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Rob Anspach is the founder of Anspach Media. He hosts the E-Heroes podcast. I was fortunate to be interviewed by Rob on the topic of Culture and Performance. We discuss hiring, firing, global brands, and how always hiring people better than you leads to outstanding companies.

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Transcript

Rob Anspach:

Hey, this is Rob Anspach and welcome to another edition of E-Heroes. Today, we’re going to talk about how culture drives high performance. So if you’re an entrepreneur out there and you want to get to that next level, or you’re on that plateau and you’re stuck, I actually brought in Coach David Greer to tell us how we can do that. So welcome, David, and thanks for being here.

Coach David J. Greer:

Thanks, Rob. I’m really excited to be here with E-Heroes.

Rob Anspach:

Now, you’re up in Vancouver. I’m in Pennsylvania. Right there, there’s already a culture difference.

Coach David J. Greer:

There is. Indeed.

Rob Anspach:

You’re just nicer up there and we’re just mean down here.

Coach David J. Greer:

I think that when an entrepreneur starts a business, what manifests itself typically is the culture, whatever the beliefs are of the entrepreneur end up manifesting themselves in the people they hire and the way they operate. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that per se. I joined a young software startup as the first employee after the founders. We added people slowly and we added a certain kind of people and built a certain culture and it worked out really, really good. We were very service-oriented and very Canadian, really wanted to look after customers. If we had one angry customer in a year, every employee would stop what they’re doing to deal with this person because we were so uncomfortable. We don’t do well with angry clients.

Rob Anspach:

Yeah, I would have just fired them.

Coach David J. Greer:

Yeah. Right. Exactly. And that’s okay too. Subsequently from selling out of Robelle, I’ve realized that there’s a lot of benefit to being more proactive about your culture, to actually writing it down. I look at some of the people who didn’t hang around or people who I hung onto when I was running Robelle for too long, there was really a cultural misfit. If I had been clearer about what the culture is and what the expectations were around that culture, I think it would have sussed those people out sooner. My belief is that you want to… You can’t teach culture. You were taught what your parents taught you, the ethics that you have, the way that you operate in the world is baked pretty deep. I think you can teach people a lot of skills, but I don’t think you can teach them culture.

Coach David J. Greer:

So my belief is that you want to hire people that match your culture, and actually have a culture filter that you put on. I have one client who’s massively growing. They net added 38 people last year, but they let go 12 and these are super smart engineering people, but they did not fit the culture. It was just becoming more and more of a clash and senior management was having to consume more and more time managing these people. Whereas when you hire people who fit in with your culture, you spend less and less time managing because they have behaviors you already want. I think that’s a sign of a really healthy company is one who’s clear on its culture, hires for culture and is prepared to fire for really serious violations of culture.

Rob Anspach:

Now let’s take that a little bit further because I see that when it comes to software companies such as Microsoft versus Facebook, when Microsoft grew, everything was culture-oriented. When Facebook grew, they enveloped all the cultures that they were going into. So with Facebook, it started out as a US company, but as they started creating Facebook for Europe, Facebook for Germany, all these different companies, they started changing their own internal culture and okay, now we’re a worldwide phenomenon. And then they had to start changing all their dynamic internal rules and regulations and policies to reflect the world instead of their own culture.

Coach David J. Greer:

Yeah. And that makes sense if you want to build a global company. I don’t know the Facebook story well enough. What I would be curious about is how many people were let go or not even necessarily let go. I think when culture is really, really powerful, people self-select themselves out. They’re like, “oh shit, this is not the place for me.” As they moved into a global company and had to go recognize and honor a lot of different cultures and a lot of different ways that people operate, that some people probably self-selected themselves out of that because it didn’t match what they valued. It’s interesting. I did an interview with Ray Zinn who’s the founder of one of the largest electronic companies in Silicon Valley. And Ray is a big, huge proponent of culture.

Coach David J. Greer:

I asked him, so you have this global operation, you have factories all over the world in many, many different cultures. And he said for him, it all just boiled down to family, that family was what was most important and that people should make decisions with their family in mind. If people had to go look after a sick child or they had to do things, that’s universal and also sharing stories about family is universal. They could always bring teams from all over the world and get people to share something about their family to help get that connection going. That was his belief and it was his belief about how he built such a successful global company.

Rob Anspach:

Twitter just announced that they’re allowing almost all their employees to stay home indefinitely. And what I’ve always discovered is that if I’m going into a company and I’m working with a company, I interact well with the people that are there. Well, if they’re all at home, I’m not getting that same interaction. I’m not getting that culture. All I’m getting is a Zoom call like we’re doing now. So it’s one dimensional.

Coach David J. Greer:

It is. I still think there is a place for face-to-face. I started working home in 1982. We didn’t have video, we just had a phone. And in the 20 years I built Robelle, the software company that I joined when I was still in university, we ran it as a virtual company. We had an office, we had a number of people who did go in the office for frontline tech support and sales, partly because the phone infrastructure didn’t allow that to be distributed in the 80s and the 90s. Bob Green and I, the original co-founder, we co-invented host-based email in 1985 because we realized the phone really interrupts me If I’m in the middle of some really deep technical problem and Bob just wants to like, are we going to have lunch on Tuesday? We wanted it to work like snail mail, but be faster. Now I see instant messaging and I see email used in a way that was not our vision.

Coach David J. Greer:

I think what happens when you’re virtual is you have to bring way more conscious thought to the interactions and the connection because you can’t, as you say, you can only get so much through this medium that you and I are talking to. You can take it quite far, but sometimes you will have to meet face-to-face. I don’t think that Twitter is precluding that by having everyone work at home. I think it’s going to be very interesting as things advance in our current society to see. I think a lot of people are going to want to go back to work. For many people, they may love their work, but the social interaction is actually one of the really driving forces of being in the organization. And again, I think it gets back. So we’re back to culture because it’s the culture that is bringing together these people that you like to interact with, not just on a business, but what’d you do on the weekend? It’s actually really important.

Rob Anspach:

Yeah. I have some clients I’ve never met face-to-face. I’ve talked to them on the phone. I’ve done video, but I’ve never gone to lunch with him. I’ve never shook their hand. I’ve never been in their office. So, it comes back down to, as an entrepreneur, where do we want to go? Who do we want to see? Who’s our ideal client?

Coach David J. Greer:

One little anecdote here. We’re building Robelle. We talked to a lot of people on the phone. I’d have people who I probably had interact on the phone with, say, for four or five years, and then that person… So in the venue, in the market that I was in, annual trade shows were a big thing in the 80s and 90s. So, one of those people say shows up at the trade show and I’m like, wow, you’re a lot taller than I thought. You’re wearing glasses. Because we didn’t have video. And we don’t have LinkedIn with everyone’s profile picture. It turns out that each of us had built this whole mental model of what we look like from what our voices sounded like on the phone.

Rob Anspach:

Yeah. Right. Yeah. I went to a conference and someone came up to me and they say, Rob, and I’m like, I didn’t even know who they were. They knew me. Scary. But let’s talk about people strategy. It comes down to hiring. Do they fit that culture? We’re bouncing back, but I think without people, there is no culture.

Coach David J. Greer:

There isn’t. So here’s another mantra of mine. So my belief system for me and what works for me is I think what’s the point if you don’t have fun. I only hire people who have fun. I only work with people we can have fun. When I facilitate with senior teams, I always set an expectation at the start of a one or two day facilitation is have fun, to just remind people no one will die during-

Rob Anspach:

Hopefully.

Coach David J. Greer:

Hopefully during the facilitation. Everyone tends to treat it so seriously. I love people that are that engaged with their work that they want to treat it seriously. But truthfully, in any organization, if I go by a meeting room, well, it’s much harder to do this on Zoom now, but to go by a meeting room and hear a bunch of people laughing tells me they’re on the right track. No matter how bad the problem is, what the difficulty is that they’re trying to overcome, if there can be some lightness in it, then I think it’ll all work out. I look for that in people when I’m hiring them too. I encourage and find ways when I’m working with groups of people to inject a little bit of fun or try something that might be a little bit of fun.

Rob Anspach:

Yeah. Besides fun, what else do you look for in an employee or a contractor or somebody that’s going to partner with you on a project?

Coach David J. Greer:

Sure. So if we go back to interviewing, so I believe the two things that I work with most and coach my clients with is Brad Smart in Topgrading. And then his son, Geoff Smart, has written a book called Who, which I find a much easier. I can consume Who. I haven’t been successful at reading Topgrading. So again, it’s about asking open-ended questions that let people reveal themselves to you. And these have nothing to do with their skills per se. It’s about how they work. And in Brad Smart’s process, there’s really only two of the most critical things I think that he is a proponent of is one, go back to high school. What was your first job? Tell me about that. Tell me about your second job. And obviously if they’re 28 years old, you want to hear about every job. If you’re old like me, you probably don’t want everything in between.

Rob Anspach:

I had a lot of jobs.

Coach David J. Greer:

Yeah. Exactly. But here’s the deal. So for that, you want to go back and look for the behaviors that were consistent through all of those jobs. If you ask open-ended questions about those experiences for people, you will discover that. And then in the last couple jobs that they’ve had, ask for their references and ask the interviewee, what will your boss say about you? And then the third part is you have to call those people and actually ask them.

Rob Anspach:

Right. I know for me, it was from 1985 to 1995, I probably had about 20 jobs. You’re like 20 jobs in 10 years? Yeah. But in 1995, when I became an entrepreneur, I started my first business. I took a lot of the experiences I had into this business. I still didn’t know marketing. I had to study marketing. I had to do all this stuff. It wasn’t until about the year 2000 that I had enough experience running this business that I could start coaching others and doing stuff. But then it was another 10 years until I started writing books. So, my progression as an entrepreneur is different than somebody else’s. But I used a lot of those experiences to shape who I am. I’m very sarcastic at what I do. I don’t think I’d hire somebody like me because we would be like, I don’t know, instant fire.

Coach David J. Greer:

I don’t think you should hire people like you. I think that’s a real mistake. Again, there’s a difference between the values, cultural values, which to me are behaviors. You’re a hard worker. Do you say what you’re going to do? Are you a person of integrity? I still think there needs to be differences, like you talked about Facebook moving to cultural differences. So you take someone from Germany and someone from India and someone from Pennsylvania, and they’re going to have very different views of the world and things. I think that that’s healthy, especially if you are like Facebook trying to build a global brand. But the underlying, like what’s important to you, do you show up to meetings on time, do you try and add value to the other people in the room? These are all things that are values that are important to me and what I would be hiring people for. And then of course, for entrepreneurs like you and like me, smart entrepreneurs just never hire us. They hire us to help them as a service. They shouldn’t hire us as employees.

Rob Anspach:

No because that doesn’t work either.

Coach David J. Greer:

Right. But most entrepreneurs know that or, well, they only make that mistake once or twice.

Rob Anspach:

No. I had made a mistake a couple years ago and I’m not saying it’s a bad mistake. It was just one of those lateral things that you do. I took on a client that although they paid me well, they treated me like an employee and I wasn’t an employee. I was a contractor just like I am now, but what they really wanted was a yes person. I would question everything that they were doing because to me it was wrong. They would never tell me, they were never clear about their vision. I’m always saying, what about this? What about this? What about… Stop questioning me, Rob. Finally, after two years, they got rid of me and hired in-staff people that were all yes people and then their marketing tanked.

Coach David J. Greer:

Well, there you go. So if I could come back…

Rob Anspach:

Yeah, go ahead.

Coach David J. Greer:

Sorry. I just want to come back to Brad Smart because so I took Brad Smart’s Topgrading course about a dozen years ago. And he was actually the teacher, which that was a privilege, but so his thesis and he’s done a massive amount of research so I have a lot of reason to believe this is true, so three out of four hires don’t last beyond year one. He’s got a lot of analysis in his book and which he presents when he gives a workshop. That’s basically $1 million is what it really costs. And he has reasons why he lays it all out that way. It’s not just for big businesses. So it’s $1 million per mis-hire and three out of four hires are mis-hires.

Coach David J. Greer:

So talk about an area where we really could up our game as entrepreneurs. I think that really is an area. And again, I’d go back to, so the book I’ve really found useful and I’ve recommended several of my clients is Who. It’s just W-H-O by Geoff Smart. I think it’s a very practical lay it out. Here’s specific questions you could ask. They also give a very specific way to do the process of filtering from advertising to the first interview to the second interview. They lay it out really nicely and give their reasoning behind it. So for entrepreneurs, I highly recommend that as a resource. We’re in a time when a lot of people, so if your business has the opportunity to grow right now, it is a great time to hire people because I think a lot of fantastic talent is out there, but you probably need to upgrade your ability to interview and work through a hiring process so that you can actually get those really top performers.

Coach David J. Greer:

Then the final piece is if A’s hire B’s, they hire C’s. And pretty soon all you have is Z’s. I think A’s want to hire double A’s and double A’s want to hire triple A’s. I know as an entrepreneur, it took me a long time to get to that place where I was comfortable hiring people that were smarter, quicker, faster than me. It can feel very threatening, but that’s actually what you want to do because your skill is to bring all those people together. Your skill as an entrepreneur, I believe, is to have the vision of the market, where the market’s going, what the market’s going to need, and then helping people to both invent the products and services to satisfy those pain points and then the operational people to supply it all. And for that, I think you want people that are way better than you.

Rob Anspach:

In my first venture, I didn’t want to hire people that were smarter than me only because I didn’t want to train them on how to do everything and then have them leave and start their own business. Basically I was training them to be my competitor. I didn’t want that, but then I realized that, especially in this business that I’m in, I need to hire people that are smarter than me. Bill Gates. He’s a brilliant guy, but most of the people that work for him are smarter than him and he knows that. Elon Musk, he’s a very bright guy, but he hires people that again, smarter than him because he’s building rockets, building these cars, doing this. I think it’s critical that you hire people that can do things beyond your own ability.

Coach David J. Greer:

And there’s two entrepreneurs with massive visions. Gates in the 80s had the vision of a computer on every desktop. Crisp, clean, and Musk is trying to change the world in two places, space exploration and electric cars. Nothing like being ambitious. But back to talk about visionaries. Both of them are hugely visionary people.

Rob Anspach:

And they’re both billionaires so they can afford to hire people. But the problem is when they first started out, they couldn’t afford anybody. But as they grew, they started to realize they have to hire these smart people. Otherwise, their business wouldn’t go the way they wanted.

Coach David J. Greer:

I know an entrepreneur in Edmonton, the province over from where I live, who’s in the food business. When she was starting out, she knew that she needed a lot deeper retail experience of people in the food distribution chain. So she hired a fifth of people’s brains to start with. She did it very proactively and did it in a way that she hoped as the business grew and she could afford to pay them more and give them more work, they would eventually come into the fold and be part of the senior leadership team. And for a number of those individuals, that’s exactly what happened. That was the way that she got that super smart people, even though she couldn’t afford it at that stage of the business, but she also has just this massive vision of what it is that they’re trying to build.

Coach David J. Greer:

And these people were very attracted to her vision. There are ways of doing it. Again, being an entrepreneur, it is being creative in all parts of your business. I trained as a computer scientist and ran a software business for 20 years. I had to be innovative all the time to survive, but I believe entrepreneurs can be incredibly innovative in all aspects of their business and in ways that how you sell can be very innovative and can be industry-changing, in fact.

Rob Anspach:

So how do people reach out to you? Where do they go?

Coach David J. Greer:

The easiest way is my website, which is coachdjgreer.com. So it’s the initials of my name, David James. And on every page of my website is my phone number and my email address. So, I like to make it easy and I offer any entrepreneur that’s feeling stuck, just doesn’t know what to do next, a free one hour coaching call.

Rob Anspach:

Wow.

Coach David J. Greer:

I promise at the end of that, you will have better direction of where it is that you need to go for yourself and your business. My promise to entrepreneurs, if you spend an hour with me, you’ll have three ideas to accelerate your business in the next 90 days.

Rob Anspach:

Can’t beat that.

Coach David J. Greer:

So, yeah. Please, listeners, take me up on that because I really would love to help.

Rob Anspach:

I think you could. I just looked at your website a little bit ago. Great stuff. And what I’ve learned from you just in the 25 minutes now is just incredible. You have experience, you have the knowledge and you understand that cultural shift that people are going through and who they need to hire and why they need to hire to level up.

Coach David J. Greer:

You got it.

Rob Anspach:

I think every business experiences those plateaus and when you do, contact David and he’s going to be patient with you. He has to be because he spent 25 minutes on this podcast with me. But for all the listeners, seriously, go to David’s website, coachdjgreer.com and follow him on the various social channels, email him, and get to know him because I think it’s going to benefit you and your business. And next time, check us out on the next episode. Hey, adios.