Episode 242: Taming Your Advice Monster with Michael Bungay Stanier

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. Skucast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

His books have sold about a million copies, including his book The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More, and Change the Way You Forever Lead. He's also the author of The Advice Trap, the book How to Begin: Start Doing Something That Matters, and the book Do More Great Work. And he's the founder of training and development company Box of Crayons. Michael Bungay Stanier is our guest today, and Michael is also our opening keynote at SCUCon held in Las Vegas on January 8th. Today, Mark Graham and I talk with Michael about how to tame your advice monster as a leader and how to transform your leadership by embracing curiosity-driven coaching. And whether you're in a leadership position or simply want to work better with your colleagues, you'll learn some fascinating tactics that you can use now. And speaking of SKUCon, today as I record this on Wednesday, October 5th, we just released the SKUCon schedule and topics for our in-person event. SKUCon is an event experience that sits at the cutting edge of merch life, features talks by tomorrow's leaders, stories from pros in the trenches, and radical thinkers who will push you and your team to dream and grow. The in-person event will be held on Sunday, January 8th at the beautiful Frank Gehry-designed Keep Memory Alive Center in Las Vegas. And a virtual event will be held on Thursday, January 19th. Here are just some of the topics that will be shared at SKUCon. Michael will talk about the 5 Question Leader. Nick Cessaris, Head of Product at PolyIntex, will be speaking on Web3 and NFTs: Fad, Friend, or Foe? Travis Veit and Caleb Gilbertson, founders of Imprint Engine, will share the end-to-end story of Imprint Engine in an interview. And 3 of the industry's top sales leaders, Trina Bicknell, CRO of HPG, Samantha Cates, Chief Sales Officer at Spectre Co., and Holly Brown, CRO at Polyconcept,. We'll talk about CRO secrets to driving sales success. Nathan Bailey, president and founder of Ideation, will join Jeff Becker, CEO of Kodas Design, and Stephanie Taylor, co-founder of Hello Promo, in a panel discussion on the tipping point behind 3 epic success stories. And Ali Delgado with Merchology will share float like a butterfly, merch like a bee. Those are just some of the topics you'll experience at the 1-day event. Now we're already 70% sold out and those remaining tickets will go fast. So register you and your team at skucon.com today. Today's episode is brought to you by Commonsku, the work from anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. To learn more, visit commonsku.com. Now here's our chat where I'm joined by Mark Graham as we talk with our friend Michael Bungay Stanier. Uh, Michael, it is so good to talk to you, and I am thrilled that you are here with yet another elegant shirt, and, uh, we love that. So let's kick this right off and get into so many things Mark and I want to talk about. Um, one of the biggest challenges in our particular business is twofold. One, it's a very, very complex business with lots of moving parts, and many people, if not many people, if not most listening right now, are scaling their business under tremendous pressure of deadlines How do we break out of the instinct of leading by gut in a fast-paced environment and to break out and become an actual intentional coach?

Shifting to being more coach-like as a leader. And I use that language instead of coach because there's a bunch of people when I say, I want you to be a coach, like, I don't want to be a coach. I'm growing a business. I'm head of sales. I'm head of marketing. I'm head of production. I've got a job title. I don't need another job title. And I'm like, Right, we don't want you to take on the coach job title, but we do want you to be more coach-like as an ongoing core leadership behavior. And here's my definition of what that is, and it's simple and difficult. Can you stay curious a little bit longer? Can you rush to action and advice giving a little bit more slowly? And even though I've not met this community yet, what I know to be true is almost everybody here is an advice-giving maniac. They love it, particularly if you're senior in your organization, particularly if you're the CEO or the founder of your organization. You are very confident about how awesome your advice is. And this is probably the real truth. You're very committed to helping the people around you to flourish and do well for their sake and for your sake and for your company's sake as well. But it turns out Advice giving is a bit overrated. Certainly, having advice as your default response is overrated. So, part of the process for becoming more intentional as a leader who is more curious, led by curiosity, is to start noticing how driven by advice you are at the moment. I call this taming your advice monster or that advice monster. Somebody like Bobby starts asking me, she says, Michael, here's what's hard. And about 2 seconds into the conversation, my advice monster kind of looms up out of the dark and goes, oh, this is great. I'm going to add some value to this conversation. Here I go. So for me, it's like, okay, so how do you start building a coaching habit? How do you start noticing that 1 or 2 or 3 good questions just slows down the rush to advice? And I'm not talking slowing it down by a day or a week. I'm like, give it 3 minutes. If you can have a conversation that for 3 minutes is you really figuring out what's really going on, honestly, if you do give advice after 3 minutes, it's going to be better advice than the advice you wanted to give after 15 seconds.

You said something sort of stunning in your TED Talk. You said that when your Advice Monster controls you, what you're really saying is you think you're smarter, better, and faster, and more experienced than the other person you're talking to. And how does a hierarchy of leadership and titles and position get in the way of simply being a good team that listens to one another?

Yeah, it's hard because for a number of reasons. First of all, we've had our whole life, we've been rewarded for being the person with the answer, right? You know, from school and high school and university and in your early career, it's all about know your stuff, know your stuff, stick up your hand, provide the answer. So it's shifting some very deep learning, deep habits that we have. And then in many organizations, hierarchy really casts a shadow, which is like, you know what, this person's there and I'm here. They're literally one up from me. So, they're probably smarter, wiser, better than me. So, I will defer to their wisdom. But I think it's never been clearer that we need to be flexible. We need to be more agile. We need to use all of the capacity and the potential we have in our organizations. And if you work on a traditional hierarchy, what you're doing is you're just establishing bottlenecks. And you're working on the assumption that just because you're old and have gray hair, like the three of us, that you actually know something. And if you're really smart, the older you get, the more you realize how little you actually know. That's certainly true for me. I'm like, turns out almost nothing that I thought I knew, I actually actually know, right? So part of the power of curiosity is, um, A, you're enabling the very best of everybody in your organization to come forth, which makes you— puts less burden on you to carry the weight. But it also means that when you've heard all of their ideas and you understand the smart stuff they've come up with, you understand where you really can add value because you can bet they haven't thought of everything. And you've got some stories and some experience and some ideas that might be helpful to share.

Michael, as you talk about the Advice Monster, I can hear or almost envision all of our listeners or most of our listeners going, "Yep, that's me. I've got the Advice Monster. And that defines a lot of the meetings that I have with my peers, whether they're direct reports or whatever the case may be." And What do you say to someone who lets the Advice Monster come out and they may think it's actually helpful and healthy? How do you get that person to move away from that slowly but surely almost to get rid of that habit when the person they're coaching, the person they're managing might be totally fine with the Advice Monster mentality? And that's a major almost jarring shift once you change.

So some thoughts on that. Well, it's true that it's very easy to collude in this way of doing things, you know, which is like, this is great. Because honestly, if you're the person who's been given advice the whole time, you're like, it's fantastic. I've trained my boss to do all the work for me. They're responsible for all the ideas, which means that when it doesn't work, it's their fault. It's not really my fault. And if it does work, they probably would have taken all the credit anyway. So you know what, I'll just follow orders and it's easier like that. And, uh, you know, there's a phenomenon that we're seeing in the news right now is this idea of quiet quitting where people are like, you know what, I'm just, I'm just going to throttle back and do the bare minimum that I'm not going to get fired, but I'm not going to really stretch and grow and try and contribute as fully as I might. The question I would ask kind of both parties is what's the price that's being paid here? For this particular dynamic. And ask the person who's giving the advice, it's like, what's the price you pay for you having to be the person with the advice all the time? What's the, you know, I can talk about every choice you make as prizes and punishments. I'm like, let's talk about the punishments of this decision or this habit. What's the punishment to you, the cost to you? It's exhausting, it's frustrating, it's irritating. Sometimes you're like, come on, people, why can't you figure this out yourself? You become the bottleneck. And so there's a price the other person pays, which is like, it's disempowering. None of my ideas are any good. So I'll just assume none of my ideas are any good, which means I assume I'm kind of not any good. And then the organization pays a price as well, which is like, we're not getting the best ideas. We're not getting the full potential. Now, the prize of being the advice giver is you feel like you're the big person in the room. You feel like you're still, you still got it, even if you've got gray hair and you're feeling a bit old and fragile and creaky. Uh, you're feeling in control, you're feeling like you're a guru. So there's a bunch of kind of short-term ego-stroking wins, but if you start weighing it up, you can understand that there's a, there's a longer-term cost to that. And if you're happy with that, then just keep giving advice. But if you're thinking, I want to scale my company, then this current behavior, it will not stand.

Michael, on this point, in your book, The Coaching Habit, something that really helped me is you wrote about how often problems will come to us emotionally, and that's why we suddenly kick into advice mode, right? We're trying to help. We're actually trying to come in on the white horse and save someone, right? We're trying to be of assistance here. But you have a unique way to break down any problem, regardless of the intensity of the moment, and that was project, people, and patterns. Can you talk a little bit about that framework and how that sort of helps you get in the right mindset in a conversation with either a colleague or a boss?

The most powerful question to help people figure out what's going on and to help you figure out what's going on because you should work on your starting assumption is like the thing that we all think is the challenge probably isn't the challenge. The presenting challenge is almost never the real challenge. So, it's just good to know that, which is like, don't get seduced by the first thing that's showing up. It's really tempting because it feels real and you can feel you can be helpful and it feels like they mentioned it. So, it must be true. It's not true. It's just the first thing they said, not the real thing that they said. So the question I think is really powerful, it's called the focus question in The Coaching Habit book, is, so what's the real challenge here for you? Part of the power of that is to say, look, if we're going to invest time and effort and money to solve something, let's solve the right things, not the first things. And what's the real challenge here for you is a question that starts slowing down the rush to figure out what's the most essential thing for us to figure out here. And if you can be, and if you can build a team that's really good at figuring out what the real problem is, that is a significant competitive advantage because all your competitors are just busy working on the first things that show up rather than the real things that show up. So you're building strategic capacity and strategic focus with Then when you're kind of getting clear on what the real challenge is, it's often a mix of these three things: projects, people, and patterns. And any challenge is going to have a mix of those three things, but each challenge will have a different weighting. Project is the stuff that needs to get done. So, it's the kind of the work that's required. People are all those other people involved in trying to get the work done because there's always other people involved. Your boss, your team, your colleagues, the vendor, the client. Honestly, life would be so much easier if there weren't all these nightmare people involved, but they're always involved. Some of them are good relationships. Some of them are okay relationships. Some of them are troublesome relationships. And it might be that your challenge is around managing, tweaking one of those working relationships. And then the third element is you, your patterns, the way you show up, the way you collude, the way you you kind of sneakily undermine the very thing that you're trying to achieve. We've all got patterns of behavior that are frustrating. We're trying to rise above and we kind of get kidnapped by our own patterns of behavior at times. So, it's just helpful to say, what's the real challenge here for you? Is it the thing you're working on? Is it the people you're working with? Or is it in some way how you're showing up as a leader or as a contributor?

I like how you let your colleague lead to that kind of conversation by giving that framework, by saying, what do you want to talk about right now? What's the most important thing? Is it people involved in this challenge, or is the— is it the project, or is it your own patterns of work and, and how you're doing things? Because it just sort of— it's just de-threatens everything, right? It just calms it down.

Well, more fundamentally than, than just calming it down, although that's part of it for sure, One of my key principles of being more coach-like, and this will make people raise their eyebrows, is to be lazy. But I've got 3 principles. Be lazy, be curious, be often. This is the 3 principles I had to be more coach-like. Being lazy is the most provocative of these 3, which is like, stop working so hard to fix everybody else's problems for them. It's exhausting for you and it's irritating for them. So just stop working so hard to figure this out. Ask the question and let them figure it out. A, they feel more empowered. B, they get smarter. C, you don't take on the work for them. Being curious, we've been talking about, which is like, so how do you get better at taming your advice monster? And then the most radical of the three principles is to be often, which is to say every single interaction with somebody can be more coach-like because in every interaction, you can stay curious a little bit longer. So whether that's a coaching session or just a weekly meeting or an email or a Slack or a text or walking to the car park or grabbing a coffee or strolling the corridors or hanging out at StuCon in Vegas, any of those things can be more coach-like because you're just going, hey, so what is the real challenge here for you?

I love the open-ended nature of that. Go ahead, Marc.

No, I was going to say that it's It's so clear that there's a difference between being a manager and a coach. And maybe this is a question actually, Michael. I mean, that's my interpretation of it, that I think we're an industry of managers and people manage their salespeople, they manage their colleagues, they manage whatever the case may be. It almost feels like there's a rather kind of clinical approach to management, which is you just kind of need to get it done. Whereas if we incorporate, and not to say that we don't want to get it done, like it's clear we're in a business of getting stuff done each and every day and we need to be efficient about that. But by adding this coaching layer, it's almost adding, it's threading in some empathy and threading in this, you called it laziness. So, I kind of love that you called it that, but this notion of of establishing a more equal partnership between you and the person that you're managing. And I think it's what— so that's what I take from what you just mentioned. I don't know if I've twisted it. But that's, as a manager myself, that's what I'm taking from your comments.

Well, let me respond to your comment. I think it is or can be about empathy. But it might not have to be about empathy. What I think it is about is coaching makes your organization people-centric. And if you say to yourself, I just can't get stuff done without really great people, I need to keep really good people, I need to bring out their best, and I need to have them working on the stuff that really matters, then coaching is one style of leadership. It's not the only style. I mean, Daniel Goleman 20 years ago wrote an article on Harvard Business Review called A leadership that gets results. And he said, look, 6 different styles of leadership. Great leaders use all 6 at the appropriate time. Each style has its pros and cons. Each style has the context in which it most flourishes. And Goldman, even 20 years ago, said, look, coaching, significant impact on culture, significant impact on engagement, significant impact on profitability and the bottom line, and the least used of the leadership styles because 'Who has time for that? It takes too much time.' And I'm like, 'Exactly.' So my belief and what I tend to teach is like, let me show you how you can coach in 10 minutes or less. Let me show you how you can coach in a way that's not additive to all the things you're currently doing. Because if I say to everybody at SKUCon, 'All right, I'm going to show you something. You just have to add this onto all of the things you're currently doing,' everybody will go, Thank you, but no, because you have no idea how many emails I've got just by being in 2 days at SCUCon. I'm like, I'm already behind. I've got so much to do. Adding to what I'm already doing is impossible. But if I'm saying, look, being more coach-like is transforming what you currently do. So there's a little more curiosity in there. And what that will actually allow you to do is to work less hard, but have more impact. In the work that you do, then it becomes interesting. And the shift in that is just to say, I just can't do this without really good people. If I've got really good people being their best, that's my culture. And if they're focused on the work that matters, that's us executing the strategy. And coaching is just a key. It's not some woo-woo HR, let's all feel good about ourselves and pretend we're Californian stuff. This is just a hard-nosed business tool to grow your, strengthen your culture and execute your strategy.

You sort of answered my question there because I had a question about how, a phrase I love that you use, a coach focuses on long-term improvement over winning. And I was curious how that squared in a fast-paced environment that's all about winning and how do we keep score and not by, you know, the difference between personal development, developing people and then following through with your strategic plan to win. I think you answered that question.

Yeah. I mean, you can't not win. I mean, like if you're like, look, we're fully expressed as people and we've been losing money every quarter for the last 5 years, you're going to be a broke, fully expressed person. So that doesn't work. You still, I mean, the reason you have a strategy is to, well, you can pick your metaphor, but let's go with Blue Ocean Strategy, which is like you're trying to find a space where you're different. And there's a really good margin and you're really profitable and you're serving the best possible customers and you're making the world a bit of a better place. That's a great strategy and you want to deliver on that. There's no, what's it, somebody said this, I've forgotten the exact phrase, but effectively they said there's no mission without profitability. You got to deliver, you got to have a business that is a good business model that makes sense. But for almost everybody, they're like, to make our business model really thrive, we need to have the best people doing the best they can. And I can't be the bottleneck to it. My guess is a lot of people are the bottleneck to the brilliance of their own team.

So, Michael, this is so fascinating, these insights around the coaching mentality. And I know that people listening to this are nodding their heads. The people who are listening to this podcast, are not only managers, but they're also primarily salespeople, whether they're salesperson owners or they're sales executives or account people. And the promotional products industry is really around sales excellence. And when I hear what you're talking about, I also, I put my salesperson hat on and I think that so much of this coaching methodology and this framework that you're talking about applies to next-level sales. That's my view, but I wanted to get your perspective as to how effectively that translates into growing significant sales by being more coach-like.

Well, I've been an average salesperson in my time, and if I've had any success as a salesperson, it's because I'm pretty good at being curious. And I certainly know that the courses that my company Box of Crayons teach, they're often in sales enablement and framed within that. Because if there's just one generic thing that salespeople tend to do that doesn't work is they start selling too soon. They're like, I don't know what your problem is, but I have the answer for it. And it happens to be the thing in my bag. What a coincidence. I've got a hammer and the problem is you need a nail that's knocked in. I haven't even listened to a thing you've said. I just know my hammer is your solution. And so, being more curious does a few things. It helps kind of most tactically, it helps you and them get really clear about what their challenge is so that you can then serve up a solution that you can frame in a way that this is the medicine you've been looking for. Now you've articulated your pain. I have the medicine you want. Or you get to go, I understand your pain. I don't have the medicine you want. So I'm not going to try and sell you something because I actually want a longer-term relationship with you. So I'm not going to just sell you anything for the sake of it. But you should go talk to Mark or Bobby or whoever, because they might be the person that you're looking for for this particular order, this particular And what that's pointing to is that it's very easy in a sales conversation to have it be transactional. I'm looking for the deal. You're looking for the merch. Can we just trade?

Make it happen.

We all know that it's easier to keep selling to people who are already customers. And if the merchandising sector is one where there's a degree of transactionality to it, and I'm sure it is among the trash and trinkets end for sure, but maybe a bit less so at the end that the people listening to this will be playing at. If you're looking to differentiate yourself because of the relationship you have, being more coach-like, helping them figure out the problem they have, helping make— having a degree of integrity about the solution you sell them gives you a better chance of building a relationship, which gives them a better chance of being a recurring customer, which makes it a better chance that you'll get better sales. I, I— there's a bunch of the questions I teach I know work in sales conversations all the time, but even if you ignore any questions that I've got to offer up and you go the mantra for me as a salesperson is to stay curious a little bit longer and rush to action and advice giving and solution providing a little bit more slowly, then that's probably going to be a win.

So, so Michael, thank you so much for that. I think that my quick insight, uh, given my former distributor days, is whenever we had any success in growing our company, it was not by landing new clients. It was all about expanding the share of wallet with our existing customers. And we had to remind ourselves of that constantly because new customers are the Shiny tool, transaction sales, adrenaline hit.

Exactly.

Whereas going to that existing customer, that bank—

You hit a gong every time you get a new customer. You're like, "Gong! It's a legend!" And you're like, if you're like, "This person who I've been serving for 5 years has kind of said they're going to be with me for the next 10 years." You need a bigger gong, quite frankly, for that.

I want to add one thing for listeners to know that lucky for you, not only are we going to be able to see Michael at SCUCon on January 8th, but his book, The Coaching Habit, actually lines out these 7 essential questions and they are vital. And Mark, just as an example you'll get a kick out of, is that the, the one of the most important questions is one of the last. We won't give them all away in this chat, but one of the most important questions was the last question. In talking with a client. Now, Mark, think of your selling days where you just closed a big deal with a customer. The most important question, the last one, is what was the most useful to you out of these solutions, or why was this important to you? Why did you choose this solution, and why was it important? When you think about it, you're letting that VP step back and go, because this is about engaging our audience in a different way that we've ever done, or whatever it is. But you're going to get some, like, intel that's really going to help you in your next in your next conversation with the customer. But the thing I love the most though is how Mark, you've opened up this conversation about how this can approach. We've talked about being consultants forever and we don't have any actionable tactical ways to do that. Here are 7 questions that can actually help you do that every time you go into a sale.

And you know, when you, the power of that question, so what was most useful or valuable about this here for you? It's kind of sneaky on a couple of different levels. You know, when you ask it, let's say you ask it in a sales context. So what was most helpful about this conversation? I'm kind of keeping it broader than what was most useful about the solution. And so what's most helpful about this conversation? Yeah. First thing you're doing is you're not saying, was this a useful conversation? You're saying, oh, this was a useful conversation. What was most useful for you? Right. So now they're like, every time I talk to Bobby, I seem to have a useful conversation because I primed them. To actually think that, like, you know, they've literally told me at the end of every single thing what was useful. Secondly, they then sell to themselves about the value of the solution and the value of the conversation. They're like, that was really useful. I should do this again sometime. And then the other way that this is helpful is that you now get feedback about what was helpful for you. And that then refines your language for them the next time or for your next call or your next customer or whatever it might be. So, you've got kind of like a testimonial, like, you know, just the other day I was saying to somebody what was most useful about this and this is exactly what they told me and maybe this will be something that will be useful for you too. So, it embeds the value of you in their brain and it gives you nuance to understand what's happening in the conversation. Otherwise, you can make it up. You know, we've all had, I just say one other thing, you know, we've all had conversations, whether they're sales conversations or other ones. Sometimes you're like, that was amazing. I was extraordinary in that conversation. And then you find out that it made no impact on that other person at all. And you're like, what the hell? And then you have other conversations where you're like, what a disaster. I mean, I just couldn't say the right thing. It was a mess. And then you find out actually that it was some earth-shattering thing for them. So it actually helps you calibrate the value of your own So, I sort of—

this is going to take us a little off topic, but the reason why I'm asking it is because this is— we're approaching September. We're approaching those cold fall/winter months where everybody's going to start turning their eyes toward next year and next year's planning. And your book, How to Begin, which is— I'm here. I'm not just like— I'm not here to sell Michael today, folks, I promise you. But I've just sort of been immersed in his work here lately. In your book, How to Begin: Start Doing Something That Matters, is all about goal setting. And a couple of questions that were really— first of all, you have a beautiful illustration, a form really for filling out a chart that talks about important, daunting, and thrilling goals. And you talk about scaling and that you have this spectrum that shows you how to scale. So one of the things I know our audience really struggles with is that there are salespeople who have— there are leaders who have emerged from a salesperson's role. They know how to set individual goals. Yeah. But this is a big question, but speaking of scale, how do we create alignment among all the areas of business around a goal when an organization is trying to set goals for the organization? And they want, you know, some, one department might find this goal thrilling, the other might not. How do you emerge from that salesperson role to a leader and set goals that are actually inspiring to everybody? I asked a million-dollar question that you wrote a whole book about, but, well, yeah, I wanted to see what you thought.

The first thing is just to say this is hard. This is really hard to do. And I think the driving force is, are people creating goals in service of the organization? Or are they creating goals in service of their small part of the organization or for themselves? And where alignment doesn't happen is where people are kind of protecting their own turf. Like this is my space and my goal and mine, like Gollum, you're like my precious, precious goal. It's only when there's a kind of alignment around a shared vision around the impact we're going to have that conversations can happen about what are we going to say yes to and what are we going to say no to? Because there's a limited capacity, limited money and time and resource. So, you can't do all the things that you want to do. For you to have the impact you want to have as an organization, it's like, how do we play together well? And what are the prizes and punishments of the choices that we make around that? So, I think it involves foundationally about finding alignment and clarity around the bigger goal. So, there's like, this isn't— you're in thrilling, important, daunting. Thrilling means it gets you excited. And that's typically where we want to go to, which is like, I want this sales goal or I want this development goal or whatever it might be. But important is about how does this best contribute to the bigger picture? And in the context of our organizational life, it's like we've got 3 or 2 or 1 key strategic objectives. What's the connection? What's the line of sight between this and the key objective. And in many ways, the discipline is whatever you've come up to, cut it by 40%. Because if you're like every entire organization in the world, as far as I can tell, it's like, let's, you know, what's hard, what's hard is saying no. So why don't we say yes to too many things and then just have a disappointing attempt at trying to deliver too many things. You're like, If you're really brave, you just ruthlessly cut and you're just like, you know what? We just can't do it all. Some stuff has to be broken. Some stuff has to burn because we've got really clear about the 2 or 3 big bets that we're going to place.

Yeah, I love that. It's like a slash and burn technique for growing, right? You've got to burn some stuff so you can create fresh ground, fresh turf. All right, we've got less than 5 minutes, Mark. I'll let you ask the last question here.

Michael, what's been the most useful part of this conversation to you?

Well, I'll answer that, but let me flip it to you first, Marc, which is like, what did you find most useful in this? This is, by the way, if you're listening, a classic coaching move.

That's classic.

Right. Classic. So, first of all, I said I'm going to answer it. So, I'm like, I didn't dodge it. I just dodged it for a little. I'm just staying curious a little bit longer. So I'm like, and then I ask it because once I hear what was most useful for Mark and Bobby, then I get to build on that rather than kind of lay the first brick. So this is me being lazy. I'm role modeling laziness right in front of your ears and eyes.

Great. I like it. A master jiu-jitsu move there, Michael.

I appreciate it. Right, exactly.

But I appreciate you asking it. I think for me, the notion of the advice monster delivering manager being the bottleneck to building a great team and being the bottleneck to growth and how it is that it comes from a great place, particularly from a founder, but has unintended consequences. That to me has been the most impactful.

How about you, Bobby? What struck a chord?

I think just the last part of our conversation there where you talked about the weight on importance and making sure that your goals hit that as well. It can be thrilling to you, but it may not be important at all to the overall organization. That was helpful to me. And this last bit that we talked about is a lot I've been thinking about lately with limited resources. What are we going to stop doing? I know that's kind of basic and 101, but I think what happens, especially in a sales world, is you accumulate these things without making the hard decision. The harder decision is not to go do this goal. The harder decision is to stop doing this other thing.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, so often when we've got too much, we try and first of all, we just try and do everything 10% faster. If I just speed up, maybe I can squeeze it all in. Right. And then what we do is we shave, but we're like, maybe I'll just cut 10% off the work or the quality or the something on this project. And maybe that will work. And I think in the end, you come to the realization is that you got to cut something. You got to kill off something you care about so that you're like, I've now got the right space for the work that matters the most.

Yeah, not trim, kill.

Yeah, it's like kill it off. You're like, it's not speed, it's not shave, it's cut. What do we need to cut?

All right, we'll let you answer, Michael.

For me, it's always helpful for me when I'm talking about what am I saying no to as well. Because I'm just, in a week, a couple of weeks' time, sitting down with my small team. And we're going to be looking at all the stuff that's on people's plates, and we have too much on our plate. So, I'm like, why don't I practice what I preach? So, it's helpful for me to say some of the stuff out loud so I can have a think about what do we need to let go of.

That's awesome. Michael, it has been an honor talking with you, my friend. And I know I mentioned it earlier, but we will see you in Vegas on January 8th. We cannot wait. I assure you, Michael will be bringing his best shirt forward. Um, but we're honored to have you.

I got— I got married by Elvis in Vegas 15 years ago, so I'm like— it'd be like revisiting my stamp.

There we go. Special times. Special times.

Love it. Thank you so much, Michael. This is a great pleasure.

Yeah, my pleasure.

Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of SKU Cast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SKU Cast on iTunes or to our blog at community.commsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.

Mm-hmm.