How Do You Build Capacity In Your Teams? (feat. Bob Glazer)

Foreign hi, I'm Susan Drum and welcome to the Enlightened Executive where your personal evolution sparks your leadership evolution. Each episode we feature groundbreaking techniques and strategies to help you get the edge in personal and leadership effectiveness. And this episode is brought to you by Meritage Leadership. At Meritage, we strengthen leaders and empower teams to achieve high performance. Go to meritageleadership.com to learn more. Today we're talking about capacity building within your team and I am happy to introduce Bob Glazer. Bob is a serial entrepreneur, award winning executive, bestselling author and keynote speaker. He has a passion for helping individuals and organizations build their capacity and elevate their performance. He is the founder and chairman of a global marketing agency, Acceleration Partners, and shares his ideas and insights via Friday Forward, a popular weekly inspirational newsletter that reaches more than 300,000 individuals. He's a number one Wall Street Journal and USA Today International best selling author of five books including the one just published, Elevate your team. So welcome Bob. I'm excited to talk about your new book and I'm so glad to have you here.

Thanks Susan. Happy to be here.

Tell me a bit about what causes someone to write five books. That's quite an accomplishment. Why did you decide to write Elevate youe Team?

Well, I talk about that a little bit in the beginning of the book. It was sort of a genius idiot epiphany that I talk about in terms of we were kind of struggling. I had written the book Elevate. I had sort of laid out this capacity building framework as a personal development tool. And we were struggling with some growth things, as a lot of companies do. And I realized that the answer I sort of needed to figure out why certain things were working and wasn't working was the same kind of framework. And when I thought about it, we were kind of doing some of it but not doing other pieces of it. And we kind of went all in on that. And it's become again, kind of our recipe for, I think, more sustainable growth in our organization over the years.

That's awesome. So you have firsthand experience and you wrote about your own experience. Share with others.

Yes. It's not academic paper. Yeah. You know, my last book was on virtual teams and that got written because I got so frustrated when Covid started and we had been virtual for over 12 years at that point. And all these people and academics were writing about this who had absolutely no direct experience doing this, dealing with it. Yes. And so I was like, let me share what's actually worked and not worked Over a decade of doing this.

Right, right. So you talk about in the book four different types of capacity building, Four elements, I would say. Tell me more about that. What is that?

Yeah, and I first divine them, defined them in my book. Elevate, kind of spiritual capacity is understanding who you are, what you want most in the standards you want to live by each day. It's not religious. For most of us, that's our core values and the things that we do really well. Intellectual capacity is how you improve your ability to think, plan, learn, execute with discipline. To me, this is your personal operating system. This is why your listeners are on here. Hey, can I take in a nugget of something? Can I get better at it? Can I apply it to my life or my business? Physical capacity is our health, wellbeing and physical performance. And then emotional capacity is how we react to challenging situations, our emotional mindset, and kind of the quality of relationships or the company that we keep. So there's a little bit of a different application to the individual as there is to the, the organization or team. But basically, I think this is the formula for how we get better, like in a very simple way, and how we grow our ability to do things that we haven't done before. And they're super interconnected. These four things, like kind of like if it was a ball rolling down the hill, they kind of grow together and it gets bigger. If one of these things grew and the other shrunk, your ball is going to fly all over the place. So they're never personally in sync, but when you see a real top performer, they have all of these things really working in their favor.

Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I love this definition that the leadership circle promotes, which is leadership is the ability to build capacity and capabilities within the organization. That is your job as a leader.

Right. You can grow the people to meet your needs, or you can get new people. Right. Those are the choices as your business grows. And any leader who is leading a business for the first time or certain growth business, like, they don't know how to do that next job, so they have to make that decision. How do I add the capacity to do that next job? Or I don't. Right. Or I don't and stay, or I don't and leave. I'm not sure which one's, which one's worse in that case.

Well, I wonder if there's a misperception about that idea of capacity building, because we're not really talking about how do we just dump more work on our people and make sure that they can handle it. You know, work, work more, essentially.

Yeah. It's not more. And it actually is very holistic. Like, look, this is what you do for a living. You know this. There is not someone who, if I am Bob the employee and I suck at time management, I'm bad with financial management, I get little sleep and I'm cranky. It's not like I walk into the office and I'm good at those things. Right. I think a lot of these things are holistic. Like how did the person learn skills, habits, routines, things that make them better overall? I think the company gets a benefit from that. But I think the person as a partner, as a child, as a parent, like, they actually should see improvement in all of these things. Like if you're learning how to deal with communication where you have a problem confronting difficult situations, you probably have that problem in your whole life. But you can't be a good leader without learning how to have difficult conversations. So that was our approach. Like, let's go all in on this. Let's talk about what does a good morning routine look like, what do healthy behaviors look like and not look like. And this was all before for most companies where people, I always say there was no difference to the person at home and coming in the office. Now there is no office. A lot of times they're just logging on. So clearly it's the same person with the same habits. And to your point, and particularly around intellectual capacity, where it's the operating system, a better operating system runs a task more efficiently and with less energy. Right back to that. I have to have a difficult conversation tomorrow. I'm a new manager, I've never done it before. I lose four nights of sleep. I'm like stressed all day. If I know how to have those conversations, if I have a framework or all that stuff, none of that happens to me. Right. It becomes a 30 minute thing that I just do and not an eight hour preamble beforehand.

And there's a bit of getting experience under your belt too, right? I know I can do it, but at least I know how I'm going to approach it. And I also think it's that internal operating system that's going on. What are you making this conversation mean? The difficult conversation about you and have you been able to deal with some of the internal landscape to be able to handle what could potentially the result that could come back at you?

Yeah. Like if you're overwhelmed, do you understand prioritization? Do you understand urgent, important? Do you understand how to let the not important things go right. None of capacity building is about doing more. For a lot of people, it's 80, 20, cutting out stuff, figuring out the stuff that matters. It's not a volume game.

And so what do you think is unique about your approach to capacity building?

Yeah, I think that from a leadership standpoint and in the context of this book, I don't think you hear a lot of people talking about let's focus on making the person better, not let's focus on making them a better employee at the job they are at today. And my experience a lot in growth companies. And so one of the reasons why it's so important in a growth company is because whatever you're doing today is probably not what you're going to be doing tomorrow. You know, that, that, that sort of expires pretty quickly. We need the people to sort of rise along. So when I'm talking about things like let your people go home and restore some boundaries between work and home and all these things, I'm not just saying this out of the goodness of my heart. Like I think the performance will be better if the people aren't exhausted, if they have some things outside of work that energize them if they come to work energized. Like, I hate the term win win. I don't mean, I don't know, mutually beneficial outcomes. I just think there are a lot of where there's improvement on both sides of the, of the spectrum if and there is a win win to be had.

Yeah. And I think that sometimes that stems from narrowing the scorecard by which you're measuring success. If you're measuring success as, yeah, my business growth is 20% or 80% year over year. But I also didn't measure. And what potential amount of my team or percentage of my team did I, you know, retain and how are they feeling? Right. There's a whole nother stakeholder that matters, not just that one scorecard. And yet I think leaders get very myopic about what does the definition of winning look like.

Yeah. And we've also had this period that the problem is if you've been in the workforce for the last 10 years and you're 30 years old or 35, you might think it's normal. Historically, it's an aberration in terms of this free money growth at all costs, don't need to make any money kind of phase to what you just said. A lot of times it's like, hey, it's all about the goal, irrespective of the consequences. I like to say if NASA sent a rocket to Mars and it reached Mars and all the astronauts were dead, no one was going to celebrate that. That was an incredible achievement. But it almost seems like some companies have celebrated getting to this goal that just caused like half the team to not be alive for the journey. I don't know. That's just not the type of business I wanted to grow. It just becomes a very hollow goal and probably not a sustainable one.

Yeah, for sure. Well, let's delve into these four different ways to build capacity related to team and give us some specific things that leaders could start doing tomorrow that would make a difference.

Yeah, I'll take two opposite ends of the spectrum. I like to start with spiritual because I think it is the foundation for most people. We help our leaders discover their personal core values like why are you doing that? And their strengths and the things they're good at. Because if you think about a Jim Collins Level 4, Level 5 leader that has to come from a place of authenticity and self awareness. There is no manual that says here's a level five leader. They all look like this. These people are incredibly self aware. They're leading from their values. They're saying, look, this is why you'll love working for me. This is why you'll hate working for me. And it's the same thing. So trying to help people actually understand who they are and what they're good at and lean into that from their leadership style and own that more practically. If I jump to something like physical, we need to restore boundaries in the workplace. So if I'm the CEO of the company and it's not what we say, it's what we do. Right. I mean this has been my learning as a parent too. People respond much more to what I do than what I say. My out of office says, hey team, I'm going away with my family this week on vacation, but here's my sell and email and slack. If you need to reach me, let me know I'm an available any time of day for you. Like that sends a clear signal to the company that you are expected on vacation to be available. Conversely, if you do what another leader I saw did and said, I'm going on vacation with my family, this is really important time for me. If it's a real emergency, you can text my wife and she'll get in touch with me and or you can email me@interruptmyvacationomanyname.com right. So this actually sends a message to the company that if family is important, the Vacation's a vacation time. Another super simple thing to do. I know a lot of us, my kids were younger, I'd kind of get through all my backlog emails at 8am on a Saturday morning while everyone's asleep. The problem is, as the CEO of a company, other people see a note from me on a weekend and they feel a need to reply. I just started five years ago using delayed delivery for any email that I send that's not important out of sort of normal hours. People really appreciate that. I also could be sound asleep on a Monday morning and I look like I'm really productive as emails start going out at 8 o'. Clock. But again, someone was telling me they're always on their email at 11 o'.

Clock.

Why? Because their boss is always emailing them at 11 o' clock and then they don't sleep. None of these things are important, as you said before. Like what are the two to three really important things we need to do? Are we looking at the data on that? Are we rallying around that? And let's give everyone some space. So those are a couple examples. I think if everyone did another one, one more emotional capacity. If you want to increase psychological safety and vulnerability on teams, just in team meetings or weekly meetings, start with a personal anecdote or how it went or higher low from the week or you kind of pick up some information about what's going on in people's lives and you might find out the low was, oh, I just found out my mother in law is really sick and now I understand why you're a little, not 100% engaged today. I thought you didn't like the topic. Turns out you're really worried about your mother in law. I think there's a lot more opportunity to just like get out of transactional mode and introduce some more kind of relationship building tools.

Yeah, I could not agree more on our team meetings. Every meeting we start with some question that sometimes the team members decide on and sometimes I'll come up with a question and it's a question both to check in, how you doing? You know, how's the weather in your world? And it's also a question to get a chance to share that we do live holistic lives. It might be something as simple as what was the best thing that happened this weekend and what's keeping you up at night.

Yeah, that's my favorite combo. Also when you're doing one on ones, how you doing? How's it going a lot of times? Oh, not great or you know, I talked to Someone last week who's dealing with some rough stuff with an ex and kids. And that was what we talked about for the first 10 minutes, you know. And I'll check in with them again on the next week. Did that get any better again? Gives you a temperature stick for where people are.

Yeah. And in order to get an authentic response to that, because sometimes you might get. Yeah, doing good. Yeah, great. Like they don't want you to see in is to share something about. Here's what's going on for me and here's something that I'm struggling with. How about you? So.

And this person I think felt comfortable tell me about this. Because I had shared. There's like a bad divorce going on in my family. And so they check in with me on it. I check in on them. Yes, exactly what you're saying. The leader always models the behavior. When we used to do what our quarterly team would get together, we would say, what's something you really screwed up this quarter? And you want to mulligate. Right. And the leader always goes first. It sets the tone for everyone.

What's great about that is also the opportunity to look back and say, what do we have to learn from this? And it's okay to learn from failures.

Yeah, no one's perfect. We don't get anything right. And we have a big thing in our culture. Failure is great, but like we're all about excel and improve. What can we learn from it? What can we fix? Like repeating the same mistake. Not okay.

Yeah. But I also find teams are always on to the next thing. There's never a post mortem, like what actually worked well with that project and what do we need to do differently? They don't even take the time to do that. They just go on to the next thing. And yet if you keep doing what you're doing, you're going to keep getting what you're getting. So where is the timeout?

The old definition of insanity.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Let's take a step back. And even a football team, they stop and they watch the replays and they look at. But I feel like the way we're running business right now is we're just constantly going at it on the field.

I know 50% of the people hate sports analogies, but actually think in leadership there is no more relevant thing into what you said.

Yeah.

In sports you practice it all week before you do it in the game, you review it the next time. The one I've always found is really interesting. Well, a couple other ones I'll just throw Them in here. The no player comes in and was like, look, I got my own style. Your playbook, not that interested in it. Like that doesn't happen. And the biggest one for me is that a coach cannot step on the field. Right. How many times in leadership you try to teach and you get really frustrated and you jump in, you save the call, you do the thing, you take over the thing. No coach in any sport walks onto the field and does anything. They have to figure out how to stay on the sideline.

So you talk a lot about building the path forward for your team. What's involved in that?

Yeah, if you do all of these things in the book, hopefully you'll have this ascending team that's getting better and better and then you better not have glass ceilings or they'll go lead all your competitors, companies. So talk about how to really think about having a meritocracy, how to open that up, how to put the best person in the role. And I use another one of these sports analogies in the book. So in 2003 it was the Patriots had just signed this quarterback, Drew Bledsoe, the largest contract NFL history. He's the poster boy of the franchise. He gets hurt in game three. This lanky six round draft pick comes in and plays for seven games for him. And Bill Belichick, the coach of the Patriots, has always believed best person on the field. He has no legacy to what you were drafted, what you were paid, like no sunk cost fallacy. And after six games, Drew Bledsoe comes back ready to take his job. And Bill Gibel said, you know what? I think we're going to go. This Tom Brady guy, he's playing really well. And it's always interesting to me, had he not been willing to do that, who knows if we would know who Tom Brady was today. And I think a lot of people do that in the management world where like they know Susan is better than the person there now, but they're just afraid to open that up or make that change or otherwise.

Yeah. And I think they're not always measuring the right things. Again, both in terms of the business performance, but in terms of the employee performance. The example I just heard is how a lot of employers are using time in front of a screen to measure productivity. And so now we've gotten wise to it with AI and AI will actually there's things that will move your cursor to show like you're working. And if you've got a measure of success or a performance metric, is this person productive? Because they're staring at their screen. You can no longer use that as the metric. You're going to have to actually look at what is the performance driven metrics that make the difference.

Yeah, you're pitching the choir. I have a slide on this. It shows where it says doing the screen monitoring. And the number one seller on Amazon is a mouse mover. And I'm like, whatever game you're playing, you're losing. Yeah. I said this in my virtual book. I said it now. And this has been the hardest thing I think for leaders transitioning the environment. You need to move to outcome management. Not input in management is time working butts in seat. See this person in the office again. Great companies, we have two or three priorities. Here are the 10 key metrics. We're going to measure these every week. Here are the outcomes. If you want to go to soccer practice with your kid at 4 o', clock, I don't give a crap. Is it green or is it orange or is it red? And you're measuring those every week. So yeah, this is also part of the 8020 rule. Like let's measure outcomes. I use the example of Marissa Meyer at Yahoo is sort of a negative case study in the book. Someone who just came in workaholic, 100 hour week bragging to press about 130 hour week builds a nursery in her office. Destroys so much shareholder value. 52 acquisitions that were worthless. Just such a focus on getting stuff done. None of it was the right stuff die.

I can't agree more because you see it all the time. And really I just said it's incompetence in the leader's part not to be able to really define what are the key levers? What are the KPIs that influence success here?

If your organization. Not everyone can say what are our top three, not 10, three things we hope to get done this year? I was just talking to someone who's struggling with an organization. After acquisition, they have all this planning stuff and EOs and gazelles and the parent company. I'm like, what are the goals? I don't know. I don't know. How do you know you're going to hit them if no one knows what they are?

What's the biggest mindset shift that you think leaders need to make? You have a bunch of them in here, but what's the one that's the biggest blind spot that gets in the way for elevating and building capacity within your team?

It's actually the one we just talked about. I actually think it is switching to an outcome oriented mindset. There's a lot of people, and particularly I've seen the people that are forcing people back to the office. They tend to be these older males with a lot of office space under lease. It's not even about the work. It's about a power control thing. You can see a lot of leaders don't like that. They're ordering people around and they're not listening to them. This to me is like, look, we try to have a great culture, but we have red lights, green lights and orange lights. And you know, if you're red for four quarters, there's going to be a really tough discussion coming. It's as much as we are supportive in culture or otherwise, hey, here's what we said we were going to do. Here's the outcome. If you're a salesperson and you were supposed to do a million and you're at 300 at the end of the year, again, you shouldn't be surprised that there'll be a discussion around that. And it should have been a discussion every week as we reviewed that. So people are having a really hard time as things change. And to me it's about the outcomes. It's about the 80, 20 move away from the inputs.

Yeah. And I think there's also an opportunity to share amongst the team what works for them.

Yeah.

So for instance, are you having conversations about what your morning routine looks like and what's really beneficial to you or where you'd like to improve? Because I bet your colleague is doing something that you might want to try. But how often do we not have this conversation because we're just focused again on checking off boxes?

Yeah, that could make a big difference. This is a culture of learning, a culture of getting better, a culture of collaboration. I do the cultural onboarding at our company. I'll never forget six years ago, we asked them to share experiences. They said at my other company, if you knew something, you kept it to yourself because it was a competitive advantage. Now this company, we had hired eight people from this organization because clearly they weren't doing very well. If the competition is within the organization, this is like the military, like, you know, friendly fire. You have no chance if you view your competition as other people on your team.

Yes. So, Bob, tell us, where can people learn more about you, your work and the book?

Sure. Yeah. My workbook podcast, all that stuff is on Robert Glazer glazer.com if you're looking for a shortcut to the book, it's EYT for elevate your team, so eytbook.com great.

Well, thanks so much for being on the show and sharing with us your firsthand knowledge about how you build capacity within your team.

Thanks again for having me.

If you like this episode, you're not going to want to miss my interview with Warren Rustin, who discusses how our external environment and the massive changes taking place in today's business world can impact us and our own ability to lead. Let's all lead the way. Hope you enjoyed today's episode, and I'd like to point you to the next important step. Hit the subscribe button and the bell to get notified when we release new content. I'll see you on the next episode of the Enlightened Executive.