What a fabulous conversation I had with Myriam Hadnes on her workshop.work podcast. I shared my journey from software entrepreneur to strategic planning facilitator and discuss the frameworks that drive business growth:
- David’s facilitation style balances structured planning with creating an environment for open discussion, laughter, and human connection.
- The Verne Harnish one-page strategic plan is a framework that helps entrepreneurs create high growth businesses.
- Start by picking a future date 3-5 years out and working backward from there.
- Real transformation comes from quarterly rhythm and consistent planning.
- The written plan becomes the accountability mechanism that stops “shiny red ball syndrome.”
- High performing businesses hire for values first, skills second creating alignment that eliminates communication problems.
- Key Performance Indicators must actually be key.
- You the entrepreneur are often the biggest limiting factor to business growth.
- I got sober 16+ years ago on January 27, 2009.
- An amazing coach Kevin Lawrence guided me to my first 12-step meeting after I admitted my drinking problem to him.
- Anyone can recover from addiction, but they need to ask for help first.
- Recovery taught me to be present —a skill that make me a better facilitator and coach
- My advice to my younger self: have more fun and be more relaxed.
Audio
Transcript
Myriam Hadnes (00:00:02):
Hello David and welcome to the show.
David Greer (00:00:07):
Thank you so much for having me. I have really been looking forward to this conversation.
Myriam Hadnes (00:00:12):
Me too. We had inspiring exploration calls already, touching on different topics, personal and professional, and growth related and entrepreneurial. And we’ll start at the beginning, as I always do with the same question. When did you start calling yourself a facilitator? And actually do you?
David Greer (00:00:35):
Yes, I call myself a facilitator, although I usually qualify it because my specialty is helping entrepreneurs with strategic planning. I often say I facilitate strategic planning. You can facilitate for many different things. And to answer your question, I don’t think I called myself a facilitator until I launched my coaching practice, which is now 10 years ago. And after doing my coach training with the Coach Training Institute, and then focusing on this one page strategic plan that I’d already been using for almost half a dozen years by that time, then I made it part of my branding and part of what my service offering.
Myriam Hadnes (00:01:22):
And it’s interesting the decisions we take in the words we are using because, first of all, I think it’s beautiful and courageous and necessary and so many other things that you niche down so clearly that you’re a facilitator for strategic planning fully because I think one big trap of many entrepreneurs and especially facilitators, freelancers in the facilitation and coaching space. If they don’t specify, then it’s very difficult actually to find their niche, to find their clients and to become brilliant at the one thing that they’re doing.
David Greer (00:02:04):
Yeah, I mean I do a lot of work around marketing and my deep belief for business is that strategy equals marketing at its core. And the more you niche down and the clearer it becomes to everyone, what you do and the value that you bring, I think the easier it gets. But as entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, we want to reduce, we think we want to reduce risks. If we can be everything to everyone, yes, the feeling is reducing risk, you’re actually increasing your risk. Whereas if you niche down, because when you tell someone, this is what I do, then they don’t refer you to anyone except someone who has a problem with strategic planning.
Myriam Hadnes (00:02:50):
Yes. And you increase the risk if you don’t niche down because you might be referred to someone whom you cannot help. And then it’s difficult to either help them or to find your way out and it makes so much sense. I would be curious, two things. One, how you got there and then your sentence about marketing is strategy. And obviously you’re the expert because that’s your niche, so you must swallow your own pill, so to speak. I hope you don’t mind going.
David Greer (00:03:26):
Let me start with the latter, which will lead me to the former. Okay, great. This one page plan I specialize in comes from a guy, Verne Harnish. He has two books, the Rockefeller Habits and Scaling Up. And this framework came from him. A lot of the actual ideas in the framework are not his, but he’s brought them together in I think a fairly unique way. And the words are strategy equals marketing.
Myriam Hadnes (00:03:56):
Okay.
David Greer (00:03:58):
I’m just borrowing them because I believe there’s a lot of truth in that. And then part of how I got into this is I had my own business for 20 years, a software business. I joined when I was still in university as an employee. Then as an owner built it into a global powerhouse. Then unexpectedly, my former partner and I had a major disagreement. We settled it by him buying me out and my wife and I did something completely different. We commissioned a sailboat in the south of France and took our three kids and homeschooled them for two years while sailing 5,000 nautical miles in the Mediterranean, about 10,000 kilometers for those that are metric. And there’s a point to this story.
Myriam Hadnes (00:04:48):
I trust you.
David Greer (00:04:50):
I came back and what do I do next? And so I decided to pursue angel investing professionally, looking at over a hundred deals a year, investing in one, and both before I went to the med and after so many of my technology entrepreneur friends in Vancouver all swore by this one page plan. Finally I kept asking them, what is it? Where does it come from? And a few years into angel investing, I put a lot of money and I was on the board of directors for this startup, this software as a service startup. This is the mid two thousands. Still no proof that software as a service is going to work.
Myriam Hadnes (00:05:36):
Oh yeah.
David Greer (00:05:38):
Today it’s obvious, but it wasn’t back then.
Myriam Hadnes (00:05:41):
And it was a bumpy road.
David Greer (00:05:43):
Yes. Anyways, Verne Harnish was coming to town.
(00:05:48):
And he was going to give an all day workshop on the one page strategic plan. And so I took my young entrepreneur, CEO, founder and me to this workshop and heard it directly from Verne. He doesn’t give that many workshops now he’s too busy. It was a real privilege for me to be able to hear it straight from him. And the way we built Robelle, which was the software company I joined out of university, it was named for Robert and Annabelle, the two founders. We did it, I think the way a lot of entrepreneurs built businesses, which is what do we do last year? Let’s incrementally improve it. And hey, I don’t knock that as a planning process. We had enormous success, really tremendous success. And I wonder how much more might we have had if we’d taken Verne’s principles. One of the biggest wake up calls for me that was different than how I’d done it before is Verne says pick a future date three to five years out. Actually it’s December 31st. If your fiscal year is like a calendar year, so we’re in 2025, well 2025 is almost over. Say 26, 27, 28, December 31st, 2028, where are you going to be on December 31st, 2028?
(00:07:25):
Are you going to serve the same markets and come up with three to five key thrusts? That could be new markets, new products or capabilities. Maybe you need to eventually attract a VP of sales who is like 10x where you’re currently at because of where you want to end up in three years time. And it might take you a couple of years to build the business and structure it and be able to have enough money. Or you may need to fractionally hire those kind of VP of sales. Again, it’s
Myriam Hadnes (00:08:00):
Basically backward engineering from the future.
David Greer (00:08:02):
And then you start that three year date or five, some of my clients like a five year date, and then you figure out these key places you need to go in that timeframe. And then from that you figure out what do I need to do this year to move me towards that goal? And then this whole process, it’s not just the plan, it’s like the rhythm of planning, which is recommended to be once a quarter. I take people offsite once a quarter, and I only work with bigger businesses and higher growth businesses. We spend a full day doing the quarterly planning and then once a year we take two days and reexamine every part of the plan, see if there’s a new future date, if there’s new key thrusts and we focus for two on the whole one page plan and rewrite it almost from scratch is what we try and do.
Myriam Hadnes (00:09:03):
I assume that you have to because I mean everything changes so fast, especially in the software world or in the digital world.
David Greer (00:09:10):
It does and it doesn’t. During COVID, what was really interesting with all my facilitation clients is that none of that long-term plan, it didn’t change for any of them. Now their immediate
Myriam Hadnes (00:09:28):
Now looking back, I mean yeah,
David Greer (00:09:30):
Well, even during, I even noted it during, I said, do we need to change where you’re going in three years based on what the data you’re getting now and what’s happening to your businesses? And one of my longtime clients is a private equity firm, which in turn owns half a dozen other firms, which are really big firms. There’s a lot of data of what’s happening. And we massively changed their quarterly goals. In fact, we met monthly and readjusted the monthly goals, and then we finally got back into a quarterly rhythm. It changed the goals for the year, but didn’t change the long term.
Myriam Hadnes (00:10:05):
I have one question regarding that. What comes to my mind is the saying that we underestimate what we can achieve in a year and we overestimate what we can achieve in five years,
David Greer (00:10:20):
Or I think it was Bill Gates, we grossly overestimate what we can do in a day and a week and a month.
Myriam Hadnes (00:10:25):
Oh yeah. Thank you. And now I wonder whether what you observe is when we are making three year plans that maybe a trap could be to not just relax and trust the plan, but go into changing and adjusting too far. Oh, now AI is coming. I need to adjust. I need to jump on that boat and I need to reprioritize something else instead of inhaling, exhaling, and trusting the process.
David Greer (00:10:58):
As part of my facilitation process, what I talk about are the brutal facts. It’s like what are the new brutal facts that have shown up? Is AI really a brutal fact or is it a trend or is your competitor if your competitor is adopting it in a way that is making them 10 times more competitive than you? That’s a brutal fact.
Myriam Hadnes (00:11:23):
I don’t think you can ignore that.
(00:11:27):
But I coach around during the course of a year, I really challenge people to not change their yearly goals unless some really significant brutal fact is showing up. There’s some massive shift in the market, but something that demonstrated is going to impact one of the goals because I work mostly with owner founders and super high performing people and almost to a person we suffer from shiny red ball syndrome. But look, it’s so beautiful. Look at the AI, look at how much it’s in the news. Oh, I’m missing out. And it’s like, okay, but you said you’re going to do this in the quarter. Are you still going to do this in the quarter or do you need to change your quarterly goals? It actually is an important shiny red ball. And what I find is nine times out of a hundred, it’s just a shiny red ball.
Myriam Hadnes (00:12:25):
And then this interesting. Is it because I can imagine that it’s part of the founder’s personality that they’re usually creative, they’re exploding with ideas, and it’s soon as it comes to the just daily business of implementation gets kind of boring and then it’s nicer to jump on the next big thing. Talking about myself, wait,
David Greer (00:12:53):
I coach around that and I am great at going in and fixing things or deciding the next things and getting it set up. But after you’ve done the process twice, make sure you get me out of there. Break it just so I got something to do.
Myriam Hadnes (00:13:09):
Yes, sounds seriously.
Myriam Hadnes (00:13:11):
And then, yeah, sorry.
David Greer (00:13:12):
I do a lot of coaching around this. The business is running well, okay, but I don’t like that aspect. Or you can tell they’re bored because it’s all running smoothly. There’s no big challenge. I say think about it, maybe if you don’t do it actually, but from a thinking point of view, think about yourself becoming chairman of the board and then what would be your advice to the company about the direction of where it should go? Should it go in this new direction as chairman, should you go acquire another company or maybe as chairman now you have all this extra time, you should go pursue being involved with another company. Or maybe you should be involved in driving race cars around a track or something that really
Myriam Hadnes (00:13:57):
Go sailing.
David Greer (00:13:58):
Or my case would be go sailing. It’s like I really try and get them to pull back and see your strategy, your gift here is this creative thinking, thinking outside the box, looking at things in all sorts of different directions, but don’t muck up the day-to-day operation of the business because you’ve, how do we find the right outlet for you and how do we harness that to move the business forward the best for you and the business? And so I help separate out those pieces.
Myriam Hadnes (00:14:36):
So that the business doesn’t become the collateral damage just because of
David Greer (00:14:41):
Exactly
Myriam Hadnes (00:14:42):
Shiny objects or boredom or a mix of both.
David Greer (00:14:46):
And the other one I coach around a lot and I write about and I talk about is especially owner founders, you grew the business and you had to know everything. You had to solve everything. And now the business gets to a certain size where you start hiring people hopefully who are better than you. And I often run into, yeah, but after the senior team, they don’t do, don’t listen to me, they don’t this. And when I dig into it, it’s like you hired someone better than you and you assigned them the tasks say of sales or sales management. And first of all, you did all the selling, which doesn’t mean you’re actually good at sales management
(00:15:30):
And they have an approach in a totally different way of doing it than you did. And what happens is they start operating their way and the entrepreneur immediately grabs the steering wheel and pulls it back and starts driving the bus again because well, that’s not the way that worked for them. But again, like you got to zero say to four or 5 million a year, which is kind of usually one of those thresholds where you kind of flatten out. If you want to go to five to 10, you actually need to think about the business differently. You have to operate the business differently. And truthfully, you as the entrepreneur should really step you got it to that point. And probably it’s time to hire people who have more professional experience at running five to 10 million business or growing five to 10 million businesses. And again, this letting go piece is really, really hard for most of us. Owner, founder, totally controlling. Well, I mean that’s why the business lasted.
Myriam Hadnes (00:16:29):
And it’s a baby. And then we always think we know best.
David Greer (00:16:34):
Exactly.
Myriam Hadnes (00:16:35):
And it’s a trust issue. And I can totally see how then met owners become founders become micromanagers. And it sounds as if then the growth piece, the business growth piece is mostly about personal growth and mindset management and about skillset management.
David Greer (00:17:01):
My belief is that the entrepreneur is probably the single biggest limiting factor to a business. The business grows as fast as the entrepreneur is able to grow her or himself, which really and a lot are not prepared to do that internal reflection work and to understand better, but the really successful ones they do.
Myriam Hadnes (00:17:27):
And is this then the reason why your one page strategy plan would not be able to be implemented by AI because it’s only that much strategic planning and the other bit is the coaching that goes along with it.
David Greer (00:17:45):
I’ve worked with the one page strategic plan for, I don’t know, 14, 15 years. I learned something new about it every quarter.
Myriam Hadnes (00:17:55):
Tell me about it.
David Greer (00:17:57):
It looks so simple on the surface, but it has so much depth and breadth. And some of it is the things that aren’t in the plan that we’re talking about. It’s one thing to have a set of five clear, clear goals for a quarter, and that in itself is really hard to achieve. And that’s a lot of the value I bring to the table is I don’t let people set fuzzy goals.
(00:18:22):
I make sure that what I say to them is when we meet in three months, and I’ve completely forgotten everything that we’ve talked about today, which is exactly what will happen, how will I know with crystal clear clarity that you got across the finish line, how you’d be able to demonstrate to me that you’ve done that. And oftentimes we don’t have a goal where that can be crystal clear. A lot of it is this outside part and it also writing it down as a team means that you can show it to each other. This is what we agreed to. Whereas entrepreneurs like maximum freedom of movement, the least number of things written down.
Myriam Hadnes (00:19:03):
Don’t tell me, don’t give me boundaries and restrictions and control
David Greer (00:19:07):
Chase shiny red balls. My longest term client who I’ve now been facilitating nine, one September, we’re going to do our next early session, it’d be nine and a half years since the end of the month. But our first two day session, I wasn’t actually hired by the two partners I now work with. I was hired by their then partner who was the managing partner. And we went offsite and we created a one page plan and we created a clear set of quarterly goals. And I didn’t know this at the time, so I barely knew them, that two of the partners felt like the other partner said he would do certain things and then he kept reneging and not doing it. And now they’ve had a third party, me, we’ve got together, we’ve agreed these are the goals. And it was only four or six weeks in. And sure enough, the other partner is not doing, he’s actually off [in a new] direction. They’d all agreed they wouldn’t go. He’s talking about starting things in England and they’d agreed they’d stay focused on Canada and the US
Myriam Hadnes (00:20:10):
Smells like conflict.
David Greer (00:20:12):
Yes. The two partners broke up the partnership and fired the guy who originally hired me basically, I mean fired in terms of they just literally split the partnership, figured out how to split the PE firms. They had to figure out who’s going to get which company. And anyways, they were going to split funds, but they figured it all out in four weeks.
Myriam Hadnes (00:20:37):
Wow. Sounds very,
David Greer (00:20:39):
Because now the two remaining ones were so crystal clear that they couldn’t work with this person did this is just not ever going to work out. They split off and then I ended up following up and they ended up hiring me to continue the process. And like I say, we’re now nine and a half years in.
Myriam Hadnes (00:21:05):
I would be curious, when you say staying away from the fuzzy goals, are you then talking about the smart goals so that
David Greer (00:21:15):
Yeah. Well, and sometimes it’s even people will say things like, I want to improve customer service. That’s like a laudable goal.
Myriam Hadnes (00:21:28):
How do you measure that?
David Greer (00:21:28):
It’s like, okay, so how do you measure your customer service today? Oh, we don’t. Improving customer service is not a goal. It’s like an intention, right? It’s like a direction we want to move in. Maybe the next quarter is we set up a system to measure customer feedback and then maybe the quarter after that we’ll do a quarter of actually measuring it and see what the results look like. And then the quarter after that we might be able to talk about improving. We start with this, the goal is improve customer service or improve customer support. But that in of itself, it’s not a goal. Again, it’s a very laudable intention, but it’s not a goal.
Myriam Hadnes (00:22:23):
If I understand correctly, it’s first to set the big vision, so the three to five years, and then to break it down so that actually that we know what we have to do in order to get there and then to set goals that are tangible, measurable. And also I guess some sort of exciting,
David Greer (00:22:54):
Sometimes exciting sometimes the art of business is to grind through the boring stuff. That’s sometimes where you create the most value. And that’s kind of an issue because it’s like it’s boring for everybody, but boring but necessary. That’s part of this process is like, well, if we don’t fix this, we’re going to go out of business. Or if this is the path to get us to that longer term where we want to go. And I focus a lot more on the goal setting on the what and much less on the how. And as a computer scientist trained mathematician, this is really, really hard for me to realize the market is changing in this way. We have to go in this direction. There is no choice. We don’t know how to get there. Well, okay, we don’t know how to get there. That’s going to be part of what we have to figure out because we clearly have, what we have to do is get over here where the market’s going. And yes, right now we don’t know how and it’s scary, but we’re just going to have to start breaking it down and we’re going to have to prioritize that over other things.
Myriam Hadnes (00:24:05):
And then I would be curious because when I heard you and customer satisfaction is a very clear example. You don’t have the data you need to get the data and you collect the data and then you know how you can improve it or not. I mean, are you collecting the right data because what
David Greer (00:24:27):
You didn’t even get into
Myriam Hadnes (00:24:27):
And there you can, I think it’s maybe the opposite. It’s another shiny object and I observe that a lot with clients who start to measure everything and start to collect data to measure something, the progress, the impact. My absolute favorite are quotes are net promoter score for workshops. How do you avoid measuring the wrong things or not getting in this measuring obsession that is just another distraction in the end from doing the real work.
David Greer (00:25:11):
Haven’t talked about all the aspects of the plan. We only have, I forget an hour and a half, it’s not enough time to talk about it all, but
Myriam Hadnes (00:25:19):
We’ll speed up a bit.
David Greer (00:25:21):
But a very core part of Verne Harnish’s stuff in the one page plan is key productivity indicators.
(00:25:28):
And we have to emphasize the word key. There’s a lot of things we can measure. What are the key forward looking indicators that are going to predict our success? And you have to run a lot of experiments to try and figure out what that is. And businesses that do it super well when a key productivity indicator is going, say it’s going down equal bad direction, some people key indicators work the other way, but going down is a bad direction. It’s like said three quarters of the company focus their efforts on making the KPI go back up. The best example I have in my book, Wind In Your Sails is Provedent Security who do use the one page strategic plan. They’re a boutique security company here in Vancouver based on breaking an industry myth, which is that when an alarm goes off in your house, something happens for pretty well the vast majority of alarm. It’s like an industry secret. What happens is you get a phone call. Mike Yeager, the founder of Provident Security, founded his company on the brand promise five minutes to your door or your money back, and then he built the systems to actually make that happen. And up in his ops center, he has a set of screens that have six numbers on it, and those six numbers need to be green.
(00:27:03):
And if they’re orange, then at least one or two people in the op center needs to stop what they’re doing and do something about it. And if anything goes red, then everyone in the op center needs to stop what they’re doing. Now, he also said he needs people who can survive in chaos. If there’s a massive windstorm in Vancouver and it starts taking out power lines and takes out lines to alarm systems, a whole bunch of the numbers are going to go red and then they need to manage throughthat.
Myriam Hadnes (00:27:38):
What I understand is a key performance indicator, KPI is only worth the name if it’s so key that it’s really business relevant. If it goes in the red, then the business might go down if we’re not really focusing on that. And then what most companies do, many
David Greer (00:28:01):
Yes and companies have too many and we need to separate out KPIs that are for the company. And then if you are VP of marketing, the level of lead generation and the quality of those leads, you may have KPIs around those and that may not even the rest of the company may not be aware of that at all. But you and your team, that’s the KPI, those are one or two of the KPIs that you need to focus on in addition to the ones for the whole company. But again, it’s like we kind of say four leading to trailing and trailing are like when you look at the financial statements because the financial statements even in really well run organizations are at least two weeks behind the end of the month typically. I mean that’s actually pretty good. And reading financial statements is trying to drive your car by looking in the rear view mirror. It tells you something. And that’s something may be really important. There may be semi truck that’s behind you that’s going to drive you over and you should move over. It still could be very important, but it’s not the majority. You want to be looking down the road, which again, when you get good at this, you should know for the month what your revenue’s going to be because you have the right KPIs that have told you all the right things are happening to get, you should be able to predict it.
Myriam Hadnes (00:29:33):
Yeah, yeah. And I’m sorry you from actually your trajectory of the one page strategic planning.
David Greer (00:29:55):
I go to the Verne Harnish event, I learn about it. I’m incredibly inspired by this idea of looking out three years. In this company, this startup company, I talked to the chairman of the board and he liked the idea. We started adopting it. I also hired an amazing coach who I met in the back of the room, which we might talk about more because he’s one of the most influential people in my life who created one of the biggest changes in my life and he specialized in the one page plan. Anyways, I started using it in my own work. And then as I moved into more executive gigs, I kind of did five years of senior VP marketing or marketing and sales, but also working with the CEO on kind of their strategy. And in a number of cases I used the one page plan or when I was VP of marketing, my last gig was with the 35 million a year telematics company and my whole team and I used the one page plan for our own planning. And I just started to really use it in my work and become familiar with it and become familiar with how to use it.
Myriam Hadnes (00:31:14):
Even as back then a freelancer so to speak,
David Greer (00:31:21):
And I was in some cases a consultant. In some cases I was an employee and in some cases, like other startups I got involved with or people asked me for favors I would actually do, I would help create a plan. And now I learned that I needed, this is where I really see if you hire me for strategic planning, you’ve got to hire me for a year because it’s not just creating the plan once. It’s the process of continually meeting and adjusting. And this quarterly rhythm, when companies use it, it’s 12, 18, 24 months before they see the big hockey stick improvement. You see incremental improvements all the way along,
Myriam Hadnes (00:32:08):
But
David Greer (00:32:08):
It takes a long time to integrate that really into the company where you really start to see the huge benefits coming out of it. And I only want to work with people that commit for the long term, but when I first went to the Verne workshop, I was willing to do one-offs and just help people create their first plan and then not do any follow-up for it.
Myriam Hadnes (00:32:32):
I am curious about that because I think many facilitators get stuck in the one-off workshops work where companies would hire them, oh, we need a facilitator for our strategy strategic planning meeting. Can you come and help us? What is the biggest risk of doing these one-off workshops?
David Greer (00:33:02):
Well, you facilitate the workshop, you create a plan, and then it doesn’t go anywhere. My services, I quote a fixed price for these services, which also includes one monthly call with the CEO like a coaching call. It’s not just like, “Hey, we meet in a quarter and then we meet in three months.” I get pulse points all the way along and I do coaching about how it’s working and Mr CEO, have you remembered to take out the plan and every one of your weekly meetings and go over the five goals with your senior leadership team and make sure you are on track? And the answer surprisingly is no. I still have even my long-term clients, I have to remind them about this.
Myriam Hadnes (00:33:48):
And what do you think is the biggest challenge in that? Because I can’t imagine that there are a lot of mental blocks or excuses. So what is really in the way of following through with the plan of sticking to the commitment?
David Greer (00:34:11):
Again, if I come from my experience more with entrepreneurs, it’s again, they like maximum freedom of movement. They don’t like having things written down because then they have to follow that and they can’t just kind of go off in all directions whenever they feel like it and they have to be held more accountable. And in most cases, no one has ever held, if you’re an owner, founder of a business, I mean probably part of why you founded the business is you hated being an employee. You hated having people hold you accountable. But again, you get to some point where your business is not going where you want it to go. And one of the sacrifices you might have to make is you might have to become more accountable with someone like me.
Myriam Hadnes (00:34:56):
Because they may then have the management issues. They then have to get their team to do the work and to hold them accountable. What is your recommended? Because that’s something that I face very often. Just everyone is overworked. Yes, I would love to do that. I would love to get the data or do the project, but it’s not my priority. I’m overworked. And then it becomes a trickle down effect. That’s I guess where the organizational facilitation comes in or is it a coaching problem?
David Greer (00:35:38):
It’s partly coaching. But again, one of the goals of the one page plan and such clarity around clear four or five big corporate goals for a quarter is that we want over time to empower a lot more people to say no. We want people to be really clear on what’s yes and what’s no and remove a lot of maybes. If your boss comes to you and says, I want you to do X, and you say, just a sec, you guys all said you got this new initiative, you hired this new facilitator, you got this one page plan, you told us these are the goals for the quarter. How does X relate to what that is?
Myriam Hadnes (00:36:22):
Basically everyone becomes an accountability partner to the CEO as well, because if they want to follow a shiny object, everyone says,
David Greer (00:36:34):
Yeah, they should be calling them on it. How does this relate? And the best planning process is the senior team goes offsite and creates the quarterly plan, and then each of those leaders meets with their team and comes up with the three to five goals their team are going to achieve for the quarter to achieve the big goals for the company. You may have some goals that are part of your team that that’s really what you’re focusing on, but it is up to the responsibility of your leader, the person who participated in creating the bigger plan to show how the goals for your team relate to the bigger goals. And if they don’t, then you should be questioning your leader if they can’t. A lot of these whole Verne has these Rockefeller habits, which are 10 broad areas, and then each of those has four sub pieces. And super high performing operating companies score 80% on that. Most people that I first, and I don’t want to get into all the detail of it, but can you give some examples
Myriam Hadnes (00:37:46):
Of the filler?
David Greer (00:37:47):
Yeah. One of the habits is communication to employee. And ultimately we would like to have every employee at the end of the day know that they did a good job or a bad job by a KPI or number that they know at the end of the day. That would be the ultimate. Very few companies achieve this, but that’s what we would like to, not anecdotally, but measurably, right? And again, there’s another piece about the communication, which is everyone in the company knows the strategic plan and knows the goals for the quarter.
Myriam Hadnes (00:38:25):
And it’s again, and I would be curious where it then goes sideways because I hear do a lot of trainings on feedback.
(00:38:38):
And many companies introducing a feedback culture and especially tech companies where they get regular and fast feedback, maybe not on a daily basis but on a weekly basis. And what happens is that the workforce feels overwhelmed, scared, stressed, the managers feel overwhelmed because they have constantly to rate other people and everyone is in this rating machine, their nervous systems exploding, and nobody has actually the head space to either have the feedback conversations that you then might need to have or to focus on the work. How can we avoid that? Because I have to be honest, when I hear that all my alarm bells go on and I try to remain curious,
David Greer (00:39:32):
Okay, so if so much of the Rockefeller habits and the one-page plan and Verne’s stuff is about rhythm.
(00:39:39):
Two days offsite for an annual plan, one day offsite for a quarterly plan. Then the next piece is a weekly like the CEO and the senior leadership team meet and they create, they have a vigorous discussion. You’ve got the brightest people in the room, you should just be reading reports. You should be like, what’s the new brutal fact? Where are we falling down? Where are we behind what’s working? And then out of that should come a who, what, when list. Again, there’s real clarity among the team about the big picture. And again, if we look at the senior leadership team and the CEO, you shouldn’t be putting everything that everyone is doing that week. It’s like what are the most important things that everyone on that team needs to know about and needs to know progress about again? Then as you cascade that down, when I was VP of marketing, I’d meet with our weekly senior team meeting, I would see the priorities for the week, and then I knew from our one page plan what we’re trying to do in the quarter. Then we’d take those two pieces and mesh ’em together and how well we did and our who, what, when from last week. And we would meet for an hour, share a couple wins, have a vigorous discussion set, a new who, what, when for my team
(00:41:04):
For the next week, any feedback I got from not above me, but beside me from sales teams and others was we had a very small team and we generally produce five X what teams three to five times bigger than us could produce. But again, it’s partly I had good people, we were high performing people, but it’s also that just really focus. And I really coach my people who were reporting to me to say no to requests from senior leaders. If they come to you, just ask them to talk to me or just say, look, I’m getting out this new four page brochure or this product line, and until we finish that, we’re not prioritizing anything else unless it’s a demonstrable emergency.
Myriam Hadnes (00:42:02):
And it makes total sense. And I love structure, I love my lists, I love my planning, and I do get the feedback that I need to let some water in my life a little bit of more fluidity, flexibility. And what I notice is that the biggest enemy of these plans are is all the human stuff that gets in the way, the misunderstanding. But I wasn’t in CC and I wasn’t in the meeting and someone having a bad day. All this …
David Greer (00:42:48):
Not intangible. My deal is don’t CC my deal is if we need to have a conversation in between our weekly meeting, what’s its purpose? What are we trying to achieve? What’s the outcome we want from it? Otherwise will it wait until our next weekly meeting? The weekly meeting is the point to have the communication touchpoint. And I’m not saying the final one is the daily huddle. A 15 minute daily huddle, which is a very, very strong structure to it. Like five minutes to this, five
Myriam Hadnes (00:43:23):
Minutes. Like the daily standups in software teams. Yeah,
David Greer (00:43:25):
Exactly. But now for everyone in the company.
(00:43:32):
Again, I think death by meeting is very true. And I think again, it’s because we don’t have this clarity of where we’re going for the year. We don’t have this clarity of where we’re going for the quarter. We also don’t have clear assignment of responsibilities and whose lane, what’s your lane? How do you stay in your lane? Because when we really help people do that, then a lot of this communication is not necessary. And I mean you do need to communicate, but it’s just you’ve got to pick your spots. And then the other piece which we haven’t touched on at all, but which is a big part of the one page plan is culture and purpose.
Myriam Hadnes (00:44:20):
Oh yes.
David Greer (00:44:21):
My belief, I do a lot of work around culture and it’s actually the leftmost, the first column of the plan is your company values or corporate culture, whatever you want to call it. And my belief is when you get really clear on your corporate culture and then you hire and you fire, you hire people who only demonstrate your corporate culture or you fire people who demonstrate that they don’t, a huge amount of communication goes away because you all, because where does culture and values really comes from is because we have a shared underlying belief system. Say for one of my clients, straight shooters,
Myriam Hadnes (00:45:03):
What is it?
David Greer (00:45:04):
We are straight shooters, which we tell the truth, we’re direct, we tell it like it is.
Myriam Hadnes (00:45:13):
The language communicates a lot about the maybe force, maybe there’s a lot of power behind it, maybe there’s masculinity and hence it communicates something that people either feel comfortable with or not. It helps you to also filter the people in who fit.
David Greer (00:45:34):
Yes. And I mean this company has some super high performing female employees, right?
Myriam Hadnes (00:45:40):
I don’t doubt.
David Greer (00:45:42):
And they’re straight shooters and so they only hire people that operate like that. And when everybody truth tells to each other and doesn’t hold back, it can be uncomfortable, but it sure helps with communications
Myriam Hadnes (00:46:04):
If everyone learned how to.
David Greer (00:46:07):
Yeah. I think this overreaching cultural piece, when we hire people that demonstrate the same kind of behaviors and values, then a huge amount of communication doesn’t need to happen because we have this shared underlying foundation that we all sit on top of. And my experience is trying to change someone’s values is it’s possible with enough work, rarely you can change your
Myriam Hadnes (00:46:37):
Own values maybe
David Greer (00:46:39):
To change then it’s a lot of work. I do a lot of coaching around hire values first skills second. And if you look at your typical ad for someone like the culture piece, if it’s mentioned at all, is kind of a footnote down at the bottom. You have so many years programming Perl in this kind of environment and doing this kind of backend. I know for your non-technical listeners that, but that might be something that a technical programmer developer you’re looking for. Whereas it’s like more about your communication skills, more about how you fit into a team. Now you still need those skills. You don’t have time to teach everybody all the skills. You need a computer science degree, you need this many years experience. But there are a lot of those people. What you want is one of those who’s good at that, who fits your company values. Hire for values first and skills second.
Myriam Hadnes (00:47:44):
Yeah. And it’s so easy to, and I guess that’s what you may observe. I only know it from anecdotes. The problem then with scaling as soon as a startup scales, it’s the culture that very quickly dissolves because hiring too fast, compromising maybe on the values and the culture or leaving. Let me ask the question differently. You spoke about the brutal facts when we spoke about KPIs. How would the principle apply speaking about culture and values?
David Greer (00:48:30):
I’m not understanding the question or the perspective.
Myriam Hadnes (00:48:33):
What I wonder is that, or what I have in mind is that very often when we speak about culture and values, we remain very fluffy and not very tangible. And then it’s easy to either allow different understandings or go off in different directions thinking that we agree and have the same understanding, but we don’t. How do you avoid that?
David Greer (00:49:00):
Again, I think cultural values should be a reflection of people’s behaviors. If one of your deep cultural values is teams and collaboration, then if you are always hiring people that really demonstrate that a lot of the problems you just discussed, they don’t completely go away, but people know can figure out how to resolve them and how to stay better aligned. But some of it is still getting, it’s this mix. This is what makes the one page plan so powerful is you have this very soft piece, what we would call soft, but I think is actually fairly hard when you are really crystal clear about your corporate values. That’s a pretty powerful filter to put people through. And then at the same time you’ve got these crystal clear where we’re going in three to five years, what we’re doing this year, what our goals are for the quarters, what are KPIs, what are the KPIs we’re trying to improve this quarter from what to what? You have this very concrete piece to the plan, married to this broader picture of what it is that you’re trying to build. I don’t know if I really answered your question, but that’s the best I could come up with right now.
Myriam Hadnes (00:50:20):
Yeah, maybe give it one more chance because what would be an example of a value that is crystal clear and what is one that is not?
David Greer (00:50:46):
Well, I think, alright, let’s try and back this up a little bit. Let’s say integrity, this idea that you are a truth speaker, you speak directly is one of the core values. Then as part of the hiring process is you ask people for their earlier experiences, how they got through challenges and you listen for things where they clearly were not telling, they tried to avoid the issue or they walked around it. You can tell just from the stories they tell, or you can directly say, if I called your previous boss, and by the way I’m letting you know I will be calling your previous boss. When I ask them about your integrity and truth telling, what are they going to tell me?
Myriam Hadnes (00:51:35):
Okay. And then integrity would be clearly defined in the one page strategic plan so that everyone understands what it means.
David Greer (00:51:45):
Usually you have a phrase and then you have a descriptive paragraph.
Myriam Hadnes (00:51:49):
It’s
David Greer (00:51:49):
Still not hard, hard and hard edged. There’s still room for interpretation, but companies that do this really well, what we like to say is if you do a mis-hire, people around that mis-hire will reject the person like a virus.
Myriam Hadnes (00:52:13):
And then it’s a sign that you have a consistent, strong culture.
David Greer (00:52:16):
Yes. I have a really young group of entrepreneurs. They founded a t-shirt printing company when they were 17, and now it’s 11 years in. They’ve just turned 30
(00:52:33):
And it’s a very, very substantial company. And one of their production managers in Toronto was struggling with an individual. And my question to her was, is this person following your core values? It was a high performer, [who] wasn’t following the core values, and she was struggling, do I just try and coach this person and try and make it work and kind of ignore some of these things or do I need to move on? And I just said to her, I need to look at your core values, then I want to look at this individual and your interaction with them. Are they violating the core values? Person was gone the next week.
Myriam Hadnes (00:53:15):
And then it makes it easy, what you mentioned before here, if you’re crystal clear,
David Greer (00:53:20):
Yeah, it was clear this individual was violating a number of the core values.
Myriam Hadnes (00:53:33):
I had a community for a while and we had very strong, our values were around risk, respect, and generosity. Risk was a big part that we are taking the risk to try something out new, even if it fails. And just to have it there also change the entire interaction because everyone who would join a workshop knew that there is a risk that it won’t work out. You have to take responsibility or be open for that and have the beginner’s learner’s mindset. And it really shaped the communication, everything we did also the generosity part, not self pitching and sharing freely.
David Greer (00:54:17):
That coach that I hired, Kevin Lawrence, who I mentioned briefly earlier in our conversation at the first Verne Harnish event. Kevin made me more uncomfortable than I had been in four or five years. He asked me a couple of questions and I literally had tears in the corner of my eyes and I worked with Kevin for nine years and then he stopped doing one-on-one coaching. I moved to his coach, who’s also been brilliant. But one of the things Kevin over and over would do with me, which is really hard as a perfectionist like me, is everything is an experiment. If you can shift your mindset to everything is an experiment and you have a desired outcome, but if you don’t get that outcome, if you could see it less as a failure and more as new data to work from to go design your next experiment.
Myriam Hadnes (00:55:09):
And
David Greer (00:55:09):
I do this a lot in my facilitation, what experiments are you running? What are you learning from these experiments? And if they get too attached to the outcome or they get really beating up on themselves, it’s like you ran a great experiment. You couldn’t have known what you know now if you hadn’t done what you did. And it moved you a long ways forward, at least in knowing what not to do.
Myriam Hadnes (00:55:34):
Yes.
David Greer (00:55:34):
But in a lot of cases, getting crystal clear on what not to do is actually beautiful because earlier conversation we talked about how I niche down as being a facilitator. It’s kind of like that in business. If you figure out a lot of what is not working, what won’t work, then the path of what’s left becomes smaller and smaller till it’s like, well, of course that’s what we should be doing all along. But you couldn’t have known that until you did all the experiments that told you the stuff that doesn’t work.
Myriam Hadnes (00:56:08):
Yeah, yeah. Very true. Very true. Speaking about niching down, there’s one topic that I was curious about because we spoke about it in our exploration call that you are 16 years sober. Congratulations.
David Greer (00:56:32):
Thank you very much.
Myriam Hadnes (00:56:33):
And you have focused or specialized also on entrepreneurs or coaching, coaching entrepreneurs who are sober. I would be curious what you have learned from sobriety about coaching facilitation and what they bring.
David Greer (00:56:59):
That’s a big topic. First of all, I really want to call out. That coach Kevin Lawrence, I hired and we worked together and kind of cleared all the clutter off the table. And after 18 months, there was only one thing left, the big elephant in the room. And on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009, on a coaching call with Kevin Lawrence, I admitted my biggest secret, which is I have a drinking problem.
(00:57:34):
And Kevin, in his private life had a summer place to the south where Vancouver is. And it turns out it was sort of a communal place. It had a lot of cabins, so there were communal fires. And he met someone with 20 years in 12 step recovery. And Kevin’s a curious guy. He asked him about that person’s experience. When I showed up, Kevin knew to try and coach me to go to a 12 step meeting, which I ended up going to that night. And that has been, and in fact, that particular meeting I made my what’s called a home group, a meeting you commit to go to every week. And I was there this week. Wow. 16 and a half years later. And in fact in the room on Tuesday were three people who were there the night I walked in.
Myriam Hadnes (00:58:28):
Wow.
David Greer (00:58:29):
Who have shared this journey with me. I just wanted to, part of why I come on podcasts like yours is there’s a couple really bigger picture things around sobriety and alcoholism and addiction that I’m trying to communicate. And one of those is to reduce the stigma. It’s a mental health disease and should be treated like a mental health disease. The other is, no matter how desperate it seems, there is always hope
(00:59:03):
Both in business, but especially in addiction. And then the mind that got us addicted is not the mind that can get us out. We have to be with someone else. And I’m not saying 12 step recovery is the only way to recover. There’s many ways, but it’s what’s worked incredibly well for me and partly because I go, it’s my tribe, it’s the people who get me. They understand. And I just want people to know, please reach out for help if this is something you struggle with, reach out for help. And it was important to me to share all of that, which also means I lost the thread of your actual question because I just wanted to make sure people understood how I got into recovery. It’s the single biggest achievement of my life. And every single day I have to get up and I have to achieve the single biggest achievement of my life, which in the one page strategic plan, clarity of what you need to do next is what you get with the one page plan. And I every day know the number one thing I need to focus on because if I don’t stay sober, then everything else goes away. And that in many ways, it’s a gift. It truly is a gift. I didn’t always see it that way. And as entrepreneurs, super high performing people, which most entrepreneurs are, I mean, I drank to make the highs higher. I drank to make the lows not so low. I drank because it was rocket fuel to get more done.
(01:00:45):
And mostly I drank to just override my feelings and my fears. Not at a conscious level, but that’s how I coped.
Myriam Hadnes (01:00:55):
That’s what people do.
David Greer (01:00:58):
Yes, exactly.
Myriam Hadnes (01:00:59):
I quit drinking beginning of this year also because I realized that it’s, I don’t have a healthy relationship to it and numbs. I quit cigarettes half a year before that because it numbs the feelings. And feeling the feelings is the first step to take good decisions.
David Greer (01:01:26):
Yes. And it also stops me from being present because my mind is so busy focusing on where to get the next drink.
Myriam Hadnes (01:01:33):
Yeah, yeah. Why is it that you then focus on, I think there’s, because you said that you focus on working with entrepreneurs who are sober as well.
Myriam Hadnes (01:01:54):
Yes.
Myriam Hadnes (01:01:55):
What do you think is their gift from sobriety for entrepreneurship?
David Greer (01:02:02):
Well, my path through recovery is being what we call the 12 steps. 12 steps are a process. One of the things we talk about in recovery is this is not a program to think about. This is a program of work
(01:02:17):
To get down and do the work. And the work is the 12 steps, which when you see them written down, they’re not that complicated. The steps are not complicated. The work that can feel pretty complicated because it means digging into yourself. And the biggest gift of 12 step recovery for me has been my own personal growth, which in turn has let me be a better coach, a better friend, a better husband, a better father, a better grandfather. It lets me be, and then as part of working the steps, I have a daily prayer practice, meditation, practice, journal practice, and all of those practices. Let me show up and be so much more present to clients to like anyone around me, to you in this call today, I couldn’t probably have done a lot of what we’ve done today and you asked me to slow down and I’ve really worked on slowing down and to being present to our conversation and what’s showing up. And I could never have done that when I was drinking. That is the gift of all of this personal growth work. And I’ve done the steps multiple, multiple times. To me working the steps of 12 step recovery is an opportunity for me to learn more about myself.
(01:03:40):
And that is the gift that I think I can bring to other entrepreneurs is helping them, whether it’s through recovery, whether it’s talking about that or some of the things that we’ve talked about in our conversation. Where are you trying to still micromanage and steer the bus when it’s really time for you to step back? And then if they can’t step back, then we have to go look at their belief system, their fears, which they’ll only let me help them go there to the point that they trust me. If we go back to Coach Kevin, it took 18 months for my trust to become strong enough and deep enough that I was willing to admit my deepest, darkest secret. And I also knew because I’d worked with Kevin long enough that once I told him he’d never let me off the hook. I didn’t know what that looked like. I didn’t know what it meant. But I just knew once I put it on the table, Kevin was not going to let me walk away from it. I knew it was a one way, it was the door I was going to open and it was going to close behind me, and I was not going to ever be able to take those words back.
Myriam Hadnes (01:04:56):
And thank you so much for sharing the story, and unfortunately, I think many will resonate with it because alcoholism is a problem and unfortunately it remains a big taboo. And
David Greer (01:05:16):
That’s the part I’d like to help change. I think, again, we need to talk about it.
David Greer (01:05:23):
10% of the adult population have alcohol use disorder
Myriam Hadnes (01:05:29):
Or other,
David Greer (01:05:31):
And that’s just alcohol.
Myriam Hadnes (01:05:32):
Yes. Not talking about the other drugs.
David Greer (01:05:36):
Well, or workaholism or many other isms, coping mechanisms. That
Myriam Hadnes (01:05:43):
Medication,
David Greer (01:05:45):
Which working hard can be fine, but again, there is a point where it goes too far and it takes away from the other aspects of your life and from yourself.
Myriam Hadnes (01:05:57):
I think in this, it now makes, at least in my mind, total sense everything that you have explained before with a rigor in the one page strategic plan and the rigorous process of sticking to the plan and doing step by step and not falling in the trap to doubt the big vision, but to follow it,
Myriam Hadnes (01:06:24):
Yes,
Myriam Hadnes (01:06:25):
You have this continuous peer accountability that you’re not doing it alone. The CEO doesn’t do it alone because everyone is watching him and saying, no, I won’t let you follow the next shiny object. I find the parallels very beautiful actually.
Myriam Hadnes (01:06:46):
Thank you. Yeah. Are,
Myriam Hadnes (01:06:55):
What do you wish you had known when you just started your coaching and facilitation journey?
David Greer (01:07:08):
Well, I’ll share with you the very first three day coach training institute session that I did, the feedback from the rest of the group, the third day started and we all had to put a word that we think the person would be better if they acted more like whatever it was. My word was clown. Clown because I’m too serious. Have more fun. I don’t actually like the clown metaphor, but I get it. And if I were to tell my younger self, it’s like, have more fun, be more loose. One of the things that’s really a challenge still for me as a facilitator is I co-create plans with my clients. That’s part of why they hire me. I have a lot of business experience, but, and if the energy is not in the room after lunch, I would try and inject the energy into the room and there’s one of me and five of them and I’d end up exhausted and how can I make that looser and more fun and relaxed? And now I just insist after lunch we go for a walk. It’s a non-negotiable now. And we often don’t talk about business. Everybody catches up, they don’t have time, they’re too busy. What’s happening with your place at Whistler? How’s your new son doing? We walk for 20, 25 minutes and have a human connection, my earlier advice is just be more relaxed, have more fun.
Myriam Hadnes (01:08:55):
And I’m so glad to hear about the human connection bit because I was thinking of the rigorous plan and all these meetings I was thinking, so where’s the human side in all of that. But then, okay, so the human side comes in the breaks and the glue.
David Greer (01:09:13):
For new clients, I usually insist on an extra half a day where we do what’s called the lifeline exercise. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but you take your whole life from zero to present day and you take your schooling career part of it, and you take your personal life and you mark out half a dozen peaks and valleys. And it is always really fascinating admitting to coach Kevin, I was an alcoholic is like a valley, but getting sober is a peak. It just really depends on the day in which side of the coin you want to look at. And then we go around and every person shares for 20 minutes their personal lifeline. That is an incredible trust building exercise. And people who have worked together for 20 years learn things about each other. They had no idea, like none.
Myriam Hadnes (01:10:17):
Because we forget that speaking about the what and the business and the KPIs.
David Greer (01:10:23):
Well even you look at someone’s school and career and you look like I lost my dad when I was five and then that caused this and that caused that. And then it’s like, well no, why that person shows up like this? It makes complete sense, right? Because now I understand that that’s where they came from, that was their experience.
Myriam Hadnes (01:10:44):
And then you can meet them with much more compassion. Knowing how important a rigorous plan is, then it’s easier to understand. We stick to the plan. Of course we do instead of think, oh, so stubborn you and your plan,
David Greer (01:11:04):
Right?
Myriam Hadnes (01:11:06):
Yeah. And what your facilitation challenge,
David Greer (01:11:18):
It’s still the same one. It’s still that being, I have a 10 page checklist for every facilitation who I am. But the days before, the day of and the day after and the day of, it’s sit on your cushion, meditate and just be grounded. Come from a place of being connected to the world and the universe and I’m not in control. Turn it over. I work a 12 step program so I have a higher power. And back to this, I don’t have to inject the energy in the room, I just need to meet the energy that’s there. And wherever it is, just meet that. It’s still, I’m much, much better at it, but it’s still the core I think of really showing up for my clients’ best is to come from that grounded place. And also to share some laughs. I go around the room when we start and I say, what’s everyone’s expectations? Which is it’s usually set the next quarterly goals. Okay, yes, we’re going to do it, but sometimes people have expectations. We need to talk about this thing that’s really important that that’s really their expectation anyways. If my clients who’ve worked with me for a long time, usually put it down first, but I always put down as my first expectation, have fun.
(01:12:48):
Or share a few laughs is sometimes how I phrase it. For my clients, no one’s going to die if we make a wrong decision, keep it in perspective and yeah, let’s just have a few laughs and some fun. And if things went really sideways and we really blew it, well let’s have a few laughs about it. This is what we do in 12 step recovery all the time, is we share about what it was like and it’s very gallows kind of humor, but we all get it all been there.
Myriam Hadnes (01:13:22):
And that would create connections and community.
David Greer (01:13:26):
Yes, exactly.
Myriam Hadnes (01:13:35):
And still I find it, I would be curious what you do because when someone says, okay, we have this problem and my expectation is to work on that, and the team has actually gathered to discuss quarterly or the strategic plan, some facilitators would say, actually, me included, if there is this big energy and force against the plan in this space, because they need to speak about that, we have to do something with this energy. Right? So how do you contain that or move it aside
David Greer (01:14:25):
You? In the end, the CEO is my client.
David Greer (01:14:29):
So I may take the first break and take the CEO aside and say, Sue raised this issue. It’s really important to her. I don’t know in the big scheme of things for you how important this is. What would you like me to do about it? Also, the way I structured my thing, if I always celebrate the wins, and then we start getting into what are the brutal facts? What are the biggest challenges? We make a list and then we vote on that list. By that point, I will know whether other people think have even put it down on the list. Well, hopefully the one person who had the expectation at least put it down. But I’ll also have the collective wisdom of the group of what they voted to the top and maybe that issue only got one vote from the person who it’s an issue for. So again, I will take the CEO aside and say, I can feel like what’s going on for this person? And I can feel how important this is. Help me manage through it. And it might be the CEO has to go take that person aside and say, I understand how important this is and I’m going to spend time with you next week. We’ll book a meeting again, I have to go back to my client, but again, the whole team is not my client,
(01:15:45):
Right? The CEO or in the case of my PE firm, it’s the partners. So sometimes I take all the partners aside and have to have a little short conversation so I don’t have to decide it. I think the big thing is I just read what’s in the room and then if I am feeling stuck, I have a client and the, it’s the client’s business, not mine. So turn it over to them.
Myriam Hadnes (01:16:13):
I find it fascinating the different hats you’re wearing and because it shows me how that informs also the way you take action or decisions. So for instance, because you’re wearing the head of a facilitator while facilitating this meeting, at the same time you have the consultant hat because you have subject matter expertise. And I think it’s and less neutrality. And from my understanding, it’s then almost the consultancy head that says, okay, I have one client, I’m accountable to you. And that’s what informs the meeting. Where the purest facilitator would say is, okay, the safety of the group is the most important. I’m here for the group and for there. So there’s much more democracy going on. And then you have the head of the coach sensing. So what mindset things might go on? Again, not with the entire group, but with your client such
David Greer (01:17:27):
And with individuals. Individuals. I work with them. There’s some people that I know they don’t like to speak up, so they’re the people I always ask last because they need to hear everyone else and then they need to assimilate it. And then usually they have some of the best pearls of wisdom, but don’t ask them, put them on the spot first. There’s some of that also back to, I talked about everyone in their lane in terms of jobs, but there’s also, as in my work, and again, let me say this is very specific to my work. I’m not talking about facilitation in general. So my lane in terms of subject matter expertise is the one page plan, high growth, high performance. I am not expert at all in their business. And so I’m able to separate out, we can talk about people culture. And for the ones I’ve worked with for a long time, I know their culture pretty well. But again, they’re the expert in the culture. I am just there to be curious about it,
Myriam Hadnes (01:18:36):
Right?
David Greer (01:18:38):
And not to make judgment about it, it’s not for me to judge whether it’s good or bad. There is no such thing. And I think that’s one of the mistakes we do in trying to elicit corporate values. Like discovering corporate values is a discovery process, not a say what they are. Process.
Myriam Hadnes (01:18:58):
Yeah.
David Greer (01:19:01):
And I mean all this stuff comes from Jim Collins and Good to Great. This is not stuff that Vern has invented. There are other books on this, but again, my lane is the high performance understanding, the one page plan, how it interacts together and bringing that to the table, but not subject matter expertise for the particular business.
Myriam Hadnes (01:19:23):
Which then, and this brings us full circle back to the beginning, you’re hyper focus on your niche. This is what you do, and which then helps you with your strategy and hence with your marketing.
David Greer (01:19:38):
Yes, exactly.
Myriam Hadnes (01:19:40):
Because you don’t speak about other things and you don’t. Yeah.
David Greer (01:19:45):
And that’s the group I’m trying to appeal to. I don’t offer to facilitate other things. I wouldn’t know where to start, honestly.
Myriam Hadnes (01:19:56):
Yeah,
David Greer (01:19:57):
Because I’ve got good at this one particular thing and I think I’m, I’m not the only one. There’s a lot of other coaches to specialize in the one page plan, but I’d rate myself up there and at the end of every single facilitation, there is a survey that I give
(01:20:17):
Including zero to 10 how you rate it. And if anyone gives me less than eight, I usually pull ’em aside and try and understand. Oftentimes it’s not about me, it’s about their ability or they’re so frustrated with someone else. But anyways, and then so I take that feedback and I integrate that. And when I open my binder for a client, the very first page says What to do next time, which I wrote the day after I did the last one.
Myriam Hadnes (01:20:50):
And I would’ve been surprised, even shocked if you didn’t have your own KPIs in form of evaluatingit.
David Greer (01:21:03):
That notion about me.
Myriam Hadnes (01:21:07):
And then again, full circle, you want people to really understand what kind of coach or facilitator you are so that they can recommend you. And I really honor this clarity and consistency in what you do and how you do it. So thank you for sharing this with me and the audience today.
David Greer (01:21:30):
Thank you for having me here. It’s been an absolutely wonderful conversation.
Myriam Hadnes (01:21:34):
Thank you, David.
