3 Ways to Lead Your Employees (and get them to do what you want)

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Business Boot Camp podcast. Today we're going to be talking about the three different ways you can lead your organization and how you can allow the culture to dictate what goes on without you having to take force physically or having to use positional authority. Before we get into today's show, though, a big thank you, the sponsor of today's show, which is Gusto. The big announcement from Gusto is that they've recently changed their pricing structure to allow for very, very simple version of their Software for just $6 per month per employee, which basically does all your payroll for you. It does the direct deposit. It is all the basics, basic parts of payroll for you. You just enter the hours in and then you can upgrade for just a few dollars more per month to get all the benefit side and all the other aspects of HR taking care of as well. But the basic direct deposits, W2 tax stuff, dealing with FICA and Fuka and all the other stuff, and your workers compensation deductions and can be taken care of very easily, very simply, just $6 per month. And what's better is for three entire months you can get it free. If you go to gusto.com bootcamp, try it out for three months completely free, and I promise you won't regret it. Alright, so today we're going to be talking about something. I'm not going to take a lot of time, but I wanted to talk about this because it comes up so often in emails from phone calls I have with other business owners, regardless of what, in terms of the leadership style that people use, and not so much the leadership style, but really, like, how do you get people to do things? And there's really three different ways, in my opinion, to get someone to do something. And usually I use this in reference to an employer trying to get an employee to do something that might be anything from the task that you ask them to do to the showing up on time, whatever it is, things that you require employees to do. There's really, in my opinion, three different ways that you can do that. The first one's usually illegal, so you probably shouldn't do it, and that is physical force. So the worst way that you can possibly get someone to do what you want them to do is physically make them do it. This is like going back to things like slavery and abuse. This is illegal, but we're starting at the bottom and we're gonna work our way up. So the worst way you can get someone to actually have to do something in your business is physically make them do it. And this is literally against the law, but this is one way you can make someone do something. For example, physical force could be. I feel like a lot of times when it comes to gun violence and things like that, and the shooters that come out, about a lot of times they're looking for relevancy. And so that's why a lot of times they maybe don't feel like they're in any friend group in a school, or they kind of feel like loners. And instantly when they pull a gun out, they become very relevant to everyone around them just by doing that action. And so what they're using is physical force to get people to do what they want. In other words, usually in that scenario, they're wanting people to pay attention to them. They're wanting to be relevant to. To the situation. They want to be relevant to the group of individuals. And the way they do that is using physical force by pulling a gun out. Physical force can be so many different ways, but most of it is illegal. It's the worst form of making an individual do something and should never, ever be used, ever. Like, to slap someone or to hit an employee, you're probably going to get fined, if not, like, you know, going to court, in prison, perhaps, if you do something stupid. But, like, physical force is one way to get someone to do something. I'm just building this as a foundation. I'm not saying you should do that by no means, but it's one way to get someone to do something that you want them to do. The second way, and a common way that people use as business owners, I find, is positional authority. So because we're the employer, because we're the boss, because we pay the paycheck, one way that we can impose our will or make people do things for us or for the business when we want or how we want, is to basically say, hey, I'm your boss. Or, like, I am your superior. I'm your manager, whatever it is, you can use your position and the authority that comes with the position to make your will happen. And so a president can veto something because he has positional authority. All right? You, as the business owner, can veto something or change something because it's your business. And you can do that in the perfect world. Politically, a president never has to veto anything because the House and the Senate and the government, everyone's agreeing and talking about and making a bipartisan decision that the president then can back up or make alterations to. And that's the perfect world, right? That doesn't happen, nor does it very rarely happen in a business when everyone just agrees on what should be done and everyone talks about it in a civil manner and then comes up with one conclusive decision and everyone supports it. There are times when you as a business owner, when you as the leader, in order for the business to be maneuvered and guided, the way that you're vision sees it happening, you have to veto things. You have to use your positional authority as the owner to say, no, that's not what we're going to do. No, that's not the decision we're going to make. No, we're going to change this and use your positional authority to make those things happen. Because if you were the bottom guy in the totem pole, no one would listen to you. But because you have positional authority, because you signed the check on their paycheck, because you own the business and have the greatest stake of equity in that company, you thereby have positional authority. So this is what many people resort to when they want to get something done. And that is when someone asks an employee, ask, well, why do I need to do that? Or I don't agree with that. And someone resorts back to positional authority by saying, I'm your boss, do your job, Or I'm your manager, just do what I said to do. And so one way to lead people, one way to get them to do what you want them to do is to have positional authority over them. And for most of you listening, you're managers or business owners and you have positional authority. And there's going to be times you have to utilize that to make decisions, to make executive decisions when you need a certain decision to align with the goals and mission that you want that business to achieve. I'm not saying that positional authority should never be used, but I don't feel it's the highest form of leadership in your organization. I do feel there's a third better way. But I want to talk about positional authority a little bit more. And there are some really positive aspects of positional authority. If you're an entrepreneur and you have a goal and you have a vision of where you want your business to go, you can use positional authority to make sure that you don't get your business and the people that you're employing don't get distracted. They don't go in different directions, they don't do other things that don't align with the goal, the vision, the direction that you're wanting to take the company. So positional authority is not fully negative. However, I feel like a lot of people will have lack in leadership ability, and I'm including myself. Like, I do this stuff, this sometimes too. I feel like there's actually a lack in leadership skills or ability to.

Reason with other people about why you're doing something within the business. And because of that, you resort back. Like, you're like, you know what? This isn't working. I can't explain why I don't have enough evidence. I don't really want to listen to people because I can't necessarily put my finger on why we're doing this. I don't really know. You don't have enough information or you don't feel strongly enough in one direction, but you step back and use positional authority to dictate what happens simply because you don't want to hear other people's opinion or you don't value their opinion, or you simply just want to make a statement, sometimes on a personal level, to another individual to remind them that you have positional authority over them and that when you say something, you can override, you can veto them simply because you have positional authority. All right, so the third and final part, the third and final way to lead individuals to get employees to do what you want them to do, to get people to show up on time to abide by the rules and the policies that you've outlined in your handbook or in your code of conduct for your company. The third way, the best way I feel, is cultural pressure. So instead of having rules, regulations, people having positional authority, God forbid, having physical force to make things happen within your business, you can allow cultural pressure to make people do things within your company. What that means, for example, if you have a problem with people being late to work, you can physically force them to come to work. Probably not a good idea from a legal standpoint. You could also use positional authority and say, I'm your boss. Show up on time or else I'm going to fire you. Or third, you could not have positional authority and utilize that. What you could do is have cultural pressure where the pressure within the organization, the culture that's been built, will put pressure on that individual if they do not conform their actions to the cultural code that has been agreed agreed upon by all parties within the organization. So what does that mean? How do you get this cultural pressure? First of all, how you hire. So I'm gonna talk about the three things, okay? Number one, lead by example. We'll get to the Hiring part in just a second. So there's three different ways to have cultural pressure. Create this cultural pressure within your organization. And I do not feel like culture. This is something I need to define better and haven't done so well at. Is it culture and like employee employer friendship? And it's not this fuzzy thing in my opinion. Like, it's pressure. Right? There's a reason I call this cultural pressure because it's actually pushing people and it's actually pushing them out of their comfort zone and it's not allowing them just to do whatever they want. That's not great team culture. That's not great company culture. That's not good for business. It's definitely not sustainable through a recession. Like, there's gotta be pressure in order to get something to move. You have to create pressure in order to make a, a business go forward. In order for a movement to happen, there has to be pressure. And I truly believe that culture. And when we talk about culture, we get like this like airy fairy, like, because we hear things about like the Google culture and Facebook culture and all this other stuff and we think of cultures like foosball tables and free food, when cultural pressure is what actually generates results and movement for the business. So three things that I feel create cultural pressure. And when I'm talking about these three, these three things, there's definitely areas of improvement in my leadership style in all these areas. And I'm not saying I'm perfect, but these are my observations and things I've learned by talking to a lot of business owners about leadership and leading people, and especially our employees. Number one is lead by example. If you're expecting people to work hard, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, you better make sure you're the one that's working the hardest and grinding the hardest. I am amazed by the amount of business owners that expect their employees to work 50, 60 hours a week and show up early and leave late, and yet they struggle to get there by 10 o'. Clock. They're taking every Friday off. They're leaving for two and three weeks on vacation four or five times a year. Like, if you're, if that's the standard you're making, that's fine. Like if you decide that family balance and time with your family a lot balance. And when you get sick, you take a whole week off over a flu that lasts 24 hours. Like, if that's the kind of culture you want to create, that's fine. But don't expect, don't have a double standard and think that you because you're the owner, can have one standard and that your people, the people you're hiring, your employees, are somehow going to be held to some higher standard if you are the highest standard. And so if you have a low standard, there's a really good chance you're not going to be able to get other people for a sustained period of time to have a standard that's higher than you. If you want them to show up on time, but you can't show up on time, good luck trying to enforce any sort of policy or having a culture that enforces and puts pressure on people to actually show up to work on time. All right. If you're wanting people to do anything within your organization, leading by example is the number one way to ensure that there's the culture that is created around your team as the business grows, that the pressure to get people to conform to your standard, you better make sure that is going to happen. The culture of a business generally tends to digress or move towards the standards of the founder. Especially in a small business, the standards of work ethic and timeliness and quality and professionalism and customer service generally tend to ebb and move towards the standards of the founder. And so if you, the founder, have a really bad time with timeliness or professionalism or speaking with customers in a professional manner, there's a really good chance you need to get another individual to handle that with your organization to train other people in your employees on that area. Because if not, if left untended to your weakness, will show up in the.

The way that your employees treat your customers. They will become. Their standards will eventually erode to the way your standards are. So number one is lead by example. Number two way to create cultural pressure in a positive direction in the way that you want employees to conform their actions to. Number two is that firing dictates culture, firing dictates culture, and firing dictates standards. You can talk all you want about showing up on time, you can talk all you want about working hard, but if you're not gonna fire based upon those things, it's empty words. It's actually just. It's just hot air. And if you're gonna say that you want people to get along and be nice and respect each other, but you're not willing to fire someone fast because they don't abide by that cultural standard, There is absolutely no way the culture is gonna get create a pressure that pushes other things that are not within that pressure. So when you talk about like osmosis and you can go From a chemical standpoint, you look at pressure like air pressure, and things like air travels to the place of least pressure, all right? If you want individuals that can handle the pressure within your organization, if you build the pressure up within your organization, and I don't mean, like, pressure, like anxiety and like all that. I'm talking about, like, pressure. Your culture develops a certain level of pressure. It will push out people that can't handle the pressure. The same way that air travels to a place of less pressure, individuals want to go to an area of less pressure unless they accept the pressure that you've built within your culture. And they say, this is where I want to be. These are the common themes. These are the common goals, ambitions. These are the things that I stand for and I want to uphold within this culture, and I want to enforce upon other people that are in this organization, and they abide and they decide to stay within that pressure, it'll push other people out. It'll push other people that can't handle the pressure, that can't handle the standards, that can't handle. And again, when I say pressure, I'm not talking about, like, pressure. You generating pressure on your people, making them work harder or anything. I'm talking about the pressure that the culture creates that will push out other individuals, other ideas that will not abide by the cultural standards. Okay? So firing, though, is the number is the best way to dictate your culture. And. And the standards. And people always ask me, how do you create team culture? And I always say one thing. Fire people. Because who you fire will dictate what should not be done within your organization. We fired someone on their second day simply because they didn't introduce themselves to another team member who was their project manager on a job and decided they could just jump in a piece of equipment and just go for it without introducing or talking to or, like, even, like, not even introducing themselves to the project manager and just hopping on a big piece of equipment and going for it because they wanted to. They had no idea what they were doing, and they had no respect to the project manager. And then, like, I wanted to get off right at eight hours when they could have just pushed through with the rest of team for 30 minutes, like, fired. I didn't even have to see it. I didn't have to talk to people. I just fired them. Because that's not our culture. We're not going. We're gonna. We're gonna try to uphold each other. We're gonna try to stand behind each other. If we got pushed through for 30 more minutes to help the rest of the team. We're gonna do that. Bailing out at eight hours because you wanted to get home and you're cold does not help the entire team. And so the people within the organization have accepted that, hey, we're trying to do this as a team, we're trying to support each other. And so individuals like that who are gonna look out for themselves are not going to worry about anyone else. You're not gonna be able to train that. And so we fired them like instantly, like it was that night. I just, we fired them. If people are late, and that's something that you want in your culture to make sure that people are on time, you better be willing to fire someone when they start having regular times when they're late. Because I promise you, if people want to stay, if people want to stay in your culture, they want to stay in your team. They will make sure they are on time. If not early. If you actually go, fire somebody else because they were late to work. We fired someone recently and we did it by lowering their paycheck. Because one of the cultural standards within the company is you need to be profitable for this business. And that if you're an employee and you're not making money for the enterprise in which you are working, your job is at risk, like you're eventually gonna get flushed out. And so for this individual, like if you're not producing revenue, if you're not producing net profit for the company, you're not conforming to the standards in which we're abiding. Therefore you get a pay cut in order to make sure you comply. He wasn't doing anything wrong. But one of the standards of the company is that you need to make revenue for the business.

It needs to be more profitable for you to come to work than for you not to come to work. And if that's not happening, we're going to cut your payment. And so when that happened, he left. That's fine, that's fine. Firing dictates culture. Because now everyone else realizes, okay, that individual was not making money for the company, he got fired. I should make more money for the company if I want to stay. It enforces the cultural standards. And what you're trying to do, creating the pressure of your culture that will push out anything that is not going to comply with those standards. Number three, the third way to create cultural pressure, and this is something more of that I think about, is balancing long term empathy with short term profitability. This is a tough one. Alright, so when we talk about cultural pressure and creating a team culture, there's a certain level of having a balance. Long term empathy, long term caring for your employees with short term profitability. And the reason I say there's a balance is because you determine the balance. Like if you are want to make a 40 year long business and you want the same employees for decades at a time, you better make sure you have a lot of empathy for them. You really care about them, you really want to get to know them, you really are willing to sacrifice the profitability so when they get hurt and even though they've used all their sick days, you still give them more money to make sure they make their ends meet, that you give them the absolute most, like 20, 30% more than the average pay in your market, in your industry. You give that to them, you give them health benefits, you just every year trying to keep give them more, more and more. Like if that's, if you're really empathetic, that's extreme. And the other side, it's like 100% profitability driven, right? It's like, okay, we're at $12 per hour and when you're done with that, if you feel like you want to make more, goodbye. Like that's the short term, like high profit, like you just want to generate profit. Now there's a balance because going through a bunch of people because they're all low level $12 an hour employees eventually cost the company money. So there's a level of like, okay, we gotta be more empathetic, we gotta care more about them, whether they be from a pay perspective or from having an HR department that will actually connect with them to having more mid level managers. Like there's this balance of empathy, long term empathy and short term profitability and they do counteract each other. Now I specifically said that, I said it this way for long term empathy versus short term empathy. I'm sorry, short term profitability. Because I do believe that long term empathy will lead to long term profitability. I do believe that. But in the short term your profitability will many times be affected. If you're going to actually be empathetic, if you're actually going to care, if you're actually going to pay people more, if you're actually going to give them second chances, if you're actually going to spend a lot of money training them. Like we spent thousands of dollars this past winter sending our whole team to a training event that was usually just for business owners and we sent all our staff like field workers and everything that cost a lot of money, but it was because I was caring about their training, their development and some of them aren't even working for us anymore. But that was my balance of empathy and short term profitability. I know I was gonna take a hit in the short term profitability. They all got paid to go to this training event. I had to pay for them at the training event. It was expensive, but it was this side of the equation. Long term empathy. Alright, so I talked today about the three different styles of leadership, three different ways to get people to do what you want within your business. Number one, physical force. Don't do it, it's usually illegal. You're going to get in trouble. Number two, positional authority. Use as little as often and don't abuse it. Number three is cultural pressure. And the three ways that I say you have to think about and things you have to consider when trying to create cultural pressure is number one, you must lead by example. Whether it be your uniform, the time you show up, how hard you work, you have to lead by example in whatever action you are trying to implement and make people conform to. Number two, firing dictates your culture and it dictates the standards or the level of pressure within your culture. Number three, there is a balance between.

Long term empathy and caring about your employees and then short term profitability. And you have to determine what that balance is. You've been listening to Mike Andes on the Business Boot Camp podcast. Until next time, be great because nothing else pays.

Sam.