Milan: [00:00:00] There’s the whole point of this podcast is like. This is what you’ll get. Like, you know, if you work with us, like this is what it is, right? Same background, same glasses, no, nothing.
Ged: Absolutely.
Milan: Okay. Teaser. And we go home.
Ged: Yep. Teaser. Yep. How, how do you wanna run the teaser?
Milan: Sure. Why not?
Ged: Sorry.
Milan: It’s not gonna be as good as yours.
Ged: You,
Milan: Oh, how do you want, I just say. You said, why do you want, why don’t you wanna run? Yeah, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll do it. You tell me it’s shit and then you’ll do it again and it’ll be better because
in the next week episode, you’ll learn about the good and evil of the daily huddles. We talked about. Why is it evil and for whom and why is it so good and so essential for the team and [00:01:00] for the organization as a whole. What’s to avoid, what’s to be aware of and why is it one of the most important foundation blocks, if you will, of the culture you want to build in the organization rather than the one you might have today?
Ged: As a CEO, if you are not prepared to run data. Huddles through your business, you’re probably not gonna work with a Metronomics coach.
Milan: Excellent.
Ged: Okay. I
Milan: Yeah.
Ged: I, I’m trying to keep them around 45 seconds, the teasers, so, yeah. Mm-hmm.
Milan: I see. Yeah, it’s, it’s all good. No, whatever. Whatever needs to happen there is fine. Excellent. So.
Ged: Okay. I will stop recording or do you want to, anything else? Anything else that Luke
Milan: No, no, I don’t think so. So we’ll do the yeah. Stop recording at, at will. [00:02:00] So I’ll call you up, or you let me know once you have the package. I need to get one to Erin. She’s the closest one, but she’s the one that UPS wouldn’t deliver to because she has a PO box. So I have to go through a post office tomorrow and the Canadian post Office is.
Ged: Okay, so we’re gonna do what you recommend as the first one was, sorry, was there something before we started?
Milan: Yeah. Yeah, I as I was looking at the, at the ideas I had one, I, I wonder if we could if you would think that this would work. What if we go about it sarcastically in the beginning? Like, do you want people completely to depend on you? Do you want to look really good because, you know you have all the answers.
You know, because frankly, obvious as it sounds to have the you know, to ask for people and to develop them, it’s not [00:03:00] as common. You actually have to tell leaders to do this, right?
Ged: Mm-hmm.
Milan: The natural reaction of many is to get to the results. Meaning the fastest way, which is providing the answer. Let’s just move on.
Especially in the early stage of the company. But if you don’t get rid of that habit, you’re in trouble. Right.
Ged: Mm-hmm.
Milan: So I wonder if we could say like, you know if we can sort of start a conversation from the other, other end
Ged: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Milan: Anyway. Yeah.
Ged: Okay. Look, I think I can riff that in the introduction. I think, I think I can weave us and position as frame us frame that type of sort of startup, okay? Mm-hmm. Okay, so we are recording. I think this will be a, probably a 15 minute episode. It’s probably not gonna be super long, but it won’t be short either.
Milan: We miss lost words. Yeah.
Ged: Yeah. Famous last, last words, but that’s okay. That’s okay. Okay. [00:04:00] So do you want me to do the intro?
Milan: Yeah, why not?
Ged: Okay. Welcome back to podcast, the podcast where we pick one topic at random and then riff on it for about 15 to 20 minutes. And what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to tease out the nuggets, the, the pieces of gold around these, these topics that we’ve uncovered from the work that we do with our clients and with the community. So Milan and I will shuffle the cards we’ll. See what the, the shuffle spits out and then we’ll riff on that particular topic. So let’s shuffle the deck.
Milan: What do you recommend?[00:05:00]
Ged: This is an
Milan: Interesting card and
Ged: One.
Milan: Yeah. Well, it’s,
Ged: One.
Milan: Yeah, it’s a magic, it’s a magic question, really. When you see. That in action. It’s, it’s amazing. It’s one of the simplest principles that we work with leaders on. Strangely, it doesn’t have tendency to be obvious to people, but once you put it up front, once you get leaders to use that the magic just appears out of nowhere.
It’s crazy.
Ged: It’s a little counterintuitive, isn’t it? ’cause after all, you know, you’ve got to where you are. By being really, really good at what you do. You got to where you are because people came to you and said, can you do this for us? You know, you’ve, you’ve developed skills, knowledge, expertise in a particular area. So it’s, it’s human nature to want to take advantage of that skill and experience and help others by. [00:06:00] How good you are at something, but why is, why is that a trap?
Milan: Well you’re, it has two negative effects, right? What you’re trading for a short term gain, which is getting quickly to the result, right? That you’re saying this is how you do it. I know. You are creating dependency on yourself and you’re training your people to be lazy. It sounds brutal, but that’s what it is.
Like why on earth would they spend time thinking and trying to do something when you have all the answers, and it’s just so much easier to ask them to think. God forbid that if they come with something and you have a better answer, you know, then you will definitely discourage them from doing things. So basically, don’t do this.
If you want to feel good about yourself, that you know all the answers and you want everybody to depend [00:07:00] on you, and you want the company to crush and burn when you are not available. It’s perfectly, you know, perfectly sound strategy to get to that point..
Ged: Because that’s what got you to where you are now, isn’t it? Yeah. Your expertise, your skill, your knowledge, being able to do something really, really well.
Milan: You know, there is a organization or concept or a book called The Living Organization by Norman Wolf. And one of the, one of the, one of the sections there is talking about leadership skills. Really the flip in paradigm between getting people to deliver results, which is your typical leadership to flipping it, to using results to develop people.
And I think that this, what do you recommend? Magic is really that turning point when you are focused [00:08:00] more on the longer term gain in getting people to grow around you, to, to get better, to relieve you of things that you can let them do for maybe sometimes. Little bit of a extra stress or a little bit of an extra time or quality in the beginning, right?
Because the first step is asking people what they recommend and accepting them, and there may be guiding them. And then the second step is letting them go with their recommendation. Even if you think that you have a better one,
Ged: Yeah, that’s tough.
Milan: It’s really tough, but that’s how you. Provided them with a learning journey, with that experience, with that, with that self-reliance, with that confidence, I can do this right, because you are the only one who has the benchmark.
You don’t have to tell them that there was a better solution. If there is good enough, [00:09:00] it might actually be word letting them go with it more to you in a, in the long run than providing the better, better solution right away.
Ged: There’s, there’s an expression in Australia. I’m not sure if it’s, if it’s a common in Canada as well. Now, if you want something doing right, do it yourself. And that is totally at odds with what we are talking about today because, and there’s some, there’s some challenges here because, you know, if you. If you know how to do it really well, you know, you’ve probably, you’ve probably built a reputation as, as of, of, of doing good things, good stuff. And as soon as you acknowledge that, well, maybe 80% is good enough and it doesn’t need to be perfect. Well, that’s sort of, that’s cutting against what you, the reputation you built. But, but if you don’t let people learn how to do it for themselves, you’re disempowering them. There’s, there’s this concept called learn helplessness. Now, if you [00:10:00] keep on telling people that you can do it better. Then after a while, they’re gonna stop thinking they’re gonna give up and they’re just gonna let you do it.
Well, you know, because you can do it better. And every time you do it better, you tell them how much better you do it. So why would you bother? So you end up surrounding yourself unintentionally by people who not really learning, they’re not really developing their own skills, and they’re not. In a position to actually take stuff off you, and you’ll get to a time where you desperately, desperately need people to take stuff off you, because you have disempowered them by wanting to do it yourself perfectly because you can, you never get them into a position where to do that.
Milan: I actually have a story from earlier this year, which is quite interesting, where and it sort of comes to together with what we talked in another episode about building a player teams. [00:11:00] If you hire people that need to be told what to do and then you tell them what to do. Right. They’ll never move from that level of maturity.
’cause again, there is no incentive for that, right? If you try to lead them on a high level of maturity or basically giving them problems to solve and, you know and then come back to you with the solutions and with, with those things done and you are moving from the task master to a true leader and they’re not capable of doing that well.
You know, they might not be the right people at the stage of the organization in which you are. And again, when you are going through, you know, some of the quantum leaps in the history of the organization, you know, going over 25 people, going over the first million dollars, you know, all the, all those things that we know are requiring sort of a face shift [00:12:00] on, you know, what’s how the organization operates. You are absolutely not prepared for that. Those transitions become harder and harder as you go. While if you always prepare people in the organization itself for what’s coming next, it might slow you down short term sometimes, little bit. But you are so much better off in the long term. I heard a quote today from Alex Hor from you know sorry. Acquisition.com, right? I, I believe and the words were, don’t waste. Time, and I’m paraphrasing building the strategy that gets you to the 10 million faster, [00:13:00] because that’s probably not the same one that gets you to a hundred million, right? That you get stuck in your $10 million strategy, so you never get to the a hundred million dollars one.
Right. Which I, I think is great sort of way of thinking that in the organization you always want to think little bit longer term than, than it’s then. That is comfortable just a little.
Ged: Yes, yes, yes. Mm-hmm. So those, words, what do you recommend? I mean, they, they seem innocuously enough, but they’re actually incredibly powerful. So, and. This, this technique is, is something that we introduce as part of the coach Cascade system which is normally something that we start turning on in the fourth, fifth quarter of implementing Metronomics, if we’re, if we’re rolling out to, to the plan. And, and this, this comes back from from a book by David [00:14:00] Marquette, wasn’t it? David Marquette. Yeah.
Milan: No.
Ged: The ship around.
Milan: Oh, that’s true. That’s true. Right? You are absolutely right. It’s there.
Ged: Yep.
Milan: And then there is also version of it in Dan Martel’s. Buy Back your Time.
Ged: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Abso absolutely, absolutely. And, and these all come back to the same concept of, you know, of know, rather than solving a problem yourself is actually giving a problem to others to let them come up with a solution. And as you say, sometimes there’s an overhead whilst they learn, but once they learn, they can then do it again and again, and again and again.
And at, at some point in this card cast we’ll also. Probably talk about one of the cards, which is the 10 80 10 principle that that this sort is, is related to. But I, I, I have a direct experience in my career of when this really, really hit me. I’d recently taken over running a $30 million business unit within a larger company.
This is about 13, 14, maybe 15 years ago. [00:15:00] And as a new leader that had never run a business of that size, I was sort of in a desperately unprepared, desperately inexperienced. Trying to learn things as I went. And it got to a point where whenever I was in the office, ’cause I tried to spend as much time out in the field either with customers, clients, or with the team. Whenever I was in the office, a queue would develop. Behind my desk, you know, and I, I felt like a doctor in a doctor’s surgery. I felt like someone basically, you know, something and then calling out next, no, fix them
Milan: Yeah.
Ged: Next. And after a while, I realized probably, it probably took me far too long to realize I wasn’t in my fast learning phase at that point. I, I realized that I had to break this cycle, so without written necessarily. Mean, I hadn’t read the book at that point, so I wasn’t aware of the concept, but it suddenly occurred to me, well, some, some of the things that I was being asked, I was pretty sure they knew [00:16:00] how to solve themselves. So I didn’t use that phrase, what you recommend. I, I, I think the language I use was like in a. Do, do you wanna see if you can solve this for yourself? ’cause I’m really struggling for time right now. You know, go away, have a think and then come back if you can think of a, of a solution. And after a while, the, the queue behind my desk, you know, after a, you know, a few days, a few weeks of doing this, you know, people would then come to, come to me and say, can I take five minutes?
You know, this is my problem and I think I know how to do it like this. What, what do you think? So they were coming up with a solution. Whereas then all I had to do was really say, yeah, that works. That’s great. Off you go. Make it happen. Or we’d work a little bit on it to make it a little bit better or refine it, whatever, and then they’d go away and do it. So this, if I’d have carried on with that huge cue at my desk every time I came into the office, now that would’ve been, that would’ve burnt out in no time. So it’s, it’s something that makes a material difference in your ability to lead and run a [00:17:00] business.
Milan:. You have to realize that there are some people who thrive on that ability to provide answers, right? And if you see that in the organization, that’s something that has to be nipped in the butt very, very quickly because again, it’s creating these dependencies that are extremely, extremely unhealthy.
But look, one of my favorite stories is I was working with with a CEO, who was also head of sales in the small organization at the same time. And again, you know, best salesman they ever had. And of course, like, you know, and all of that stuff and everything relying on him. And we started measuring how many questions he answered versus how many times did he use the frame, what do you recommend?
And he came to me about a week later and said, look, so. I got a text message from my account executive with a question, and I started typing an answer and about two pages on my phone, [00:18:00] two screens on my phone. Later, I was like, what am I doing? Delete the whole thing and say, what would you recommend?
And then five minutes later I got about two screens of pretty much exactly what I have written before. And I said, yeah, okay, go ahead. Which is what it really happens. People know, right? If you have, if you have people, they. It’s about permission to act, permission to make the call. Right. And also for you to give yourself a chance to understand how they take, think, how they operate, what their weaknesses might be, where they might need to further development.
If you just tell them what to do, you’ll never, never get out of that outta the trap. Yeah.
Ged: Another concept which is related to, what do you recommend in, in. In David Marque’s book was the I intend to, rather than some, and this, this, this goes back to a story in the
Milan: Oh yeah.
Ged: And I think it’s the, the Santa Fe was the, the, the [00:19:00] worst submarine in the fleet. And within 18 months or two years or so, it was the best submarine in the fleet. And one of the. One of the behavioral changes that he implemented was rather than giving orders to get pushed down the chain, empowered people to actually. Say what they were gonna do, giving people the time to say, that’s not right, or, or, you know, why have you decided that? You know, so, so that phrase I intend to is, is great because it’s saying, okay, I’ve made a decision.
This is what I intend to do. It’s also giving people the opportunity to come in and say, well, that’s not right. That’s not right, because we should be doing that. And it opens up the, the, the, the for a conversation around the intent, the intent.
Milan: Well, in case of David Marquette’s situation, he also as the. Commanding officer had the ultimate responsibility for that action, so he was the one who [00:20:00] had to eventually give the order, but because he trained his team to think about it this way, all he have to say very well, please proceed order given. But the power of making the choice.
Meaning getting, getting the agency and the control to to their team was given by having them present first. What is it that they intended to do?
Ged: Yep. So, so how, how’d you. Translate this into a habit. Now, if we, if we accept that this is a good, a good concept, and you should be encouraged to do it within your business and within your teams, how can people actually make this a behavior change? How can they make this a habit?
Milan: The simplest I have is and I recommended it to many people. Get a sticky note or a piece of paper, put it on the side of your desk and make a little note mark every time you ask. What do you recommend? [00:21:00] And then t it up over the week. And then, you know, in our one-on-one coaching ization, we look at a number and say, okay, so what did you learn?
And it becomes a habit very, very quickly because the benefits are so apparent and so fast. It’s ridiculous.
Ged: It, it is. I, I have, I’ve, I’ve worked with companies where, and, and interestingly that.
Milan: I.
Ged: Professional services companies are often very bad at doing this because it’s so fundamentally rooted in, in billing hours that, you know, even the senior, you know, the senior partners, you know, they, they, you know, they’re expected to bill a certain amount so often.
It’s easier for them to just do the work than it is to train their next level down now ’cause they’ve got their own billing hour targets to, to achieve. So I’ve, I’ve often found it really difficult in that sort of organization to get this concept. You know, everyone says, yeah, yeah, I understand. That’s a great idea, that’s a great idea, but I can’t do it because, [00:22:00] you know, so they’re actually demotivated from actually starting to take on this process because this behavior change. Because everything in the organization is stacked up against them. So it, it’s often harder to do than you expect, but even then, it’s worth making the change because. You can then change from being someone who really only deals with the high value stuff and everything else gets pushed down to the layers below.
And that’s also building in succession because the layers below now know how to do what only you could do before. And if the layers below you know what you, what only you could do, then they can take even more of your plates. And at some point in time you can elevate them and take even more of your plates. And if they start doing it to their team. It just becomes this virtuous circle, but you’ve gotta buy into the concept first, and if you don’t, you just end up everything coming back to you, everything being decided by you, and probably everything being [00:23:00] done by you because only you can do it well.
Milan: Absolutely. And look, you used the words before, which is the cascading system, and I think is really important. So as a CEO, it’s not just having this habit as quickly as possible, but al also coaching it and watching for it with your leaders to make sure that, that it’s propagates down in the organization or, because otherwise you’re just creating the new bottleneck, the one layer below.
You suddenly have a tons and tons of overworked leaders because you know, they are now doing your work in their eyes because, you know, you’re not giving them the answers anymore, which you shouldn’t, but they haven’t learned yet to do the same to their team. So now they become the, the bottleneck and the potential breaking point. And you get burnouts and you get all of those things. So, you know once this habit gets. Implemented in the [00:24:00] organization, it has to spread rapidly. Otherwise it will just create the new pressure points.
Ged: Yep. Mm-hmm. So the next time someone comes to you with a problem or a challenge that you think they should be able to solve for themselves, use that phrase or something very similar to it, what do you recommend And put the onus back on them to come up with a solution. You might be surprised, most of the time they know how to solve it themselves.
They’re just looking for permission give them permission see how quickly that changes in your organization.
Milan: Just add permission is the first step. The demand is the second. It needs to become the new way of doing things If you want to grow rapidly.
Yeah, with little bit of editing, I think that.
Ged: I think so. [00:25:00] I think so, yeah. Now I’m gonna pause there ’cause I’m gonna go and make Martha some lunch and he won’t want to hear me doing that. Upload.
