INBOUND 2016: Kevin Daum "The 12 Habits of Valuable Employees"

Now, there have been a lot of independent reports that have said that the unemployment in the next few years, based on the new administration's policies, are supposed to go to between 7 and 10%. So how many of you are here because you're trying to figure out how to keep your job? Too soon. I started work on this project 12 Habits of Valuable Employees. Vern Harnish, my co author, and myself, we started looking into this about a year and a half, two years ago, and it was very interesting. I speak for Inc. I speak at Gazelles. We were just at Inc. 5000, and we did this interesting thing. We thought, you know, there seems to be this disconnect between what employers think is valuable and what employees think is valuable. And so let's go find out. Let's go find the stories. So I spoke and spoke, and every time I would speak, I would say, mostly to CEOs, I would say, look, let's have some stories. Let's have some stories of valuable employees. Send me stories. Send me stories. I want to put them in the book. Send me stories of valuable employees, and I will write a column for you on Inc. What CEO are there. Are there CEOs in the room? Raise your hand if you're a CEO. Great. Okay. You're now qualified to be president. Excellent. Too soon. So I'm from New York. I should probably qualify that. So we said to all these CEOs, send us. Send us these stories. We even offered them Apple gadgets. I didn't think to offer them an Amazon Echo, but we tried to get them to send us stuff out of the. I think it was roughly 8,000 people that we made this offer to, plus my mailing list of 15,000. How many do you think stories do you think I got? 0. 0. So for you CEOs in the room, right, you're sitting there going, what the hell's wrong with my people? And for all of you that are employees in the room, which. Which apparently is all but about five of you, you're sitting there going, I don't get it, because I'm working hard and I'm doing things. So I sat in to dig in on this and figure out what was going on. So the first thing I did is I went into deep cover. So for a little over a year, I got into this secret society of really ambitious young people. I actually, this is really interesting society. They would get together on a daily basis. They spent a lot of money, too, tens of thousands of dollars to be in this society. They would go and they would Learn. They would learn from experts. Really ambitious. I mean, they didn't take just everybody. They only took, like 10% of the people that wanted to get into the society, get in. And they would go every day and they would learn and they would talk to each other and they would do projects. And most of them, by the way, they were plotting to take over your jobs. That's what they were doing. In fact, they're still doing that. And the really cool part was, at the end of this entire process, it was kind of fun. They have this really cool ritual. And I got invited, like, I was good enough to, you know, sit into it. I don't know why, because obviously I'm a lot older than they were, but they invited me to this thing, and it's super secretive. It was like something out of a Dan Brown movie. We had to put on these. These special capes and these hats and these hoods. I did get a picture. I snuck a picture. Here it is. That's me on the back finishing up my master's in media management at Fordham University. And, boy, was it fascinating to spend the time. How many of you have been to grad school? Yeah. Boy, what an experience, huh? The fact is that all these people are thinking, I'm going to go in and I'm going to take over the world, and I'm going to be valuable. Then what happens is they get into the workplace and somehow there's a disconnect. Somehow there's a disconnect. And we thought, well, why is that? Right? What's going on there? And it's actually pretty simple. It's a couple of factors. I could give you a lot of statistics, but here's the simple case. Raise your hand if you have direct reports. Good. Most of you. So most of you are going to get something out of both sides of this employer employee conversation now. And There's a few CEOs in the room. So I'm going to ask you to close your eyes. I don't want anybody to be embarrassed. Raise your hand if you have time to train your direct reports. There are less people that raised their hands than the CEOs in the room. And so the expectation years ago, people talk about, well, the younger generation's got to come in and pay their dues. Here's what that used to mean. That used to mean that you, as a younger generation, would come in and you would sit there and shadow around somebody for a year or two while they taught you everything that they needed to teach you. And you would eventually figure it out so that by the time you actually got a position of management and a position of responsibility, then you would actually have some idea of what's going on and what you're doing. Those days are gone. We've made you people so much more productive. Now you're so productive, you don't have time to be productive. And so here you have these people that work for you and they come to you and they say, please help me, help me understand what I'm supposed to do. How did you get to this place? And you say, I don't know. I just figured it out because that's how you got to be management. That's how you got direct reports. So that's part of the problem. And then here's the worst problem. So I wrote Video Marketing for Dummies. How many of you work with video? Raise your hand. Oh, a lot of you. Okay, great. So I wrote that book in 2012. I very authoritatively said, the thing you have to know if you're going to do video is final cut. Because Apple is the only way that it's going to go for the next 10 years. How many of you use Apple to edit your materials? It's Adobe Premiere. So that means if five years ago you were an Apple expert, you don't know shit. Now the person who came into the business two years ago, they got a better handle on it, which means we've moved to this thing that people have been asking for for a whole long time, which is a meritocracy. We're actually at a meritocracy where you're gonna get hired and rise in the company based on what you can do, not how much experience you have. This is making a lot of my baby boomer and Gen X generations very unhappy these days. Very unhappy. So let me give you an actual example. There's this woman that I met named Jessica. Jessica got an opportunity out of grad school. After she finished her mba, she headed on to to go work in customer service. It was a management up opportunity. She was excited. She got onto a team of five people. She's working her butt off, working her butt off. And pretty soon she's doing pretty well. And pretty soon Mark, the team leader, hey, you know what, he moves out, he sees a better opportunity somewhere, figures out that, you know, the latest Facebook, the latest Google is there. So he goes off for his stock options and all of a sudden they have an opening on the team. So they look at Jessica, they go, you're doing great. You've got an mba. We're going to move you up. Now, all of a sudden, at 26 years old, you are the leader of the team. You now have four direct reports. Jessica goes, woo hoo. Now what do I do? So she sits there and she says, well, I'm not really sure what to do. You know what? I'm going to meet with my boss, Kathy. Now Kathy, who works remotely, she has a very, very good policy of having a 30 minute meeting with each of her team members at least once every two weeks. So Jessica waits two weeks, goes into the meeting and says, okay, Cathy, what do I need to know about management? And Kathy goes, well, you're the manager, you gotta figure it out. So Jessica kind of freaks out a little bit. She's not sure exactly what to do, but she says, hey, I'm a smart person. I. Yeah, okay, the stuff I got in grad school, not all that helpful. But I will figure, you know what, I'm gonna, I'm gonna just, I'm gonna talk to my people, I'm gonna keep them happy, and I'm gonna solve problems as we go. That's what I'm gonna do. And that's how it'll be great. And this actually goes pretty well. I mean, she's got some snags, she's a smart girl. And the team actually, you know, they don't. They have a little stumble here and there, but they actually do okay. They're meeting their metrics most of the time. They even one week or two, they come up pretty good. And over the course of a few months, Jessica, she can breathe a sigh of relief. She feels like she's doing her job. Now, from a CEO standpoint, hey, one less problem I got to worry about. Now, I don't want anybody to be embarrassed. The way I like to keep things on is. So I'll often ask you to close your eyes and raise your hands. Because what I really want, I really want to get the truth out into the room. And that's the best way to do it. So I'm going to ask you to close your eyes, raise your hands if you think Jessica is a valuable employee. Okay. About a third. I would submit to you that Jessica is an adequate employee. Now, the funny thing is, I can tell you I've been involved. If you've heard of YPO and EO, I've been involved with 25,000 CEOs. I can tell you, the CEOs are so desperate right now, they would love to have a Jessica because they're busy spending so much time on people who can't even figure it out to that level. And it doesn't have to do with education and it doesn't have to do with experience. It just has to do with the fact that people are being asked to do more with less in less time. So they accept Jessica as a valuable employee when really what she is is an adequate employee. And the problem, because I'm going to talk to, we talk to the employees in the room, I'm going to talk to the employers in the room, which, as you figured out, like I said, is most of you. The more you treat valuable as adequate, then the more you enable adequacy in your environment. And that will reflect on you as a leader. It will make your life difficult. It will give you the challenge. So what could Jessica have done that would have made her valuable? Now, I want to be clear, because when I flash this next list, many of you are going to go, oh, my God, that's a ton of stuff. I just want to be clear that, you know, this was not my book that I finished last night and this speech was not about the 12 habits of adequate employees. It's about valuable employees. So you ready? Here you go. The first thing that Jessica could have done was, was. It's a four letter word, probably more so now today than it was three weeks ago. Read, read. She could have read. Raise your hand. Close your eyes. Raise your hand if you know who Jim Collins is. About 20% of you raise your hands if you know who Patrick Lencioni is. Even less. Tom peters. Anybody over 50 besides me? Yeah. So a couple people may know who Tom Peters is. Now here's the funny thing. For those of you who don't know who Collins and Lencioni are, those are the number one and number two business writers in the world. More books than anybody else. Most of the stuff that's come down through your corporate world has come down from these two gentlemen. In books like Good to Great, Built to Last, Great By Choice, Death by Meeting, Five Temptations of a CEO, Lencioni has a brand new one that came out. Now, the irony is those guys are writing for you. They're writing for you as employers, they're writing for you as employees, and you don't even know who they are. You're going to find out in a minute that you're already dealing with stuff that these guys are talking about. You didn't even know. So she could have read. She could have said, hey, you know what? I know how to read. Now here's what actually goes on in Grad school people don't read anymore. They just. Because they provide you with the lesson on slides, they provide you with the lesson in the book that nobody reads, and they provide you with the lectures, and then you go regurgitate it. And that's the same way in the bachelor's world as well. Now read. Find teachers and mentors. Okay. Kathy didn't have the time. That didn't stop Jessica from reaching out. There's this thing, some of you may have heard of this. There's this tool that's actually really useful for finding teachers and mentors. Some of you may have heard of it. It's kind of been around LinkedIn. Anybody heard of LinkedIn? It's a little known. It's not one of the big three, but that's a place where you can go and you can connect with people. Oh. And the best part is you get to look at their experience and you get to find out who's on that journey. She could have established internal peer groups. It's possible that Jessica, in this company had other people in the company that actually all of a sudden had to manage people. So why couldn't she go and engage with those people and say, hey, let's put together a peer group of three people who are recent managers and three people who have been there for a while and figure out how to do this in a better way and share best practices. Nobody didn't. Nobody told her not to do it, but she didn't step up to do it. She could have created an information sharing process. Raise your hand if your company does not have some sort of intranet or communication process. Great. So all of you have the ability to share information with other people. Some of you share too much information. We understand, but the fact is you can use that system. And then there was nothing to prohibit her, who just spent $50,000 to get a degree in management, of actually creating a management training program that would have helped the company beyond her team. These are five things that would have made her valuable. Close your eyes. Raise your hand if you would not like to have somebody working for you that did this. Great. Because if you raised your hand, I was going to tell you, you're wasting your time. Go listen to somebody else. Now. This is not all her fault. So I want all of you that are now feeling uncomfortable in your stomach because you're going, I wouldn't have done that. It's a good idea. I would have thought of it, but I wouldn't have done that. That's fine. You know what? Life's not over yet. Most of you are younger than me. You got time. Let's talk to the employers in the group, the people who are working for you. Here's what they should could have done. They could have deconstructed their leadership process. They could have taken the things that they've learned now, okay, maybe you've been in the business for 10 years, maybe you didn't start out at the beginning and go, I'm going to think about these things that I do with management because they're going to be useful for me down the line to share. I'm going to journal every day, I'm going to catalog them. But you know what? You can start today because if you're already at management, you're going to get more employees along your way. And the people that are working for you, if they're really talented, hey, guess what? Those people, you can get them started on that process as well. And then you'll have all these great practices to share this. Number two, this is a big deal, a big deal. Because the truth is we're too exhausted to manage anything. We do not need to spend our time, nor do we have the time to manage our people. We need to coach them. We need to coach them to do that. Because if we coach them to do that, then they will fill behind us and we will be able to elevate ourselves to go places. Nobody's more important for that than the CEOs. If you don't know that, if you don't realize that's your number one job, you're in the wrong job. You might want to go back to business development or software engineering. The company needs to facilitate the internal peer to peer learning programs. They need to apportion resources to leadership development. I can't tell you how many companies, and it usually happens at about a hundred employees and they start to figure out and they go, oh my God, this is becoming unmanageable and I don't know why. And we don't have, we know we have good people, but we don't know how to take them up through it because they never gave it a thought. They just do, do, do without actually thinking about the future. And then here's the thing. This is for my benefit. Close your eyes because this is private information. Raise your hand, hold them up through this, through these questions. Raise your hand if your company does annual reviews. At least annual reviews. Keep your hands up, raise your hand, keep it up if you do quarterly reviews. Wow. There are 10% of the hands up now. Let Me do this one more time. Raise your hand. Close your eyes. Raise your hand. If there are people in your company that you hate working with, okay? All of you people that have that, that is because they don't do quarterly reviews. Because they wait for an entire year before they tell these people they suck. And then they go, we'll try and do better. And they give them a raise, right? That's the problem, right? Quarterly reviews. You go, hey, you know what? Q1, you suck. Get it together or you're gone by Q2. Q2, you still suck. I'll give you 30 days or get out. That goes into all sorts of other things. Like, the reason they don't fire those people is because they don't have robust recruiting programs that they can replace them. So they let them terrorize the company itself. Nobody's had that experience here right now that you understand. I actually know a little something about this. You'll enjoy the book. So let's do this. The 12 Habits of Valuable Employees. Here's what we're going to do for the rest of this. I am going to give you the tool that is necessary not to be a valuable employee, not to be an employer that fosters valuable employees. But I'm going to give you the information. I'm going to give you what it's all about and how you get there, and then it's up to you to do something with it. I suggest buying a case of my books. But now, it's a funny thing. Somebody asked me about the book and they said, what is it? And I said, well, it's the birds and the bees of business. They're like, what do you mean, the birds and the bees of business? I said, well, I said, here's the thing. Raise your hand if you have kids. Oh, good amount of you, okay? The rest of you are going to find this out. So at a certain point, there comes a time when you got to teach your kid about sex. Most of you do not want to teach your kids about sex. You want them to be successful in a sex life because you know how important it is to have a good sex life. But you do not want to be the person who tells them. What you really want is somebody else to tell them. Or you want a really entertaining book that you can just buy for them anonymously so it shows up on their Kindle. And then you want them to read that, right? So that they can learn how to be really good at sex. Most of you employers feel exactly the same way about creating value. You don't Want to spend the time to teach your employees how to create value. You don't want to break it down in your mind. You don't want to have that conversation, that uncomfortable conversation, conversation of, you suck. You don't want to do any of those things. You just want somebody that actually gets it, who's taken the time to put it into an entertaining process that they can learn from it so that they can show up three weeks later and become valuable. Raise your hand if that's what you want. Really? Okay, well, maybe I got the marketing wrong. Here's what they need to learn first. First four habits. Habits of desire. Siobhan, I'm gonna make this easier. Siobhan, my dear friend here from Ireland is going to pass out a whole list. No reveal. Here's the whole list. Now, here's the fun part of this list that you're going to get. It's actually an assessment. So on this list, it says two things. It gives you the first one. Developing leadership in yourself and others. I've just given you an example of developing leadership and what she could have done and what the company could have done. This is a sheet for you to assess yourselves. Since most of you are employees, and even some of you CEOs, if you have partners or ownership that's beyond you, you also are employees. This is a chance for you to assess yourself in each of these categories. You'll see it has the name of the habit. You'll see that it has a what are you doing that is adequate? And you will see that it has a what are you doing that is actually valuable. Now, it's not going to give you the specific guidance. I'm going to give you some of that. And if you really want some of it, you can take a look at the book. But the fact is, is if you're not asking yourself these questions, you're not going to get anywhere. And it's a form you can then use on every one of your employees and probably should at a minimum, every quarter, even if your company doesn't say you need to do a quarterly review. And by the way, if you really want to have fun, use it as a 360. Because I guarantee you, if you pass this out as a360 to your entire team of employees that are working from you, they will tell you who is bringing you value and who is not. So let's walk through these a little bit. Now raise your hand if you have core values in your company. That's fantastic. Keep your hands up. Raise your hands if you have core values. Close your eyes. How many of you can recite them? There's about eight in the audience. Now, the best part is when I do this with a group of CEOs. I did this at Inc. 5000. So here's, you know, here are the fastest growing companies, everybody raises their hands. I asked the second question, and in a room of 103 people, they were the CEOs, by the way. Raise your hand if you know who came up with the concept of core values in today's modern business. Nobody. Jim Collins. No. Gino stole it from Verne. Jim Collins. He and Jerry Porras at Stanford did a book called Built to Last. Before they did that, they did a Harvard Business Review study that talked about core ideologies, which were core values, core purpose, and the vision, which is the bhag. Big hairy, audacious goal. If you've heard this term, you're already learning the stuff that's come from Jim Collins, because all those people, like Geno, eos, Traction, Gazelles, they're all pushing that stuff. And if you want your people to do something with it, you got to tell them. Now, here's the thing about integrating core values. If you are not taking your core values and using them in your language and praising the whole idea around core values is to praise, reprimand, hire, and fire. So if you can't take your core values in a way that people are actually making decisions with them on a daily basis, they are useless to you. If they are not included in your quarterly reports and quarterly reviews, they are useless to you. And this is why most of you have core values but don't know how to use them. Now, we've actually written an entire study. If this were a CEO group, I'd be sitting with you and showing you that there's a process to actually taking your entire job description and making that based upon your core values with metrics that you can do every single quarter with your employees. Many of you would be excited to have this for the people that work for you and scared to have it when you get to your own review. But that's the kind of stuff that you can take on and make happen. The valuable employee looks beyond just their own department, their own performance. They look to how to grow the company. And unless the core values are pervasive, it's not going to go anywhere. Siobhan, where are we timewise? Okay, so core values. By the way, we will do Q and A at the end if you can still stand me fostering communication, making the Message stick. Now, when I, when I put this book together, by the way, here's how the book is structured. Every chapter in the book, there's a part one that gives you a lot of the background on why this stuff works the way it works and gives you the excuses to blame someone else because we all need that. A lot of us have a lot of excuses, excuses to go for the next four years too soon. Okay, but here's what happens in the second part of the book, which is so cool. Each one of these chapters we wrote, it's a puzzle. We wrote a story taken from real experience of adequate employment of somebody in this category who's doing a good job, who's doing a job like Jessica, that we would go, man, I wish I had somebody like that. And then the fun puzzle for you before you get to the commentary, is to figure out what more could they have done. In fact, the whole fun of this is we've got people who are coming to us saying, I'm going to use this as part of our hiring practice because here's a 10, 12 chapter test, here's a 12 story test to say, let's see if you're thinking like an adequate employee or a valuable employee. So as I go through these, I'll talk about what the valuable employees do relative to, to the adequate employees in the integrating core values. Pretty simple. You read the core values, you maybe put them into your daily meetings, you talk about them every stick them on your screen, but that valuable employee is taking them and making them come to life in your company with process and systems, fostering communications, making the message stick. I'm a messaging guy. I write three to five articles a week for ink. I wrote video marketing for Dummies. I, I do a podcast for ypo. I'm all about the message. And yet I am fascinated. I continue to be fascinated about how companies will not put time and energy into their internal communications. So what do they do? They come in and they take people and they say, hey, just make sure that you tell your people a lot about this now what they don't do. And I saw this, boy, I saw this in grad school and I see it in every company. What they don't do is teach their people how to communicate well. They don't teach them how to present, they don't teach them how to write. Now there's a funny interesting study out of Pew just curiosity, how many here are software engineering based employees? Okay, so you're all marketers. Okay, that's not fair. How many of you are marketers. Good amount of you. Okay. You have an advantage in the community that a lot of your people don't. Here's the funny thing. So I'm a theater graduate from Humboldt State University. Oh, Humboldt. Go Lumberjacks. Yeah. Okay, I know you guys were talking about Humboldt. We're yelling for Humboldt for a totally different reason. Congratulations to California, where that's now legal, so. Oh, there's a tell. See that laugh, Right? So here's the thing about being a liberal arts major. We are constantly told how we suck and how we are children. And they get. There's this thing, you might have heard of it, called stem. Ooh, that's what I want to be. Stem. Right. Well, funny thing, a report came out from Pew. They did research and yes, the bigger jobs right off the bat, the more the higher salaries are going to STEM people. That's absolutely true. Now that they've had a chance to look at things for a while. Funny thing, in later life, like once you're past your 40s, apparently you make more money as a liberal arts person than you do as stem because you hit the rock top on the engineering side. And while the employers said, hey, we really want STEM skills because they have immediate needs in regards to coding, it's probably going to go away as the machine language, as the machine learning takes over most of those jobs, the number one thing that employers said they value in an employee is the ability to write. The ability to write. So that means for you guys as marketing people, if you actually have that capability that makes you valuable in your company in a whole different level. The ability to present, the ability to write, these are things that are critically important. Now, if you don't actually, oh my God, we only have 10 minutes. Well, we're gonna go faster. Anybody who's not into fast talking, great, because here we go. So if you don't have the ability to get that message in a clear way that people can respond to, you are doing nothing for your company. That single little email or newsletter that you put out. And by the way, I'm not even going to show it here when I talk about media. There are 34 disciplines in live audio, visual and text that are now capable and available to you for less than a couple of thousand dollars in your company. But you guys don't do podcasts, you guys don't do video channels. You guys don't spend the time understanding what these different dynamics are and how they're different. And let me tell you, you cannot take a one hour speech like this and throw it on a video and expect your people to do it. I just took 10 speeches like this and broke them down into multiple content areas of short audio, short video, five exercises, 750 word listicles, 750 word articles and study guides. And people are looking at this thing going, oh, my God, that's amazing. Amazing. Ironically for all, any of you use a software program called HubSpot? Okay, good few. That may change afterwards. Here's the conversation that I've been having with HubSpot. And they just kind of look at me like a stare, like a blank stare. You all want to sit there and take video and go use it in a big way to go get more customers. I want to take video and go use it in a compelling way with my internal customer, which gets three times the roi. So if I was going to sit there and use the HubSpot software, I'd focus less on my external customer and more on how I'm going to use that to communicate with the people who are going to make exponential difference in my company. That's about fostering communication, and that's what a valuable employee would do. Managing conflict. Any peacemakers in the group? Yeah, conflict avoiders. I was married to one of those. Oh, shoot, we're recording. She'll see this. Here's the thing. We don't want conflict. It's uncomfortable. It's terrible. I hate it. I'm a New Yorker, so I'm boring.