Entrepreneurial Management Math (Performance is NOT an Opinion) | Ep #46

Hey everyone, I'm Chris Plackey and this is how to Lead for female entrepreneurs and founders. Because the best way to grow a business is to grow the person who's running it. Let's go ahead and get started.

Hello everyone. Welcome, welcome. Today I want to talk with you about entrepreneurial math. If you have been a podcast listener for any length of time, you know that one of the things I say frequently is that performance is not an opinion.

Performance is based in evidence, it's based in facts. But one of the biggest kind of pitfalls that entrepreneurs fall into, and frankly anybody who is in any kind of management position, this is a big trap, is that we get very emotionally affected by.

Our employees performance or their lack thereof. And so then we become emotional in our response, right? And so when we're affected by other people's performance in a way that, that is negative, it's influencing our emotional response in a way that. So we're not, we're not basing anything on evidence. We're not really managing now. What we're doing is we're trying to make someone be different so that we can feel better. And this, I don't know if any of you have figured this out yet, but that really doesn't work out.

First of all, there's always another person who does something that irritates us or what have you and makes us upset. And then we aren't showing up as really good leaders. We're not showing up as the person who really needs to hold this person accountable. We're just now just trying to worry about the fact that we're upset and we want to feel better and we're mad at them for making us feel bad. It's emotional.

Childhood behavior. It's very normal, but it's not useful. And so I want to talk to you today about entrepreneurial management and math in the way that I like to think about it when it comes to managing performance.

Because I think it will give you a tremendous amount of peace of mind so that you can be more effective at what you need and what your business needs instead of trying to.

Influence or manipulate or change the way that people are showing up in their work that makes you feel like crap. Okay, so the first thing I kind of want you to do is it's not a kind out. First thing I want you to do is we're going to do some of this podcast today. I want you to get a piece of paper out. So go ahead and hit pause if you need to or get your phone out, open up Your notes app. And I just want you to write down what the most common feelings are that you feel every day at work.

And, you know, just write them all down. Now, if I were going to tell you what I hear from a lot of my clients, what I hear is frustrated, annoyed, impatient, irritated, disappointed, angry, hurt, powerless.

Afraid, resentful.

That's the list of icky negatives that I would say I hear regularly. Overwhelmed. That might be another one. Confused, that went in there. Now, you could take out any one of those feelings, and I know that you could attribute them.

To someone or something that's happening in your business. So if you circle one of those feelings, then I would want you to attribute it. What do you attribute that feeling to? If you said that you feel angry, what do you attribute that to? If you said that you feel irritated, what do you attribute that to? Or who do you attribute that to? And then I want you to ask yourself, okay, so if this is the. The circumstance or the person that I attribute that emotion to, why.

What is it that happened that made you feel like this person is making you angry? Okay. And it could be that they forgot to open up the store on time, or that they missed an important deadline, or that.

The shelves weren't stocked right, or that we didn't hit a benchmark we anticipated hitting, and they said they would. Whatever it is, I just want you to write down whatever that thing is that actually happened that you're now attributing to this person, and then you're assigning your emotional response to. Okay. It's kind of a backwards way to think, but I want you to do that. So what happens at work is people do things that we don't expect, or people don't do things that we had hoped that they would. And then we have this emotional response. But as soon as we're there, as soon as we're in emotion in a negative emotion, we're no longer leading, we're no longer managing. And it becomes very difficult to hold people accountable. Now, in a way that's constructive, because one of two things tends to happen when you feel bad, when you feel badly, you may yell or raise your voice or get curt or get passive aggressive or dismissive, or you may just avoid them altogether and hide from them. Pretend like they don't exist. Right. I've heard both. Like the scales of both sides. Right? Right. The range. What we want to do is identify what happened and address it and not have to be upset. Why do we got to be upset? It's not personal.

Other People not doing what they said they would do or that they make mistakes or that they didn't do as well as you think they could. That is not a personal affron.

There is no need to be offended or angry or frustrated or irritated.

All we have to do is the math. Here's what I asked you to do. Here's what you did do. Here's what the assignment was. Here's what you produced. Here are the hours you're supposed to work. Here are the hours you did work. Here is what success looks like, and here's what you delivered. It's not personal. It's math. Right? We don't look at a number and say, oh, my gosh, two plus three is five, and we get all offended. We just look at two, three, and we say, oh, that's five. It's neutral, right? This is what we asked you to do, and here's what you did. It's neutral.

Your job is to give feedback on the outcome. This is not what we expected. This is not what we asked you to do. This is not what your role is responsible for. This is not the commitment that you made.

That's what we do.

It's not hard, and it's so much easier if you just stick to the math. Performance is not an opinion. So if you catch yourself having conversations in your brain or with other people and you're saying things like, I just feel like he's not really a good fit. That is an opinion. I just have this feeling. It's just. It just is a feeling like she's not really getting it done the way she should. That is an opinion. You know how we turn this into math, we turn this into facts. We. We focus on them. But it requires something of you in order to do that. Right? First, you have to be clear about what you expect. Does everyone in your company have a job description? Does everyone in your company have outlined key results that they're responsible for? Do they have goals? Do they have action items? Have they made commitments? All y' all use different words. I. It doesn't matter to me. It's. This is what they said they would do. This is what I asked them to do. Whatever word you use to call that something in your company, does it exist? Is it written down? Have we made agreements?

And if so, they either do or they don't. It's not personal. And so if they do or they don't, then we address it. If they did a really good job, let's tell them nice work. If they didn't get it done right, let's tell them and what they need to do to fix it. If they do that enough times, they don't work here anymore.

So when you can pull your brain away from all of the things that you make other people's performance mean.

They don't care. They're lazy, they're disrespectful, they're trying to make me look bad. My company's not as important to them as it is to me, which we already established in the last podcast is true.

We can just stop assigning meaning to math and instead just talk about math. Here's what was supposed to happen, here's what did happen, here's what needs to happen.

As a result, you will move so much faster in your company. You will feel so much better every day. Your employees will actually like to work with you better. Because if you do tend to get really emotional at work and mad and angry and irritated and passive aggressive or resentful.

No offense, but you're not any fun to work for. That's intimidating.

Other people's behavior has nothing to do with your emotions. Right? And your emotions are your business, not theirs. So other people don't need to change so you feel better. But. But other people who work for you need to do the job that they've been hired to do. And that's not personal. That's just an agreement that's been made. It is math.

As soon as you really get this, I know I talked about a couple months ago or a couple of podcasts ago, those phases, right? Sort of that instinct. And then we get to. Ultimately, the goal is to acknowledge, and then we get to wisdom, right? What I want so much for everybody that works for me is this wisdom of knowing, like, look.

It'S okay you didn't do your job the way that you were supposed to. I'm not going to take that personally, but I'm also going to not have that in my company. I'm going to have accountability here. Because the more emotional you are to how people react, the less likely you are to hold people accountable. Which is so ironic, right? It's. It's not. It's like. It's like. It's like a junk food response. It's not substantive. It's just very, very shallow. So instead, if we can be substantive, like, look, I want to talk to you about what happened here. I want to talk about your missed deadline or your consistent tardiness or the mistakes that you're making, and you're doing it substantively in a way that you would present a math equation.

It's. It's more meaningful. Now that doesn't mean it's going to magically make people be better at their job, but at least you're consistent instead of it being based on your emotional reaction. Okay? So I want you to practice that this week. I really want you to notice because people make mistakes all the time. People, people drop. I do. I don't know about you. People drop the ball, right? Like how. What do you do in your brain when that happens?

Do you immediately get into this emotional entangled kind of relationship in your brain and experience with them when all you really have to do is just look at the math? You know, sometimes you weren't clear about what you asked them to do, so they delivered something. It's not what you wanted, but it's not what. It's not their fault because you weren't clear. So now you're mad at them for not delivering and not doing the right thing. And yet.

You weren't the one who was clear about what you wanted. Right?

So remember that. That there's. This is, this is a double edged relationship. Like you have to be clear in order for them to deliver, but then you have to give them feedback if they don't. But it's not personal. Don't get offended, don't get hurt. Just manage lead. Stick with math.

Okay, so write your feelings down. What do you attribute in your brain? What do you think makes you feel that way? And then what is it that actually happened? Let's get to the root of the facts. Let's focus on the math and then let's have those conversations from math, from performance is not an opinion. Performance is based in evidence and you can always find the actual facts here. I know you can. So practice that this week. Let me know how it goes. Thanks for tuning in.

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