April 9, 2024 • 34 mins
Build a team, stay focused, make better decisions, and crush your competition with the practical insights from this interview with David Dodson. The Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author shares his expertise on effective management and leadership, offering tactical strategies for running great meetings, onboarding new hires, and showing compassion when letting someone go. David emphasizes the importance of clarity, preparation, and empathy and provides a roadmap for maximizing team success.
- Mobilize Your Team to Deliver Breakthrough Results: Organizations are not immune to the vastly changing environment that we live in today. Leaders are facing more pressure than ever to keep up with increasing demands to continue to deliver impactful results. Our new guide provides four trusted execution disciplines that will mobilize everyone in your organization to reach new heights.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:10):
Hello and welcome back toFranklinCovey's twice weekly podcast,
On Leadership with Scott Miller. I'myour host each week, six years running.
We never missed an episode all throughthe pandemic because FranklinCovey's
mission is to help people reallyaspire to achieve their own great
purposes,
to help organizations and people reallydiscover how they can be the best,
most effective versions of themselves.
(00:33):
This podcast has over 350 episodestaped. We have interviewed business CEOs,
titans, celebrities, actors,athletes, researchers,
people that are household names,
and other times people who may not be ahousehold name but have dedicated their
lives to discovering asolution, defining a problem,
perhaps they even suffered someunspeakable tragedy or trauma and live to
(00:57):
share about it, to help us be betterleaders both in our organizations,
in our homes, with our families andour friends and our communities.
And I'm privileged to be the hostof FranklinCovey's On Leadership
spotlight, where we twicea week interview guests.
Sometimes they areinternal thought leaders.
Oftentimes they are outsideof the organization.
(01:19):
Today we have a friend of the family.
You may know Joel Peterson is amember of our board of directors.
He is also a member of the facultygraduate school at Stanford and one of his
colleagues and friends, DavidDodson has joined us today.
David is the author of the USA Today andWall Street Journal bestselling book,
The Manager's Handbook (01:38):
Five Simple Steps to Build a Team, Stay Focused,
Make Better Decisions, andCrush Your Competition.
David
Dodson, welcome to On Leadership.
Great, thanks. Let's getinto it. Scott. I'm excited.
After 350 episodes,
we've interviewed a few experts onleadership and management and there's this
(02:01):
age old debate aroundmanagement and leadership.
You manage things and you lead people.You manage processes, you lead culture.
I would argue that they actually canbe used somewhat interchangeably.
I know a lot of managers thatneed to be better leaders.
I know a lot of leaders thatcan be better managers. David,
(02:21):
was there any particular reason as beingon faculty at Stanford and I've been in
the leadership entrepreneurialbusiness for decades.
Any reason why you chose tocall it The Manager's Handbook?
That's really interesting, Scott, andyou and I have talked about this before,
but probably the biggest sort ofdebate I had with the publisher
(02:42):
and with my friends, including my wife,
was whether we were going to use the wordleader or leadership or manager in the
book.
And I ended up having a pretty strongopinion that I wanted to use the word
manager because while wetalk a lot about leadership,
we oftentimes forgetthat the underpinnings,
the foundation of good leadershipis being able to manage well,
(03:07):
the skill of being able to getthings done. And I do, by the way,
reject the theory that somepeople have that they're separate.
Being a good manager for example,includes how to give good feedback.
And I discussed in the book thesix steps to giving good feedback,
but of course that's partof good leadership as well.
So I do think that youcan't really pull 'em apart,
(03:30):
but I wanted someone to lookat the book and say, okay,
I want to not only myself getbetter at getting things done,
but I want to build an entire organizationthat's better at getting things done.
So that's why I ended upwith the title manager.
Beautifully said. I have to tellyou, I couldn't agree more with you.
I know a lot of leaders that are veryaspirational, very strategic thinkers,
(03:54):
big vision, creative,
but they can't manage the quarterlyrevenue or profit to save their life,
and they also can't necessarilymanage accountability.
And so I think all of us at timesin our career need both management
and leadership. David,rewind a couple of decades,
reintroduce yourself to all of our guests.
You've done a lot of things and havehad some sage advice for us today.
(04:18):
Before we start there,
give us the crib sheet onyour professional history.
So I grew up in rural Colorado and farmthe whole world was sort of separated
between farmers and ranchers.
So I grew up in a very rural environment,
pretty sheltered actually. And funnyenough, I went to Stanford undergrad.
(04:39):
The reason I wanted to go to Stanfordundergrad is I saw someone walk by who had
the Coors Beer franchise in our areaand he had a Stanford sweatshirt on.
So I thought, oh, okay, I think I shouldgo to Stanford. And I kid you not.
When I applied to Stanford,
I did not even know what stateStanford University was located in,
so that's how kind of sheltered I was.Didn't have a lot of money growing up.
(05:01):
I took my classes in the morning so Icould work in a meat packing plant in the
afternoon in San Josebecause it paid well.
So I had kind of that sort of agritty growing up and background,
but Stanford really opened up thisworld to me about that maybe I could be
better or maybe I could aspire to thingsthat I didn't previously think I could
(05:21):
aspire to.So I worked for McKinsey,
realized that as much as Iadmired that organization,
it was not how I want to spend my life.
Came back to business school at Stanfordand all I could think about is how I
wanted to run and build something overand over again. And at that point,
Stanford's a veryentrepreneurial school now,
but back then it was more aboutgoing to be an investment banker,
(05:42):
or going to be a consultant orgoing to work at General Motors,
but I could not get it out of my headthat I wanted to run something and I
wanted to build something.
So one day I called up everybody whoI was interviewing with and took my
name out of the hat, went andtalked to a professor of mine,
a guy named Irv Grousbeck who had builta huge media company and came back to
teach.And I said to him, I don't care what I do,
(06:04):
you don't have to pay me. I just wantto work for you. I'll wash your car.
And so I worked for him for a yearand that really set off my life
trajectory,
which has been as an entrepreneur andI've been CEO or executive chairman of
five companies,
been on probably 50 boards and principally
(06:25):
now I coach and mentor
early CEOs and leaders both on the facultyat Stanford and also in my investment
firm. And I just love
the subject of management and leadershipand I remember Irv Grousbeck had said
one thing to me. He said,
what we do is honorable becausewe impact people's lives.
(06:48):
And as I think back onmy own life as a CEO,
the memories that I remember are thoseinterpersonal interactions that I had
with people,
someone who I hired who was maybe workingin the call center and they ended up
becoming a vice president.
Those are the things that make beinga manager and being a good leader.
So incredibly rewardingand frankly important.
(07:09):
David, I want to dive into this book.
Before I do so I want to payappropriate accolades to your book.
As I mentioned to you off air,
I have no credibility when it comesto recommending restaurants or movies,
but I'm arguably one of the world's,
I think most crediblerecommenders of leadership books,
having interviewed nearly everyleadership author in the world,
(07:32):
certainly those who speak English,
having read literally thousands of booksover the course of my 30-year career in
what I think is the world's mostprestigious leadership development firm,
the FranklinCovey company, includinghaving as the CMO for nearly a decade.
Your book is extraordinary and I don'twant it to get lost in what is a sea of
leadership books. I want to repeat thetitle again for those who are listening.
It's called The Manager's Handbook: Five simple Steps to Build a Team, (07:55):
undefined
Stay Focused, Make Better Decisions,
and Crush Your Competition. This bookwas a Wall Street Journal bestseller.
We're going to dig into some items here.
I highly recommend everyonewho is listening today to buy
this book because for me, a guywho's been in this business 30 years,
(08:16):
I found myself reading it withone of two things happening;
finding you validating meon something I already knew,
but reinforcing it or giving mea perspective. I thought, gosh,
that's a really good idea,kind of how have I missed that?
I want to dig into some of those. First,
you talk about the five must-haveskills from people who get things
(08:36):
done right, commitment to building a team,
fanatical custodian of time,
willingness to seek and take advice,setting and adhering priorities,
and obsession with quality.
I've picked a few outthat I found particularly enlightening and I want to do a
deep dive with them.One is about meetings,
(08:58):
seven steps to running a greatmeeting. I have to tell you,
I read your book four days ago and Idid a TikTok video and I took a bunch of
your ideas and put it in my TikTok videobecause I thought one of your ideas
around being intentional with who youinvite to a meeting is such a great
decision.
Walk us through yourexpertise on what makes
(09:19):
a great meeting.
So we all know that basically meetingsare kind of broken and they're even more
broken now that so many ofthem are taking place remotely.
There was a statistic that was done aftera fair amount of work. Bain & Company,
the average manager spends23 hours a week in meetings.
We actually don't realize howmuch time we spend in meetings,
(09:41):
and half of those attendees reportedthat the meetings were either
ineffective or highly ineffective. Sowe're wasting a massive amount of time.
It's not just wasting time though,
because the issue with meetingsis we spend too much time in them,
kind of all know that,
but also we don't optimizethe decision-making process of it. So what I did,
(10:02):
I didn't pretend to be the bestperson in running meetings.
I went out and I lookedat who were the very,
very best people out there reputationallyand how they ran meetings. They all
ran them a little differently,but I found these common themes.
And so when I wrote the book, ratherthan tell our war stories about, well,
this is what Sheryl Sandberg did atMeta and this is what Jeff Bezos does at
Amazon and let the reader sortit out, I harmonize it into,
(10:26):
as you know Scott,
a step-by-step approachto how you run meetings.
And my hero in this isactually Jeff Bezos.
We think of Jeff Bezos as a guy whocan see around corners and sort of a
visionary and so forth,
but he was first and foremost amanager and he insisted that the
meetings that Amazon be run acertain way are his meetings.
(10:49):
And then he insisted that all meetingsin Amazon be run a certain way.
And that was what was so transformativewhen I was working on this chapter
because I realized it's not that actuallythat helpful for just the CEO or just
you to be running meetings well.
It's transformative when yourentire organization does,
and that's why Amazon makesbetter decisions and they make faster decisions and
(11:11):
why they have crushed their competition.
Illuminate some of thoseideas because in your book,
which literally is a handbook,
you give five or six or I guessit may be seven strategies,
remind everybody what your aggregateresearch showed are the five or
six or seven things people shoulddo, rattle them off real quick.
So basically everythingin this book is formulaic.
(11:32):
So you start a meeting by saying,
this is the problem we're trying tosolve or the opportunity we're trying to
take advantage of.
Being able to articulate that isreally important to be able to do,
and most people just sort of wantto talk about it at the issue.
So you have to articulateexactly what we're doing here.
The second thing is you askfor clarifying questions.
You don't want to start the conversationuntil everybody's sure on what this
(11:54):
number meant or what that graph meant.So you ask for just clarifying questions.
Then you dive into the discussion itself.
And I personally love the idea of askingpeople to talk in reverse order of
seniority. So you really get the fullbenefit of everyone's in the crowd.
People aren't sort of guessing whatthe boss is thinking or saying, oh,
that must not be a good idea,
not what the boss said. You try to talkto people in reverse order of seniority.
(12:18):
Then you summarize whatyou believe everybody,
what you believe the group decided on,
and then you finalize with a quicklittle email saying this is what it is,
not a summary of themeeting who said what,
but it's a summary of thedecision that were made.
What do the dates do and who'sdoing what? It's that simple.
I run every meeting like this, Scott,and our meetings take so much less time.
(12:41):
And by the way, everybody loves themeetings because we go in there and we go,
we got stuff done today.
David, drill deeper. Onemore thought on this.
Talk about how important itis to curate your guest list.
Oh yeah. So
especially because of today's technologywhere it is so easy with cell phones,
(13:02):
computers, and so forth to add attendees,
and there's no worst waste oftime to have somebody in there who
doesn't need to be in the meeting. Sothis is something that Google does,
and Eric Schmidt was very,
one of the founders of Google was veryspecific about is that if you're in a
meeting, you must participate in themeeting. You're not there at an audience.
(13:23):
And so if you ask yourselfthe question, okay,
what is the minimum number of peoplewe need in order to make the right
decision? Not everyone we can attend,and then everybody must participate.
Then you get your attendee listdown lower, and by the way,
you free up people to go and work onsomething else that they should be working
on. The other thing that youcan do is if you've got a,
(13:45):
let's say a 40-minute meeting,
everybody doesn't need to bethere for the first 40 minutes.
So if someone is important forthe first part of the meeting,
have them on the first part of the meetingand then dismiss 'em so that they can
go work on something else.
David, we all have brands and reputations.
I know people that you wantto invite them to the meeting,
but their meeting style is cancerous.They either can't stay on topic,
(14:09):
they go down rat holes,
they get passionate about asolution that isn't on topic.
Any advice from your own experienceon either how you have prepped people,
how you need them to behave in a meeting,
or do you just cut your losses and don'tinvite them because even though they
could add some value,
they actually have a deleterious ordiminishing impact on the meeting?
(14:31):
Any experience there?
And it cuts through all layersof the book. Actually, Scott,
we have this crazy notion that wehave to sort of tiptoe around people
who wear a white collar and wetreat everybody else differently.
If you and I are running
a manufacturing plant and someone isnot making the car or making the widget
(14:53):
right, are we going to go?Well, I mean it's okay.
It's okay if they don't make the car.No, we say This is how you make a car.
This is how you do things.If we're running a sports team, you don't say, well,
you get to kind of throw the pass whoeveryou want and do your own thing. No,
we say this is the way youoperate on the athletic field.
So we win a championship. The samething is true with people in the office.
(15:14):
And so over and over again, I've said,
this is how we're going to run a meeting.I'm going to model it. Okay,
then I'm going to let you start runningthe meeting. And after the meeting, no,
I'm very prescriptive. I said,you let that person talk too long.
You need to be able to politelysay, I think we have the point down.
Now it's time to moveon to the next issue.
So you absolutely have to do itthis way. And just to finish up,
(15:37):
I was talking about Jeff Bezos.
Can you imagine Jeff Bezos building Amazonsitting in a meeting with someone who
is droning on and on and on for a second?
Would you think that thatperson would tolerate that?
Or Steve Jobs or Sam Walton go downyour history of business heroes?
Of course they wouldn't. So why should we?
Let's pivot to terminations and exits.
(15:59):
Your chapter is calledBreaking Up is Hard To Do.
I think it was based on NeilSedaka's song or something like that.
Rattle off some of the importantaspects you write about including how
important preparation is when youknow are going to exit an employee
from the firm, the organization. Youtalk about compassion and preparation,
(16:20):
rattle us through. Everyone's going toface this in your career multiple times.
If you are an effective leader,give us a primer on that.
Sure. So if you're going to be aleader, you have to let people go.
There's no escaping it.
And so the first thing is acceptingit is part of your job description.
It's not an intrusion in your day,it's first thing. Second thing,
(16:41):
in prior chapters,
we talk about instant performancefeedback and how to give feedback to under
performers.
If you follow those steps when it comesto someone who you think you're going to
need to let go, that you'vedone everything you can do.
And I also outline three questions orthree frameworks to determine whether you
need to let someone go or not. Becausea lot of times we agonize over, oh,
(17:03):
and then you keep putting it off andkicking the can down the alley. Well,
that's not how you builda high performing team.
So the first thing is identifyingwho's a problem or who's suffering
or struggling,
and then going through the steps to givethem the best chance of success once.
If they have not been able to do that,then you've done everything you can.
And so then how you showcompassion is through preparation.
(17:25):
And the reason I say breaking up is hardto do is the idea that we're going to
somehow try to morph this conversationinto a way that is not painful for the
other person. It doesn't work thatway. Breaking up is hard to do,
but how you show your compassion andyour humanity is preparing for it.
So in class, for example, we'll practicea termination and I'll call on someone.
(17:46):
I'll have them terminate me,for example, and I'll say, well,
what about my severance? Oftentimesa student will say, well,
what do you think is fair?
That's when you startto degrade compassion.
That's not compassionateto put on the other person.
What you do is you are prepared for that.For Cobra, continuing health benefits,
(18:08):
we make sure that the forms arefilled out, they're complete.
Everything we can do.
We do everything we can to make thelogistics of the termination as gentle as
possible.
And we talk about how you don't getinto the reasons why you're terminating
the person because that oftenjust degrades into a he said,
she said or an argument, and you end up,
all of a sudden you've realized that allI've been doing is kicking this person
(18:31):
while they're down. So you can move thatto an alternate meeting. You can say,
look, Scott,
the purpose of this meeting is to talkabout the terms of your separation.
If you'd like to talk about more detailsabout how we got to this decision,
we'll have a separate meeting for that.
So these are the things that you doto show your compassion around letting
someone go. David,
(18:52):
I think it's extraordinarilyvaluable. Obviously the author,
Brené Brown says clear is kind.
What you're talking about is just makingsure that you've done your preparation.
If the decision is final, thatyou're not in a debate about it.
It's not a conversation as muchas it is a clear and succinct
download of what the factsare. And then like you said,
(19:13):
if you want to talk aboutthe why behind the what,
we can schedule a separateconversation for that.
This chapter is worth the book alonebecause it's going to help you respect
people. It really is highon compassion and empathy,
even though it's probably highon clarity and even curtness.
I want to go to a different chapter.You call it The Hundred Day Window.
(19:33):
I want to read a passage out of thebook and then have you expand on it.
Vigilant, clear and supportive onboarding
is important,
is as important to successful hiringas interviews or reference checks.
The Harvard Business Reviewreports that 40 to 60% of new hires
(19:54):
fail within 18 months.
Much of this has to dowith poor onboarding.
Today we know that employees who gothrough a structured onboarding process
are nearly two-thirds more likely to bewith the company after three years than
those who didn't. Let's talk aboutwhat you call The Hundred Day Window.
(20:15):
And everyone who's listening right nowis going to benchmark their onboarding
process or lack of one against what youare telling us in terms of maybe some of
the big tranches of importantparts of their onboarding process.
Great. And by the way, Scott, it's evenmore important now because now in 2024,
we live in a world wherethere's a lot of remote work.
(20:37):
The connective tissue that we have withour employees or with each other on the
team is not the same. Everybody's kindof out for bid on LinkedIn every day.
So this is even more importanttoday. Okay, first of all,
there's a mindset which is even thebest people at hiring have about a 20,
25% unsuccess rate.
(20:58):
So the hiring process does notend when you make the offer.
So the onboarding isbifurcated into two areas.
One is we want to make sure thatwe made a good hiring decision.
The second is we want to maximize thisperson's chance of success and that
they'll stay with the company. Sothe book describes in the first one,
we call it vigilance,
a structured process on how you makesure you made the right decision because
(21:20):
you will learn more in the first week ofthat person's being on the job in your
company or in your organization than youdid to the whole interviewing process
and recruiting process. And it's betterfor both you and the candidate or the
new employee to find out that it's notgoing to work within a month than six or
seven months down theroad. But you've got that,
(21:41):
you're battling this confirmationbias. You don't want to be wrong.
And so the book outlines specific thingsthat you do in a structured way to
maximize the chances that youidentify if you made a problem,
if you made a mistake or not.
The second part of it isthe onboarding process.
And I want you to thinkabout it this way, Scott.
Imagine you're driving to work and thefirst couple days you're driving to work,
(22:04):
you don't know where to getgas and where the parking is,
and then you get to work and youdon't know who fixes your laptop.
And so there's a fair amount ofdiscomfort. You don't know who have lunch,
do people go out on Thursday nights,
all of those kind of norms. It isimportant that you structurally get people
through those norms on how we do thingswith the company and where to park your
car and how to get your laptopfixed or whatever early on,
(22:27):
because that's when that employeeis most vulnerable about leaving.
Once they get kind of settled in andthey know people and like people,
then you've got some resiliencearound the working relationship.
So how do you do that? So for example, Italk about Madison Reed and Amy Errett,
the CEO of Madison Reed,every single new employee now,
Madison Reed's a big company.
Every single employee is welcomedon a Wednesday Zoom call,
(22:50):
and they show up on the Zoomwith balloons behind them.
So they know everybody knowswho the new employees are,
and their manager introducesthem playfully with three,
or two truths and a lie.
So it is just one example of how youmake the person feel comfortable.
So then when they go into the lunchroom,people go, oh, that's the new person.
Come on, sit with us.
(23:10):
So the book goes through about a dozenspecific things that the best companies
do to onboard employees.Think about if you increase,
you mentioned the two thirds number.If you increase by one third,
the number of people that stay withyour company that you want to keep,
just the cost savings alone is incredible.
(23:31):
Sir, you are the real deal.
I've kind of hit a tipping pointin my fatigue reading books from
organizational behaviorPhDs at universities that I've never hired or fired a
person in their life, thathave never managed a P&L,
that have never sweated out bringingtheir quarterly revenue number in at the
last minute, managing a dozen salespeople,
that had never had to make really toughdecisions on allocating resources.
(23:54):
I'm kind of overreading the only academicbooks on leadership because if you've
not hired or fired people, I'm notreading your book. You, however,
I think are a very nice blend of teachingthe business principles at Stanford
that you've learned in your many roles.This book is extraordinary. Again,
I encourage people to pick up TheManager's Handbook. I want to talk about
(24:18):
what else you've learned.
You write a lot about this sort of fierce
management of your time.
What have you learned are some of thebest things that successful leaders,
managers do to keep on top of what istheir most precious asset and that it's
their time, the allocationof their own time?
(24:38):
He was saying sort ofconverged on this, by the way.
I didn't sort of come up with these fivethings and then decide to write a book.
I identified that the commonreasons why we thought
some companies succeeded anddidn't succeed were wrong.
And then I went out and I investigatedthe best companies out there and the best
leaders and managers and foundthese five characteristics.
(25:00):
And I stumbled upon thetime management one,
I was having a cup of coffee witha friend of mine, Tom Staggs,
who at the time was CEO of Disney.
And I got there a couple minutes lateand I'm threading over the emails I
haven't answered over. Andthere he is, calm as can be,
and he's running an organization that hadover 200,000 people in six continents.
And I talked to Tom about it,
(25:21):
and he said that one of the most importantthings he does is he's very good at
managing his time. And then he's verygood at teaching his staff how to manage
their time.
So they're very good at teachingtheir staff how to manage their time.
That was followed up not too long afterthat with the conversation I was having
with Michael Porter, a friend of mine.
And he told me about this study thathe had done where they followed 27
(25:41):
high-performing CEOs that collected 60,000hours of data on how they spent their
time. And what was clearis that they were very,
very protective of their time becausethey knew that that was their scarce
resource. But when I went andlooked at how everybody did it,
everybody did it a little bit differently,
and some people had kind of exotic waysthat they managed their time and so
forth. So what I did is, Scott,I pulled out the easy, simple,
(26:05):
low hanging fruit, if you will,
if pardon the expression that all ofthese managers did. So for example,
this saves you 70 minutes a day andyour listeners can do it tomorrow
morning,
is you take all those hour-long meetingsand you turn them into 40-minute
meetings and you take all those30-minute meetings and you turn 'em into
20-minute meetings. That alone,if you have a typical calendar,
(26:26):
will save you 70 minutesright off the bat.
So what I looked for is I wasn'tsuggesting that people should go away
for a seven-day seminar on time managementor completely re-engineer their work.
It's basically,
here are a handful of things that youcan do to recapture hours in your week.
David, you said somethingearlier I think that is profound,
(26:46):
and I want to kind of end our conversationon this. You said loosely quoted,
everybody's in a bidding warright now, up for bid on LinkedIn.
And I think this is a great way to endour conversation because that is true.
If leaders and managers don't thinkthat every one of their team members is
being actively recruited fromall of their competition,
they're delusional because you've doneall the work to train the people and get
(27:09):
them matured and acclimated,
and therefore your competition canpay them more money and still save a
tremendous amount of resources.
Will you remind everyonelistening of that reality and what
in your experience do you thinkleaders and managers should be doing to
re-recruit?
They spend most of their time recruitingand very little time re-recruiting.
(27:31):
What should we be doing? A,
to be aware of the constantbidding process and B,
best practices around keeping your highperformers engaged to inoculate them
from being poached by your competition?
I can really simplify this down, Scott,
is I think the most important thing youcan do to keep the top high-performing
(27:53):
people on your team is to managewell. Now, let me explain.
I'm finishing up the MichaelJordan Chicago Bulls.
I think I'm the last personto watch it, The Last Dance.
And I'm watching this championshipteam and realizing once again that
champions want to workfor high-performing,
(28:13):
but also very demanding organizations.That's where the best players want to be.
So if you want to keep the best players,what you do is you manage really,
really well. And I realizethat might seem simplistic,
but if you give people feedback,instant performance feedback,
like I know you've had Kim Scotton the class using Radical Candor
and that people who are not working out,
(28:35):
you allow them a dignifiedexit out of the company by
we were talking about exits that youhave an obsession with quality and you
measure quality in a certain way. Youtreat your customers a certain way.
These are all the basic building blocksof management. And if you do that,
people don't want to leave because theydon't want to leave the championship
team for the AA team. And to me,
(28:58):
that is the single most importantthing that you can do and the gimmicks,
all the things that you can do that youmentioned people who've never managed
before. Here's the slogan of the day,
that doesn't work because championsjust want to be with high performing
organizations.
Michael,
who's your most influential mentorin your life and what lesson did
(29:20):
you learn from her or him?
The most influential mentor in my lifeis I mentioned him at the beginning,
Irv Grousbeck. And a partner built a very,
very large media companybefore he taught at Harvard.
And then he went to talk to Stanford.
And here's why he was such animportant mentor in my life,
and he was on many of my boards,and I taught with him at Stanford.
(29:43):
He still teaches at Stanford,
is he pointed out that your humanity
and bringing love and kindnessinto the workplace is not
only your responsibility,it's part of good management.
And then he modeled it for me becauseif you just go with the words,
you're like, yeah, yeah,yeah, but I got a job too.
(30:04):
And he showed me and taughtme how everything I want to
be as a human being,
how I can bring my experience as adad or as a partner with my wife,
and I can bring that humanity and empathyinto the workplace and to do all of
these other things moreeffectively because of
that.
We talk about instant performancefeedback and there's six steps to instant
(30:26):
performance feedback. Well,
if you do all those stepsalongside empathy and caring and
love, it is so much more effective.
And that's what I learnedfrom Irv Grousbeck.
I want to ask you one more question.
And I had mentioned thismany times on this podcast.
The best advice I ever receivedin my senior level career was
(30:47):
from our current chairmanand former CEO Bob Whitman.
And Bob once said to me,
thinking is a legitimatebusiness activity.
Meaning just putting your feet up onyour desk and staring out the window and
putting your arms behind your neck orwhatever your version of that is and just
thinking about your brand,your strategy, your strengths,
(31:11):
opportunities, partnerships,people, relationships.
And I'm not very good at that becauseI tend to be a very productive,
hyper-efficient person. It has servedme well in some areas and not in others.
I'm that kind of guy that my phone isringing off the hook at a dinner table or
at emails and social media stuffand kind of the discombobulated,
(31:32):
got lot going on,
and I want to become a littlemore deliberate and a little less
responsive.
I want to be more in control of mypriorities and my time and spend more time
thinking.
From what you've written in the bookor you've already said in the podcast,
is there any advice you would offer meand those listening who can relate to
sort of my trying to thinklong-term in a short-term world,
(31:55):
but being so subject to demands, right?Podcast interviews and audiobook,
you name it. What wouldyou send us off with?
Yeah, I talked specifically aboutthis in the book with Tom Watson,
who eventually ran IBM and how he said,
part of my job description is think,
and that ended up being the nameof the company newsletter at IBM.
(32:17):
It is absolutely partof your job description.
And I was smiling at one pointbecause a CEO who I've come to admire,
and I was on his board actually withJoel Peterson, a company called Asurion,
Kevin Taweel,
the CEO there viewed part of his jobdescription as kicking his feet up on
the desk and staring out the windowand thinking about it and thinking.
But it's one thing to sortof understand that concept,
(32:40):
but it's another thing to do it becauseyou get caught in the urgencies of the
day and the emails apply and your Slackchannels blowing up and you forget about
it. And so I specifically talkabout the concept of deep work,
which is outlined in Cal Newport's book,
which is by the same name Deep Workand how you have to structure deep work
and thinking time into your dailyplanning. And it's not hard to do
(33:04):
if you understand that it's important.
And so it is not about sortof an aspiration alone.
You have to have the aspiration,
but then you also have to structure yourday in a way that allows for this to
happen. Otherwise the urgenciesof the day will overcome it.
And I make the case,
and I think it's a strong andcompelling case that where true
(33:27):
value is added to your organizationis in your deep work time.
And that's why when we talk about timemanagement, fanatical custodian of time,
we talk about quantity of time.Okay, reducing your minutes,
your meetings from 60minutes to 40 minutes,
but also how you manage your qualityof time so that you have this time to
really add true shareholdervalue or organizational value.
(33:47):
David Dodson, former McKinsey consultant,
professor at the StanfordGraduate School of Business,
serial entrepreneur investorin over a hundred companies,
Wall Street Journal and USA Todaybestselling author of this book,
The Manager's Handbook (34:00):
Five Simple Steps to Build a Team, Stay Focused,
Make Better Decisions, andCrush Your Competition.
Superb read, so delighted you joined ustoday. Thanks for your time, my friend.
You're quite welcome.
And we'll see you back here next weekfor a new conversation On Leadership
(34:21):
and management.
Hello and welcome back toFranklinCovey's twice weekly podcast,
On Leadership with Scott Miller. I'myour host each week, six years running.
We never missed an episode all throughthe pandemic because FranklinCovey's
mission is to help people reallyaspire to achieve their own great
purposes,
to help organizations and people reallydiscover how they can be the best,
most effective versions of themselves.
(00:33):
This podcast has over 350 episodestaped. We have interviewed business CEOs,
titans, celebrities, actors,athletes, researchers,
people that are household names,
and other times people who may not be ahousehold name but have dedicated their
lives to discovering asolution, defining a problem,
perhaps they even suffered someunspeakable tragedy or trauma and live to
(00:57):
share about it, to help us be betterleaders both in our organizations,
in our homes, with our families andour friends and our communities.
And I'm privileged to be the hostof FranklinCovey's On Leadership
spotlight, where we twicea week interview guests.
Sometimes they areinternal thought leaders.
Oftentimes they are outsideof the organization.
(01:19):
Today we have a friend of the family.
You may know Joel Peterson is amember of our board of directors.
He is also a member of the facultygraduate school at Stanford and one of his
colleagues and friends, DavidDodson has joined us today.
David is the author of the USA Today andWall Street Journal bestselling book,
The Manager's Handbook (01:38):
Five Simple Steps to Build a Team, Stay Focused,
Make Better Decisions, andCrush Your Competition.
David
Dodson, welcome to On Leadership.
Great, thanks. Let's getinto it. Scott. I'm excited.
After 350 episodes,
we've interviewed a few experts onleadership and management and there's this
(02:01):
age old debate aroundmanagement and leadership.
You manage things and you lead people.You manage processes, you lead culture.
I would argue that they actually canbe used somewhat interchangeably.
I know a lot of managers thatneed to be better leaders.
I know a lot of leaders thatcan be better managers. David,
(02:21):
was there any particular reason as beingon faculty at Stanford and I've been in
the leadership entrepreneurialbusiness for decades.
Any reason why you chose tocall it The Manager's Handbook?
That's really interesting, Scott, andyou and I have talked about this before,
but probably the biggest sort ofdebate I had with the publisher
(02:42):
and with my friends, including my wife,
was whether we were going to use the wordleader or leadership or manager in the
book.
And I ended up having a pretty strongopinion that I wanted to use the word
manager because while wetalk a lot about leadership,
we oftentimes forgetthat the underpinnings,
the foundation of good leadershipis being able to manage well,
(03:07):
the skill of being able to getthings done. And I do, by the way,
reject the theory that somepeople have that they're separate.
Being a good manager for example,includes how to give good feedback.
And I discussed in the book thesix steps to giving good feedback,
but of course that's partof good leadership as well.
So I do think that youcan't really pull 'em apart,
(03:30):
but I wanted someone to lookat the book and say, okay,
I want to not only myself getbetter at getting things done,
but I want to build an entire organizationthat's better at getting things done.
So that's why I ended upwith the title manager.
Beautifully said. I have to tellyou, I couldn't agree more with you.
I know a lot of leaders that are veryaspirational, very strategic thinkers,
(03:54):
big vision, creative,
but they can't manage the quarterlyrevenue or profit to save their life,
and they also can't necessarilymanage accountability.
And so I think all of us at timesin our career need both management
and leadership. David,rewind a couple of decades,
reintroduce yourself to all of our guests.
You've done a lot of things and havehad some sage advice for us today.
(04:18):
Before we start there,
give us the crib sheet onyour professional history.
So I grew up in rural Colorado and farmthe whole world was sort of separated
between farmers and ranchers.
So I grew up in a very rural environment,
pretty sheltered actually. And funnyenough, I went to Stanford undergrad.
(04:39):
The reason I wanted to go to Stanfordundergrad is I saw someone walk by who had
the Coors Beer franchise in our areaand he had a Stanford sweatshirt on.
So I thought, oh, okay, I think I shouldgo to Stanford. And I kid you not.
When I applied to Stanford,
I did not even know what stateStanford University was located in,
so that's how kind of sheltered I was.Didn't have a lot of money growing up.
(05:01):
I took my classes in the morning so Icould work in a meat packing plant in the
afternoon in San Josebecause it paid well.
So I had kind of that sort of agritty growing up and background,
but Stanford really opened up thisworld to me about that maybe I could be
better or maybe I could aspire to thingsthat I didn't previously think I could
(05:21):
aspire to.So I worked for McKinsey,
realized that as much as Iadmired that organization,
it was not how I want to spend my life.
Came back to business school at Stanfordand all I could think about is how I
wanted to run and build something overand over again. And at that point,
Stanford's a veryentrepreneurial school now,
but back then it was more aboutgoing to be an investment banker,
(05:42):
or going to be a consultant orgoing to work at General Motors,
but I could not get it out of my headthat I wanted to run something and I
wanted to build something.
So one day I called up everybody whoI was interviewing with and took my
name out of the hat, went andtalked to a professor of mine,
a guy named Irv Grousbeck who had builta huge media company and came back to
teach.And I said to him, I don't care what I do,
(06:04):
you don't have to pay me. I just wantto work for you. I'll wash your car.
And so I worked for him for a yearand that really set off my life
trajectory,
which has been as an entrepreneur andI've been CEO or executive chairman of
five companies,
been on probably 50 boards and principally
(06:25):
now I coach and mentor
early CEOs and leaders both on the facultyat Stanford and also in my investment
firm. And I just love
the subject of management and leadershipand I remember Irv Grousbeck had said
one thing to me. He said,
what we do is honorable becausewe impact people's lives.
(06:48):
And as I think back onmy own life as a CEO,
the memories that I remember are thoseinterpersonal interactions that I had
with people,
someone who I hired who was maybe workingin the call center and they ended up
becoming a vice president.
Those are the things that make beinga manager and being a good leader.
So incredibly rewardingand frankly important.
(07:09):
David, I want to dive into this book.
Before I do so I want to payappropriate accolades to your book.
As I mentioned to you off air,
I have no credibility when it comesto recommending restaurants or movies,
but I'm arguably one of the world's,
I think most crediblerecommenders of leadership books,
having interviewed nearly everyleadership author in the world,
(07:32):
certainly those who speak English,
having read literally thousands of booksover the course of my 30-year career in
what I think is the world's mostprestigious leadership development firm,
the FranklinCovey company, includinghaving as the CMO for nearly a decade.
Your book is extraordinary and I don'twant it to get lost in what is a sea of
leadership books. I want to repeat thetitle again for those who are listening.
It's called The Manager's Handbook: Five simple Steps to Build a Team, (07:55):
undefined
Stay Focused, Make Better Decisions,
and Crush Your Competition. This bookwas a Wall Street Journal bestseller.
We're going to dig into some items here.
I highly recommend everyonewho is listening today to buy
this book because for me, a guywho's been in this business 30 years,
(08:16):
I found myself reading it withone of two things happening;
finding you validating meon something I already knew,
but reinforcing it or giving mea perspective. I thought, gosh,
that's a really good idea,kind of how have I missed that?
I want to dig into some of those. First,
you talk about the five must-haveskills from people who get things
(08:36):
done right, commitment to building a team,
fanatical custodian of time,
willingness to seek and take advice,setting and adhering priorities,
and obsession with quality.
I've picked a few outthat I found particularly enlightening and I want to do a
deep dive with them.One is about meetings,
(08:58):
seven steps to running a greatmeeting. I have to tell you,
I read your book four days ago and Idid a TikTok video and I took a bunch of
your ideas and put it in my TikTok videobecause I thought one of your ideas
around being intentional with who youinvite to a meeting is such a great
decision.
Walk us through yourexpertise on what makes
(09:19):
a great meeting.
So we all know that basically meetingsare kind of broken and they're even more
broken now that so many ofthem are taking place remotely.
There was a statistic that was done aftera fair amount of work. Bain & Company,
the average manager spends23 hours a week in meetings.
We actually don't realize howmuch time we spend in meetings,
(09:41):
and half of those attendees reportedthat the meetings were either
ineffective or highly ineffective. Sowe're wasting a massive amount of time.
It's not just wasting time though,
because the issue with meetingsis we spend too much time in them,
kind of all know that,
but also we don't optimizethe decision-making process of it. So what I did,
(10:02):
I didn't pretend to be the bestperson in running meetings.
I went out and I lookedat who were the very,
very best people out there reputationallyand how they ran meetings. They all
ran them a little differently,but I found these common themes.
And so when I wrote the book, ratherthan tell our war stories about, well,
this is what Sheryl Sandberg did atMeta and this is what Jeff Bezos does at
Amazon and let the reader sortit out, I harmonize it into,
(10:26):
as you know Scott,
a step-by-step approachto how you run meetings.
And my hero in this isactually Jeff Bezos.
We think of Jeff Bezos as a guy whocan see around corners and sort of a
visionary and so forth,
but he was first and foremost amanager and he insisted that the
meetings that Amazon be run acertain way are his meetings.
(10:49):
And then he insisted that all meetingsin Amazon be run a certain way.
And that was what was so transformativewhen I was working on this chapter
because I realized it's not that actuallythat helpful for just the CEO or just
you to be running meetings well.
It's transformative when yourentire organization does,
and that's why Amazon makesbetter decisions and they make faster decisions and
(11:11):
why they have crushed their competition.
Illuminate some of thoseideas because in your book,
which literally is a handbook,
you give five or six or I guessit may be seven strategies,
remind everybody what your aggregateresearch showed are the five or
six or seven things people shoulddo, rattle them off real quick.
So basically everythingin this book is formulaic.
(11:32):
So you start a meeting by saying,
this is the problem we're trying tosolve or the opportunity we're trying to
take advantage of.
Being able to articulate that isreally important to be able to do,
and most people just sort of wantto talk about it at the issue.
So you have to articulateexactly what we're doing here.
The second thing is you askfor clarifying questions.
You don't want to start the conversationuntil everybody's sure on what this
(11:54):
number meant or what that graph meant.So you ask for just clarifying questions.
Then you dive into the discussion itself.
And I personally love the idea of askingpeople to talk in reverse order of
seniority. So you really get the fullbenefit of everyone's in the crowd.
People aren't sort of guessing whatthe boss is thinking or saying, oh,
that must not be a good idea,
not what the boss said. You try to talkto people in reverse order of seniority.
(12:18):
Then you summarize whatyou believe everybody,
what you believe the group decided on,
and then you finalize with a quicklittle email saying this is what it is,
not a summary of themeeting who said what,
but it's a summary of thedecision that were made.
What do the dates do and who'sdoing what? It's that simple.
I run every meeting like this, Scott,and our meetings take so much less time.
(12:41):
And by the way, everybody loves themeetings because we go in there and we go,
we got stuff done today.
David, drill deeper. Onemore thought on this.
Talk about how important itis to curate your guest list.
Oh yeah. So
especially because of today's technologywhere it is so easy with cell phones,
(13:02):
computers, and so forth to add attendees,
and there's no worst waste oftime to have somebody in there who
doesn't need to be in the meeting. Sothis is something that Google does,
and Eric Schmidt was very,
one of the founders of Google was veryspecific about is that if you're in a
meeting, you must participate in themeeting. You're not there at an audience.
(13:23):
And so if you ask yourselfthe question, okay,
what is the minimum number of peoplewe need in order to make the right
decision? Not everyone we can attend,and then everybody must participate.
Then you get your attendee listdown lower, and by the way,
you free up people to go and work onsomething else that they should be working
on. The other thing that youcan do is if you've got a,
(13:45):
let's say a 40-minute meeting,
everybody doesn't need to bethere for the first 40 minutes.
So if someone is important forthe first part of the meeting,
have them on the first part of the meetingand then dismiss 'em so that they can
go work on something else.
David, we all have brands and reputations.
I know people that you wantto invite them to the meeting,
but their meeting style is cancerous.They either can't stay on topic,
(14:09):
they go down rat holes,
they get passionate about asolution that isn't on topic.
Any advice from your own experienceon either how you have prepped people,
how you need them to behave in a meeting,
or do you just cut your losses and don'tinvite them because even though they
could add some value,
they actually have a deleterious ordiminishing impact on the meeting?
(14:31):
Any experience there?
And it cuts through all layersof the book. Actually, Scott,
we have this crazy notion that wehave to sort of tiptoe around people
who wear a white collar and wetreat everybody else differently.
If you and I are running
a manufacturing plant and someone isnot making the car or making the widget
(14:53):
right, are we going to go?Well, I mean it's okay.
It's okay if they don't make the car.No, we say This is how you make a car.
This is how you do things.If we're running a sports team, you don't say, well,
you get to kind of throw the pass whoeveryou want and do your own thing. No,
we say this is the way youoperate on the athletic field.
So we win a championship. The samething is true with people in the office.
(15:14):
And so over and over again, I've said,
this is how we're going to run a meeting.I'm going to model it. Okay,
then I'm going to let you start runningthe meeting. And after the meeting, no,
I'm very prescriptive. I said,you let that person talk too long.
You need to be able to politelysay, I think we have the point down.
Now it's time to moveon to the next issue.
So you absolutely have to do itthis way. And just to finish up,
(15:37):
I was talking about Jeff Bezos.
Can you imagine Jeff Bezos building Amazonsitting in a meeting with someone who
is droning on and on and on for a second?
Would you think that thatperson would tolerate that?
Or Steve Jobs or Sam Walton go downyour history of business heroes?
Of course they wouldn't. So why should we?
Let's pivot to terminations and exits.
(15:59):
Your chapter is calledBreaking Up is Hard To Do.
I think it was based on NeilSedaka's song or something like that.
Rattle off some of the importantaspects you write about including how
important preparation is when youknow are going to exit an employee
from the firm, the organization. Youtalk about compassion and preparation,
(16:20):
rattle us through. Everyone's going toface this in your career multiple times.
If you are an effective leader,give us a primer on that.
Sure. So if you're going to be aleader, you have to let people go.
There's no escaping it.
And so the first thing is acceptingit is part of your job description.
It's not an intrusion in your day,it's first thing. Second thing,
(16:41):
in prior chapters,
we talk about instant performancefeedback and how to give feedback to under
performers.
If you follow those steps when it comesto someone who you think you're going to
need to let go, that you'vedone everything you can do.
And I also outline three questions orthree frameworks to determine whether you
need to let someone go or not. Becausea lot of times we agonize over, oh,
(17:03):
and then you keep putting it off andkicking the can down the alley. Well,
that's not how you builda high performing team.
So the first thing is identifyingwho's a problem or who's suffering
or struggling,
and then going through the steps to givethem the best chance of success once.
If they have not been able to do that,then you've done everything you can.
And so then how you showcompassion is through preparation.
(17:25):
And the reason I say breaking up is hardto do is the idea that we're going to
somehow try to morph this conversationinto a way that is not painful for the
other person. It doesn't work thatway. Breaking up is hard to do,
but how you show your compassion andyour humanity is preparing for it.
So in class, for example, we'll practicea termination and I'll call on someone.
(17:46):
I'll have them terminate me,for example, and I'll say, well,
what about my severance? Oftentimesa student will say, well,
what do you think is fair?
That's when you startto degrade compassion.
That's not compassionateto put on the other person.
What you do is you are prepared for that.For Cobra, continuing health benefits,
(18:08):
we make sure that the forms arefilled out, they're complete.
Everything we can do.
We do everything we can to make thelogistics of the termination as gentle as
possible.
And we talk about how you don't getinto the reasons why you're terminating
the person because that oftenjust degrades into a he said,
she said or an argument, and you end up,
all of a sudden you've realized that allI've been doing is kicking this person
(18:31):
while they're down. So you can move thatto an alternate meeting. You can say,
look, Scott,
the purpose of this meeting is to talkabout the terms of your separation.
If you'd like to talk about more detailsabout how we got to this decision,
we'll have a separate meeting for that.
So these are the things that you doto show your compassion around letting
someone go. David,
(18:52):
I think it's extraordinarilyvaluable. Obviously the author,
Brené Brown says clear is kind.
What you're talking about is just makingsure that you've done your preparation.
If the decision is final, thatyou're not in a debate about it.
It's not a conversation as muchas it is a clear and succinct
download of what the factsare. And then like you said,
(19:13):
if you want to talk aboutthe why behind the what,
we can schedule a separateconversation for that.
This chapter is worth the book alonebecause it's going to help you respect
people. It really is highon compassion and empathy,
even though it's probably highon clarity and even curtness.
I want to go to a different chapter.You call it The Hundred Day Window.
(19:33):
I want to read a passage out of thebook and then have you expand on it.
Vigilant, clear and supportive onboarding
is important,
is as important to successful hiringas interviews or reference checks.
The Harvard Business Reviewreports that 40 to 60% of new hires
(19:54):
fail within 18 months.
Much of this has to dowith poor onboarding.
Today we know that employees who gothrough a structured onboarding process
are nearly two-thirds more likely to bewith the company after three years than
those who didn't. Let's talk aboutwhat you call The Hundred Day Window.
(20:15):
And everyone who's listening right nowis going to benchmark their onboarding
process or lack of one against what youare telling us in terms of maybe some of
the big tranches of importantparts of their onboarding process.
Great. And by the way, Scott, it's evenmore important now because now in 2024,
we live in a world wherethere's a lot of remote work.
(20:37):
The connective tissue that we have withour employees or with each other on the
team is not the same. Everybody's kindof out for bid on LinkedIn every day.
So this is even more importanttoday. Okay, first of all,
there's a mindset which is even thebest people at hiring have about a 20,
25% unsuccess rate.
(20:58):
So the hiring process does notend when you make the offer.
So the onboarding isbifurcated into two areas.
One is we want to make sure thatwe made a good hiring decision.
The second is we want to maximize thisperson's chance of success and that
they'll stay with the company. Sothe book describes in the first one,
we call it vigilance,
a structured process on how you makesure you made the right decision because
(21:20):
you will learn more in the first week ofthat person's being on the job in your
company or in your organization than youdid to the whole interviewing process
and recruiting process. And it's betterfor both you and the candidate or the
new employee to find out that it's notgoing to work within a month than six or
seven months down theroad. But you've got that,
(21:41):
you're battling this confirmationbias. You don't want to be wrong.
And so the book outlines specific thingsthat you do in a structured way to
maximize the chances that youidentify if you made a problem,
if you made a mistake or not.
The second part of it isthe onboarding process.
And I want you to thinkabout it this way, Scott.
Imagine you're driving to work and thefirst couple days you're driving to work,
(22:04):
you don't know where to getgas and where the parking is,
and then you get to work and youdon't know who fixes your laptop.
And so there's a fair amount ofdiscomfort. You don't know who have lunch,
do people go out on Thursday nights,
all of those kind of norms. It isimportant that you structurally get people
through those norms on how we do thingswith the company and where to park your
car and how to get your laptopfixed or whatever early on,
(22:27):
because that's when that employeeis most vulnerable about leaving.
Once they get kind of settled in andthey know people and like people,
then you've got some resiliencearound the working relationship.
So how do you do that? So for example, Italk about Madison Reed and Amy Errett,
the CEO of Madison Reed,every single new employee now,
Madison Reed's a big company.
Every single employee is welcomedon a Wednesday Zoom call,
(22:50):
and they show up on the Zoomwith balloons behind them.
So they know everybody knowswho the new employees are,
and their manager introducesthem playfully with three,
or two truths and a lie.
So it is just one example of how youmake the person feel comfortable.
So then when they go into the lunchroom,people go, oh, that's the new person.
Come on, sit with us.
(23:10):
So the book goes through about a dozenspecific things that the best companies
do to onboard employees.Think about if you increase,
you mentioned the two thirds number.If you increase by one third,
the number of people that stay withyour company that you want to keep,
just the cost savings alone is incredible.
(23:31):
Sir, you are the real deal.
I've kind of hit a tipping pointin my fatigue reading books from
organizational behaviorPhDs at universities that I've never hired or fired a
person in their life, thathave never managed a P&L,
that have never sweated out bringingtheir quarterly revenue number in at the
last minute, managing a dozen salespeople,
that had never had to make really toughdecisions on allocating resources.
(23:54):
I'm kind of overreading the only academicbooks on leadership because if you've
not hired or fired people, I'm notreading your book. You, however,
I think are a very nice blend of teachingthe business principles at Stanford
that you've learned in your many roles.This book is extraordinary. Again,
I encourage people to pick up TheManager's Handbook. I want to talk about
(24:18):
what else you've learned.
You write a lot about this sort of fierce
management of your time.
What have you learned are some of thebest things that successful leaders,
managers do to keep on top of what istheir most precious asset and that it's
their time, the allocationof their own time?
(24:38):
He was saying sort ofconverged on this, by the way.
I didn't sort of come up with these fivethings and then decide to write a book.
I identified that the commonreasons why we thought
some companies succeeded anddidn't succeed were wrong.
And then I went out and I investigatedthe best companies out there and the best
leaders and managers and foundthese five characteristics.
(25:00):
And I stumbled upon thetime management one,
I was having a cup of coffee witha friend of mine, Tom Staggs,
who at the time was CEO of Disney.
And I got there a couple minutes lateand I'm threading over the emails I
haven't answered over. Andthere he is, calm as can be,
and he's running an organization that hadover 200,000 people in six continents.
And I talked to Tom about it,
(25:21):
and he said that one of the most importantthings he does is he's very good at
managing his time. And then he's verygood at teaching his staff how to manage
their time.
So they're very good at teachingtheir staff how to manage their time.
That was followed up not too long afterthat with the conversation I was having
with Michael Porter, a friend of mine.
And he told me about this study thathe had done where they followed 27
(25:41):
high-performing CEOs that collected 60,000hours of data on how they spent their
time. And what was clearis that they were very,
very protective of their time becausethey knew that that was their scarce
resource. But when I went andlooked at how everybody did it,
everybody did it a little bit differently,
and some people had kind of exotic waysthat they managed their time and so
forth. So what I did is, Scott,I pulled out the easy, simple,
(26:05):
low hanging fruit, if you will,
if pardon the expression that all ofthese managers did. So for example,
this saves you 70 minutes a day andyour listeners can do it tomorrow
morning,
is you take all those hour-long meetingsand you turn them into 40-minute
meetings and you take all those30-minute meetings and you turn 'em into
20-minute meetings. That alone,if you have a typical calendar,
(26:26):
will save you 70 minutesright off the bat.
So what I looked for is I wasn'tsuggesting that people should go away
for a seven-day seminar on time managementor completely re-engineer their work.
It's basically,
here are a handful of things that youcan do to recapture hours in your week.
David, you said somethingearlier I think that is profound,
(26:46):
and I want to kind of end our conversationon this. You said loosely quoted,
everybody's in a bidding warright now, up for bid on LinkedIn.
And I think this is a great way to endour conversation because that is true.
If leaders and managers don't thinkthat every one of their team members is
being actively recruited fromall of their competition,
they're delusional because you've doneall the work to train the people and get
(27:09):
them matured and acclimated,
and therefore your competition canpay them more money and still save a
tremendous amount of resources.
Will you remind everyonelistening of that reality and what
in your experience do you thinkleaders and managers should be doing to
re-recruit?
They spend most of their time recruitingand very little time re-recruiting.
(27:31):
What should we be doing? A,
to be aware of the constantbidding process and B,
best practices around keeping your highperformers engaged to inoculate them
from being poached by your competition?
I can really simplify this down, Scott,
is I think the most important thing youcan do to keep the top high-performing
(27:53):
people on your team is to managewell. Now, let me explain.
I'm finishing up the MichaelJordan Chicago Bulls.
I think I'm the last personto watch it, The Last Dance.
And I'm watching this championshipteam and realizing once again that
champions want to workfor high-performing,
(28:13):
but also very demanding organizations.That's where the best players want to be.
So if you want to keep the best players,what you do is you manage really,
really well. And I realizethat might seem simplistic,
but if you give people feedback,instant performance feedback,
like I know you've had Kim Scotton the class using Radical Candor
and that people who are not working out,
(28:35):
you allow them a dignifiedexit out of the company by
we were talking about exits that youhave an obsession with quality and you
measure quality in a certain way. Youtreat your customers a certain way.
These are all the basic building blocksof management. And if you do that,
people don't want to leave because theydon't want to leave the championship
team for the AA team. And to me,
(28:58):
that is the single most importantthing that you can do and the gimmicks,
all the things that you can do that youmentioned people who've never managed
before. Here's the slogan of the day,
that doesn't work because championsjust want to be with high performing
organizations.
Michael,
who's your most influential mentorin your life and what lesson did
(29:20):
you learn from her or him?
The most influential mentor in my lifeis I mentioned him at the beginning,
Irv Grousbeck. And a partner built a very,
very large media companybefore he taught at Harvard.
And then he went to talk to Stanford.
And here's why he was such animportant mentor in my life,
and he was on many of my boards,and I taught with him at Stanford.
(29:43):
He still teaches at Stanford,
is he pointed out that your humanity
and bringing love and kindnessinto the workplace is not
only your responsibility,it's part of good management.
And then he modeled it for me becauseif you just go with the words,
you're like, yeah, yeah,yeah, but I got a job too.
(30:04):
And he showed me and taughtme how everything I want to
be as a human being,
how I can bring my experience as adad or as a partner with my wife,
and I can bring that humanity and empathyinto the workplace and to do all of
these other things moreeffectively because of
that.
We talk about instant performancefeedback and there's six steps to instant
(30:26):
performance feedback. Well,
if you do all those stepsalongside empathy and caring and
love, it is so much more effective.
And that's what I learnedfrom Irv Grousbeck.
I want to ask you one more question.
And I had mentioned thismany times on this podcast.
The best advice I ever receivedin my senior level career was
(30:47):
from our current chairmanand former CEO Bob Whitman.
And Bob once said to me,
thinking is a legitimatebusiness activity.
Meaning just putting your feet up onyour desk and staring out the window and
putting your arms behind your neck orwhatever your version of that is and just
thinking about your brand,your strategy, your strengths,
(31:11):
opportunities, partnerships,people, relationships.
And I'm not very good at that becauseI tend to be a very productive,
hyper-efficient person. It has servedme well in some areas and not in others.
I'm that kind of guy that my phone isringing off the hook at a dinner table or
at emails and social media stuffand kind of the discombobulated,
(31:32):
got lot going on,
and I want to become a littlemore deliberate and a little less
responsive.
I want to be more in control of mypriorities and my time and spend more time
thinking.
From what you've written in the bookor you've already said in the podcast,
is there any advice you would offer meand those listening who can relate to
sort of my trying to thinklong-term in a short-term world,
(31:55):
but being so subject to demands, right?Podcast interviews and audiobook,
you name it. What wouldyou send us off with?
Yeah, I talked specifically aboutthis in the book with Tom Watson,
who eventually ran IBM and how he said,
part of my job description is think,
and that ended up being the nameof the company newsletter at IBM.
(32:17):
It is absolutely partof your job description.
And I was smiling at one pointbecause a CEO who I've come to admire,
and I was on his board actually withJoel Peterson, a company called Asurion,
Kevin Taweel,
the CEO there viewed part of his jobdescription as kicking his feet up on
the desk and staring out the windowand thinking about it and thinking.
But it's one thing to sortof understand that concept,
(32:40):
but it's another thing to do it becauseyou get caught in the urgencies of the
day and the emails apply and your Slackchannels blowing up and you forget about
it. And so I specifically talkabout the concept of deep work,
which is outlined in Cal Newport's book,
which is by the same name Deep Workand how you have to structure deep work
and thinking time into your dailyplanning. And it's not hard to do
(33:04):
if you understand that it's important.
And so it is not about sortof an aspiration alone.
You have to have the aspiration,
but then you also have to structure yourday in a way that allows for this to
happen. Otherwise the urgenciesof the day will overcome it.
And I make the case,
and I think it's a strong andcompelling case that where true
(33:27):
value is added to your organizationis in your deep work time.
And that's why when we talk about timemanagement, fanatical custodian of time,
we talk about quantity of time.Okay, reducing your minutes,
your meetings from 60minutes to 40 minutes,
but also how you manage your qualityof time so that you have this time to
really add true shareholdervalue or organizational value.
(33:47):
David Dodson, former McKinsey consultant,
professor at the StanfordGraduate School of Business,
serial entrepreneur investorin over a hundred companies,
Wall Street Journal and USA Todaybestselling author of this book,
The Manager's Handbook (34:00):
Five Simple Steps to Build a Team, Stay Focused,
Make Better Decisions, andCrush Your Competition.
Superb read, so delighted you joined ustoday. Thanks for your time, my friend.
You're quite welcome.
And we'll see you back here next weekfor a new conversation On Leadership
(34:21):
and management.
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