Wearing Busy as a Badge of Honor - Mistake #2

Foreign welcome to the Agent Leader podcast. My name is Brent Kelly, your host. Thanks again for joining me. And this will be part number two of a five part series, I think that's what I'll call it, a five part series on the five biggest mistakes that agency leaders, agency CEOs make. And just to point things out, you know, one thing that I, that I hope I mentioned or got across in the first session, that these aren't all the mistakes, this isn't every mistake. And by the way, it's okay that you make these mistakes because we all make mistakes. It's just the idea that when I go through these mistakes one by one, it's really just an awareness level, you know, and that's one of the biggest things in coaching, is to say, hey, where am I at? Or where are we at as an agency? Are we even aware of this? And one of the things that I often see and when I work with agency leaders, and this is true when I get coached and mentored by others, is that we all have blind spots. We have these areas that we simply don't see. I mean, a blind spot is just like when you're driving in your car and it always said, you know, if you went back to driver's ed school, it's a check your blind spots. Well, what is a blind spot? It's an area you can't see, right? Not in the mirror or looking out. You have to kind of look around and sometimes people have to point those blind spots out for you so that you have a greater amount of awareness. I'm a believer that awareness allows us to take the right action. Which, by the way, if you go back to my last point podcast last week that I released was this idea that running the wrong way enthusiastically is stupid. From the book the Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham. This idea that, you know, if we take action, that's great, but are we taking the right action? The right actions right in our, in our agency? And obviously when we take action, then we can make the proper adjustments. So as I go through again, these mistakes, just to point out this is not to belittle or beat up any agency leaders out there. It's just to hopefully create some awareness. You know what, I wonder if we do have an issue here or I wonder if maybe there's a better way that we can do this. What improvements can we, can we make out of this? And again, that's really what I want to get across to you, the agency leader, the listener. Before I get into today's part topic Number two, session number two, whatever you want to call it, of the mistakes that agency leaders make. Do want to make just a few announcements again right at the top of this podcast because time is of essence. We have a few different programs starting at the Sitkins Group group here coming up now, again, depending on when you're listening to this. But September 10, so September 10 we have a producer fit program and a CRO chief revenue officer program starting. Both of these are virtual. Both of these will include live roundtables, ongoing coaching, Q and A at the end. These are our most popular programs. We can talk directly to insurance producers and sales leaders. So if you're an insurance producer and a sales leader, or you've got a sales leader or insurance producer on your team, then that you want to get back to some of the most important impactful things in your business, certainly in the times of COVID and just all the different uncertainty that you're facing. This is a great opportunity and you know, we're excited. I said this before, but the fact that every problem is indeed an opportunity. And now that we've finished up two sessions already of Producer fit, the feedback has been tremendous. We've learned a lot. We continue to make improvements. Bottom line is we're able to impact more producers and sales leaders because there's not the requirement to travel and not the requirement have you know the time of a few days. So again, if you're Interested, go to sitkins.com programs or sitkins.com profit if you want to go directly to our Producer fit. Also, our CEO fit program begins on September 28th. So agency leaders, and that should be you listening right now. And again, if you are an agency leader looking to rev up your agency for the end of 2020 and into 2021, this is the boot camp you want to attend. In fact, these five mistakes that I'm going through are going to be the basis around the lessons and the teachings and the interaction that we're going to have with all the agency leaders. So again, if you go to sitkins.com programs, you can see all those there, including CEO fit. So with that, let's get into mistake number two. Mistake number two, that agency leaders, agencies, CEOs make that we see with independent insurance agencies. So here it is. You ready to write this down? Agency leaders, mistake number two is they make busy a badge of honor. They make busy a badge of honor. Now, I've talked about activities and results before, but certainly if I have to think about all the mistakes that I see agency leaders make, whether it's initially we're having conversations with our private client group, or I'm doing trainings or coachings or interactions or involved with just any other program out there. What I see too often is that busyness or activities get rewarded more than results. As many of you know, I'm a huge John Maxwell fan of all of John Maxwell's books. I think the 21 laws of leadership are the Irrefutable Laws of Leadership are probably at the top of the list. Certainly one of the foundational books and one of the chapters in that book is the Law of Priorities, which states leaders understand that activity is not necessarily accomplishment. And I'm just going to read a short excerpt because I think it's powerful. He says this. He says when we are busy, we naturally believe that we are achieving. But busyness does not equal productivity. Activity is not necessarily accomplishment. Second, prioritizing requires leaders to continually think ahead, to know what's important, to know what's next, to see how everything relates to the overall vision. That's hard work. Third, prioritizing causes us to do things that are the least uncomfortable and sometimes downright painful. So a lot to unpack just in that. First of all, it's just this mindset, that activity, busyness just, it makes us feel good. Let's just face it. Like, I mean, we get frustrated by busyness. So there's two sides of the coin. But if you're busy, you feel like at least you've done something right versus, well, I just laid around all day now I was really Busy. I returned 100 emails and returned phone calls and did this, you know, paperwork here, and did this and responded to this and put out this fire, whatever the case may be. And at least we feel like we did something. Now. We don't feel very accomplished in many cases. And activity doesn't necessarily mean accomplishment, as John Maxwell state here stated here. But it does make us feel good in some cases, at least. We feel like, you know, we're. We're doing something right. Not the right stuff, but we're doing something. And the other party says here is that prioritizing requires leaders to think ahead, to know what's important, to know what's next. And of course, this goes back into what I talked about last week. Running the wrong way enthusiastically is stupid. So when you have that mission and vision, you understand the critical success factors of your agency. Here, here's what we're going to rally around. This is what we're all about. It becomes a little bit easier, right, to be able to do some of these things, understand where we're actually going. Because if you don't know where it is, you really want to go. Busyness might, we might be doing the right stuff. I don't really know, but we're doing things, so that's good. And this is so true with insurance agencies all the time. I've been part of insurance agencies, I've coached insurance agencies. I've been around insurance agencies, had roundtable discussion with insurance agencies. And it's, it's a huge mistake. And a lot of agencies are aware at least that, well, maybe there's, there's something better we can do. But the bottom line is that they're caught in what we call at Sitkins hog H a w g hysterical activity on the way to the grave. Right? And you can be busy for a while. Like I explained this last week, a little bit with Hill Shaw and Eric Loesch, Atlantic Shield Insurance that, you know, you can work really, really hard, but if you don't have direction and intention behind it, you just get tired eventually, right? You get worn out. So that's the first couple parts. The last part, just to talk about is the fact that John mentioned this is hard work. Understanding that. And we look at that activities don't mean accomplishment, that we have to prioritize and get more serious about our productivity. It causes us to be uncomfortable, right? Because now we have to acknowledge some of the busy work, which by the way, one of the reasons why, going back to what I just said, that we sometimes like busy work is because it can also be easy work. It doesn't take a lot of effort to return emails, right? Makes you busy, but it doesn't take a lot of deep thought and effort. Now maybe you get an email or two. I get that. That takes a little more, you know, thought and attention. I get that. But for the most part, just doing busy stuff, returning things, let's just call this reactive stuff, doesn't require a lot of mental capacity. One of my favorite books that I read last year was called Deep Work by Cal Newport, and he talks about this a little bit too. It's that, you know, anybody can kind of do this stuff, right? Stuff. Now you can be busier than other people, maybe have a slight advantage, but you're never really going to gain or get the results you want just by being busy. But we have to understand that to move from busy or activities to results, it's going to require us to make some changes, some improvements, which by the way, may not be all that comfortable. So I want to talk about this in just a different context today. And the first thing is just to understand this, that time, your time, my time, everyone's time is our only diminishing asset. So we can't get that back, right? We can't. It doesn't matter. And here's the thing to think about. I mean, you can get money back, you can get things back. In many cases, you can restore relationships. But time, when it's gone, it's gone. So part of this, and I think for many of us, I know I felt this a little bit as we start to get a little bit older and have been around a little longer now, some of you have been around longer than me, some of you have been around not as long as me, but as you start to grow and mature, you go, you know what? This thing called time, I can't beat it, so I must leverage it and use it. Because again, we all have 168 hours each week, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So this idea, and this goes back years ago, this idea of time management. You know, at Sitkins, when we're talking to our producers and sales leaders and our agency CEOs, we never talk about time management. Well, because. Why? Well, you can't manage it, but you can manage and be more proactive in your situations. You can manage and be more proactive in your energy. Right? Those kind of things we can do. I mean, time management goes back to the 19th century when, you know, we're talking about the industrial revolution, right? The fact that it's just mass processes, that if, you know, we had this thing and you just, you clock in and clock out. Well, obviously, we're in the information age. We're in the digital age, right? So now it's about how you apply knowledge, not just doing something over and over and over again. And I think again, too often in agencies, we reward activities even if they're not producing results. You know, people on the team go, oh, I was really busy, boss. Oh, good for you. Keep working hard. Just keep putting that nose to the grindstone. Right now, whether they're doing or not, that's another question. But we reward that. Well, that shouldn't be rewarded. I mean, honestly, now, you could say, well, you know, if you make enough calls, if you do this kind of stuff, things will happen. Well, yeah, to a degree. But I would always ask, is there a better way? Can we do this more effectively? Can we do this more efficiently? Right. Because the bottom line is results. I mean, I use sports analogies. Every podcast. I know, but you know, it's just like, well, coach, you know, we really pushed hard today at the game. I know we're 0 and 20, but we're doing great. It's like, no, you're losing every game. So now again, you may be outmanned or outwoman or whatever the case may be as a team, but wouldn't you as a coach or in this case an agency go, okay, peers were working hard, but maybe we're not working hard on the right things. Right. That's maybe a better way to think about that. So here's something I see with activity based agencies and the mistakes they make is that every year looks about the same. I mean, I see this all the time with agencies that I initially talk to. It's like, well, tell me about your last five years or 10 years. Well, we did this and there may be a couple little things, ups and downs as you go. But it's like every year pretty much is the same. I tell this many times during a keynote or different session I'm doing maybe with a group. I said, sometimes people say that they've got 20 years or 30 years or 40 years of experience. After you talk to them for a while, you go, you know what, I don't know. They really have 20 or 30 or 40 years of experience. They really have one year of experience doing the same thing every single year. Right. So it's just something I would ask you to think about, right where in your life and in your business and whether you're an agency leader who runs the entire agency or maybe you are the sales leader, maybe you're an agency leader, then you do it. You're in production. You've got to really analyze and ask yourself, am I, you know, just busy being busy or am I looking at each week is what are my results? Where does my results based focus need to be? How do I measure, monitor and improve upon my strategies and behaviors to be results focused? So here are just some questions to consider. Just consider as an agency leader. And then I'm going to give you something. One more thing from John Maxwell that I use often in my coaching calls. I think has been very helpful for agencies, but just, just questions to consider for your agency. And you know, in, in our CEO boot camp, in our coaching calls, you know, we, we dive really deep into some of this stuff. But here's just some basic things to think about. As a podcast listener right now in your agency, are you measuring or at least reviewing a stat called tss? Tss? Time spent Selling. You know, one of the biggest issues that we see with producers is simply they're not full time producers, I mean that's a fact, is that, you know, they may make a full time living whatever capacity regards or how they're paid, but they're really part time producers. They, they work maybe 8 to 10 hours at best in some cases of really doing sales and sales related and pipeline activity work. The rest of it is just paper shuffling. Right? And so are you measuring that? You know, we look at with agencies, you know, there's a producer's perfect schedule and there's no perfect. But can we try to attain that? Do we? Here's a second question I'd ask you. So the first question is, are you measuring time spent selling? Which is by far the most important overlooked metric. In fact, just before I go to the next question, if you just understood time spent selling and you began to look at your producers saying how are we investing, not spending, investing our most precious asset time each and every week, are we in sales and pipeline building and relationship management or are we doing emails and who knows what. Right? Because there's paid time and no paid time just by getting focused on that. We've seen agencies have a 25% increase just by measuring, monitoring and looking at the behaviors of time spent selling. So there's question number one. Are you measuring or understanding that as an agency leader? Number two, what's the relationship between sales and service? Are there defined roles and responsibilities? You've heard me talk about this before. But one of the things that we preach and teach and continue to learn and adapt is how to build high performance teams. Sales and service, working together. And I always say we have the same goal, different role, same goal, different roles, Right? And sometimes that's missed. We've got salespeople doing lots of service stuff. Why? Because they're busy, they're avoiding sales stuff. Or maybe they don't trust the service team or, or maybe the service team isn't equipped. Who knows? There could be a number of reasons, but they're doing that and the service team is consistently interrupted, right? On different things and they're kind of getting off track and they're not doing the type of service they should be doing. So do we have defined roles and responsibilities? Probably the first question, and we learned this a lot in some of our training programs initially with new agencies is do they even like each other? Are we having ongoing communications? Because it's pretty hard to have a strong high performance team when not only do you not work together, but you don't like each other. And again, doesn't mean you have to go out and be best friends when you get out of the office or when you get out, you know, through. Through the week or whatever the case may be. But we do have to respect each other, we have to equip each other, we have to empower each other, we have to have conversations with each other. So is the relationship between sales and service good? And then the last thing I would say, this is what gets rewarded for in your agency. Is it results or hysterical activity on the way to the grave that I've talked about what gets rewarded? Because again, if you're not going back to last week and having a plan and just having some type of key performance indicators and not even just the numbers, but what are the behaviors that you as an agency, whatever your role is, lots of different roles. But what are the behaviors that I need to do consistently or that my team needs to do consistently to get the results that we desire? Because if we're just saying, ah, yeah, how I busy. I mean, you ask people how they are now, again, I know with COVID and what's happened over the last five or six months, some of that may have changed, but still you talk to people, ah, so busy, so busy. Busy being busy. Oh, you know how it is out there. It's busy. Crazy world. I mean, just talk to people. You've had those conversations, oh, good for you. Keep out there and keep going at it. Right? But that's not what I want to hear. If I'm the agency leader, I don't care how busy you are. Again, it goes back to what are you doing to generate a result? And not because I'm trying to be difficult. It's because I want the best for you. I want the best for the agency. I want to make sure you're doing the things and helping you do the things that are going to drive a result. Not that you're just busy and frustrated all the time. Right. So just, again, those are some questions that I'd ask you to consider as an agency leader. And the last thing I would share goes Back to the 21 irrefutable laws of leadership. And one of the things I've actually worked with agencies on this, and these are some pretty impactful questions. So here's some more things for you to consider as we wrap up here is John Maxwell has something called the three R's. Right? Three R's. And this will lead a little bit into next session. I'm going to do or the next podcast I'll be doing which is going to be ignoring the power of Pareto. So there's a little tease for you for the next session, next podcast. But the three Rs that John talks about this, there are three questions that you should ask yourself as a leader. Number one is what is required? What is required of me? Right? And there are certain things that are absolutely required for you to do, right? They're the non optional things in your role. Now at some point you might be able to look at some ways to delegate those things, right? That's something I always say for agency leaders. If you're currently wearing 47 hats, can you take a few of them off? What would you need to do? Who are the people you need to position? Right. Whether it's internal, external, outsourced, insource, I don't care what it is. But what are some things you need to do? But there are some things that you have to say, what am I required to do? So that's the first R. What are you required to do? Secondly, and this really gets into what I've been talking about is what gives you, what gives an agency leader the greatest return. You should be a working in areas of strength and we spend a lot of times in productivity understanding a concept from Dan Sullivan called unique, unique abilities. It's just your strength zone, right? I mean just one thing to point out, just talking about producers and service teams is that producers not only are typically really bad at service, but they screw it up, right? So it doesn't give them return for two things. Number one is that they don't make money doing service. They don't make the agency money and profit doing service. And number two is they typically cause more headaches, right? Because they don't do complete and accurate information. So that's just one example. So you have to ask what gives the greatest return? Where am I getting the best return on my time, return on my investment, return on my relationship? So you could call ROI rot ror where are you getting the greatest return? And again we're going to talk a little more about that next week. When it comes to power, Pareto and the last thing I would say is this what brings the greatest reward? See, I'm one of those weird people that I think and I believe with my heart of hearts in agencies and if I do my job, we do our job well at Sitkins, not only can we help agencies have a plan, be more productive, have the right priorities, build the right relationships, have pipelines, points of differentiation, have accountability of culture and cadence that people want to be part of something that's, that's great. That's what we want to do. It's how we help agencies. But you know what I think? I think this profession, this career should be fun. I think you should get great reward from it. I know many of you listening do, but I think it could even be better, right? Call me crazy. A part of that comes back to what I've talked about today. If we're in busyness and we reward activities or we focus on activities and we think activities are accomplishment and we haven't got fine tuned and say, you know, where are we not result based? How do I get there? And part of this goes into then not only the results but what gives me the greatest reward, what do you love to do? And when you get more of a handle on this, you're not only able to spend more of that time and I would say invest right your energy in these situations, but you'll be more productive when you're doing it. That's a pretty cool, pretty cool thing. So again, mistake number two that we see is we were busy as a badge of honor and I would just ask you as an agency leader, as I wrap up, are there areas where busyness has overtaken results focused? Are there areas in your agency where you're in hysterical activity on the way to the grave and what are some of those things that you need to begin to address and look at what are some blind spots that you have that you can focus on to help you be more productive and help you get a greater return. So I wish you all the best. Again, as a, as a Note, go to sitkins.com programs if you want to learn more about any of our upcoming programs. Again I say this, yes, I want people to be in our program. I want Sitkins to be successful. That comes from our heart. But the only way that we can be successful, common sense is is that you're successful. So we want to help as many agency leaders, we want to help as many sales leaders, we want to help as many producers in these programs we have coming up for you to be your best version, get the results in 2020, this crazy year with a little momentum and to go into 2021 and make some serious things happen. So love to help you there. Also, if this podcast is and has added value to you and your life and your business, I would really appreciate a review trying to reach more agency leaders as we move forward. So with that, all the best in your success. Thanks for listening. It.