9 Leadership Frameworks From Elon Musk, Dr. House, & More

What's up, y'all? Sean here. Sam is in Europe traveling around with the fam, and, uh, so I'm on my own today and I wanted to do something cool and I think I got a great idea. So I believe, here's my guess, I think this pod is gonna be one that people really, really like because I know I would've wanted to hear this at some point in time. And the reason why is because most of the people who listen to this podcast are some form of leadership, right? You might have started your own company or your own business. Uh, you might be kind of an exec somewhere or a manager somewhere, or you want to be a leader, right? So most people who don't want to be leaders are not listening to a podcast like this. So the problem is me and everybody else sucks. You know, everybody sucks the first time that they are managing people. And, um, And this isn't like, you know, how to manage people 101. There's a lot of books that are written about this. Um, there's some best practices, there's common sense, but I wanted to share some of the unorthodox, some of the weird things that I do that I have found work for me. And they might not work for everybody, but they work for me. And, um, not all of these people are gonna agree with, not all of these will work for you, but again, they all work for me. Nobody, I couldn't find any of this stuff in a book. Um, I heard about these either from somebody or I just kind of made it up on my own. And so I think I have 5, maybe 6 different things that I do that are unorthodox but work. Okay, so let me start with number 1, and this is called Dr. House, or it's inspired by Dr. House. So if anybody watches the TV show House, he always does this thing. Uh, the show is like there's this genius doctor, uh, but he's kind of like a curmudgeon, and, um, all the other doctors really respect him because he's amazing, but he's kind of hard to work with. And one of the things he does that's amazing but hard to work with is he has these 3 junior doctors who are kind of like, he's, I don't know, advising them or whatever. They work under him. And when a patient comes in and they run a test to try to figure out what's wrong with the person, he doesn't just look at it and say, "Here's what's wrong with the person." First of all, it's usually not that straightforward. Second of all, even if he kind of has an idea, he doesn't spoon-feed it to his to his team. Instead, he will usually slap the, the res— the, the, the, like maybe the scan or the data or the, the X-ray or whatever up on a screen. And he'll say, what do you see here? Or he'll say, what's weird about this? Or he'll say, what's interesting about this? And then the team has to start thinking and getting curious and looking at the thing and saying, well, there must be something there. What do I see? And this is really effective. I do this all the time. I will take, let's say some data I'm looking at, when I'm curious about something, I see something that makes me go, hmm. And what I used to do is I used to just like share that with the team. Hey guys, here's what I found. Look at this data. This data shows that A is B and C, right? I would like give them a conclusion. I'm basically spoon feeding them an answer. They'd read it, they'd say, yeah, that makes sense. And then they would go on with their day, right? Because they didn't have to struggle to understand it. They didn't have to be curious enough to go find it. They just got spoonfed an answer and they say, yeah, yeah, I'm not surprised by that. All right, I'm gonna move on. Or, oh, that's weird. Okay, sounds like you got the answer. I'm gonna again, move on. So I do it the other way, which does 3 things. One, it trains the team to be curious and clever, right? Because you're not looking for some luck. I'm not telling you to go do 10 more analyses. I'm saying there's something in this. What is it? It's a little bit of a riddle. The second is it's not a gotcha, right? Like I'm genuinely asking. Uh, because they will see things that you don't see. So even if you saw one of the interesting things, they might find two others that you didn't really, um, appreciate. And the last is it trains everybody on how to, cuz you know, maybe one person out of the group will see the interesting thing, but the other four will say, why didn't I see that? And that trial and error, that like guess and check is how people get better at stuff. So you'll train a team of curious, clever people who get good at finding insights into data. And so, uh, that's the Dr. House technique. I, I recommend you try it rather than spoonfeeding your team answers. Okay. The second one I learned from my wife. My wife was a consultant and she used to go to these companies and it was like, it was always like, I'm getting alignment, right? She would go in, it would be a board meeting of like, you know, Yahoo's board meeting. It's like you have 10 executives at Yahoo and they cannot, you know, they all think they're on the same page. And then only when you ask them certain questions, Do you realize that like everybody has like a different, you know, game plan, vision of what we're trying to do here, et cetera, et cetera. So she got good at sussing that out, but people are a little bit, um, not defensive, but they're a little bit limited when you just ask them very literal logical questions that tap into only the analytical part of their brain. Like if you say, what are our 3 key objectives for the year? They sort of feels like they're taking a math test. And so she does this thing that was called the holiday party. The holiday party tactic is she had me go, she had me go to a whiteboard and she goes, all right, let's fast forward. It's Christmas Eve of this year and we're at the company holiday party. I want you to start drawing what's at the company holiday party. I'm like, what do you mean? She's like, just draw things that would make it an awesome company holiday party. So I'm like, okay. So all of a sudden I'm having kind of fun. I'm something creative. I'm drawing. I'm just thinking of cool shit that could be at a party, right? So my guard is down. And so, you know, I'll draw like whatever, there's a DJ and I, we kind of laugh because the DJ booth is like, you know, my drawing is bad. And then I'll draw the next thing and then she'll say, okay, what's on the screen? What are you celebrating? And that question, what are we celebrating? Is like, that's kind of like, what are we trying to do this year? Right? What's the milestone that we hit? And instead of saying, what are we trying to do? It's assuming it's already done that we're already celebrating. We're popping bottles because we hit 1 million users or 10 million downloads or 100 million in revenue, whatever it is. And so it's, you know, we'd say our, our big North Star goal, cuz it's like that screen can only have one big thing on it that we're all cheersing our, our glass to. So what is that North Star metric? And then she would say, cool, let's walk around. Like, you know, who's, who's at this party? And you, you know, there's this little exercise. And as she unfolded this party, it kind of rev— at first it got me in the mood for winning, right? Because it's like I'm already working backwards from the assumption that we've won. Then I identify the North Star goal. And then after we do that little game, it only takes 2 minutes. Then we would say, all right, uh, so how are we gonna get there? Right? What, what would be the things that we would need to do now so that that party happens? And all of a sudden we're, we're talking and brainstorming from a place of certainty and confidence rather than fear and doubt about not being able to pull it off and the stress, right? Because when you're in fight or flight, your brain only works in a very limited capacity. Compared to when you are, you know, at ease, relaxed, which is why, you know, great ideas come to you in the shower because you're, you're relaxed, you have warm water pouring on top of your head. And so your brain kind of melts away and can start to, you know, put together different data points that, that are not there when you're tense. And so I love this tactic of the holiday party drawing game. It really loosens people up. It gets them thinking, it focuses them on the North Star goal. And then when you make a plan after that, They go into that plan from in a state of mind of we already won. Okay, now here's the opposite. This is called the, um, the misery, misery loves company tactic. Okay, so whenever we're making a plan, at the beginning of any plan, everything seems achievable and, um, everyone's optimistic. And it's hard to say— it's one thing to ask somebody what are the key risks in this, and then people, you know, again, they get a little defensive. They're using the logical part of your brain. So a better question is You know, if I was to, um, let's say, you know, we— you go do this, I go do my thing, and we get busy. And, you know, 6 months from now, 12 months from now, we, we catch back up. We're getting a beer here at the local pub in the afternoon. It's 4 in the afternoon. We go grab a beer and we say, man, that idea was so cool. Let's assume it went wrong, right? So, man, that idea was so cool. I can't believe it didn't work out. Yeah, what happened? What is the, what is the most likely reason we would give that things went south? And this is a way to identify the core risk, the chief assumption, the riskiest proposition in your plan is to sort of work backwards from we're getting a beer, we're hanging out, it's already failed, and we say, man, that thing had so much potential. What, What went wrong? What, what do you think is the number one reason it might go wrong? And then because you're identifying that up front, you can now like work against that. You can get, you can game plan around that. Okay, here's another one. I find that people get very defensive about the status quo, especially the leaders, because as a leader, you're sort of responsible for the way that the company works, right? You're respon— like, uh, you're responsible for how many people work at your company. Right? If I said, did you hire too many people? Most people don't wanna say yes. And the reality is that certainly, I don't know, 20, 30, 40% of the time, the answer truly is yes, you've hired too many people. But if you ask CEOs, they'll rarely ever say yes. And in the same way, you'll say, are you working on a bunch of useless stuff? Or are you working on a bunch of extraneous things? They would say, no, I mean, these are all important or they're valuable, right? So people get defensive about their current plan. And so how do you get— how do you get people to, uh, to identify the fat in their, their plan, right? Be able to trim the fat without the pressure and the stress of them feeling like they're wrong or they're being blamed or that they're gonna have to make some tough decisions, have some hard conversations, and because of that they just want to avoid it. So here's what I do. We play a game. It's sort of like that, you know, that F, Murder, Marry game, right, where you decide, you know, if out of these 3 choices, who would you— who would you murder, who would you marry, who would you F? So similarly, let's just focus on the murder part, which is like, if I asked you, right? So I could sit down with any manager in my company. I could say, in your team, I know you love your team and I know they're all great. They're all great in their own ways. But if you had to do it, what would be the 3, who would be the 3 people that you would cut if you had to cut? I'm not saying you will, we are not gonna cut anybody, but who would those 3 people be? Similarly, like out of all the projects and initiatives you're doing, what are the 3 that you would cut if you had to cut 3 initiatives off? Which ones would go? And you could do this with anything, right? Customers, all your customers on the roster, your clients, who are the 3 that you would cut where they're just a pain in the ass? It's not worth, the juice is not worth the squeeze. And if you can create a safe, a safe space basically where somebody can freely identify what they would cut if they were gonna cut, but don't worry, we're not asking you to cut anything. And you do it yourself, right? You're not just asking others to do this, but you do it yourself and you think aloud, maybe do it as a group. Like, hey, what would we, what projects would we cut? You know, which team members are really not, you know, are at the bottom, right? There certainly is a top and a bottom. Who is that, right? Which customers are at the top and the bottom? And if you can identify those, it plants a seed. And people, once they've said it out loud, they've heard a truth. It's very hard to unsee a truth. And it might be a month later or 2 months later or 3 months later, but eventually they will decide to trim some of the fat either on their team, their projects, or the client list that will help the team grow. So that's the F, Murder, Marry tactic. Okay, I think I've done, what is that, 4 tactics. Okay, let's do another one. This is the superpower one. So this is a way to build people up. So I did this at my last startup and people really resonate with this, which is I made a presentation about each person in the team. I did this on a Friday afternoon. I said, hey guys, let's go do a little happy hour. And I said, I got a presentation for you guys. I said, you know, I've learned that in it, in any team, you can, you can look for two types of people. You can look for people who lack weaknesses, meaning they're pretty well-rounded, they have no fatal flaws, but they may not be great at anything, right? They're, they're just good. They're, they're at least good at everything. Or you can have some people that are amazing at some things and kind of weak in other areas. And I've learned that the, the, the best performing teams are filled with people who are amazing in at least one area. So you're hiring for an extreme strength, not a lack of weakness, right? That's Andreessen Horowitz framework that I really loved. And so I said, I'd like to, you know, I said, but the funny thing is for most people, they don't, they're not even aware of what their extreme strength is. And, um, because you're too close to it, it's so normal for you to be great at it. You don't even really realize you're great at it at, at, at some point. It's other people who point it out. So I'd like to point out for you the superpower that I've seen each of you have. And then I would give, and so I would put each person's, uh, face on a slide and I would say, hey, this is like, for example, hey, this is Derek. Derek's our designer. Derek, what I've noticed is your superpower. I don't know if you're aware of this, but Most designers that I've worked with, they're creative types. They're sort of like, you know, messy desk procrastinator types. They pull all-nighters when they get creative inspiration and they do amazing work sometimes. And other times, you know, they get stuck with sort of a creative writer's block of sorts. I said, Derek, your superpower is that you're a great designer, but you're like the mailman. You deliver every day at the same time, right? Like I give you the, the, the brief, I scribble a, um, a, a, a scribble, a poorly written address of where we're, where I'm trying to get this package and you're able to interpret it like a mailman and say, oh, I know where this is trying to go. And then you deliver it every day at 5:00 PM before you leave. And I said, I, I, you're like the mailman. I said, and you know, you don't work on the weekends. I know that you're not the type of guy that I should be hitting up for that, like that crazy project we're gonna do on the weekend. So you're like the mailman, you deliver every day of the week except for Sundays. And so I gave him basically a superpower, which is you have this amazing ability to consistently take a loose set of instructions and deliver on it. And I gave him a nickname that goes with it. That's why I call you the mailman. And then, you know, that's your superpower. And I gave it a little symbol. And then I like, you know, went to the next person. I said, oh, this is Furkan. Furkan is, you know, he's not gonna win any awards for being the most eloquent speaker or the most politically, you know, polished kind of guy. But man, when I, when you talk to Furkan, it's almost like he's allergic to bullshit. Like, you know, when someone's allergic to peanuts, you can't even have a peanut dish, or you, you feel uncomfortable taking peanuts around them because you might kill them. I said, that's what it's like when I bring bullshit around you. I don't even feel comfortable saying bullshit around you because you're so good at seeing through bullshit and saying, that doesn't make sense, or wait, I thought you said this other thing, so how, how could both of those be true, right? And so I, you know, you were like, um, you were allergic to bullshit. That is your superpower. You just can't stand it. And that, because of that, it It makes the rest of us up our game and not bring that, bring half-baked plans or incongruent, illogical plans to you because you'll sniff it out in a second. And the beautiful thing is these things are both true and aspirational, meaning they are this way, but by giving it their superpower, they then wanna live up to that identity you've given them. And so you can kind of architect the type of team you want by calling out areas they're good, but they may not be the best at it or they may not be doing it all the time, but by giving them their superpower, they will start to do it more often. Okay, so that's the superpower technique. Um, okay, I'm gonna give you 3 quick ones. The Tesla Master Plan. If you've never read it, Elon Musk wrote a master plan for Tesla, um, you know, back when it started. So he wrote the Master Plan V1 like 10 years ago, and then he wrote V2. And basically he said, Master Plan V1 basically was like, you should go read it. I've handwritten his many times and then wrote ours, uh, wrote my own plan for my own business after writing his. And so his plan basically says Tesla's job is to accelerate, you know, the, um, the society's move off of fossil fuels onto sustainable energy. To do that, we need to create a car that's high performance, um, and high efficiency. And so we're going to start with the Roadster, the expensive car, then we're going to make the next car, then we're going to make the, the mass market Model 3, uh, car blah, blah, blah. And he's like, you know, so in summary, here's the master plan. Build an expensive car to build the brand, build a less expensive car to get more people on it, then build the— use the economies of scale and the learnings from production to build a mass market car that'll get to everybody, right? That's the master plan. Um, and then he wrote a master plan V2, but it is very powerful if you can write the master plan for your company, right? It's basically any— and it doesn't have to be right, right? But it's you putting it out there. What are we here to do? How do we plan to do it? And like, you know, here's the takeaway. And if you look at his writing style, it's a very empowering style. And so I like to take his master plan and then write my own. All right, the next one comes from the CEO coach called Matt McCary or something like that. So he has this technique called the calendar audit, which is very simple. Imagine you print out your calendar from the last week and you look at every, every meeting that was scheduled, every kind of block of time that you used, and you take 3 highlighters. You take a green highlighter that says That was something that I enjoyed that gave me energy. You highlight those in green. Then you take a red highlighter. You say, these ones that I highlighted in red are the ones that I felt like my soul was being sucked outta my body, right? Like these are the soul-crushing, energy-draining things that I dread, parts, things of my day that I don't look forward to. You put those in red and then you have the yellow that are like neutral. And you look at that and then you say, okay, this is an audit. I now need to take these red things and I need to figure out over time how I'm gonna get more green than red. right? How I'm gonna phase all the red away and get to only green. And, um, that might be hiring somebody who does, who likes doing that thing. Cuz what's red for you might be green for them, or just getting rid of it or minimizing the time you do it and saying, man, do we really need 3 meetings for this? Could we not just do it in one? Could this meeting be an email, right? Or whatever. So a calendar audit is a very valuable technique. Okay? So that was, so, so far we've had number 1, the Dr. House screenshot technique. Number 2, my wife's holiday party work backwards question. Number 3, the if we got a beer saying, you know, saying, man, it's a bummer that thing failed. Why did it fail? Right? That's number 3. Number 4 is creating a safe space for the F, Murder, Marry game, right? Who are the 3 that you would double down on? Who are the 3 that you would cut? 3 is just a magic number. It might be 3,000 for you. I don't know, whatever. It doesn't, the number doesn't matter. Same idea. What are the bottom 20% of things? What are the top 20% of things? This is what you're trying to identify. And with a promise of we're not taking an action on this right now. So that's what, 4? Yeah, that's 4. Number 5 was tell each person their superpower and give it to your team as a presentation. They will live up to that reputation. Number 6 is the Tesla Master Plan. Number 7 is the calendar audit. Okay, I'm gonna do 2 more, maybe 3. Number 8 is peer groups. So anytime I have an objective, like let's say I wanna become a great poker player or I wanna get to 100,000 Twitter followers or I wanna build a D2C brand that does $50 million a year, I will create a text chat group of 5 other people who have— who are in the same kind of ballpark as me of where they're at now and have that same ambition as their top ambition. Uh, mentors and advisors, overrated. Peer group, underrated. And so that's what I would do, and I would start by texting them, and then I would do like a once a month kind of call where we spend 3 hours on the phone or in person hanging out, um, shooting the shit together, sharing tactics and strategies, what's working for them in trying to achieve your mutually shared goal. Um, okay. Last one is the kickoff document. I think this is number 9. A kickoff document is a template that I have, and I could share this, but, uh, if you subscribe to my newsletter, I think you get it. So just go to SeanPorey.com and, um, and I think you can get it. Uh, or if not, just email me at Sean@SeanPorey.com. Okay. So the kickoff document is basically something I do before I start a project because I believe that clarity is power. And I think too often people go into doing something without actually being clear of what are we trying to do here? Why are we trying to do it? How will we measure success? And what's the first thing that we should really do? And that's what a kickoff document does. So the kickoff doc has 3 sections. The first is what are we trying to do? One-liner. The next is what's a win look like? And I define a win in 2 ways. I say what's the floor of this win? Meaning what is the minimum that I would consider like a successful, good outcome? Like what's achievable thing? And then what's the eff yeah win, which is the like the result that would make me say eff yeah, then that really worked. And so now I got kind of like a range. I have like the bottom goal, my floor goal, and then I have my stretch goal. And then I also do an anti-goal, meaning what are some traps that I could fall into along the way that would like make this whole thing, even if I hit my goals, I would feel bad at the end of it because I like I did this other thing, right? Like for example, we all have these in life. Like, you know, I would love to be successful, but I don't want to, you know, screw over people along the way and carry that guilt with me, right? So that's like being successful financially would be your goal. I mean, you'd put some numbers around it, but then your anti-goal would be, I don't want to do this in a way that makes me feel unethical or ashamed in any way of what I did. I'd like to feel proud of it. Right? So those become your anti-goals. Or like, you know, I'd like to be successful, but I want to be able to make sure I'm home with my kids every day at 5 because that's really important to me. So an anti-goal would be, yeah, I made it happen, but I'm never home, right? So my anti-goal would be, you know, never getting home before, you know, X time. And so it's important to identify your anti-goals. They're very clarifying for you. Um, and the kickoff doc ends with 1 hour— oh yeah, your power hour. Basically like, what's something I could do in the next hour that would just get like, create like momentum Uh, get me to a win. And so this is not like do some research or make a list. It's like get momentum towards the actual outcome. So if I want to, you know, increase sales, that's like make a sale, make one sale. Or like if I wanted to grow my list, uh, my email list, it's like, I don't know, post a thread on Twitter in the next hour that will get some subscribers to my list. Just something to get the ball rolling that's action-oriented. So you're not just always in planning mode. So those are 9 different little tips and tricks that really work for me that I don't think you'll learn most of those in, I don't know, business school or, you know, at your job that, you know, even if people try to do management training, it's usually not things like this. These are my kind of like, you know, unorthodox pet tricks that I like to do that help me, you know, with my companies. And so I hope that's helpful for you. If it is, let me know. You can tweet it at me @SeanVP. If it's not helpful, tweet at me saying, hey, Wasn't that helpful? Honest feedback. I love honest feedback. So either way works for me. I'm @ShaanVP, which is S-H-A-A-N-V-P on Twitter. All right, I'm outta here.