's a good takeaway. If you don't have a tool like that or an online tool, they're not that expensive.

You could use something as simple as Excel too.

Oh yeah, you could do that.

SurveyMonkey.

But that's something to track all that, you know, just to have that cadence every week. I think consistency is the main thing you need.

So with that, anytime you guys have had goals that just like didn't work or didn't fall flat, and how did you handle it when they when you didn't meet goals? Because you don't want to be the person that comes in and just rains on the parade. There are ways to kind of take, you know, when you haven't met a goal, you can kind of communicate around it and say, all right, what are the, you know, we talk about Xero Fleet and what happened with that, that it didn't take off the way we did, that we wanted it to. Part of that was because we launched it in the middle of a pandemic, which is a great time to launch any new product, is right when you're about to go into a, you know, like people are holding back because there are recession fears. But I think one of the things I always try to re-encourage is that what do we take, even if we didn't meet the goal, what are the lessons that we've learned from that? How do we treat failure as a learning opportunity?

I'm just trying to think. I can't think of any goal that I totally sucked or fell off.

Totally whiffed on?

But, um—

You need to see more red in your chart.

Yeah, but I can tell you that, I mean, there was a time when I worked for the state of Georgia And I didn't do this, I actually came in, they actually had a state plan, and then Administrative Services where I worked was actually using 4DX. And so we had a weekly cadence where we came and stood around a table, we didn't get to sit down. It was a weekly 10-minute meeting, and we went around and we reported our WIGs. And the result of that meeting was, are you on task? Is your wig green, red, or yellow? And then if it was like yellow or red, then there was a clear the path discussion, which means essentially what is in your way to get from yellow to green, right? And so if there was anyone in that room that was in my path, then I would take that offline and we would sit down together and we'd figure out a solve to get from yellow to green.

To move it around. And move all the blockers.

Right, move all the blockers. There was times when I was red on my WIGs, so I wasn't totally successful all the time, but we usually had the process itself allowed us to move the needle, and I really like that format.

Well, and there's a process too with OKRs. If you ever realize that a goal is no longer achievable or it's no longer relevant, you have, you just drop it. You ditch the OKR and you create a new one because there's nothing worse than knowing you're doing something that's futile and banging your head against the wall. It's so demotivating to have that situation. And so we call it circuit breaking sometimes in the product side, but we'll circuit break and say, okay, this is no longer applicable or it's no longer achievable. We need to reset expectations.

And that's really a good segue into if you've got a goal and you don't have an attainable goal, you know, I always see people say, I'm going to increase my PM compliance from 40% to 95%. That's not gonna happen. You need to see incremental goals to get to that point. It might take you 5 years to get from 40 to 90.

Let's see what it takes to get from 49 to 55.

Exactly.

And if it takes you 2 months, okay, well now let's push it from 55 to 70. Okay, that took a year. All right, so we can do some—

But don't set yourself up for failure is a good point, 'cause then you'll demotivate everybody and they won't wanna do anything.

Stretch but be flexible. Yes. I think that's one of the good, then that's the strength of the OKR system is it helps with that.

And communicate, right? 'Cause that's the other thing is a lot of us will set goals and we'll be really hot and heavy on it for a few weeks, and then it just drops off, right? And we stop talking about it, we stop measuring it, we stop trying to hold our people accountable to it. And it may be because we don't think about it because it's not a regular cadence, or because, uh, we get a lot of complaints. I mean, whatever the reason is, is kind of irrelevant, because if it's what your OKR is, you need to measure it, you need to communicate it, you need to talk about it consistently, or you're never going to achieve what you have out there. And if you're not learning from those losses, then you've got a big issue, right? I mean, there's always ways to tell how you can improve. Mine, I usually look at a P&L statement and see, you know, off of the— based off of this P&L statement, where did we miss? Our customer rates were too low. We didn't haul enough freight. Our drivers weren't getting enough miles per day or enough revenue per truck per day. You know, our maintenance costs were too high. Our maintenance costs should be $0.09 a mile, and instead we've got them at $0.67 a mile. I mean, there's different things you can look at. That's going to help you gauge, okay, we didn't hit our goal, but what are my big triggers, right? What are the big things that if I made adjustments and changed right now, we can turn that around?

I think one of the things that, that I like with OKRs, you know, kind of one of the last things I want to cover, looking at those events and forecasting where it is that you want to be. You know, we go out and Jim Collins calls it a BHAG, which is a Big Hairy Audacious Goal. But setting that really far out vision 5 to 10 years in the future setting a really ambitious goal and having that as kind of a guiding principle. And then, you know, like the next goal level we set is we have a 3-year mission. Like, what's the thing that we're going to focus on the next 3 years? And the reason we do 3 is that, you know, like most average tenure is about 3 years before somebody turns over. And so if somebody is looking at your 10-year goal saying, I don't even know if I'm going to be in this company in a year, let alone 10, that 10-year goal doesn't really speak to them.

A little different for government, though.

Probably. But the 3-year mission Yeah, I could do something today that I know is going to impact that mission. So again, you get a little bit more of that relevance with something that's closer, more tangible, more incremental, like you said. And then what we do from there is we go down even to— from a 3-year, we break it down to an annual. We've been skipping the annual lately because we've been focusing on trimesters. And so we do every 4 months, we go through a goal planning process where we as a team basically step aside, we get input from our our team and our frontline employees. We take all that input back. We look at things, you know, that just happen in the marketplace, in the industry. And then we sit down and part of our 2-day planning process is to figure out, okay, what's the most important thing we need to work on over the next 4 months? And we usually pick 2 to 3 goals or 2 to 3 OKRs with 2 to 3 key results per each. If you get more complex than that, we've even found that 3 is too much for us.

Yep.

We can only really focus on 2 things. Otherwise, we get too distracted and then we don't make enough progress with one thing. So, like, we'll make progress with all 3, but we won't finish any of them. And so we've discovered, okay, well, if we focus on 2— there's this principle that Andy Page over at Google talks about. He says we're trying to get more wood behind the arrow. You know, it's more force. There's an allegory I like to call the laser. You know how many— how much power is in a laser?

No.

It's like less than a— less than a watt inside of a laser. Yet that same laser can burn a hole through something. But you look at like the lights in this room, you know, some of these are 60-watt bulbs. So they're 60 times as powerful, but because they're so much less focused, they just kind of heat up, but they don't burn anything. And so that is that focused intensity. More wood behind the arrow If you get that focus where you're focused on 1 to 3 OKRs and those have 1 to 3 key results, that's when all of a sudden you start delivering results because—

Well, that's where most people fail. They set too many goals. They have too many metrics.

Too ambitious.

Yeah.

We talked about, you know, I've recommended here at the end of Connect, as you reflect on what your key takeaways are, focus on your top 3.

Yeah.

Don't get distracted to try to do it all at once. Focus on your top 3 things. Prioritize. And that's really what I like about the OKR system too, is that it helps you prioritize and focus on what's most important. Measure what matters, as John Doerr says.

Exactly.

So I want to, while we have the live studio audience, I want to take advantage of this. What are, as you listen to some of this, what are some of the questions you guys have about OKRs? What are some of the things that you've had in the past that haven't worked or that have worked really well? What's on your minds as we're as we're talking about some of these things. Just kind of shout it out. Go for it.

So an OKR is— what is the length and the distance of that objective? Are you looking a year down the line? Are you looking incrementally, sort of like what I think I heard you mention earlier, like, are you looking to see what it looks like in a month from now and then kind of create your next strategic move based on the progress that's taken place that month? So for this month now, we're going to try to, you know, accomplish ABC, and then, you know, kind of take it on a month-to-month basis, or do you just set one goal and just continuously work towards that?

So we'll set a goal every 4 months for that next 4 months, and some of it might be done like our Take Connect. This is going to be done in month 1. Our trimester runs from September to the end of December, but a lot of the goals are set like by the end of December. This is what we're hoping to achieve in probably about a month before the month ends. So early December, we'll go out and we'll set the next trimester's goals based on where we're at today. or where we're at at that point in time. How close do we get? Are there things we need to adjust? You know, what's now most important? This thing's done. What's the next thing that we need to work on? Thinking— and this is why it's so important that you have kind of a longer-term vision— thinking in context of that North Star. You know, we call it— Jim Collins calls it like the Everest mission. I think Vern Harnish from Scaling Up says the same thing. It's the idea is that if you're always looking at the peak, you can set milestones along the way like Base Camp 1, Base Camp 2. You know, by this day, we're going to be at Base Camp 1. And, you know, are we aligned to that? And so every 4 months, we're looking at Base Camp 1, knowing that the long-term game is to get to Everest. But for right now, we're just focused on Base Camp 1. We're gonna get to Base Camp 1, and maybe we didn't get to Camp 1 until way later than we thought. So it doesn't do us any good to set goals for Base Camp 2 and 3 and 4 until we've hit 1. And then from 1, we'll pivot and say, okay, are we still aligned? Are we looking in the wrong direction? Do we need to refocus and point? I don't know if any of you have gone orienteering. I used to go orienteering as a Boy Scout and same thing. You would pick a landmark and then you'd go over the terrain and every once in a while you'd come up at a high spot and you'd reorient. You'd say, okay, this is where we're supposed to be headed. Is that landmark still in the right direction? Or did we get totally turned aside? Because, you know, as you're going across terrain, especially in the desert, there's all kinds of stuff that you got to get around. There's boulders and cactus and scorpions and things trying to kill you. And the idea is that you constantly are moving around it. And so as you're doing that, you're in the firefight, you're going to get lost. You have to resurface and reorient and say, oh, okay, we're pointed this way. We actually need to reorient and point to the right. Now let's adjust by 15 degrees. And we'll start walking that direction again. And so that's what our weekly or our monthly— our weekly tacticals help keep us where we at. And then our trimester planning is those moments where we resurface, reorient. Okay, where are we trying to get? This is our 3-year mission. All right, let's— we're going to head that way and kind of repoint. So like next trimester, Operation Fleet Success won't be the OKR because we'll probably knock out the rest of the stuff for that. But there might be another version of that, or something else will come to mind. You know, it might be stuff going on with mobile or web. We'll focus something on product, or it could be something like we really need to focus on sales. The point of the OKR is that like it's the whole executive team, we're all focused on it. So it better be really darn important because we're spending our most valuable time talking about that issue.

Which is a good point. You don't want to have a goal that nobody talks about or everybody spends a lot of time on it.

Nobody cares about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Back to back.

You also mentioned in a session earlier today that you should set aside a few minutes every day to say, hey, did I do anything to achieve anything towards moving the arrow?

Yeah, I think that's critical. You know, some companies call it 20% time. You know, it's dedicating time away from BAU, which is business as usual, and setting aside time to focus on working. You know, we call it in here working on the fleet versus working in the fleet. We are all very good at working in the fleet, but if we want to grow and mature the organization, we have to work on the fleet and set things up and work on the business of running the operation. But that takes time that you have to set aside. And so, like, you know, taking 10 to 15 minutes at the end of the day, you know, sometimes I've seen companies that they'll set aside every Friday afternoon, they will leave their office and they'll go work at a coffee shop somewhere. And just focus on OKR stuff because they just can't get out of firefight mode unless they dedicate themselves and actually leave the space. Yeah, Neil.

So listening to you over the past couple of days, I think I've boiled down your secrets to these: planning, organizing, motivating, and tracking.

That's a pretty good summation.

Yeah, I would say so. Um, but you're all the attributes of a manager. Yeah.

So, um, but sprinkle through this, um, you've, you've mentioned, um, a few pieces of literature. Could you off the top of your head name your top 3 pieces of literature that we should all be reading?

Top 3, Josh? Give me 3.

That's all you're gonna narrow it down?

Narrow it down. You should see my bookshelf at home. It's a little bit of a mess. Okay, so my top 3, if you're going to implement anything, my first 3 are going to be Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Ideal Team Player. Oh, now you're going to make me pick the third. There's so many good ones.

Jago, probably.

Yeah, Five Dysfunctions of a Team and Ideal Team Player, both Patrick Lencioni. Oh man, I'm going to give you 3 more.

3 more.

Because there's a tie between 3 and 4. Number 3 is The Advantage, also by Patrick Lencioni. And then number 4 is Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, who are two former Navy SEALs. They're just freaking awesome people. It's even better if you can get the Audible version of those books.

Yeah.

Because they— the authors read it.

Extreme Ownership.

Extreme Ownership is the fourth one. And they sound like Navy SEALs.

Back when we're in Iraq, looking around the corner, Charlie's sitting there staring at me through his sights.

We developed an OKR.

Knee deep in hand grenade pins. There was no way out. But yeah, the audiobook is a pretty good— yeah, it's a pretty good listen. But those would be like my first 4, and then I could go on for another 4 and give you like, hey, here's another great one.

Don't ask. We'll be here all day.

I'm telling you.

But we're definitely a learning culture. We read a lot of books.

We're a reading culture for sure.

That's how we grow. I think from a manager standpoint, you have to do that because I think failure stems from you as a manager not improving yourself so that you can improve others.

So John Maxwell is another, another great author, and he talks about leaders are the lid. The law of the lid is that leaders are the lid on the organization. You are the bottleneck, and the organization cannot grow beyond whatever your capabilities are. And so if you're not growing, your organization can't grow either. So it's, it's absolutely critical that you grow and mature yourself in order for the organization to grow up underneath you.

I had someone ask me one time what was the most important thing I did in my fleet management career. And I think it boiled down to a simple 15 minutes a day before I started work I read. It didn't matter what it was. Usually I would read publications like Fleet Publications, things like that. But it just fueled my mind and gave me ideas and made me think of what I was gonna do in that day. Or the next day and the next day. And then probably the last thing is Friday, I'd make a list of everything I was gonna do next week. And so it always kept me on target and on task. So, you know, I mean, you need to dedicate time to yourself to learn and to grow and to expand your mind and your thinking.

Other questions? Other comments? Yeah.

I was just going back to the OKR thing. I just think it's really interesting. I think in order to really be successful at creating change and accomplishing goals, like, it's a multifaceted process, but too often you see companies that the decision and the process, the whole solution starts at like management and goes up, but they never go to the boots on the ground. Ground and get that true raw input. Like it almost, you know, sitting back and kind of analyzing it, I feel like I could go to my manager and ask, what Mark are we missing? And he tell me whatever information he gives me. I take it back and digest it and then take it to my team and ask them, you know, why do you guys feel like we keep having this problem? Or what do you guys feel like we can do in order to solve this fleet problem? But it just seems like in my history in this industry since the early '90s, I've never had a manager come to me or come to the whole team and say, guys, we have this problem. What do you all think we could do in order to fix it?

So yeah, and that's a problem. But you got to understand too, that guy has a different goal. An objective, right, necessarily than what you have, because you're in the weeds. But here's what I would tell you is the best thing you can ever do for that situation. Do sit-ins. Go around with all your people and spend an hour, just 1 hour a month, sitting with them, observing, talking about their job and what they're doing. You will learn more about what can be improved upon than in any other time in your week, guaranteed.

Definitely more than you can from—

Yes, absolutely.

They definitely don't know what's going on in the shop.

Yep. Well, and I think that's, you know, we talk about, we include our frontline employees and everything because they provide us the intel. They give us the perspective from the ground level, and they know where the problems are. They know where the landmines are. What they sometimes lack is perspective. Well, because that's what we have. And so the idea is that we can't make decisions without the intel, and they can't make decisions without perspective. And so we have to work together. You know, it was funny, we asked the questions like, if you were CEO for a day, what would be the most important thing we should do? Because I love getting that question, and we ask the whole company that. And sometimes we'll get something really insightful, and sometimes we'll get something insightful like, you should do free lunches every Friday. You know, and that's that perspective that comes into play. But other times it's, hey, this is really a problem. Wow, I had no idea about that because I'm so far removed. From that problem. I didn't realize that that's a rock in my shoe and it's really hurting my foot, but I didn't feel that. So it's absolutely critical, and that's why I like the OKR process, is it encourages you to get buy-in from all layers because they're all impacted by it. And it's not top-down, it's like meet in the middle, you know, top-down, bottom-up, and we meet in the middle and create the department OKRs together.

If I were to choose a process to use, I think OKR in my career, throughout my career, I think that is the simplest, easiest, I mean, well, maybe not easy, but it's the simplest way to do this. 'Cause the other ones, you start getting into mission, vision, goals, objectives, results, you start getting— Yeah, it just gets so complicated. If you really wanna do goal setting, The OKR really works well. I know it's kind of IT-based, but I think it really works well for fleet because that way you can set those goals and you set them. We kind of work on a trimester basis, right?

Yeah.

So remember to KISS, right? Keep it simple, stupid.

Yes, exactly.

And that's a lesson we get out of Extreme Ownership too. Simplicity is how you keep the execution speed up. Were there any questions from our Zoom attendees at all? Perfect.

All right.

Well, I think that's going to wrap it up for us today. Thank you, Ivan, and for everybody for listening. We will catch you next time. If you have any questions, comments, we'd love to hear from you. podcast@rtafleet.com. And until next time, we'll see you.

Hasta la vista.

Viva Las Vegas!

Us on this episode of the Fleet Success Show. If you liked our show, we'd appreciate your 5-star review. Be sure to subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts and come hang out with us anywhere on social media @fleet_success. See you next time.