Matt Tenney has a mission to inspire greatness in business. He has a book of the same name and I was privileged to be on the Inspire Greatness Podcast with Matt. These are the points we covered in our conversation:
- Facing the brutal facts is 50% of the challenge.
- David’s brutal fact was that he was an alcoholic.
- An outsider can bring clarity to our business and life.
- High performing companies follow these practices:
- Getting off site once a quarter to plan the next quarter.
- Facing the brutal facts.
- Setting a small number (3-5) goals for a quarter that are crystal clear.
- Meet with your leadership team once a week, check progress on your goals, and detail a Who, What, When list for the next week.
- Grow faster by developing the next level of leadership making sure you higher A-players and above.
Video
Building Powerhouse Teams: Why Values Come Before Skills
Weekly Leadership Rituals: Celebrate Wins, Face Truths, and Align Your Team
Brutal Truths & Bold Goals: Quarterly Leadership Strategies That Drive Growth
Audio
Transcript
Announcer (00:02):
Welcome to the Inspire Greatness Podcast, the go-to source for leaders who are looking for inspiration and practical tips for bringing out the best in others. The Inspire greatest podcast is brought to you by People Thriver, which offers a groundbreaking solution for dramatically improving employee engagement and performance while saving organizations a significant amount of time and money. It’s my pleasure to introduce the host of the Inspire Greatness podcast. Matt Tenney, author of the bestselling book, inspire Greatness, How to Motivate Employees with a Simple, Repeatable, Scalable Process.
Matt Tenney (00:37):
Hello, my friend. I hope you are well. In this episode of the Inspire Greatness Podcast, you’re going to hear the top three tips for bringing out the best in others from David J. Greer. He’s an author and entrepreneurial coach and a seasoned business leader with over 40 years of experience, and he’s helped grow a young software startup into a global powerhouse before setting sail on a transformative journey with his family. Wow, that sounds a lot like a lot of entrepreneurs, right? And have an exit and go sail the world. And now he coaches entrepreneurs on culture, leadership, and strategic growth. His book Wind In Your Sails: Vital Strategies that Accelerate Your Entrepreneurial Growth is packed with insights and strategies to help business leaders and their teams to thrive. And today, David is going to share three ideas that are really important to consistently bringing out the best and others. One is facing the brutal facts frequently and locking in on a regular basis. Four to five, game-changing goals. Two, making sure that you’re celebrating big wins while also tackling the tough truths. And three is building a powerhouse team by prioritizing values first, then skills. I hope that you are as excited as I am to learn from David J. Greer. David, thank you so much for joining me today on the Inspire Greatness podcast.
David Greer (02:02):
Thanks much for having me, Matt. I’m super excited to be here.
Matt Tenney (02:05):
Absolutely. David, before we dive in to the three ideas that you’re going to share with our listeners, I would love it if you could tell us a little bit about your journey. I know it’s been an interesting one with,
David Greer (02:20):
And it’s 40, 40 plus years long.
Matt Tenney (02:22):
Yeah. If you don’t mind just condensing 40 years down to five minutes or so, give us the five minute version. I would love to hear that. I think that’ll really set up the three ideas that you want to share.
David Greer (02:35):
Sure. I’m happy to. When I was 22, getting my computer science degree, I joined a young software startup as the first employee, and it was founded by Bob Green and Annabelle and was called Robelle, which is a made up name. Still Google’s pretty well today. And as you mentioned, your intro, I mean, I stayed 20 years. After 10 years I bought out Annabelle, became partners with Bob, and we built it into a global powerhouse. We specialized in a very particular niche and we were the top one of the top third-party vendors in that niche. We were one of the thought gurus in that niche. Bob and I, every year for 20 years, created a new paper, either technical or management paper, and then we traveled the planet presenting and creating belief in the obscure Canadian based software company. You were going to trust your whole business to.
Matt Tenney (03:36):
Cool. Yeah, I’m sure there’s that. You’re almost a unicorn, not in the sense of a billion dollar valuation, but a software company from Canada. That’s not something you hear every day, right?
David Greer (03:47):
Yeah. And it turned out in the market, back in marketplace two of the biggest success stories in that marketplace, actually three of the biggest success stories, third party vendors in that marketplace all came from Canada as it happened. At the end of the tenure, the computing platform we specialized in, we knew it was coming somewhere to the end of its life. It was the longest lived mini computer platform ever produced. And my former partner, Bob, wanted to downsize dramatically and milk the customers until the last one left and turn out the lights. I brought some outside people in and they were reflecting back. We had built an extraordinary team that could do things that most software companies couldn’t. I wanted to take a little more risk and money and move it in a new direction, and I think they’re both viable strategies. They were not complimentary. And the last six months was very, very emotional, kind of very spiteful, hateful emails and just, I only had one major disagreement with Bob in 20 years, but it was a doozy and it ended in divorce. He ended up, we settled the difference by him ending up buying me out.
(05:04):
In 2001, I’m on the street. I haven’t noticed this thing called the dot com meltdown. I’m busy chasing technical deals and entrepreneurial friends of mine in the Vancouver community until someone smarter than me sat me down. And she helped executives restart their career when they’d been downsized and networking had introduced me to her. And anyway, she sat me down in her office and I had pivotal conversation with her. She looked me in the eye and she said, “David, do you need to work again right away?” And I’m like, “No. I got a pretty good check on my jeans and I’m not done for life, but I don’t need to work right away.” And she said, “Well, your kids will never be 11 nine and five again.” And I had the literal light bulb, aha moment sitting in that chair. I can still picture it. Here we are almost 25 years on from that moment. And the year before, my wife Karalee had sold her physiotherapy clinic that she founded. And we didn’t have anything that was really holding us down. And we hatched a plan to commission a sailboat in the south of France and take our three kids and home school them for two years while sailing more than 5,000 miles. It’s about 10,000 kilometers in the Mediterranean
(06:29):
And is a legacy that we have as a family. We still draw from today. It was just an extraordinary experience as a high performing entrepreneur. It also was a really, really hefty project. You pretty much 24/7 for two years, but what an adventure. And I came back and I became an angel investor and kind of connected with the entrepreneurial investment community here in Vancouver. Looked at a hundred plus deals a year, invested kind of in one or one and a bit, became a director, worked for options. And after about four years of that, I took one of my young CEOs to an event put on by a guy called Verne Harnish. He has two well-known books, The Rockefeller Habits and Scaling Up.
(07:24):
And many of my tech entrepreneurial friends kept talking about this one page plan. You got to use the one page plan, the one page plan, it’s magic. And Verne Harnish created the one page plan. And I went to this event to learn about it and with one of my investee CEOs to see if that’s what we should use in strategic planning, which we eventually did actually. And I learned a lot from Verne. Well, probably later in answering my three big things, we’ll probably get to some of what Verne recommends, which is different than how we built Robelle. But at the back of the room was a coach, Coach Kevin Lawrence, and I talked to him for five minutes. He made me more uncomfortable than I had been in four or five years. I literally had tears in the corner of my eyes.
Matt Tenney (08:10):
Oh, wow.
David Greer (08:11):
I did not realize how completely unfulfilled I was. And Kevin’s seen this a lot with entrepreneurs who exit and do the kind of board thing. Just we have too much energy, we’re just too, we need our hands in it. We’re not well suited and we something.
Matt Tenney (08:33):
Yeah, this is a story that’s not uncommon. I’ve heard a …
David Greer (08:36):
Lot of something deeper to tork up against.
Matt Tenney (08:38):
Yeah, I hear that. I mean, I can think of three or four just off the top of my head of people I personally know who had an exit did something like that. They went and lived abroad or sailed the world. And then about 12 months in, they realized, oh my gosh, I need something. I’m not an impact. I need to build something. I need to see how I’m impacting others. And it sounds like that’s kind of hit you in the same way, right?
David Greer (09:02):
It did. I hired Kevin on my 50th birthday. We had our first coaching session, which at that time with Kevin, Kevin’s my kind of guy, all in or all out. The opening coaching session with him was two eight hour-hour days.
Matt Tenney (09:18):
Wow. Making sense.
David Greer (09:20):
I mean, all in. And I worked with Kevin for nine years, but after 18 months, we got me back into an executive gig, and I was working with two other CEOs, which was an interesting experience itself. And we cleared all the clutter off the table until the only thing left was the elephant in the room. And on January 27th, 2009, I admitted for the first time ever to another human being that I had a drinking problem. And Kevin coached me to go to a 12-step recovery meeting. And that was a Tuesday. I committed to go to a meeting by that Friday. Being the overachiever I am, I know I had a networking event downtown that day that ended at eight. I looked online, lo and behold, there would be a meeting at 8:30, a quarter of a block off the road, I’d be driving down to go home. I went into that meeting and I walked in and I eventually stood up and said, “I’m David. I’m an alcoholic.” And that was my truth. I don’t even think I knew at the moment what I was admitting to. Although what I really was admitting to was my truth.
(10:35):
And a month or later, I made that meeting my home group, and tonight happens to be a Tuesday. And tonight I will be at my home group and probably there’ll be three or four people there tonight who were there the night that I walked in.
Matt Tenney (10:52):
Wow.
David Greer (10:53):
Academia, witness to my journey.
Matt Tenney (10:58):
Those are people living the 12 step, right? They’re helping someone else.
David Greer (11:03):
They’re helping someone else. They’re me. Career-wise, Kevin helped me get into a couple of more senior executive gigs. I was typically a senior or VP sales and marketing. And I came out of the last of those in my mid fifties. And I realized I’d worked as hard in the previous three years as I had any time in my career. And I made the decision I did not need to prove to anyone that I could work hard. Good. And as part of that, I also decided I wanted to give to entrepreneurs the gifts that Kevin had given to me both in business and in life. Ten years ago, I decided to become an entrepreneurial coach and facilitator, just like Coach Kevin, and started my coaching practice. And I wrote my book, Wind In Your Sails, Vital Strategies that Accelerate Your Entrepreneurial Growth, which I interview viewed over 45 entrepreneurs and sales and marketing leaders for that book. Ten of them I feature is case studies at the end of the 10 chapters of the book. A third of the book is actually other entrepreneurs experience. It’s not just mine,
Matt Tenney (12:22):
But the title’s all Yours, Wind and Yourself, the Title.
David Greer (12:24):
And every chapter, every chapter starts with the sailing metaphor that tries to illustrate what I’m trying to get across. And the book starts with a very exciting story about avoiding a thunderstorm in the middle of the Adriatic Sea, which how we actually figured that out was we stopped the boat for an hour and we did something called heaving to, which is the maneuver that parks the boat literally in the middle of the Adriatic Sea, more than 10 hours sailing time from any safe port. And we were sailing right into the middle of the thunderstorm. And my son and I, after an hour figured out it was moving the opposite way we thought, and we were sailing right into the middle of it, which leads to the intro of my book and one of the things I preach about, which is “slow down to speed up.
(13:18):
And in business, we are fast and we’re the next fire and the next thing, the next email, the next next that to actually slow down and do some work on the business instead of in the business and do some planning is actually really hard for most of us. After Kevin stopped one-on-one coaching, he turned me over to his coach, Nan O’Connor, a brilliant coach from Atlanta, and then kept reflecting back to me how pure my energy was when I talked about my recovery and how every time she asked me a question around alcoholism, I had an answer. And I decided four or five years ago to become public about my recovery and to specialize in helping entrepreneurs challenged with alcoholism or addiction. And my bigger purpose I live today is to share my experience, strength, and hope in both business and recovery. And that brings us to our conversation today.
Matt Tenney (14:15):
Yeah. Wow. I love it. What a story. And I would imagine sadly that this is not an uncommon issue. I think you were talking about just the kind of inherent drive that is common among entrepreneurs. And as I’m sure you’re aware in the work that you do, all addiction centers around this cycle of neurotransmitters, right? Where we get a quick hit of some type of opioid neurotransmitter that gives us pleasure, and then when that goes away, there’s an emptiness and dopamine comes in and says, “Hey, you got to go get that again.” Go do something. Not only in chemical addiction, but work addiction, right? Where you run into people, you get that hit much better when you are checking things off the list, you’re checking things off the list. But did you do anything to move the needle? Right? Did you do anything to plan strategically? That doesn’t give you the quick opioid neurotransmitter pleasure hit right. Other stuff, guys,
David Greer ((15:14):
I mentioned. I don’t think workaholism is as bad for me. I think I am somewhat balanced, but this taskmaster spirit and this 10 years ago, I set a goal of not working hard. Well, it turns out for me to not work hard is hard work. Really hard work.
Matt Tenney (15:30):
Really? Yeah.
David Greer (15:32):
I have to be very conscientious about it.
Matt Tenney (15:35):
No, this is something I hear all the time. I am not sure if you’re aware, but I’ve been teaching mindfulness for a couple of decades now, and I too work with leaders, and this is something I get a lot when people first sit down and just are still the first voice that comes into their mind is, you don’t have time for this. You need to be doing something. And that voice doesn’t go away for a while. That is very, very common.
David Greer (16:01):
It never goes away. It, it’s more muted and I’m much better able to say, “Hello, nice to see you taskmaster spirit. “
Matt Tenney (16:11):
Great.
David Greer (16:11):
Don’t need you right now. You can have some time off. It’s okay. And then 10 seconds later it shows up again. That part is just like meditating. You just need to, okay, it just shows up again, no judgment, it’s just what it is.
Matt Tenney (16:27):
There. It’s, yep,
David Greer (16:28):
There it is. And I know where it comes from. I know why it’s there. And it’s never going to go away completely, I don’t think. But I can just again, be mindful about it and just say, hi, we’re still resting. It’s okay.
Matt Tenney (16:42):
That’s awesome. You got it. Yeah, just let it be there. Let it be as it is. It’s going to go away whenever it’s going to on its own and it’ll come back 10 seconds later. But yeah, your job
David Greer (16:53):
Is to just, yeah, the hard part is sometimes it’s sneaky I move into action unconsciously. Again, still that happens to me sometimes. It’s like, why am I in the middle of this? Why am I walking down the street and it’s like, oh, pass master spirit took over again and this time I just didn’t catch it.
Matt Tenney (17:12):
Always a work in progress, right?
David Greer (17:15):
Indeed. It’s very much on multiple levels as the fun intends.
Matt Tenney (17:22):
Well, David, I’m very excited to hear more on some of your wisdom. I mean, you have so much wisdom to share for you the listener. Before we dive into that though, I do want to let you know about something that I think is really, really kind of David. He knows that a lot of people think they might benefit from coaching, but they dunno how to get started. They don’t want to take a risk financially. He’s been kind enough to say, look, anyone listening to this, if you think you could benefit from coaching, particularly if you’re struggling from some type of addiction, he’ll be happy to provide you with an hour of coaching for free and see if there’s any big blocks that can be removed. See if there’s any way that some value can be added in that hour with no obligation to do anything moving forward.
(18:08):
If you are interested in that, if you’d like to have a conversation with David, it’s very easy. You go to his website, which is coachdjgreer.com, and we’ll have a link to that on the show notes as well. And just on every page on the website, if I remember right, it’s top left corner, you can request a free consultation. Thank you David for offering to do that. It’s really kind of you. I’m sure your workaholic brain says, well, I’m doing something that way. That’s great. The first idea that you are going to share today is about the importance of facing the brutal facts regularly. And in your words, I think you’re suggesting each quarter and then locking in four to five, not maintenance type goals, but four to five game changing goals for each quarter. Can you just tell me more about that? What do you mean by facing the brutal facts? And then let’s go into what do you mean by these four to five really game changing goals?
David Greer (19:10):
In order to do this, I really recommend that you get on a quarterly basis, you try and get offsite for half day or a day. Either you as an entrepreneur or the entrepreneur with your senior leadership team celebrate some of your successes. I think you can right size your challenges if you first remind yourselves about what’s succeeding. And as high performers, we always go into the next challenge first. Always, always, always. And I put the brake on and say, great, can you tell me a couple of things that are going well
Matt Tenney (19:41):
First,
David Greer (19:43):
That’s just a preface a bit about the process that I use and then the conversation we just had about my admitting to coach Kevin that I had a drinking problem. I mean, that was the brutal fact, and I was in denial about it for 20 years. And what I find is that for entrepreneurs themselves or entrepreneurs and their team, there often is a brutal fact that everyone dances around. They won’t put it down for founder entrepreneurs. I mean, oftentimes the brutal fact is they are getting in the way of the senior leadership team, but no one wants to call them on it.
Matt Tenney (20:22):
The founder,
David Greer (20:24):
Because the founder. And sometimes what happens, I in the set up for strategic planning meetings that I have 10 questions survey that I send out. The last one is confidential. Sometimes the senior leadership team will admit to this underlying stuff that’s going on, and then I have to try and figure out a way to introduce it that’s not threatening. Or sometimes I take the entrepreneur off side and I do coaching calls for the entrepreneur in between these planning sessions. I may bring that up and here’s my experience. Businesses will or can absolutely fail if you don’t face the brutal facts. But if you face the brutal fact, it’s very, very rare their company will fail. It might be extremely painful to deal with it. You may have to lay off half your staff, you may have to restructure, you may have to get rid of a toxic a person. It’s not necessarily the solution is going to be easy, but you can’t go face that challenge unless you first to face the fact. And my kind of estimate is 50% of the battle is to get the brutal fact on the table
(21:31):
And collectively to agree. That’s the brutal fact. Sometimes it’s like, oh, it’s not that bad, or, well, that’s not really what it is. Sometimes we get the symptoms rather than what’s really underlying all those symptoms, which is the bigger problem that we really needs to get dealt with. I ask the question why three times? If I ask why it’s three times, you’re almost always at the root, which by the way, I also coach in sales. If you ask why three times in any solution oriented sales kind of situation, you will typically get to the root problem, not the symptom. Because up to that point, the prospect is probably telling you about the symptom.
Matt Tenney (22:13):
Let me give you a hypothetical example, which is not hypothetical in many, many sales organizations, just you can kind of illustrate the difference. We’ve got our best sales person crushing it, but this person’s toxic and bringing the rest of the team down. Can you break down, what’s the brutal fact? How would you do the three why’s to get to what we need to do?
David Greer (22:36):
Well then it’s asking the sales manager or the CEO or both, why do you keep this person?
Matt Tenney (22:44):
Because their close rate is 50% and they’re crushing it. That’s why.
David Greer (22:49):
Yeah. How can you afford to have the entire rest of the sales team be unproductive? How are you going to grow if you don’t grow more salespeople?
Matt Tenney (22:57):
Yeah, I don’t know if can grow with just this one person,
David Greer (23:00):
Right?
Matt Tenney (23:01):
Yeah. I see where you’re going. Yeah. You ask a couple why’s like that, and then the truth eventually comes out. Look, if we get rid of this one person who’s toxic, we lift everyone else up. We’re going to net gain will be huge.
David Greer (23:14):
Short term might be negative,
Matt Tenney (23:16):
Right? But long-term, huge return,
David Greer (23:19):
But long-term, massive return. And isn’t that the essence of strategy? Oftentimes we’ve got to give something up in the near term to achieve our bigger strategic goals. The thing is to get really clear on our bigger strategic goals, at least we know where we’re aiming for, where we’re trying to get to, because then we can make some of those more difficult tactical. We go back to, okay, four things in a quarter. Well, what happens is teams typically try and do too much. I’ve seen teams try and do way too much. And if you have 12 goals for quarter, what do you focus on? And more importantly, what are the people who work for you focus on? Whereas when you boil it down to four things, that’s hard. And I just finished all my strategic planning bunches up a quarter ends. I’ve just finished a whole set of facilitations and yeah, we got 12, 13, 14, 15 things on the list of things to do in the quarter. And I get everybody to vote. Yeah, vote, you got five votes, we’re only going to end up with five. And then we see what bubbles to the top.
(24:29):
The other thing is as teams, we often are very poor about choosing those goals with crystal clear finish lines. You get in a room, you make all these decisions and you think it’s really clear. And then you get together three months from now, well, you want to evaluate, did we pass each of the goals that we set?
Matt Tenney (24:46):
But you don’t have a binary goal that can is either yes or no.
David Greer (24:49):
Exactly. We don’t have a crystal clear did we cross the finish line or not, or did we at least get 80% of the way to the finish line, which meant we knew what the track was we were running and how far along we made it. And a lot of my work is to help them get clarity about the goal. Sometimes the goal can be go, no go. I work with a PE firm. Sometimes the goal is go, no go for this acquisition. We can’t say we’re going to have it. They haven’t finished diligence. They hope it’s going to go all the way through. That’s the plan. But we can’t say that as a goal because then if they don’t go through the acquisition because something showed up in diligence, it was really bad. It would be stupid to invest. You don’t want to say, well, but we achieved the quarterly goal.
Matt Tenney (25:36):
The better quarterly goal is to have a clear go/no go understanding
David Greer (25:41):
And that you’re going to put all of your effort and get all of the work, including a whole bunch of you have no control over, which is the other side, and they’re providing the right documents and meeting with banks and doing all these other things. You have to be clear that you’re far enough into the process that you will get to that go/no go before the end of the quarter. And I may challenge them on that. Are you deep enough into the deal that you can actually say that by the end of the quarter? And we might have to pick a different, which is we got a diligence, go. No, go to this milestone. I mean, these super experienced people, they understand their process very well. It can very well make sense to have an intermediate milestone knowing it will take them two quarters to actually get it all the way across the finish line. It helps. It helps. I’ve worked with ’em for nine years.
Matt Tenney (26:32):
You can anticipate some things.
David Greer (26:34):
I can anticipate some of this, but this is the work that I do in facilitation is really challenging the entrepreneur and their team around clarity around these finish lines. Oftentimes I can see the goal, but it’s like, help me understand the color on this that when I go away and then I come back three months from now and I ask you that I, and you can be crystal clear, did you get across the finish line or not?
Matt Tenney (27:01):
That’s fantastic. And then once this is really, you faced the brutal facts and you’ve clearly understood what needs to be eliminated, which I totally agree to me, that is if not the essence of strategy, it actually is. Strategy is eliminating everything that isn’t the most important things to be thinking about and working on. You’ve got your four game-changing goals. The next big idea that you wanted to share is the importance of having this weekly cadence, right? Where you’re doing a couple things, you’re celebrating wins, you’re tackling the tough truths, and you’re locking in who needs to be doing what and when for the next week. Can you just tell me a little bit more about that, what that looks like in practice?
David Greer (27:44):
I couldn’t have described it better myself. The thing is here, regardless of size of company, you take the entrepreneur and the senior leadership team, you have the most expensive, hopefully the smartest people in the company in the room at the same time. You want to maximize the value you get out of that.
(28:06):
Just having status updates, which should have been sent by email. And if you are running the business well and have key productivity indicators, you should know whether you’re up ahead or behind for the week. Yes, you want to go celebrate the wins. You set the tone for the meeting and then you want to have debate and discussion like you’ve got the smartest people in the room. They shouldn’t be agreeing with each other every time you, you’re probably missing something, the founder or the founder. But then my experience is the high performing companies are the ones who figure out who when, even if they have not that great a strategy, and even if the goals aren’t as good as they could be for the quarter, if you are really, really great at figuring out what to get done for the next week, documenting it and then actually executing on it, that’s where the magic can really happen. And here’s why I do quarterly as a meeting rhythm planning rhythm, 13 weeks is long enough to get a lot of serious stuff done and short enough, if you totally went off in the wrong direction, you wouldn’t kill the company if you reconvene after 13 weeks.
(29:16):
A brutal fact, maybe we just totally blew it in the last planning session. We went off in a direction at the time made perfect sense. But we now know we knew information. We tried some experiments, we tried some experiments, they didn’t work out at all like we thought they would.
Matt Tenney (29:32):
Well, also, doesn’t the quarterly cadence also give you the flexibility? I mean, market conditions could change.
David Greer (29:38):
Absolutely.
Matt Tenney (29:39):
Policy could change. I mean no one
David Greer (29:41):
Policy and our
Matt Tenney (29:42):
Current, two years ago, yeah, two years ago, no one was thinking you’d have someone just arbitrarily slapping tariffs on whoever he feels like on a daily basis. I mean, no one could have planned for that, right?
David Greer (29:53):
No, absolutely not. No one could plan for COVID,
Matt Tenney (29:55):
Right?
David Greer (29:56):
Interestingly, when COVID happened among my facilitation clients, not one of them changed their three to five year goals, their one year goals and their quarterly plan got completely their quarterly plan, definitely got completely blown up. The one year goals, I wouldn’t say were blown up, but were definitely adjusted. But where they were going in the three to five years did not change the vision of where they’re trying to get to. Even though none of us knew how long COVID would be, none of us knew what exactly the impact would be on our business. And I think that really is a testament to this idea of starting farther out three to five years where you want to end up and then working backwards, which is really the core essence of the planning using the one page plan. But the who, what, when. And the other thing about when is it’s an art. You need things in the, the entire team needs to have awareness about and you need your own when that has a lot of things that your team needs to know about, but maybe not everybody on the leadership team needs to know about.
(30:58):
But if you’re a VP of marketing, it’s your team needs to know for the next week, this is the who, what, when. I also practice the cadence of you should have the team meeting with the entrepreneur and you as, say you’re a VP, you have that weekly meeting and then you have your team meeting with your team to basically do the same thing, but now more tactical and more with your specific team. Because how can you set what your team needs to do if you haven’t got real crystal clarity on what the whole senior leadership team’s going to do for the next week?
(31:31):
And then it cascades, there was an interesting point you made earlier. I just want to highlight from the one page strategic plan that Verne Harnish talks about in his books. We want to really make it easy for people in the organization to say, no, not maybe, but no, we really want to make it much easier for what’s in and what’s out. Because when we’re wishy-washy, people just wander off and they do kind of their own thing. And also it’s very hard for them to push back to their managers. But if you have crystal clear goals and your manager’s asking you to do something and you’re going, well, just a sec, you guys said this is the four goals for the quarter for the company, what you’re asking me to do, it does not compute with what you said. The four goals are, help me understand how do I tie this together? Otherwise, I’m just going to say no, and I’m going to go back to the plan I have for the goals that you shared with me.
Matt Tenney (32:22):
Yeah,
David Greer (32:23):
It takes a lot of gumption to do that, but we actually want to make it easier for people to lower in the organization to actually do that.
Matt Tenney (32:29):
Excellent. And that I think flows perfectly into the third idea you want to share is building a team that is a powerhouse that feels like they have the autonomy to do that. And you do that by prioritizing values first and then skills is your suggestion. Can you tell me more about that?
David Greer (32:50):
I think companies that really get clear on their values, their corporate values and articulate them and write them down and describe them. And then what I like to see, I think values are demonstrated by stories, but we need to run the business on the data. I know as an entrepreneur, I’d go into a planning the next year and I’d hear the salesperson who just told me that no one was ever going to buy the product unless they had this feature. And the problem is the last story sticks in our head, and that’s probably not what the data says, but culture, I think we demonstrate. I’m really big on weekly meetings or monthly town halls. You celebrate a couple big wins of people and the core value it demonstrates that you keep it, it’s a living thing. You want it to really live in the organization. My belief is the values actually demonstrate the behaviors of the people in the organization. That’s really what they represent. And our organization where everyone’s behaviors are similar, their skillset is different, their perspective on things is different, but being honest and being straight shooters, that’s who they are. You’re going to perform better because everyone has that behavior and consistently knows it between each other.
(34:12):
Now, it also means when you hire, you need to do a values set of questions before you do the skill based questions. Because again, and there’s ways to do this because you’re looking for people’s past behaviors and seeing if it’s consistent with the values that you have.
Matt Tenney (34:32):
When you use a behavioral interview question to say, “Hey, tell me about a time when you did this …”
David Greer (34:38):
All completely open-ended questions, or what would your former boss say to you about being a straight shooter, right? Because I’m going to talk to your former boss and ask him or her. That’s what I do when hiring people. The other part that I didn’t put in when we were prepping for this is I believe a’s should hire A’s and AA’s higher AAA’s. Because otherwise, if a’s hire B’s, B’s hire C’s, pretty soon we’ve got Z’s.
Matt Tenney (35:13):
You’re saying you should really challenge yourself to hire someone who you think is slightly better than you in some way, at least 10%, 10% better, whether it’s 10% smarter, 10% more agile, whatever it is, but somebody,
David Greer (35:27):
Whatever, it’s
Matt Tenney (35:28):
Got
David Greer (35:29):
It. And for owner founders, that can be one of the really brutal facts is that they really struggle with that. Well, what if someone is smarter than me? Well, that’s great, that’s fantastic. That part of the business will move quicker, faster. But I mean, when you’ve been an owner, founder, and you’ve grown everything by the seat of your pants and you’ve had to figure out the answer to every question yourself, you think you still have all the answers. But as the company grows, there’s a point where it’s beyond your particular strength and skillset. And my coaching belief is I really focus on people’s strengths and I really help people go deeper into their strengths. And I don’t work almost at all on their weaknesses except to backfill it. Who can you hire to do that?
(36:11):
How can you delegate that? How can you build a system it never shows up? And how can we let go of that aspect?
(36:19):
And that’s part of the personal growth. I believe entrepreneurs are the single biggest impediment to the growth of their business. In fact, the high growth businesses are limited by the next generation of leaders and how fast you can grow those and create those. That’s my personal belief, and that’s the actual limit to growth is that next level of leadership. If you’re growing 20% a year of revenue per year continuously, that means you’re going to have to take existing people and you’re not going to be able to hire outside for all of that. You’re going to have to develop leadership internally as well as hiring it externally. And you have to be constantly focused on that. And that becomes the CEO’s role. How am I constantly, the CEO’s role is market. Where’s the market going? What’s the market doing? And what’s going to be our place in it? Strategy equals marketing, I think in big picture. As a CEO, you need to be really focused on that big picture, and then you need to be focused on your people and how you’re generating that next level of leadership.
Matt Tenney (37:27):
I love it. I love it. David, thank you much for taking the time to be on the Inspire Greatness podcast with me here today. It’s not often that I’m surprised by an interview, and there was way more wisdom that I got out of this than I was expecting to, and there’s a lot of really good nuggets. Thank you much again for your time.
David Greer (37:50):
Oh, thank you. And I hope your listeners feel the same way, and I hope there’s some concrete things they can take away and improve their business with today.
Matt Tenney (38:00):
There’s no doubt. And again, if you’d like some help with that, and you’ve kind of thought about coaching but never really seriously explored it, want to get a sense of what it can do for you, as you might recall from earlier in the episode, David is happy to provide you with a free coaching session for an hour, see if he can add value as no obligation to move forward and just visit his website, it’s coachdjgreer.com. We’ll have a link to that on the show notes here for this podcast episode. And on every page on the site in the top left corner, I think is where you can find it. Also for you, the listener, and for you, David, I apologize for taking a few more moments of your time, but I do like to always send a shout out to Muriel Call who produces the podcast and does a great job. She does a great job finding great guests like you to bring on the show. Thank you, Muriel, for doing the work that you do and for you specifically the listener. Until the next time, I have an opportunity to hopefully serve you in some way, whether it’s bringing on a great guest like David or in some other way, I wish you great success building a world class organization that is making a positive impact both on the people within your organization and on our global community. Until next time, bye for now.
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