Summary
How fun to be on a podcast called I Need To F***ing Talk To You. Join my conversation with Ken Cameron and Russell Stratton as we discuss:
- My 45+ years of entrepreneurial experience as a coach, author, and facilitator.
- How I help entrepreneurs who may be struggling with alcoholism or addiction.
- My experience as co-owner and President of Robelle Solutions Technology.
- The concept of my “Task Master Spirit” and how I’ve learned to manage it.
- That one of my most difficult conversations led me to my 16 years of sobriety journey.
- The joy of our family sabbatical sailing the Mediterranean while homeschooling our three children.
- Ken, Russell and I explored how reframing situations can transform leadership experiences.
- Get a lot done by using the “who, what, when” framework for accountability.
Audio
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1wKm9xZpVJCx1bRo8bUYKJ
Transcript
Ken Cameron (00:05): Welcome to the I Need the Effing Talk to You podcast. If you’re a leader who is serious about building your leadership skills and transforming your organizational culture, you are not alone. This is the right place to join with like-minded people because in every episode of the I Need to Effing Talk to You podcast, we’ll be asking our guests about the most difficult conversation that they’ve had with an employee, coworker, supplier, customer, or even their boss also that you can learn from the challenges faced by leaders who are a lot like you. I’m Ken Cameron.
Russell Stratton (00:37): And I’m Russell Stratton. And today I’m delighted to speak with David Greer. Welcome to the podcast,
David Greer (00:43): Ken Russell. Thank you so much for having me. I am really excited and looking forward to this conversation.
Russell Stratton (00:51): Excellent. David is an expert on culture, people and strategic planning aimed at creating high performing and high growth businesses. A 40 plus year entrepreneur, an angel investor, senior executive, and since 2015 he has been an entrepreneurial coach and facilitator, that’s not all. David is also the author of the book, Wind In Your Sails: Vital Strategies That Accelerate Your Entrepreneurial Growth, which celebrates its 10th anniversary of publishing. We’ll start with our first question. We ask all of our guests, it’s the elevator pitch question, what do you do and why should anyone keep everything listening to you?
David Greer (01:36): What I do is I coach entrepreneurs, or I facilitate strategic planning for entrepreneurs in their senior leadership team. Why you might be interested in what I say is I do have a 40 plus year career as an entrepreneur for my book I interviewed over 45 entrepreneurs and senior sales and marketing leaders, and for 10 of them I actually wrote case studies that end every chapter in my book. A third of the material in my book is from other people and I share my experience, strength and hope in business so that other entrepreneurs don’t have to fall into all of the potholes that I and my fellow entrepreneurial friends have fallen into over the years. You’re welcome to do that if you want, but you don’t have to is what I like to let people know and that’s what I do in working one-on-one with entrepreneurs and helping them both in business and in life.
Russell Stratton (02:42): Okay, that’s excellent. Well, you’ve teased our listeners here with the potholes that entrepreneurs might fall into. From your experience maybe what are one or two of the most common potholes that people fall into from your experience?
David Greer (02:58): A couple ones as entrepreneurs is we can’t see the forest for the trees. When you founded and started a business, which is what I tend to specialize in as owner founders of businesses, you don’t have anyone who’s really holding you accountable. You don’t have anyone who challenges you and that over time can actually hold you back. My belief is that the entrepreneur is the single biggest reason for holding a business back is the business can only grow as fast as you grow. That’s one piece. And then the other piece is most entrepreneurs I know are super passionate about their business. They really want to bring change to the world in some way or they found some pain point in how to solve it and they’re usually very passionate about life. They go race cars or jump out of airplanes or they’re very committed to their marriage and their children and doing exciting things. (04:04): And what we’re really, really good at is squeezing ourselves out of the middle and not taking care of ourselves. I work on this idea that comes from my former coach, Kevin Lawrence, that there’s your business career, there’s your life and then yourself. And when you’re planning your year or your quarter, you need to focus on all three of those areas and have one specific goal at least every quarter for each of those and make sure that you’re doing those things that really build your resiliency, really work for you, whatever that is. And sometimes I work with entrepreneurs to help them discover or rediscover oftentimes what that is.
Russell Stratton (04:51): Okay. Do you see the people sometimes just lose sight of that? Is that what you are finding why that disappears? They’re so focused in on their all work or is they focused on a particular aspect of their life that they forget about maybe one of the others?
David Greer (05:04): I think some of it is just they’ve never really learned to really focus on themselves or the way my former coach Kevin Lawrence talks about. It’s there’s being selfless and focusing on other people and then there’s being selfish. And we often perceive that being selfish equals bad. It’s egotistical it, you shouldn’t. But the truth is, if you’re at either end, I think it was the pendulum going back and forth. And if you’re at either end of the pendulum, if you’re completely selfless, you’ll completely burn out. If you’re completely selfish, you’ll have no family, no friends, probably no business. You need to find this middle ground. But sometimes we have to be very proactive about being selfish and there’s so many demands on our time and other people oftentimes don’t like us being selfish or they will tell us you are being selfish. And the truth is sometimes that is the most important thing that we need to do and we need to grow thicker skin. (06:10): That might be one of the difficult conversations you have to have with someone important in your life is right now I need to do what I’m doing for me and no, I’m not going to be available to you and no, I’m not going to. Yesterday was a perfect example for me. The Masters was on and I took the entire afternoon to watch the Masters. My wife interrupted me three times, and every time it was just a critical putt was coming up, I held up my hand to just signal stop. And a couple times she was pretty ticked off and that’s okay. I was just, for me, one of the hardest things for me to do in the world is just to take time off and just chill and just be with the Masters and what’s on TV and not do anything else. It turns out not working hard is really hard for me.
Ken Cameron (07:09): You’re probably not alone in that, David. And I wonder for certain leaders who might be challenged in taking that personal time for personal development or personal reflection or recharging, but who may be the kinds of leaders who might be people pleasers? And I’m asking for a friend here then. For those friends of mine who might be people pleasers, then what kind of tricks do you have to help them make that paradigm shift?
David Greer (07:40): Well, for me, I’ll just share my experience. I’m a recovering people pleaser and if I’m not careful, I’m back in people pleasing mode. And some of it has come to really recognize that this is just something, and I have reasons from my family of origin why I’ve ended up this way, and I know where it comes from. Some of it is just, it’s okay if people don’t like you and rarely do people not like you all the time. They just might not like you some of the time and that’s okay. And then separately from the people pleasing, I have this internal Task Master Spirit that’s really, really powerful. It was developed probably when I was two or three years old, mostly to get the attention of my narcissistic father, which is where it comes from. And it served me super well. I mean, it’s let me do absolutely amazing things in my life, achieve incredible things, but it doesn’t always serve me. (08:48): And what I’ve discovered in working, I find a lot of entrepreneurs I work with have a very powerful taskmaster spirit, but they’ve never named it and they’ve never wanted to tame it or look at it for me, it can operate completely unconsciously. I can be back into trying to do 20 things. I’ve had to come to really recognize this part of myself and to say sometimes, Hey, Task Master Spirit, nice to see you. I don’t need you right now. You can chill, take your time out. We’re okay. And that’s been the end of a lot of personal growth to let me get to that point. And part of achieving a lot of tasks is, well, it’s great for people pleasing in most things in life. If you’re a doer and you got a lot of stuff done, oftentimes people like that. It’s part of that people pleasing part of how I get people to be pleased with me.
Ken Cameron (09:54): I really appreciate the way that you describe that as a part of yourself that’s individuated from yourself and really reminds me of some of the work that I’ve done around parts work, which is the notion that we have several different parts of us that manifests into our whole, and I really appreciate the way that you’ve articulated that particular task master self as having been really useful for you. I think what often happens in this kind of stuff as leaders, we try to really discipline ourselves or be hard on ourselves because we’ve got these parts that are no longer serving us. But what you’ve really done there is really essential to this kind of leadership growth, which is recognizing, hey, this part of me that is a bit of a superpower but it’s not serving me now. And our tendency is to kind of banish that part and then that just comes back in an underhanded, subconscious nightmarish way. I really like the way that you integrated that part. Right.
David Greer (10:56): I’ll just add one thing. Working with a really great therapist, I was going to call it the task master devil or something like a really negative name. And then my first response when she helped me to identify this part of me and my first response was, what are you going to say? Well, I’m going to say F off TMS. And she pointed out, it’s a part of you, you’re just being unkind to yourself. A lot of the personal growth was first of all calling it a spirit. It doesn’t have a connotation of good or bad, it just is. And then this idea of it’s a fully part of you, be kind to it because be kind with Task Master Spirit because you’re being kind to yourself. And part of mastering my Task Master Spirit is to be kind to it, to recognize it as good in my life as well as not trying to call it bad, but not of service right now. Again, I’m very, very thankful to this therapist to help me frame what the conversation, how I think about this is because my initial reaction was to really be bad boy, to really go down that path and she just coached me and encouraged me to think of it differently.
Ken Cameron (12:26): Wonderful. It sounds like you’ve done a lot of that personal growth development. One of the things you’re pretty public about is 15 years of sobriety and that you coach other executives who struggle with alcohol or struggle with their relationship with alcohol or who question their relationship with alcohol. Let’s put it even more gently. Tell us a little bit about how do these things fit together?
David Greer (12:52): Well, I mean I never went for therapy work until I got sober. That’s one way it fits together. And most people who are alcoholics for a very long time, I, certain aspects of my personal growth happened and my professional growth, but there were other big holes of my personal growth that were just not possible when alcohol was the dominant story in my life. I had to get sober to be open to the possibility of these conversations that I just talked about. I don’t think there was no way I could have awareness around it when I was still beholden to alcohol.
Ken Cameron (13:36): Yeah, good for you. I have a mentor who had been chief of staff to Joe Clark at the Prime Minister’s office in Ottawa before returning to Calgary and gave up alcohol because it’s just so ubiquitous in that world, both the world of politics, the world of business, especially in the 1980s or I guess that would’ve been seventies, eighties. He really found his way through that. And then by the time I connected with him as a mentor, he was well into his eighties by that point, and it was just a delight to be around someone who was just so grounded for so long.
David Greer (14:12): Yes.
David Greer (14:15): You mentioned that I work with entrepreneurs who might be challenged with alcohol or who’ve gotten sober, and now it can be very tough as an entrepreneur and you’re high powered in your community and you go to networking events and you go to any, I’ve been part of the BC Technology Association and another organization here called Ace Tech. I tell you when they get the CEOs, the entrepreneurs together, somebody’s going to sponsor the bar, there’s going to be open bar free booze, everyone’s drinking. I coach around what do you do in situations like that? If you’re in any kind of high powered complicated sale, there’s a good chance that as the CEO, you fly down for a big dinner close to the end of closing of the sale. And I had a client a couple of years ago who was in that situation and he came back from that trip and said, “we each had a couple of drinks before dinner and we had a bottle of wine each.” And I said, I don’t know if anyone was alcoholic, I can’t tell you you were drinking a alcoholically as defined by the National Health Institute in the US and by Health Canada here in Canada. And it was just perfectly, perfectly normal. (15:34): I help people come up with strategies for how do you cope in that situation when you don’t want to drink.
Ken Cameron (15:41): It can be a bit of a challenge. It’s true.
David Greer (15:43): It can be a huge challenge.
Ken Cameron (15:44): Yeah. And I remember one CEO who he didn’t quit drinking, but he told me very proudly that at his board meetings he was able to nurse a single glass of wine for four hours and make it look like four. Right. And that was his strategy. There doesn’t have to be, there could be complete abstinence at one end or there can just be controlling things at the other end, and it may be something that all of us have different strategies for. But I know that Russell has something he wanted to add. I apologize for cutting you off Russell.
Russell Stratton (16:11): No, no, no. I think it was a lot of it was as cultural. It’s changing somewhat I think, but it’s certainly still there. That was business was done over drinks at the bar, at the golf club, at the restaurant, and if people didn’t drink, that was some idea. There was something odd about them and maybe not to be trusted because they weren’t going to go and drink. It sort of became people falling into, I’d certainly seen this somewhere, people sort of fell into that sort of drinking culture because that was what was expected, particularly if their boss thinking more moving away from entrepreneurs but into corporately. If you work for somebody who said, Hey, we’ll go down to the power on Friday after work, the expectation was if you wanted to progress, you were expected to be there to be part of that group. And if you weren’t, then there were things that you missed out on because there was a lot of networking, a lot of conversations, people pitching ideas that all happened in the bar. And if you weren’t there then somehow you were going to miss out.
David Greer (17:22): I have a client who is a senior sales leader for one of the largest tech companies in Canada and not too long ago was in Toronto and a big dinner and his boss’s boss was there and he was across the table from his boss’s boss. And even though he got the wine glass off the table and this client of mine is sober, this individual pushed wine on him for whole dinner and he had to fight his way off of that. And what he said was, it was very interesting is that people of other, of Muslim faith, that individual was not pushing those people, but because he’s a white male, absolutely was. And interestingly, many of the people kind of at his peer level after that dinner thanked him for his leadership and example in not caving to the boss’s boss, like a really senior, senior person. And literally, I’m talking one of the largest tech companies in Canada, and this is very recent, it still is more prevalent than people think. And I like for remind people, alcohol is the most powerful drug on the planet
David Greer (18:43): And it’s socially acceptable to consume it. And if anyone drinks enough alcohol over time they’ll become alcoholic. Bottom line that some of us are predisposed to get there sooner, but anyone, it doesn’t matter if you have enough alcohol over time, you’ll become an alcohol.
Ken Cameron (19:06): Thank you for this part of the conversation And it’s also been a part that we had not intended to go down into in such depth, but this has been just a wonderful rabbit hole with all sorts of wonderful stories along the way. And there are other topics and other aspects of your life that are equally worth investigating. For instance, you spent an entire year on a sailboat sailing around the Mediterranean, homeschooling your children. Tell us about the strategies you developed in working and living in close confines with your family.
David Greer (19:40): I’ll go there, but first let me get the conversation about how I ended up doing that. I was 22, I was getting my computer science degree. I joined a young software startup as the first employee and I liked the place I stayed 20 years, 10 years in, I bought out one of the co-founders who had hired me, became partners with the other co-founder, and at the end, Bob and I only had one major disagreement in 20 years, but it was a doozy and it ended in divorce and he ended up buying me out. It’s 2001. I haven’t really noticed the dot com meltdown because our particular industry was pretty insulated from that. And I’m chasing deals and someone’s smarter than me. You two talk a lot about difficult conversations. I don’t know if this is a difficult conversation, but it’s one of the most important conversations of my life. (20:42): I was sitting, I met a woman through networking who helped people figure out the next part of their career. We went out to lunch, went back to her office, we were sitting in front of her desk and she said to me, David, your kids will never be 11, nine, and five again. And if your listeners can imagine the most cheesy, cartoonish light bulb going off over my head, it was that moment. It was just literally where another human being just pointed out something so obvious. And it completely changed my life, which was my wife had sold her physio clinic two years before, we were unencumbered. I’d sold out of the software business she’d sold out of her physio business to stay home with the kids. We hatched this plan to commission a sailboat in the south of France and to homeschool our three kids for a year. It actually took two years, true entrepreneurial fashion. We planned it for a year and then it took twice as long. But we connected with another family from our school who just before we left, they had spent the year living in a bar in northern Europe. And Helen, I think sent in an email to me best, which is living on a barge or a sailboat with your family is like being in a pressure cooker. And one of two things happens. Either the lid blows off
David Greer (22:16): Or
David Greer (22:18): The sum of the parts becomes greater than the individuals as you learn how to cope and be together. Many people pointed out to me, I’ve spent more time with my kids than most parents will spend with their kids in their entire lifetime. And yes, I got to tell you, your listeners, that in that experience, your children get to see you at your best and your worst. There is no escaping, running a sailboat and all the things that go with that. Plus trying to feed three children, plus homeschool them, it has its stressful moments. It’s an incredible, incredible adventure, don’t get me wrong, but it has its stressful moments and they saw sometimes us blow up front and center and you have to deal with that and then you have to deal with the followed from that and own your part. That was part of our growth. For example, one of the things that we eventually did was that we asked during school time that the children call us Mr. or Mrs. Greer or teacher, and they never got to Mr. or Mrs. Greer. They did get to teacher and eventually I realized that the most important aspect of that wasn’t for them. It’s when they said teacher, it helped remind me, I am not the parent right now.
David Greer (23:50): I need to be wearing the hat of a teacher, which with our middle child especially was very, very challenging. But it let me show up better as a teacher and not be a parent or the other role. That’s some of the learning that I take away from it. And that’s a perfect example. My former coach, Kevin Lawrence likes to say, change the story, change the experience. We just got that one word change, which instead of mom or dad, it’s teacher and now the experience starts to change.
David Greer (24:34): Reframed the story with that one change.
Ken Cameron (24:42): That’s wonderful. David. My brain is already ticking over with all the ways in which leaders can reframe that for themselves. If you’ve graduated into a new role, really just kind of adopting that new title or that new role and trying it on a coat to make sure that it fits all the way through to taking that role off and putting on a new role when you enter your household or when you arrive at a community meeting. Many of us as leaders in business world, we then turn to a community meeting and it’s challenging for us to simply be a member of the community rather than to be the chair of neighborhood committee or whatever it might be. I really, really appreciate that metaphor and I can’t wait to unpack that for myself in the coming days.
David Greer (25:30): Yeah, I’m a super driven individual who’s led businesses, led teams, and when I get into my 12 step recovery and especially what we call business meetings where we collectively meet as a group and decide what’s best for our group, man, is it hard for me to hang up the hat of these are really, really slow meetings because we work on a consensus in 12 step recovery and the voice that’s no, we give special emphasis to and listen to and I want to tear my hair out and can’t you see this is obviously what we should be doing and I have to park all of that and I’ve learned it’s good for me. Patience’s not always my strong suit time, but I’ve learned more by having to be there and show up for my group.
Russell Stratton (26:30): Okay, that’s great. David. There’s been a couple of great sort of nuggets of learning. I think therefore our listeners to be thinking about particularly that piece about reframing ourselves or a situation and we talk about in our book, actually I need to actually talk to you when we talk about a situation where there’s working with the leaders who had to make exactly the situation that Ken is talking about, the difference between their role in their business and then having to be in the community and you had to reframe who they were and how they showed up. Simple example there without getting into too much detail, was somebody who chose to use first name terms rather than title. They used their first name rather than their title. And also they didn’t wear a uniform. They wore a smart casual that completely changed the dynamic of their interaction from being a senior police officer to be with a community group that no one ever spoke to them, to people who would come and speak to them. (27:29): But there was a third as well that he would talk about his experience as a father. My name’s John, I mean smart casual wear and I’m a father in this community, completely changed from I’m Chief Superintendent Smith and I’m a senior police officer and my job is to police this community completely changed the dynamics for him and also for the people work with and the results they got out of it were great. I know how that works in practice. Thank you for bringing it back to front of mind. We’re going to take a short break here, our intermission for a moment. When we come back from our advert break, we’re going to hear about the most difficult workplace conversation that David has had, how he dealt with it. We’ll be back in a flash.
Ken Cameron (28:21): Okay, this is going to be a different kind of ad. One of our clients wants to do the pitch for us.
Russell Stratton (28:27): That client is Dean Jess, who’s operations manager at Volker Seven Highways.
Ken Cameron (28:32): Dean was a guest on our podcast in episode number 36 and at the end of his interview he surprised us by telling our listeners just what he thought of our work. Dean Jess (28:43): Russ and Ken, I appreciate the work your team does with managing difficult workplace conversations. Volker, Stephen has had the pleasure of going through that a few times now and I know some other parts of our companies are also engaging that with yourselves in Blue Gem. And just for the audience’s information we know in a work environment it goes without saying that there’s different views and perspectives out there. Agreements, disagreements, conflicts, et cetera are going to take place. And what we’ve really benefited from the work your team does is that you address these conflicts or disagreements. You work with the company, you address their specific conflicts and disagreements and you make it a real life setting by bringing actors and mediating and keeping that context going in the discussions going. It prepares our leaders in Volker Seven and others in the leadership role to be ready for these conversations when they do take place. Really appreciate the work you gentlemen do as well in your team.
Ken Cameron (29:41): We had no idea that Dean was going to say that, but we are really glad that he did.
Russell Stratton (29:46): For years, Ken and I have been leading these workshops on how to navigate difficult workplace conversations because we use live actors to play your difficult employee, customer, supplier or boss. It’s as close to the real thing as you can get without having the real problematic individuals in the office with you.
Ken Cameron (30:05): And lemme tell you, it’s a whole lot psychologically safer. If you’d like to find out more about our live workshops or our online courses, then head on over to I need to effing talk to you.com. And now back to the episode.
Russell Stratton (30:21): Welcome back to the I Need to Effing Talk You podcast. We are speaking today with
David Greer. Let’s take a look at the most difficult workplace conversation that you’ve had to conduct. David, could it have been with an employee, coworker, customer? Perhaps it was even your boss. Talk us through what happened. If you could set the scene for us, what was the context for it? Then perhaps there’s a little detail of the conversation itself, what went well, what didn’t go well, what lessons learned. It’s our listeners often get a lot of benefit from hearing people’s lessons learned to see that they’re not the only people that are in that same similar situation. Take it away. I’ll hand it over to you David.
David Greer (31:01): Thanks Russell. The one I’m going to pick starts with work but is deeply personal, hopefully it’ll just, that’ll fit with your podcast and your listeners. We’ve talked briefly, I had this 20 year career with the software company. I left to go to the Mediterranean for two years. I come back, I’m like, what’s next? I mean, being a software engineer and an entrepreneur for most of my career. I came back and I did a lot of angel investing looking at a hundred deals a year and investing in one and working as a board, as a director on the board.
David Greer (31:44): And I kind of knew it
David Greer (31:52): Wasn’t really totally working for me. And in the meantime I’d heard from a lot of my entrepreneur friends about this thing called the one page strategic plan. It comes from a guy called Verne Harnish and there’s a lot of benefits to it because it sets really clear goals, which then is much easier to hold people accountable to. But I didn’t know a lot about it. And this guy, Verne Harsh, was coming to Vancouver and I wanted to learn more about it. And I took one of my young CEOs to this event, learned about the one-page plan, and at the break in the morning he said, there’s a couple coaches at the back of the room, anyone who wants to should go talk to them. And I went and talked to both of those people and one of them was a guy, Kevin Lawrence, Coach Kevin, I think one of North America’s, maybe the world’s best entrepreneurial coaches. (32:42): And Kevin made me more uncomfortable in a two-minute conversation than I had been in four or five years. I had tears in the corner of my eyes. That’s kind of the first difficult conversation was coming to this realization. And he said something really simple like “David, there’s like a hundred entrepreneurs in this room and I bet every one of them could use your help.” And I’d been trying to find entrepreneurs to work with and to offer my help for now three, four years. And it wasn’t happening. And he really made me realize how unfulfilling this directorship and working on boards and having CEOs that were 35 rungs down the ladder that I climbed when I was 23. Anyways, he gave me his business card and I had it by my phone and probably once a week I’d look at his card and I think about calling him and the phone would weigh about 10,000 pounds. And then eventually about three weeks in, Kevin called me and he said, “Hey, this is coach Kevin, do you remember me from the Vern Harnish event?” And I said, yes. I didn’t say, oh, I haven’t thought about much else for the last three weeks, but I ended up hiring him. And on my 50th birthday on August 9th, 2007, we did our first coaching session. And what’s Kevin, the first opening coaching session with the new client is two eight-hour days. He is my kind of guy all in or all out? No. And we worked together
David Greer (34:24): Well. We worked together for nine years and then he stopped doing one-on-one coaching to focus more on strategic planning. But 18 months into our relationship on January 26th, 2009, I was in my office about 10 o’clock at night and I had my last beer. And the way I worked with Kevin was the day or night before a coaching call, I would email him some of the wins I had and then the topic of our conversation. And I emailed Kevin and I said, the topic of our conversation is my drinking. And the next day, Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 in the afternoon we had a coaching call and we talked about my drinking and he asked me how much I drank, which was a lot. I was a daily drinker for over 20 years. And that was unquestionably the scariest conversation I’ve ever had in my life. Alcohol was my crutch, was my rocket fuel was how I got past fears was how I celebrated successes. I could not imagine a life without it. I literally could not imagine what looking forward was going to be without alcohol. And I also knew I had built enough of a trust relationship with Kevin. I knew once I told him he’d never let me off the hook. I didn’t know what that would look like, but I just knew we’d built this trust relationship where I knew Kevin just would hound me. He wasn’t. Admitting to him this problem was the biggest step I ever took in my life and unquestionably the most difficult conversation.
David Greer (36:17): It turns out as his recreational property, he had met some people with long time 12 step recovery. He’d sat around the fireplace and had conversations with him about 12 step recovery. When I showed up, he had no idea I was a high performing alcoholic and I didn’t start drinking till later in the afternoon. I never showed up drunk on any of our calls. And even if I was, I still would’ve, you probably would’ve never known. But he knew what to do, which was to coach me to go to a meeting and he asked me to commit to go. That was a Tuesday. He asked me to commit to go by that Friday, which I did. And then later that afternoon being the overachiever that I am, I looked online for meetings for that night and I was going to be downtown at a networking event till eight o’clock. And I looked online and lo and behold, there was going to be a meeting, a quarter of a block off the road I would be driving down to go home like at 8:30 and the event finished at eight.
David Greer (37:23): On the way home from that event, I stopped and parked and I went in and the meeting at that time was in a Legion, Legions have bars. I walked into this building and the doors were open to the bar and there was a bunch of people drinking at the tables. And I literally, I’m not even 24 hours of putting down a drink like 20 and I’m frozen. And then a couple people going to the meeting, they had this sixth sense that we have in recovery and they looked at me and they said, Hey, are you looking for the meeting? Go down the hall and go up the stairs. And I went down the hall and I went up the stairs and that was my first ever 12 step recovery meeting. I later learned that coincidentally in that building there’s 12 steps which always amused us. (38:15): And we also were very amused to have a 12 step recovery meeting over a bar, especially when the music was on below. And within a month I had made that my home group. And a couple months ago I took my now 16 year cake. I have 16 years sober and it’s no longer in that building, we’ve moved it somewhere else. But coach Kevin came for my 16 year cake and was there to help me celebrate. And it’s really important to him that he makes it out once in a while to my cakes, as we call it, in this neck of the woods, how we celebrate our sobriety. (39:01): And that completely changed the trajectory of my life. It changed the trajectory of my career, it changed the trajectory of how I look after myself and everything changed. And I like to say to people, when I came into recovery, I had a house and I had a wife and I had three kids and I had two cars. And if you looked at me today, I’ve got a house, I’ve got a spouse, I have three kids, I have two grandkids and we have two cars. You might say on the outside, nothing’s changed. But what I’m here to tell you is that we talked about it earlier in this call about some of the personal growth, identifying my Task Master Spirit, like the person I’m on the inside today is a completely different person than that person 16 years ago that had that conversation with Coach Kevin,
Ken Cameron (39:59): Thank you so much for sharing that very personal story and that very personal journey of growth. David and I recognize too that after that initial moment of walking into that legion, there would have been a lot of extra challenging moments and challenging opportunities for it to slip back and many more difficult conversations that must have also taken place. Thank you for giving us everything that you just did in a nutshell. And also recognizing all of the work that the 15 years has taken since then.
David Greer (40:35): Yes, yes indeed. And the thing about difficult conversations in most cases is if it goes well and people recognize what’s at the end of that difficult conversation, then one or both people who have that conversation get a chance to grow. They have to be open to growing, which they may not be, which might result in further difficult conversations. But I was listening earlier to your interview with Rob Leon and avoiding, I’m a people pleaser. I come from a family of conflict avoidance. Like in 20 years with Robelle, Bob and I never fired anyone, not once. We had two individuals who conflict avoidant. But what I heard in that previous conversation that you had is, and I think it’s really for listeners to know, is as a senior leader, as an executive, as a manager, you’re being unkind to the people who work for you. When you avoid the difficult conversations, the kindest thing for you to is to have the difficult conversation to hold people accountable. Otherwise they don’t know. They don’t know they’re not performing. And we have a saying in 12 step recovery, step 10 is every day I take an inventory of how I did today and whether I did something really wrong and whether I owe someone an amend and from the lineage that I come from, when you owe someone an amend when you’re doing your daily inventory, and anyways you need to promptly admit it and promptly in my lineage of 12 step recovery is 24 hours. And I think the same thing in corporate, if you find, what I find is, I had this conversation all the time with entrepreneurs, they don’t want to have a difficult conversation with one of their people once a week goes by. It’s almost impossible to have a conversation who remembers an event from a week ago and what’s going on? I like this idea of when you notice something wrong, you need to have a conversation within 24 hours. It’s kind of like ripping the bandaid off the wound, have it sooner rather than later and just get into it. I mean, you need to be prepared, you need to be fair. There’s a lot of ways I think we show up better to have those conversations. And the important point I’m trying to get across is not to avoid it, which almost all of us do at some point or another.
Ken Cameron (43:21): Yeah, for sure. For sure. And thank you for referencing that wonderful interview with Rob Leon. Listeners, if you’re interested in following up on that interview, that’s at episode 1 0 6 and I know that Russell had something he wanted to add into the conversation here. Can I hand it over to you, Russell?
Russell Stratton (43:36): Yeah, sure. I mean what you were talking about there, David, is if you were actually taking part in one of our workshops because the messages you were putting out there is reiterating exactly what we say to people and those key points of early proactive management action, is it better to deal with the problem when it’s small or wait till it gets big? Well, it’s better to deal with it while it’s small, not just that it fester because it rarely gets better on its own occasionally, but rarely nobody just gets worse or it gets passed to somebody else and now it becomes a bigger problem for them. And that point you’d say around, we’re doing anybody any favors. And I think that’s the part often that people don’t think about. Have I want to be liked, I want to be nice, I want to be seen to be empathetic. (44:29): I don’t want people to not like me. If I don’t have the conversation, then our personal relationship stays intact. And one of the things that Ken and I do in reframing that with people is saying, well, what it really shows is if you care about the person that works for you and you want them to do well, then you’ll have the conversation because you want them to do well. The similarly way that you would do with your partner, a close friend or your children, you want to have that conversation. If you don’t care about them, I’m not really, but you are an employee, you are not actually somebody I’m bothered about, then why would I put myself through it of actually going and having the conversation? I can just leave it, let it get on there, you’re leaving, whatever happens. I said to them to reframe that rather than seeing about I’m doing something that it might upset somebody in the short term, maybe it does, it just comes as a shock out to them. But if you are doing out of a place of, because I care about you as an employee, then it reframes it in their mind. They don’t necessarily have to say that to the employee, but it reframes it in their mind as the leader that, okay, I’m doing this for the right reason. There’s a positive reason, not a negative one.
David Greer (45:44): And a lot of the work I do with entrepreneurs around goal setting, which I think when I look back at my career as the manager and leader of a software company, I think I could have done a better job, is setting really clear goals and expectations when I’m coaching and working in facilitation, people set goals which they think are clear. You’ll have a goal like improved customer support. Well that’s a nice intention, it’s not a goal because, how do you measure customer support today or customer service today? Do you survey customers? Do you use NPS? (46:24): And often is we don’t have anything. Okay, well then maybe a goal is set up a system to actually survey customers and find out what they think of you and maybe that’s a reasonable goal for the quarter. It’s helping people who work for us to co-create. And part of my growth as a leader is stop dictating goals and help be clear on the direction we need to go and what has to happen. And then for individuals, they need to help set their own goals for where they need to go within that context. And then one of the tools that I use is something I called the who what when list. Even if my last executive role was VP of marketing for a 35 million a year publicly traded company. And I met every week with my team. I had the corporate goals, which were pretty much assigned to me. (47:22): Then I had my goals for the year as the VP of Marketing. Then every week I would meet with my team and I create a document. It’s really just a spreadsheet with crystal clear dates, who’s accountable and what needs to happen through the week. And what I find is the best high performing organizations, companies that I work with are ones who get really good at this, who, what, when as kind of an art. Because if you get too detailed, too deep into the weeds, it’s more what do we collectively as a group need to keep each other accountable for the next week and bigger picture and let’s make sure and then it really changes when you get it written down. (48:10): This is part of the difficult conversation that you need to have every week is like what’s in and what’s out. And I think a weekly rhythm within a quarterly rhythm, like quarterly setting goals because 13 weeks I tell people it’s enough time to get a lot of shit done. And it’s short enough that if some brutal new fact shows up or you get it completely wrong, you can still course correct. You won’t tell the company if you get it badly wrong because you’re going to relocate at your goals every 13 weeks. But within that 13 week context, this meeting rhythm every week and getting crystal clear for everybody on who, what and when, I think is a really that I do a lot of coaching around, A lot of entrepreneurs don’t do that and they don’t get clear enough with their team leads on what needs to happen needs to happen. That’s a conversation I do a lot of coaching around is you need to be in that meeting rhythm and you need to make sure you come out of that meeting with really strong who, what, when, and you as the
David Greer (49:15): Leader have to help facilitate that, not dictate it.
Ken Cameron (49:21): That’s a really wonderful tool. Thank you for sharing that David. It’s
Ken Cameron (49:25): Like many things. Some leaders will probably find that they do that already without using the template or the frame in such an intentional way that you’ve just described. And it’s always useful. Russell and I, our eyes always light up in these calls when we come across these useful, simple frameworks that can be applied immediately, either immediately after the workshop or immediately after the podcast. I really encourage our listeners to write down that who, what, when framework and start implementing it immediately. Look it up after, implement it now and look it up after.
David Greer (50:00): Yeah. And if you’re unclear or uncertain, visit my website. The top left corner adds my email address and my phone number and I offer a free one hour of coaching to anyone who wants it. This is interesting to you, but you don’t know where to get started, I just want to make sure that you know that offer is there. Please take advantage of it.
Russell Stratton (50:24): That’s great David. And that brings us really to, just before we close, we always like to ask our guests, what are you working on that people don’t know about, but they should be interested about? How can they get in touch with you to find out more? Take it away, give us the details of your website and anything you’re working on at the moment you want to let our listeners know about, but they should be interested about? How can they get in touch with you to find out more? take it away, give us the details of your website and anything you’re working on at the moment you want to let our listeners know about
David Greer (50:51): coachdjgreer.com, coach D as in David, J as in James greer.com. Actually, if you just Google my name, putting
David Greer coach, there’s a pretty good chance I’ll be in the top five. Like I said, I’d visit my website. Every single page has my phone number and my email address up in the top left. And if you prefer, there’s a contact form too. What I’m working on is what we’re doing today, I want to take my experience, strength and hope in business and my experience, strength and hope in recovery, and I want to share it. And I did 26 podcast interviews last year and hopefully we’ll do about the same this year. And thank you much for allowing me to be here and to share what I have. And for entrepreneurs, really anyone who’s struggling, there’s two key messages I like to make sure everyone leaves with. (51:51): One is no matter how dire it seems, no matter how dark, no matter how desperate, no matter how big the challenge there is a solution. For me in recovery, it was to go to 12 step recovery. And the deeper and the darker it is, the more important it is. My belief is we can’t do it alone. I know for sure I can’t do it recovery alone and my reaching out to coach Kevin was the breakthrough moment. And then getting involved in 12 step recovery where we all admit we can’t do it alone. That’s why we go to meetings, to be there for each other. My message is no matter what, there’s hope and reach out, there’s someone who can and will help you.
Russell Stratton (52:41): Okay, that’s a wonderful way to finish our interview. Thank you much for being a great guest for us. David, it’s been a pleasure to have you on.
David Greer (52:50): Thank you much for having me. It’s been a wonderful visit and I really enjoyed it.
Russell Stratton (52:57): Thank you to our listeners for joining us. Share the links to this podcast with your friends and colleagues. Don’t forget to check out the links that we’ll have in our show notes for David’s website and his offer there. And as he said, if you are somebody who is an entrepreneur and you are struggling, there are people out there to help you. And David may be a good person for you to wait as a first port of call. Thanks for listening and we’ll be back with
