Episode #656 - Embracing Flexibility with Joseph Santana, Chairman of CDO PowerCircle

Welcome to this edition of the million dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell. The thing is that the podcast format.

Is so flexible, you can do it however you want. And I wanted to dig in there, see how you did it because I know a lot of people, there's always more people, always more people considering doing a podcast than are actually doing a podcast. And so they like fresh ideas on how to do it. Because I have one of my guests that has like a one minute update he does every day. That's his podcast. One minute on the news and latest news in the world of real estate. You know, here's where's what happened in real estate today. And you know, he prepares it, listening, gets it all put together on his way to work. You know, it'll dictate it and everything. And so he's got his one minute. Then, you know, then you'll have people that, what I do is I'll do these interviews and break them into four chunks. Like our interview will be broken into four segments and then roll that out in a week. And so that allows have consistent content, but it's doable, you know, you can still have a life, you know, and so.

That'S important.

Well, it's important. I think it's like, and let's, let's talk about this. It's important that you design this in a way where you can keep doing it. Yes. I'd like you to talk about this real quick. Where you are experientially and knowledge wise about the industry and how to build a productive company versus where you were, let's just say even before you started your association. You were very knowledgeable when you started the association. But I'm sure your learning has just gone off the charts. And as you've got more and more, bigger, bigger, more situations and talk about like. So the thing is, what I'm saying to you is you've got to design this thing where you'll keep doing it.

Yes.

Yeah. You do not allow yourself to get burned out.

You have to build it to scale. And one of the things that you also have to be willing to do is, which is really hard. This is one of the hardest things to do, especially for us, and I mean us here in the United States, because we hold up, stick to itiveness and grit as almost a religion. Like the old coach who said winners never quit and quitters Never win, right? And that whole concept of just stick with it. Well, when you're developing a business and you're developing a podcast, any program, anything that you're doing, you have to be willing to go down multiple paths as if it was a hypothesis. I hypothesize that this is going to produce value and work. Sometimes things look marvelous on paper, but when you put them actually to work, you're like, this is not quite producing what I thought it was going to produce. At that point, you have to be willing to move on and try something else. If you don't do that, you end up sticking to something that's just never going to work. So I think that that's one of the things that. That I learned in this whole adventure of building this is the idea of the pivot. You have to keep pivoting. You have to keep pivoting. You think that you know what your audience needs or what your clients need or want, but then you find out that it's maybe a little different than what you thought.

You have to pivot.

You think that the best way to do a podcast is a particular way. And then later on, you listen to it and you listen to others, and you try to figure out, well, what is it I'm trying to achieve?

And.

And you realize, no, I need to redo this format. And like your format, you break it down into four. My format is each one of those interviews becomes an episode. But what I do is, in order to make it instructional, after I create the episode. So during the episode, I'm doing what you're doing, I'm asking questions, and I'm listening and recording. But then after I do the episode, before I send it away to have them fix the sound and add the music and all that stuff, I listen to it again, and I listen to it with a different ear. Now I'm hunting for, what are the pearls here? What's the stuff that's actionable that people can do? And then I extract that. And then I do a voiceover, and I record my voiceover where I say, here are the 10 things, or here are the seven things that I learned from this. 1, 2, 3. I enumerate them, and then I bridge over. In the next half, we're going to find out about. About whatever the next thing is. And then I do the same thing in the next half, and then I close it out with some kind of overlaying comment about, you know, what I got out of this. And by doing that, it takes a conversation and it turns it into a learning experience for the listener. And that's what I was trying to achieve. That's what I was. So that's what we ended up doing.

That is absolutely priceless to get, you know, to listen to it, pull out the summaries, listen for these things. This is what I got. That's absolutely priceless. And I'm very jealous that you can get yourself to do that, because I never could. I go into complete withdrawal if I have to listen to myself talk on a recording like that. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, it's funny. But what I find is that over the years when you were talking about my learning curve, you know, my learning curve was moving, especially after I started, you know, doing some of this stuff on my own. I started building this group and building the business, but my learning curve absolutely took off when I started doing the podcast. And there's another program I do that doesn't go into a podcast. This is for the more senior leaders. These are for the chief diversity officers. It's called Sharpening the Axe. And there I get select thought leaders, sometimes CEOs, of companies that come in and they basically talk about, like, some of the other business aspects that you can leverage a lot of this. And I have to tell you that just being able to listen to a lot of these different people who have deep, deep expertise in so many different areas, A lot of times after the podcast, I go out to Amazon and purchase books because I become curious about this topic and I want to learn more. So, literally, this has been not only something that's been developing as a business and provided value for the listeners and for the people I serve. It's actually been a tremendous education for me, too.

Yeah. And it's unavoidable when you do these things if you have the proper guest list that you become hopelessly behind on the books that you want to read, you know, but. But that's another reason to keep living. You know, I've got to catch. I can't go now. I've got all these books to read.

That's right. That's right.

That's right. Yeah.

You know, I mean, I started. I actually started listening to books on audible also because I sometimes didn't have the time. I bought the book and it sat there and I'm like, I want to crack that book open, or it's on my Kindle. And maybe if I was going on a long flight, that would be the opportunity to read. So then I started using Audible, and now I just plug into these books and you know, after a while I was buying because when you buy the membership, you get an automatic certain amount of credits automatically, right? Well, I would go get another book and they would say, you're out of credit, so I'd have to buy it, right? And they're like, wow, it's like I need to upgrade my membership or something because my reading speed, you know, is beyond the credits that I'm getting every month. But it's just that you sometimes believe that the topic is like I just interviewed someone on the topic of burnout and a really important topic.

And as she was talking about the.

Topic, she started talking about all these other signals that are like the pre signals of when a person is headed toward burnout. So a lot of times when people say, oh, I got to do something about this or take a vacation, I'm getting burnt out. They're already burnt out. They're already like on stage seven, you know, she was talking about these earlier stages and how your environment and your community affect you. And I found that fascinating. So I went out and got another book. You know, now I'm reading about that, right?

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Guys kind of to want like thirsty, you know, by the time you realize you're thirsty, you've been, you know, you're.

Way dehydrated, you know.

Correct? Yeah, that's correct. But as you look at this, the life you've had, when you go in even now at this point, you can't always expect to make recommendations to people that are going to actually work. Like you said, you have to make, you know, be prepared to pivot or the way to look at that is you're just improving. Basically it's like the iPhone. They come up with the iPhone and they improve it. And so as you look, what are some early on. I'm sure you probably had these more early on. I can't go without hearing one of These, I'm sure you had one where you went into a place, you paid high dollars to fix something, you got the great reputation and you made recommendations that just turned into crap and you just can't have an unblemished life. Does one of those come to mind? And what did you do about it?

Yeah, no, I mean, I actually had. I was fortunate, and I call it fortunate that I didn't do this on my own dime because I was actually working for another company when I did it. So I was an employee at the time. But I thought that if we basically just went out and did this training that, you know, it would make changes in the way that people behaved and so forth. I don't know what made me do it. I was fortunate that I decided to do a pilot instead of doing a full blown 75,000 people. And after I finished, I looked at it and I looked at the results and I was like, people behaving the same way as they were before. This thing didn't work, right? It didn't. And you know, later on, you know, more reading and more learning later on. Now today there are tons of articles that you can get on the Internet that say that day long trainings or half day trainings do not change human behavior because we tend to go back to our habits. So that was a big lesson and one of the things that I recommend that people do today when they approach any kind of intervention. So let's say you want to change your behavior in people or you want to change the way the company works. I always say approach it like you are doing an experiment and you have a hypothesis. And that hypothesis is that we currently have this condition, we want to be in this other condition. And if we do this intervention, it's going to get us from here to there. So do it with that control group and measure where you are in the beginning and then measure where you are later on and look at the two. And if there is no change over a period of time, have the intestinal fortitude to say, this doesn't work. Let's find something else. Right. Instead of continuing to double down. There are organizations today that are still doing, let's say they do firm, wide unconscious bias training as a way of changing the way that people think. It doesn't change the way people behave to do a four hour or a full day training. What changes the way people behave is when they get on a regular basis some piece of information that again and again reminds them until they change a habit. Ben Franklin was doing this years ago. On a piece of paper he wanted to be a better man, made a list of all the different attributes he wanted to have. And on a regular basis he went back and he checked, did I do that? Yes or no? And he graded himself. And in his writings he even said, I find that when I pay attention to one thing, I tend to slide on the other. Not in those exact words, but that was the sentiment. And he found out, focus on a few things, change that little behavior in that one area, then focus on something else. And if you can get people to do that over time that behavior changes. But the old let's pay a million dollars and train half of the company in this one thing to change their behavior and do it in one day. There is no evidence that that works. In fact, to the contrary, there's a lot of evidence that it does not.

Yeah, and you know, it's got to be combined in with incentives, competition, accountability. Focus on exactly what, you know, things. A lot of thinking from the higher level people or in the management is like, exactly what do we want people focusing on? And then make sure they understand that number and then have them report in on those things so that you know, they'll know what, what's supposed to move what, the indicator that you know. So that they know that what you're looking at is what they need to be looking at. Exactly. You can start to see things go up because everybody's looking at the same number.

Exactly. Someone shared a great story with me along those lines about a training like that. What they were doing is they were a company that manufactured a product that really depended a lot on shippers, on distributors, independent distributors. So now these independent distributors were people who, they tended to do what most people do. They favored working with the people they like best. And so the organization realized, hey, you know what, we need to make sure that we are really in a good relationship with these people that are the people who are going to take our stuff and logistics people, they're going to move our stuff product from one place to the other. So they put together a program that was designed to help their team members that interface with these people to become more effective in, in understanding different people from different backgrounds and so forth and become more effective in creating rapport. It was literally, you could call it a diversity program, literally. But it had a very specific outcome that it was looking for. And so they were able to measure the success of that mini program that they had and then they had reinforcement for it, of course, but they were able to measure that particular project from the initial training and all the reinforcement and success by looking at the degree of engagement that they had from their logistics suppliers. So now they were finding, hey, they're favoring us. They're, they're, they're, they're coming in to pick up our stuff and deliver it to our customers, and they're doing it more frequently, they're doing it more effectively. We know this worked because. Because as you said, we had a clear idea what it was that we wanted to change and how to visibly see that change right when it happened. If it's just, you know, Larry's going to change the way he feels about this, well, then, unless I'm a mind reader, you know, and I can feed into your brain and your emotions, how do I know that you feel or think any different than you did before the training? I don't. Right.

Yeah. And practical lessons that never change. And so as you come up in life, you know, you have to learn them for yourself. But these are lessons. If you were to run that same experiment that you ran early on in your life, you thought, whatever company you did that with, just train them. You. It's not going to make a difference at all. So it's kind of a universal lesson, and the sooner. But I think every manager, every leader says, what we need is more training, more training. And when we. Quick story, we went independent in financial services, and all of a sudden we're recruiting, training, development. So I got 10 recruits the first month. And my upline came to me and he said, you're not going to recruit any more people, are you? He said, going into the next month. He said, what are you going to do? He said, you're going to train these people, right? I said, oh, yeah, I need to train them. So I stopped recruiting. Well, never stop recruiting. Anyway, I stopped recruiting and I went, I trained these people, 10 people. Here's the result. In fact, I went up, I found Fred Herman, who designed the Dale Carnegie sales training courses. He wrote them, he ran them. He had retired. He was in Rome, Georgia. I went up there and sat in his backyard with a folding chair, and he told me, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, how you put together training programs.

So I said, okay, I got it.

I went down. I designed a training program. I did 30 days of, well, four weeks of training in the office all day long. At the end of the month, well, I'll say I had one person still standing. The other nine had quit. Oh, no. I had trained him out of business, you know, so the thing is, you can overdo your Training, it's got to be combined in with results. You know, the thing that would have worked is if he had made one word in there. Field training, you know, you train them in action, you know, where you're actually closing sales and doing what you're supposed, whatever it is you're supposed to do. You're getting trained, doing that little things you learn, like who holds the pencil. Like if you train them on filling out a form, you want to do it fast to say, just watch me do it. They don't learn a thing. But if they hold a pencil, all of a sudden there's a bigger retention, you know, so I'm excited about what you're doing. We need more productivity, we need more winners, we need more successful companies. And that's never going to get away from the quality of people they come in and how productive those people are allowed to be. And so you're doing a great service and I wish you the best. Thanks so much. Joseph. Do you have any last word that you want to pass on to everybody before we leave? Yeah.

Well, thank you, Larry, for having me on your, on your program. It's been a pleasure talking to you. You actually made me walk down memory lane a few times. Some good memories and some that were scary for me sometimes, but they were good. But yeah, no, I mean, I think you summed it up very well. I think the important thing is that we are heading into a future that is faster, more competitive, and certainly more complex than it's ever been before. And in order to be successful in that future, we need to be able to get the best people, support them in their success. That supports us and our success. And we need to do that now. This is not something I say. It's like climate change. If you wait until the ocean is boiling, you need to go to another planet. It's too late. And if you wait until you see all the markets change and all the people changes and everything and you start to do this, it'll be too late. Because by then the competition already has your lunch well in hand.

Absolutely. And so wish you the best and let's stay in touch. Thanks so much.

Absolutely. Thanks, Larry.

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