November 20, 2023 • 41 mins
Picture this: living in a van, exploring the globe, and suddenly, you find yourself stepping into a 30-day role in your boyfriend's team, which evolves into your first COO role. That's the extraordinary path Jhana Li took as she journeyed into becoming a leader. Her experiences taught her invaluable lessons about harnessing teamwork to its true potential, as well as the critical importance of converting business operations into comprehensible language for the team and visionaries to understand.
Now, let's take a moment and ask ourselves: What truly matters to us as CEOs - controlling everything in our business, or personal freedom coupled with making an impact larger than ourselves? This compelling episode brings home the raw truth about a CEO's evolution and the trials they undergo in the process of delegation. Hear a client's riveting tale of inching towards burnout before recognizing the need to relinquish control.
To wrap it up, we delve into the realm of business seen through the lens of a personal development tool. Jhana and I unravel how business data can be interpreted to enhance our leadership styles, strategic thinking, and the pivotal role of self-compassion in understanding it. We zero in on the significance of owning our experiences and how our triumphs and failures mold us into better leaders. So, if you're ready to embark on a journey of transformation, growth, and a fresh perspective on business, this episode is for you. Tune in and redefine your leadership style!
Join Dr. William Attaway on the Catalytic Leadership podcast as he shares transformative insights to help high-performance entrepreneurs and agency owners achieve Clear-Minded Focus, Calm Control, and Confidence.
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Ready to elevate your business? Book a free 30-minute discovery call with Dr. William Attaway and start your journey to success.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Catalytic Leadership, the podcast designed
to help leaders intentionallygrow and thrive.
Here is your host author andleadership and executive coach,
dr William Attaway.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Hey, it's William and welcome to today's episode of
the Catalytic Leadership podcast.
Each week, we tackle a topicrelated to the field of
leadership.
My goal is to ensure that youhave actionable steps you can
take from each episode to growin your own leadership.
Growth doesn't just happen.
My goal is to help you becomeintentional about it.
(00:37):
Each week, we spotlight leadersfrom a variety of fields,
organizations and locations.
My goal is for you to see thatleaders can be catalytic, no
matter where they are or whatthey lead.
I draw inspiration from thestories and journeys of these
leaders and I hear from many ofyou that you do too.
(00:57):
Let's jump into today'sinterview.
I'm so honored today to haveJohnna Lee on the podcast.
Johnna first stumbled intooperations five years ago while
traveling full-time in aconverted van through North and
South America.
Since then, she has been COO attwo successful startups,
directly consulted over 37 and 8figure businesses and coached
(01:21):
hundreds more.
Our company, spyglass Ops,helps founders scale their
businesses and scale themselvesout of the day to day by
training their operator tobecome the second in command.
Her mission lies intransforming purpose-based
businesses into vehicles forgrowth and good.
Johnna, I'm so glad you werehere.
(01:41):
Thanks for being on the show.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
I'm so excited to be here.
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
I would love for you to share some of your story with
our listeners, Johnna,particularly around your journey
and your development as aleader.
How did you get started?
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Yeah, when I was living in that van, my boyfriend
at the time, who I wastraveling with, was scaling a
digital marketing agency.
I was watching him build thisthing two feet across the table
from me, every day.
As you do, you weigh in, youtalk through problems and
questions and things.
What became very clear to meover time is that the things
that I was seeing in hisbusiness the things that seemed
(02:18):
very obvious to me he was notseeing at all Through a series
of odd events, I ended upstepping into his team for what
was supposed to be filling infor a 30-day role and eventually
became that company's COO.
That was my very firstleadership experience.
I had no idea what I was doing,going totally off of gut.
I learned a lot, actually, inthat very first role in
(02:42):
leadership.
I still learn every day aboutleadership.
It was important for me, Ithink, in that first management
role to learn how to get thebest out of people and really
invite the best out of people.
I think that that was somethingthat I didn't know how to do
when I first became a leader.
It was something I studiedreally hard over the next few
(03:03):
years to learn how to create thehighest performance teams
possible.
Now, in the work that I do asan operations coach and
consultant, leadership is at thecenter of my operational model.
It's something that I find tobe the deal breaker, the
transformative event betweengood companies and great
companies.
It's something I've actuallybecome very passionate about
(03:25):
over time, but it started withme not being particularly good
at it.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I think that's where we all started.
I don't know anybody whostarted saying wow, I'm
fantastic.
I don't think I have any placeto go.
That's a good question, Right.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
Either you're a born leader or you're not.
We hear that all the time.
I never thought I was the bornleader.
I was never the alpha in theroom.
I thought for a long timeleadership was not something
that I was good at.
Then I realized it's likeanything else it's a learned
skill that you can choose tostudy, you can choose to acquire
and you can choose to practiceit and master it.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
I love what you said a second ago, that you saw
things that he did not see.
I often tell clients you needsomebody who's going to help you
see what you can't see, becauseevery leader has blind spots.
You can't see the whole picturewhen you're in the frame.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Yeah, absolutely.
I find that operations.
The more I look at operationsand study it, the more I really
believe that operations is itsown totally unique lens.
A visionary founder will lookat the exact same business, the
exact same set of data as theiroperator and walk away with two
completely different conclusions.
The visionary is looking foropportunities.
(04:35):
Here's where we can grow,here's where we can build.
Next, the operator is seeing meon science everywhere saying
this is what's breaking, this iswhat could be better, this is
worth it.
There's gaps in inefficienciesand areas for improvement.
The reality is you need both togrow the most effective and
efficient company possible.
You need both.
It is two fundamentallydifferent lenses and the power
(04:59):
of the operator, visionarydynamic lies in bringing those
two lenses together.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
How do you train operators to see not just
through their lens?
But, also through the lens ofthe founder.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
Yeah, that's a very good question.
We train on this extensively.
I have coaching programs foroperators.
That's how we serve our clients.
It is the challenge of theoperator and I believe it is the
responsibility of the operatorto learn how to translate their
lens into language that the teamand the visionary can
(05:34):
understand.
How can you take something likethat to you is so obvious.
Let's say something intangiblelike a culture issue.
How can you literally translatethat into monetary value so
that you can put a number with adollar sign in front of a
visionary and say this is howmuch this culture issue is
costing us?
This is why it's ROI positiveto fix it.
(05:55):
That's an example.
At the end of the day, it'sabout how do we quantify things
that are very difficult toquantify, that we play in the
operation space so that we canjustify the value of the work
that we do within a business.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
I love that phrasing.
To change it into a differentlanguage, to translate it so
that other people can understandit.
So many of the people that Iwork with do not understand that
concept.
They think everybody sees theworld the same way they do.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Right, right.
Unfortunately, it was thelesson I learned the hard way
because I totally and utterlyfailed In my second stint as COO
.
I will never forget this.
I was trying to rebuild thesales CRM for the business and
to me it was so obvious why thiswas so important, why we needed
more structure, why we neededmore process, and I was trying
(06:50):
to impose that force that on thesales team within the company
and understandably, they pushedback.
Because why is operationsgetting in the way?
Why is it slowing me down?
Why is it putting all of thisprocess around, something that
we never needed process aroundLike?
These were the objections I wasgetting and I didn't understand
(07:11):
that it was my responsibilitynot just to know what the right
answer was, right, Know what theright system is, but to
actually be able to get peopleto buy into it.
The Jedi mind trick that ischange management is something
that was not on my radar at alland it ultimately resulted in me
, for a variety of reasons,leading that business because I
wasn't able to get by in andenact the change that I knew the
(07:35):
company needed and so walkingaway really from like.
I do consider that to be a hugelearning opportunity, but a
personal failure in terms of myown ability to be the best COO I
could have been for thebusiness.
It was ultimately because I wastaking ownership for just
knowing what I know and thinkingthe way that I think and
assuming that everybody shouldthink that way as well, and I
wasn't taking ownership for theactive translation which is
(07:56):
ultimately what's required toget people to buy in and shift
things behaviorally, which isthe whole point of operations,
Wow.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
That is so.
I can hear the pens scribblingright now.
People are hearing that.
I think that is a concept thatis not communicated and taught,
particularly in theentrepreneurial space.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
Yeah, 100%.
And to your point right, we allhave our own lenses.
We can only see from our ownframe, from our own context.
But if you want to createmassive change within other
people, that's just it's justnot good enough, right?
Like it's just not enough toget people to truly buy in and
want to run with you.
And so operators, who arechange makers within their
(08:39):
businesses, they have to learn.
Whether they want to or not,they have to acquire the skill
set of.
It really does feel like a Jedimind trick, like how do you get
somebody to want to use thesystem even more than you want
them to use the system?
There's a very specific skillset instead of steps to make
that happen.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
That's fascinating to me.
I think about the old MarkTwain book Tom Sawyer, when Tom
is basically doing what you'redescribing.
He's painting this fence, buthe doesn't want to whitewash the
fence, and so he convincesother people how fun it is and
how much they really want towhitewash the fence.
Right, and I'm thinking thelevel of emotional intelligence
(09:17):
there is pretty high, but that'san example of using it in a bad
way to manipulate other people,Like.
What you're describing is, howdo we use this for the benefit
of other people?
And I think from thatperspective, operators bring
value in a way that so manyfounders simply don't understand
.
They even need.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Well, and it's interesting, because the number
one person that you have to knowhow to Jedi mind trick a little
bit is your CEO, right?
Because, again, they aren'tnaturally systems oriented.
They don't want to show up andfollow your SOP, right, they're
busy with the business and yetyou need their buy-in, you need
them to lead by example, so therest of the team sees how
(09:57):
important systems are right, andso to be able to manage across,
to be able to manage down, butalso to be able to manage up, is
, in my mind, the differencebetween a good and a great
operator.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Absolutely.
Managing up is a skill that Ibelieve every second in command
must master, or else they're notgoing to last very long.
They're going to bounce fromplace to place to place.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
Yep absolutely absolutely so.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
How do you describe what you do in your company?
Like you've talked aboutcoaching, you've talked about
helping to train in how youstepped into this place, but you
now empower far beyond just youand the people that you work
with directly, right?
Speaker 3 (10:38):
Yeah.
So we work with visionaryfounders Like that CEO.
Visionary is our end client andour goal is to help them scale
up their business, accomplishtheir own definition of success
and personal freedom and growthand impact, and do that without
becoming the bottleneck in theirown business, do that without
getting stuck in the weeds, andso the mechanism by which we
(11:00):
serve those CEOs is throughtheir operator.
If they don't have an operator,we can help them find one.
If they do have an operator, wehave coaching programs.
But my whole belief around this,william, is that most CEOs are
not the best person to solvetheir own operational
bottlenecks Because, again,they've got that fundamentally
different lens.
It doesn't come naturally tothem and it's not the highest
(11:21):
value add.
There's so many more value addthings that they could be doing
in the business.
They should not be wastingtheir time learning how to build
SOPs, and so our goal is totake their operator, train that
person up, give that person theskills and the method they need
to build systems and buildscalable team so that the
visionary can remain in theirzone of genius, they can drive
(11:42):
growth at their highest into thebusiness and they can really
enjoy the process because theyaren't forcing themselves to
wear all these hats that theydon't want to be wearing.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
That is so good.
I was working with a team theother day.
Are you familiar with theworking genius profile from
Patrick Wynch?
Patrick Wynch yeah.
Fascinating tool, an assessmentthat I use, and working with
them, helping the founder tounderstand that they do not have
all the areas of genius.
They have two Right.
(12:12):
You only get two, you only gettwo and if they don't understand
, they need the other four aspart of a healthy, sustainable
business and how the people inthe roles need to be leveraging
their areas of genius as well.
If everybody's operating out oftheir areas of working.
Frustration that's not going tolast long.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
Right, that's a lot of friction.
No, that makes perfect sense,and I think it is part of the
CEO's growth curve that wesupport them through Oftentimes.
This operator is one of thefirst members of the leadership
team.
This is their first timeworking alongside a fellow
leader within the business, asopposed to just delegating
straight downwards to a team,and that's very confronting.
(12:56):
To shift your leadership styleso that, by design, you are not
the best person to make everydecision, you are not the
smartest person in the room inregards to every element of your
business, which is reallychallenging because up until
that moment you were, you had towear every hat, you had to make
every decision.
That is what made yousuccessful to even get to the
(13:19):
point that you could bring in aleadership team and then to
evolve that and shift that andhave the humility to change what
it means to be successful awayfrom I can do everything, I can
make every decision, I can comeup with every idea towards.
How can I build the highestperformance team and ecosystem
around me to do every task, makeevery decision, have every idea
(13:40):
.
It's a very fundamental andchallenging evolution for a CEO
to go through, but it's alsototally necessary if they ever
truly want to be able todelegate and elevate themselves
out of the day-to-day weeks.
You ever get pushed back onthis Often.
Yes, yeah.
Again it's super confronting,right Right.
It's really uncomfortable.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Do they ever push back and say you know, yeah, I
don't need that, I can do thismuscle?
Speaker 3 (14:09):
We do, and those clients come back to us six
months later because they'reclose to burnout and they want
to burn their company to theground right, like I have seen.
I've seen entrepreneurs likeamazing entrepreneurs just sheer
brute force.
They will power their way tosuccess.
Yes, and there is always alimit.
I think the cap I saw was an800K per month business where
(14:32):
the entrepreneur was just wildlytalented and very hardworking.
I was able to get it to 800Kmonths, but he was miserable.
He was doing everything withinthe business.
He had built this cage aroundhim that he could not get out of
.
Right, and most people don'tmake it that high, like.
Most people cap out at like 100to 150K month range.
And so the question I wouldpose to that CEO who say you
(14:53):
know, I don't need to delegateor build a high performance
leadership team or do thesethings.
The question is just well, whatmatters to you more?
The ability to controleverything in your business, or
personal freedom, the ability tothe humility to not be the
smartest person in the room, orthe ability to scale a company
(15:15):
that is bigger than yourself andcan have an impact larger than
yourself?
Right, because there's not aright or wrong answer.
It's just what's more importantto you and are you willing to
go through the uncomfortablepersonal work it will take to
truly get your business to thenext level?
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Love that question.
What matter more to you?
So many entrepreneurs would saythey started their own thing
for time freedom, for financialfreedom, to be able to do what
they want when they want.
And they traded that.
You know eight hour job for a15 hour a day job.
That's right, Like we're allthat freedom.
(15:50):
We're all free, Yep, Yep 100%,100%.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
And again, I have all the all the empathy in the
world, because the things thatmade an entrepreneur wildly
successful when they werestarting out are the things that
actively start to stall themout and trap them in the weeds
as they begin to scale.
It's not an easy transformationby any means, and it's totally
necessary.
So the question just becomes doyou want to stay small and not
(16:17):
go through the personalevolution required, or do you
genuinely want to scale a bigbusiness?
Do you genuinely want to run alarge team?
Do you genuinely want to createsomething that can outlast you
and outgrow you?
And again, I think it's atotally valid answer, william,
to say no, I don't actually wantthose things.
I'd rather stay smaller.
I'd rather just keep startingbusinesses because that's where
I'm comfortable and that's whereI thrive.
(16:38):
I think that's a brilliant andself aware answer.
But I see so many clients getstuck when they think they want
the big business, they thinkthey want the big team, they
think they want the passiveincome, they think they want
these things.
They try and drive towards it,but it's actually not them in
their zone of genius, it's notthem in a lived experience, it's
(16:58):
not that they actually want,it's not them acquiring skill
sets they actually wanted toacquire, like they don't
actually want all the thingsthat come with that, and so they
either self sabotage and scalethe business back down or they
exit Generally at less of avaluation than they originally
wanted, and neither of those areideal outcomes.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
I love that you have taken this skill that you
learned and you're nowleveraging it not just for your
own benefit, but for the benefitof other people, because it
sounds like you come alongsidethese founders, these CEOs,
these companies and you helpthem see what they can't see and
grow beyond themselves, becausethey're what's holding them
(17:39):
back.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
I love that, yeah Well, and to me it's a matter of
impact.
When I left my last COO job, Ihad the opportunity to become
COO somewhere else, commitmyself to one founder, one
vision, one mission.
Or I realized I had a skill setthat could become its own
vehicle, its own leverage toimpact hundreds of visionaries,
(18:01):
hundreds of visions and impacts,and so for me, it was.
I think entrepreneurs areamazing.
I think they're the mostincredible change makers we have
in society, and so if the bestway I can serve them is to help
them get out of their own wayand allow their vision to come
to life, then the best way Icould do that was through
training not being theiroperator, but training their
operators.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
So good.
What a wonderful, fantastic wayto ripple your impact beyond
what you can do personally.
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
I love that.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Well, let's dive into you for aminute.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
You are not the same leader today that you were five
years ago.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
We've talked about that You've learned a few things
.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
How do you continue to grow and develop yourself?
Because a year from now, fiveyears from now, your company is
going to need you to bleed at ahigher level.
Your clients are going to needthat.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Hundred percent.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
How do you?
Speaker 3 (18:55):
develop you?
That is a fantastic question.
I always say that ourbusinesses are reflections of
ourselves.
I think your business is justlike the world's harshest
personal development tool.
It is just a mirror being heldup to your face every single day
, saying here's you, here'swhere you have opportunity to
(19:15):
grow next.
It's this beautiful giftbecause you can directly measure
the results of your ownpersonal growth.
Right Like that.
Those are business outcomesthat you're able to track.
For me, every single day, whenthings go right, things go wrong
, challenges come my way.
The reframe isn't these thingsare happening to me.
(19:37):
I have to react to them.
I just have to handle them.
The reframe is this is just data.
My business is just feeding medata every single day.
If I'm having a problem with amember of my team, how is that
data about my own leadershipstyle?
If my revenue is not where Iwant it to be, how is that data
around my own strategic thinkingand where I have room for
growth?
And so, when your business isfeeding you that much data and
(20:01):
you have the awareness to takeit and ask what is this telling
me?
It's this feedback loop that youhave every single day that says
okay, I guess this is what Ineed to work on next.
I guess this is where I need togrow next.
I'm very lucky to have a coachthat I work with on a weekly
basis to help me process thatdata and move through it and
analyze it and take action basedoff of it.
But ultimately, I think itstarts with the mindset of
(20:24):
showing up to your business fromthe place of these things are
not good, they're not bad,they're just data and I can
choose how to interpret thatdata and grow from it or not.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
I love that frame.
I think that's brilliant and Ithink a whole lot of people need
to adopt that immediatelybecause they want to interpret.
They want to immediatelyinterpret the data, typically in
a derogatory way towardthemselves.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
That's not helpful.
Speaker 3 (20:52):
No, the self-compassion is so critical
and has been really hard for mein my own personal growth and
development journey.
But when you're no longerhaving to fight yourself in
addition to the thing and youcan be compassionate and say
again this is what has made mesuccessful until now, I can
celebrate this.
It's just no longer serving me,it's just no longer where my
(21:15):
business needs me to be or togrow next.
So I can honor that, I canappreciate that and I can still
continue to change.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
Well said, there is no such thing as a wasted
experience.
Yes, absolutely, becausethey've all made you who you are
Yep, right, and they wereeither an experience where you
won or they were an experiencewhere you learned something
Exactly, exactly Right.
There's no such thing as awasted experience.
It's for your benefit or thebenefit of those around you.
Now you're able to use evenyour failures to impact other
(21:44):
people, to help them avoiddriving into the ditches that
you might have driven into.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
Well, and I think that, on the topic of leadership
, the best leaders I know alsocarry that forward for their
team, where their team'sfailures, their team's mistakes,
become their learningopportunity, and when everyone
is processing the ups and downsof the business not as good as
bad, but just as data, then theentire team is able to take
ownership for growth, for levelup, versus many CEOs that I see
(22:12):
again stuck in that mindset oflike it has to come back to me.
I have to do everything.
When a team fails, that iseither a personal failure of
theirs and then they have tostep in and they have to fix it,
Versus cool team failed.
What did that teach me about mytraining, about my systems,
about my process, about myleadership?
How can I take ownershipultimately, Cause it's my
(22:33):
business and this did happen,but how can I also empower my
team to take ownership withtheir contribution to this,
their learning from it?
How can they get better as aresult?
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Those are fantastic evaluative questions.
So often people think thatexperience is what makes you
better.
I do not believe that at all.
I don't believe experiencemakes you any better.
I think evaluated experiencemakes you better.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
I love that.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
And I love those questions because those are
evaluative questions that pointforward.
They don't leave you in thepast, leave you stuck in the
mire of failure and despair.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
What are we gonna do better next time?
How did we learn here?
I would change this.
In the next time we're in asimilar situation, what would we
do differently?
Speaker 3 (23:16):
Yeah, absolutely, and my biggest invitation to
leaders that are trying toincorporate more critical
thinking, more proactive problemsolving, more ownership within
their team would be that everytime, you run the play right.
So, whether that is, let's say,a massive client project or a
big deliverable or a failure, afire that blows up, to take 15
(23:38):
minutes, like hop on the thing,fix the fire right, like solve
the crisis, and then take 15minutes with that team and sit
down and ask the question right,we just ran the play.
What went well?
What could have gone better?
What will we do differentlynext time?
Right, I love that.
It's about carving out the time,and so many CEOs are so stuck
jumping from fire to fire thatit feels like there's never time
(24:01):
to sit down and talk about it.
And also, that was terrible andI don't wanna spend any time
thinking about that because thatwas the worst, right, the
problem is, when you don't takethe time, that same exact fire
will just crop up again andagain because you're not
learning from it, versus everyfire again not being bad or just
being data.
That offers you the opportunityto say why this happened and
(24:22):
what we can do differently toavoid it.
That fire should never happenagain, not the same way, and so
every fire actually becomes ifdone well, I think, roi positive
, because you become such abetter business as a result that
you earn more than whateverthat fire cost you, and you can
actually turn it into anaccelerant and a lever for
(24:43):
growth.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
You know, I think, what you that process.
You just walked through for the15 minutes when I call a hot
wash after a failure or after anevent.
Love it Like.
When you do that, you areprocessing your learning so that
you can carry it forward,correct, yeah, and I think so
many leaders don't do that forthe reasons that you've laid out
, and so they continue to circlethe same grades.
Yeah, I wanna learn from it.
(25:05):
I don't wanna circle that drainagain.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
I don't want that.
That fire was terrible.
I never want that fire tohappen again.
But the only way to do thatright, it's like a sports team,
right?
The best sports teams will playthe game.
They'll come into practice thenext day and they'll sit down
and they'll watch the recording.
Yeah, like maybe we won thegame.
Fantastic, why did we win?
How can we?
How can we create more success?
(25:28):
And when we fail, when we lose,how can we do differently next
time?
Everything is a learningopportunity, but to your point
only if you take the moment toevaluate the lived experience as
opposed to just jump straightinto the next experience.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
So good.
A mentor of Maan says it thisway.
He says if you don't know whyit's working when it's working,
you will not know how to fix itwhen it breaks.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
I love that.
That's fantastic.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
That's the beauty you have to autopsy success, just
like you.
Autopsy failure, yes.
So, johnna, if people look atyou online, it's really easy, I
think, for many of us to look atsomebody like you and say, wow,
like her journey is just upinto the right, like she hasn't
really had any of the challengesthat I've had, there hasn't
(26:14):
really been any hard things thatshe's had to go through.
She's just succeeding, successafter success after success.
Now I would imagine you wouldsay that's not the whole story.
Would you be willing to sharesome of the challenges that you
faced as an entrepreneur?
Speaker 3 (26:34):
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean I will share that.
The reason I got into businessto begin with is because my very
first job out of college wasfor this company that I really
believed in and I thought wasamazing.
And they went bankrupt becausethey were a mismanaged business
and it was the most catastrophicfailure I'd ever experienced in
(26:54):
my life.
It ended in threats of legalbattle and it was a proper,
proper explosion.
And I needed that because I hadnever failed that
catastrophically in my lifebefore and it taught me that I
didn't know anything aboutbusiness and that if I wanted to
live in this world, if I wantedto come up with an idea one day
that I thought would make theworld a better place, I needed
(27:16):
to understand the vehicle ofbusiness so that I could
actually make that impact toreality.
It's not enough to just havethe right idea, and so that
really sent me down the path oflearning about business and
entrepreneurship and embracingwhat is now my career, and that
career itself has also beenscattered with so many failures.
I shared the one where I endedup leaving a company because I
(27:39):
lacked the awareness of changemanagement and how to actually
influence behavior and get teambuy-in.
I would say that At every majormilestone of my career, there
is a failure that precedes thenext growth curve.
It is only because of thefailure that the growth curve
can take place.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Man, I'm going to want to process that for the
next day or two.
That's really good at every wow.
I'm thinking, I'm reflecting onmy own journey and I see that
same thing.
I don't know that.
I would have put it quite likethat.
That's pretty brilliant.
Speaker 3 (28:20):
It's interesting.
I actually just dropped a poston this week where I think
moments of crisis are also thegreatest opportunities, because
when everything is going well,there's no incentive to change.
Because everything's going well, people get stuck in their ways
and change is hard and changeis uncomfortable.
But when things are not goingwell, all of a sudden, change is
(28:42):
readily available.
Everybody's on board.
Yes, we will do whatever ittakes to get out of this moment
of crisis.
And so, as a leader trying tomanage your team, as a business
owner, trying to manage marketfluctuations and the ups and
downs and just the things thathappen, if every crisis that
comes your way, is there a wayto turn that into an opportunity
, because it shakes things upand you're able to move faster
(29:06):
and change faster and get by infaster around a change that you
want to make in business.
Moments of crisis are yourgreatest opportunities to do
that, because when everything'sgoing well, no one's changing.
We're just going to continuedown the road of success.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
And too often we drift, yeah, absolutely.
And you never drift intoexcellence, you always drift
into mediocrity.
Speaker 3 (29:29):
Yeah, I love the quote from the book Legacy,
which is when you're at the topof your game, change the game.
And I think that is such a hardthing when you are faced with
perpetual success to recognizethat the thing that made us
successful is about to bite usin the butt and we need to
change something fast.
That's right.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
Yeah, that's good.
I cannot remember who said this, but I love the quote.
One of the hardest decisionsfor a leader to make is
exemplified when you watch aSuper Bowl team's coach go into
the locker room at halftime andhave to change the strategy that
got them there.
(30:11):
Ooh love that that's so good,because you think in those
crisis moments that's not thetime for a new play, that's not
the time to change anything,right, right.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
But it is, yeah, absolutely.
And if we're talking about therole of leadership as a business
starts to grow and scale, Ithink it takes a 30,000-foot
view to be able to takeadvantage of these opportunities
.
Catch these moments of crisis,evaluate the day that your
business is giving you, do allthe things that we've talked
(30:44):
about today, right, and so manyCEOs are genuinely unable to do
that because they are stuck inthe weeds of the business every
day.
It is impossible to work on thebusiness simultaneous to
working in it, and, as startupfounders, yes, we have to work
in our business.
Yes, we have to wear many hatsLike this is the reality of the
(31:04):
game that we've chosen.
And are you systematicallyputting more and more time onto
your calendar that I call itdeep think time, time to elevate
out, time to step back, time togain clarity, time to gain
context, because your businessneeds that from you.
Your business literally doesn'tneed anything else from you.
There is somebody on your teamwho can do literally everything
(31:27):
else except for have that30,000-foot vision and view and
owner's lens, and so the highestvalue thing that we can do as
business owners is to giveourselves that time and space,
but it is also the mostchallenging and what I find
often comes last on a CEO'sto-do list.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
It's so true.
I watch this in so many of theleaders that I work with.
They have the mindset of whattheir job is to do to execute,
right yeah.
And they have such a hard timewhen they have to, when they
begin to hire a team to helpwith fulfillment and operate it,
and so on.
They have such a hard timeletting go of that do mindset,
that execute mindset, becausethat's what they've always done.
(32:07):
That's what got them here.
Absolutely, your job as aleader is no longer to get
things done, it's to get thingsdone through other people.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
Yep, and that is again so much empathy in the
world for that transition,because it comes down to
self-worth Right, that all thatnarrative around the hustle and
the grind and you are the solecreator of your own success.
There's so much power thatcomes from that, there's so much
confidence that comes from that, and that is what makes startup
entrepreneurs successful.
(32:36):
And so to conceive of abusiness that doesn't need you
in that same way is very scary,because if I've got all this
white space on my calendar, whatdoes that mean about me?
What does that mean about mybusiness?
What does that mean about myworth and whether my company
needs me or not?
There is this reallysignificant existential and
(32:59):
identity shift that takes placein the CEOs who are able to
successfully scale.
I shared with you, and I thinkthe stats back this up Most CEOs
who scale their businesses arenot the same CEO who started,
and many startup entrepreneursnever successfully scale a
company.
They just become serialentrepreneurs because that
(33:20):
existential shift is not onethat they choose to go through.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
You know, I think it's helpful to think in terms
of seasons like what you'redescribing too.
You know, I think about as I'vegot two daughters right One is
in college and one is in highschool and I look at both of
them and they don't need me thesame way they did when they were
preschoolers.
They don't need the same things.
For me as a dad, they needdifferent things.
(33:46):
Now I'm not as involved intheir life in a whole lot of
ways as I was back then.
Sure, yeah, I'm leading in adifferent way.
And I wonder if there's notsome parallel there with how
you're leading your company,that there has to come a point
where you're not leading thesame way you did in the
beginning, you have to make theshift, and if you don't, well,
(34:08):
if you want a perpetualpreschooler.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Right, which I think is probably how many CEOs feel
about their team.
At least that's what they sharewith me.
Right Is why can't my teamthink for themselves?
Why can't they just be better?
Why can't they just beproactive?
Why can't they just solve theproblem?
And the unfortunate reality isit's because you have led them
in such a way where they'venever needed to, so why would
that?
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Yeah, you haven't led them to do that yet.
Yeah, yeah, look in the mirror,yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
If we were to go back and you were able to go back
and talk to yourself when youfirst came out of college and
you were able to tell yourselfone thing based on what you've
learned so far, what would youlove to go back and tell
yourself?
Speaker 3 (34:56):
I would tell myself that the only, the only skill I
need is the ability to learnquickly.
There were so many moments inthe journey where I suffered
from imposter syndrome and alack of confidence because I'd
(35:19):
never done that thing before andI don't know how to do that
thing, don't know anything aboutthat thing, and what eventually
gave what I eventually learnedand gave me the confidence to
move through those moments, isthat you don't actually need to
know how to do the thing.
You just have to be willing andable to learn it quickly and so
long as you can approach everyunknown from the place of yeah,
(35:41):
I have no idea what I'm gettinginto, but I trust in my ability
to figure it out.
That becomes the bedrock toconfidence and action, even in
the face of wild uncertainty andfeelings of being out of your
depth.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
That's a great answer .
In my study of leaders anddetermining what differentiates
a leader, that is what I callcatalytic and what's a leader.
That's not the number onenon-negotiable that I see and
the leaders that make that shiftand that become catalytic in
their impact is a teachablespirit and that's what I'm
(36:15):
hearing in you, like that's whatI'm seeing from your story, and
I think that's what we have allbeen able to benefit from today
and what you've shared that'sso critical.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
It is, it is.
And again, like, your businessis just going to be a reflection
back If you don't change, yourbusiness is not going to change.
If you don't grow, yourbusiness is not going to grow.
Again, not bad or good, it'sjust a question of what do you
want?
Speaker 2 (36:41):
You are constantly learning and you've referenced a
couple of different books.
You're in our talk today.
Is there one book that youwould say, hey, if you're a
leader and you haven't read thisbook, you need to put this on
your Treadlist.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
Yes, the book that absolutely changed the game for
me and my own leadership was thebook Multipliers by Liz Wiseman
.
It is a highly confronting bookabout all of the ways that you
are accidentally, with the bestintentions, holding back your
team, and I really needed tolearn that.
As a service-based leader whowanted to do my best for my team
(37:15):
, I needed to learn how I wasaccidentally disempowering them
through my good intentions andmy desire to serve.
Speaker 2 (37:22):
So good.
Liz Wiseman is a brilliantthinker.
He is brilliant Yep.
Oh my goodness.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
As we wrap up, people typically are gonna walk away
from an episode like this withone big idea.
If you were to define what thatbig idea is, if you were to say
hey, this is the one thing Iwant you to walk away with, what
would that one thing be?
Speaker 3 (37:47):
I think, if I'm thinking about the conversation
we just had and how to sum it up, I think my biggest invitation
would be to shift your own frameof your business away from.
This is bad, this is good.
This is happening to me towards.
(38:07):
This is data Becoming, andacquiring that analytical lens
is going to allow you to grow somuch faster, make so much more
sense of the information, takeadvantage of all of the
opportunities your business isgiving you to grow and learn and
feel less emotionally reactiveto the natural ups and downs of
(38:31):
day-to-day entrepreneurship lifeand, I think, everything else
that we talked about today andbe worked on, so long as that
founding mindset is there.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
I know people are gonna want to stay connected
with you and continue to learnfrom you.
What is the best way for themto do that?
Speaker 3 (38:53):
Right now, William is to actually follow me on
Facebook.
I do weekly live training everysingle week on my Facebook page
and in my Facebook group, soyou can find me, Johnna Lee, or
my Facebook group is SpyglassOps on Facebook and I love I
absolutely love providing thiskind of value and education to
entrepreneurs to help them scaletheir businesses and scale
(39:14):
themselves out of the day-to-dayof those businesses.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Well, you have added a lot of value today, so thank
you for that.
Speaker 3 (39:21):
You're very welcome, thank you so much for having me.
Thanks for joining me for thisepisode today.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
As we wrap up, I'd love for you to do two things.
First, subscribe to thispodcast so you don't miss an
episode, and if you find valuehere, I'd love it if you would
rate it and review it.
That really does make adifference in helping other
people to discover this podcast.
Second, if you don't have acopy of my newest book,
catalytic Leadership, I'd loveto put a copy in your hands.
(39:50):
If you go tocatalyticaleadershipbookcom, you
can get a copy for free.
Just pay the shipping so I canget it to you and we'll get one
right out.
My goal is to put this into thehands of as many leaders as
possible.
This book captures principlesthat I've learned in 20-plus
years of coaching leaders in theentrepreneurial space, in
(40:12):
business, government, nonprofits, education and the local church
.
You can also connect with me onLinkedIn to keep up with what
I'm currently learning andthinking about.
If you're ready to take a nextstep with a coach to help you
intentionally grow and thrive asa leader, I'd be honored to
help you.
Just go tocatalyticaleadershipnet to book
(40:35):
a call with me.
Stay tuned for our next episodenext week.
Until then, as always, leaderschoose to be catalytic.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Thanks for listening to Catalytically Leadership With
Dr William Attaway.
Be sure to subscribe whereveryou listen to podcasts so you
don't miss the next episode.
Want more?
Go to catalyticallyadershipnet.
Welcome to Catalytic Leadership, the podcast designed
to help leaders intentionallygrow and thrive.
Here is your host author andleadership and executive coach,
dr William Attaway.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Hey, it's William and welcome to today's episode of
the Catalytic Leadership podcast.
Each week, we tackle a topicrelated to the field of
leadership.
My goal is to ensure that youhave actionable steps you can
take from each episode to growin your own leadership.
Growth doesn't just happen.
My goal is to help you becomeintentional about it.
(00:37):
Each week, we spotlight leadersfrom a variety of fields,
organizations and locations.
My goal is for you to see thatleaders can be catalytic, no
matter where they are or whatthey lead.
I draw inspiration from thestories and journeys of these
leaders and I hear from many ofyou that you do too.
(00:57):
Let's jump into today'sinterview.
I'm so honored today to haveJohnna Lee on the podcast.
Johnna first stumbled intooperations five years ago while
traveling full-time in aconverted van through North and
South America.
Since then, she has been COO attwo successful startups,
directly consulted over 37 and 8figure businesses and coached
(01:21):
hundreds more.
Our company, spyglass Ops,helps founders scale their
businesses and scale themselvesout of the day to day by
training their operator tobecome the second in command.
Her mission lies intransforming purpose-based
businesses into vehicles forgrowth and good.
Johnna, I'm so glad you werehere.
(01:41):
Thanks for being on the show.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
I'm so excited to be here.
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
I would love for you to share some of your story with
our listeners, Johnna,particularly around your journey
and your development as aleader.
How did you get started?
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Yeah, when I was living in that van, my boyfriend
at the time, who I wastraveling with, was scaling a
digital marketing agency.
I was watching him build thisthing two feet across the table
from me, every day.
As you do, you weigh in, youtalk through problems and
questions and things.
What became very clear to meover time is that the things
that I was seeing in hisbusiness the things that seemed
(02:18):
very obvious to me he was notseeing at all Through a series
of odd events, I ended upstepping into his team for what
was supposed to be filling infor a 30-day role and eventually
became that company's COO.
That was my very firstleadership experience.
I had no idea what I was doing,going totally off of gut.
I learned a lot, actually, inthat very first role in
(02:42):
leadership.
I still learn every day aboutleadership.
It was important for me, Ithink, in that first management
role to learn how to get thebest out of people and really
invite the best out of people.
I think that that was somethingthat I didn't know how to do
when I first became a leader.
It was something I studiedreally hard over the next few
(03:03):
years to learn how to create thehighest performance teams
possible.
Now, in the work that I do asan operations coach and
consultant, leadership is at thecenter of my operational model.
It's something that I find tobe the deal breaker, the
transformative event betweengood companies and great
companies.
It's something I've actuallybecome very passionate about
(03:25):
over time, but it started withme not being particularly good
at it.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I think that's where we all started.
I don't know anybody whostarted saying wow, I'm
fantastic.
I don't think I have any placeto go.
That's a good question, Right.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
Either you're a born leader or you're not.
We hear that all the time.
I never thought I was the bornleader.
I was never the alpha in theroom.
I thought for a long timeleadership was not something
that I was good at.
Then I realized it's likeanything else it's a learned
skill that you can choose tostudy, you can choose to acquire
and you can choose to practiceit and master it.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
I love what you said a second ago, that you saw
things that he did not see.
I often tell clients you needsomebody who's going to help you
see what you can't see, becauseevery leader has blind spots.
You can't see the whole picturewhen you're in the frame.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Yeah, absolutely.
I find that operations.
The more I look at operationsand study it, the more I really
believe that operations is itsown totally unique lens.
A visionary founder will lookat the exact same business, the
exact same set of data as theiroperator and walk away with two
completely different conclusions.
The visionary is looking foropportunities.
(04:35):
Here's where we can grow,here's where we can build.
Next, the operator is seeing meon science everywhere saying
this is what's breaking, this iswhat could be better, this is
worth it.
There's gaps in inefficienciesand areas for improvement.
The reality is you need both togrow the most effective and
efficient company possible.
You need both.
It is two fundamentallydifferent lenses and the power
(04:59):
of the operator, visionarydynamic lies in bringing those
two lenses together.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
How do you train operators to see not just
through their lens?
But, also through the lens ofthe founder.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
Yeah, that's a very good question.
We train on this extensively.
I have coaching programs foroperators.
That's how we serve our clients.
It is the challenge of theoperator and I believe it is the
responsibility of the operatorto learn how to translate their
lens into language that the teamand the visionary can
(05:34):
understand.
How can you take something likethat to you is so obvious.
Let's say something intangiblelike a culture issue.
How can you literally translatethat into monetary value so
that you can put a number with adollar sign in front of a
visionary and say this is howmuch this culture issue is
costing us?
This is why it's ROI positiveto fix it.
(05:55):
That's an example.
At the end of the day, it'sabout how do we quantify things
that are very difficult toquantify, that we play in the
operation space so that we canjustify the value of the work
that we do within a business.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
I love that phrasing.
To change it into a differentlanguage, to translate it so
that other people can understandit.
So many of the people that Iwork with do not understand that
concept.
They think everybody sees theworld the same way they do.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Right, right.
Unfortunately, it was thelesson I learned the hard way
because I totally and utterlyfailed In my second stint as COO
.
I will never forget this.
I was trying to rebuild thesales CRM for the business and
to me it was so obvious why thiswas so important, why we needed
more structure, why we neededmore process, and I was trying
(06:50):
to impose that force that on thesales team within the company
and understandably, they pushedback.
Because why is operationsgetting in the way?
Why is it slowing me down?
Why is it putting all of thisprocess around, something that
we never needed process aroundLike?
These were the objections I wasgetting and I didn't understand
(07:11):
that it was my responsibilitynot just to know what the right
answer was, right, Know what theright system is, but to
actually be able to get peopleto buy into it.
The Jedi mind trick that ischange management is something
that was not on my radar at alland it ultimately resulted in me
, for a variety of reasons,leading that business because I
wasn't able to get by in andenact the change that I knew the
(07:35):
company needed and so walkingaway really from like.
I do consider that to be a hugelearning opportunity, but a
personal failure in terms of myown ability to be the best COO I
could have been for thebusiness.
It was ultimately because I wastaking ownership for just
knowing what I know and thinkingthe way that I think and
assuming that everybody shouldthink that way as well, and I
wasn't taking ownership for theactive translation which is
(07:56):
ultimately what's required toget people to buy in and shift
things behaviorally, which isthe whole point of operations,
Wow.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
That is so.
I can hear the pens scribblingright now.
People are hearing that.
I think that is a concept thatis not communicated and taught,
particularly in theentrepreneurial space.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
Yeah, 100%.
And to your point right, we allhave our own lenses.
We can only see from our ownframe, from our own context.
But if you want to createmassive change within other
people, that's just it's justnot good enough, right?
Like it's just not enough toget people to truly buy in and
want to run with you.
And so operators, who arechange makers within their
(08:39):
businesses, they have to learn.
Whether they want to or not,they have to acquire the skill
set of.
It really does feel like a Jedimind trick, like how do you get
somebody to want to use thesystem even more than you want
them to use the system?
There's a very specific skillset instead of steps to make
that happen.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
That's fascinating to me.
I think about the old MarkTwain book Tom Sawyer, when Tom
is basically doing what you'redescribing.
He's painting this fence, buthe doesn't want to whitewash the
fence, and so he convincesother people how fun it is and
how much they really want towhitewash the fence.
Right, and I'm thinking thelevel of emotional intelligence
(09:17):
there is pretty high, but that'san example of using it in a bad
way to manipulate other people,Like.
What you're describing is, howdo we use this for the benefit
of other people?
And I think from thatperspective, operators bring
value in a way that so manyfounders simply don't understand
.
They even need.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Well, and it's interesting, because the number
one person that you have to knowhow to Jedi mind trick a little
bit is your CEO, right?
Because, again, they aren'tnaturally systems oriented.
They don't want to show up andfollow your SOP, right, they're
busy with the business and yetyou need their buy-in, you need
them to lead by example, so therest of the team sees how
(09:57):
important systems are right, andso to be able to manage across,
to be able to manage down, butalso to be able to manage up, is
, in my mind, the differencebetween a good and a great
operator.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Absolutely.
Managing up is a skill that Ibelieve every second in command
must master, or else they're notgoing to last very long.
They're going to bounce fromplace to place to place.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
Yep absolutely absolutely so.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
How do you describe what you do in your company?
Like you've talked aboutcoaching, you've talked about
helping to train in how youstepped into this place, but you
now empower far beyond just youand the people that you work
with directly, right?
Speaker 3 (10:38):
Yeah.
So we work with visionaryfounders Like that CEO.
Visionary is our end client andour goal is to help them scale
up their business, accomplishtheir own definition of success
and personal freedom and growthand impact, and do that without
becoming the bottleneck in theirown business, do that without
getting stuck in the weeds, andso the mechanism by which we
(11:00):
serve those CEOs is throughtheir operator.
If they don't have an operator,we can help them find one.
If they do have an operator, wehave coaching programs.
But my whole belief around this,william, is that most CEOs are
not the best person to solvetheir own operational
bottlenecks Because, again,they've got that fundamentally
different lens.
It doesn't come naturally tothem and it's not the highest
(11:21):
value add.
There's so many more value addthings that they could be doing
in the business.
They should not be wastingtheir time learning how to build
SOPs, and so our goal is totake their operator, train that
person up, give that person theskills and the method they need
to build systems and buildscalable team so that the
visionary can remain in theirzone of genius, they can drive
(11:42):
growth at their highest into thebusiness and they can really
enjoy the process because theyaren't forcing themselves to
wear all these hats that theydon't want to be wearing.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
That is so good.
I was working with a team theother day.
Are you familiar with theworking genius profile from
Patrick Wynch?
Patrick Wynch yeah.
Fascinating tool, an assessmentthat I use, and working with
them, helping the founder tounderstand that they do not have
all the areas of genius.
They have two Right.
(12:12):
You only get two, you only gettwo and if they don't understand
, they need the other four aspart of a healthy, sustainable
business and how the people inthe roles need to be leveraging
their areas of genius as well.
If everybody's operating out oftheir areas of working.
Frustration that's not going tolast long.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
Right, that's a lot of friction.
No, that makes perfect sense,and I think it is part of the
CEO's growth curve that wesupport them through Oftentimes.
This operator is one of thefirst members of the leadership
team.
This is their first timeworking alongside a fellow
leader within the business, asopposed to just delegating
straight downwards to a team,and that's very confronting.
(12:56):
To shift your leadership styleso that, by design, you are not
the best person to make everydecision, you are not the
smartest person in the room inregards to every element of your
business, which is reallychallenging because up until
that moment you were, you had towear every hat, you had to make
every decision.
That is what made yousuccessful to even get to the
(13:19):
point that you could bring in aleadership team and then to
evolve that and shift that andhave the humility to change what
it means to be successful awayfrom I can do everything, I can
make every decision, I can comeup with every idea towards.
How can I build the highestperformance team and ecosystem
around me to do every task, makeevery decision, have every idea
(13:40):
.
It's a very fundamental andchallenging evolution for a CEO
to go through, but it's alsototally necessary if they ever
truly want to be able todelegate and elevate themselves
out of the day-to-day weeks.
You ever get pushed back onthis Often.
Yes, yeah.
Again it's super confronting,right Right.
It's really uncomfortable.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Do they ever push back and say you know, yeah, I
don't need that, I can do thismuscle?
Speaker 3 (14:09):
We do, and those clients come back to us six
months later because they'reclose to burnout and they want
to burn their company to theground right, like I have seen.
I've seen entrepreneurs likeamazing entrepreneurs just sheer
brute force.
They will power their way tosuccess.
Yes, and there is always alimit.
I think the cap I saw was an800K per month business where
(14:32):
the entrepreneur was just wildlytalented and very hardworking.
I was able to get it to 800Kmonths, but he was miserable.
He was doing everything withinthe business.
He had built this cage aroundhim that he could not get out of
.
Right, and most people don'tmake it that high, like.
Most people cap out at like 100to 150K month range.
And so the question I wouldpose to that CEO who say you
(14:53):
know, I don't need to delegateor build a high performance
leadership team or do thesethings.
The question is just well, whatmatters to you more?
The ability to controleverything in your business, or
personal freedom, the ability tothe humility to not be the
smartest person in the room, orthe ability to scale a company
(15:15):
that is bigger than yourself andcan have an impact larger than
yourself?
Right, because there's not aright or wrong answer.
It's just what's more importantto you and are you willing to
go through the uncomfortablepersonal work it will take to
truly get your business to thenext level?
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Love that question.
What matter more to you?
So many entrepreneurs would saythey started their own thing
for time freedom, for financialfreedom, to be able to do what
they want when they want.
And they traded that.
You know eight hour job for a15 hour a day job.
That's right, Like we're allthat freedom.
(15:50):
We're all free, Yep, Yep 100%,100%.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
And again, I have all the all the empathy in the
world, because the things thatmade an entrepreneur wildly
successful when they werestarting out are the things that
actively start to stall themout and trap them in the weeds
as they begin to scale.
It's not an easy transformationby any means, and it's totally
necessary.
So the question just becomes doyou want to stay small and not
(16:17):
go through the personalevolution required, or do you
genuinely want to scale a bigbusiness?
Do you genuinely want to run alarge team?
Do you genuinely want to createsomething that can outlast you
and outgrow you?
And again, I think it's atotally valid answer, william,
to say no, I don't actually wantthose things.
I'd rather stay smaller.
I'd rather just keep startingbusinesses because that's where
I'm comfortable and that's whereI thrive.
(16:38):
I think that's a brilliant andself aware answer.
But I see so many clients getstuck when they think they want
the big business, they thinkthey want the big team, they
think they want the passiveincome, they think they want
these things.
They try and drive towards it,but it's actually not them in
their zone of genius, it's notthem in a lived experience, it's
(16:58):
not that they actually want,it's not them acquiring skill
sets they actually wanted toacquire, like they don't
actually want all the thingsthat come with that, and so they
either self sabotage and scalethe business back down or they
exit Generally at less of avaluation than they originally
wanted, and neither of those areideal outcomes.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
I love that you have taken this skill that you
learned and you're nowleveraging it not just for your
own benefit, but for the benefitof other people, because it
sounds like you come alongsidethese founders, these CEOs,
these companies and you helpthem see what they can't see and
grow beyond themselves, becausethey're what's holding them
(17:39):
back.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
I love that, yeah Well, and to me it's a matter of
impact.
When I left my last COO job, Ihad the opportunity to become
COO somewhere else, commitmyself to one founder, one
vision, one mission.
Or I realized I had a skill setthat could become its own
vehicle, its own leverage toimpact hundreds of visionaries,
(18:01):
hundreds of visions and impacts,and so for me, it was.
I think entrepreneurs areamazing.
I think they're the mostincredible change makers we have
in society, and so if the bestway I can serve them is to help
them get out of their own wayand allow their vision to come
to life, then the best way Icould do that was through
training not being theiroperator, but training their
operators.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
So good.
What a wonderful, fantastic wayto ripple your impact beyond
what you can do personally.
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
I love that.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Well, let's dive into you for aminute.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
You are not the same leader today that you were five
years ago.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
We've talked about that You've learned a few things
.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
How do you continue to grow and develop yourself?
Because a year from now, fiveyears from now, your company is
going to need you to bleed at ahigher level.
Your clients are going to needthat.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Hundred percent.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
How do you?
Speaker 3 (18:55):
develop you?
That is a fantastic question.
I always say that ourbusinesses are reflections of
ourselves.
I think your business is justlike the world's harshest
personal development tool.
It is just a mirror being heldup to your face every single day
, saying here's you, here'swhere you have opportunity to
(19:15):
grow next.
It's this beautiful giftbecause you can directly measure
the results of your ownpersonal growth.
Right Like that.
Those are business outcomesthat you're able to track.
For me, every single day, whenthings go right, things go wrong
, challenges come my way.
The reframe isn't these thingsare happening to me.
(19:37):
I have to react to them.
I just have to handle them.
The reframe is this is just data.
My business is just feeding medata every single day.
If I'm having a problem with amember of my team, how is that
data about my own leadershipstyle?
If my revenue is not where Iwant it to be, how is that data
around my own strategic thinkingand where I have room for
growth?
And so, when your business isfeeding you that much data and
(20:01):
you have the awareness to takeit and ask what is this telling
me?
It's this feedback loop that youhave every single day that says
okay, I guess this is what Ineed to work on next.
I guess this is where I need togrow next.
I'm very lucky to have a coachthat I work with on a weekly
basis to help me process thatdata and move through it and
analyze it and take action basedoff of it.
But ultimately, I think itstarts with the mindset of
(20:24):
showing up to your business fromthe place of these things are
not good, they're not bad,they're just data and I can
choose how to interpret thatdata and grow from it or not.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
I love that frame.
I think that's brilliant and Ithink a whole lot of people need
to adopt that immediatelybecause they want to interpret.
They want to immediatelyinterpret the data, typically in
a derogatory way towardthemselves.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
That's not helpful.
Speaker 3 (20:52):
No, the self-compassion is so critical
and has been really hard for mein my own personal growth and
development journey.
But when you're no longerhaving to fight yourself in
addition to the thing and youcan be compassionate and say
again this is what has made mesuccessful until now, I can
celebrate this.
It's just no longer serving me,it's just no longer where my
(21:15):
business needs me to be or togrow next.
So I can honor that, I canappreciate that and I can still
continue to change.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
Well said, there is no such thing as a wasted
experience.
Yes, absolutely, becausethey've all made you who you are
Yep, right, and they wereeither an experience where you
won or they were an experiencewhere you learned something
Exactly, exactly Right.
There's no such thing as awasted experience.
It's for your benefit or thebenefit of those around you.
Now you're able to use evenyour failures to impact other
(21:44):
people, to help them avoiddriving into the ditches that
you might have driven into.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
Well, and I think that, on the topic of leadership
, the best leaders I know alsocarry that forward for their
team, where their team'sfailures, their team's mistakes,
become their learningopportunity, and when everyone
is processing the ups and downsof the business not as good as
bad, but just as data, then theentire team is able to take
ownership for growth, for levelup, versus many CEOs that I see
(22:12):
again stuck in that mindset oflike it has to come back to me.
I have to do everything.
When a team fails, that iseither a personal failure of
theirs and then they have tostep in and they have to fix it,
Versus cool team failed.
What did that teach me about mytraining, about my systems,
about my process, about myleadership?
How can I take ownershipultimately, Cause it's my
(22:33):
business and this did happen,but how can I also empower my
team to take ownership withtheir contribution to this,
their learning from it?
How can they get better as aresult?
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Those are fantastic evaluative questions.
So often people think thatexperience is what makes you
better.
I do not believe that at all.
I don't believe experiencemakes you any better.
I think evaluated experiencemakes you better.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
I love that.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
And I love those questions because those are
evaluative questions that pointforward.
They don't leave you in thepast, leave you stuck in the
mire of failure and despair.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
What are we gonna do better next time?
How did we learn here?
I would change this.
In the next time we're in asimilar situation, what would we
do differently?
Speaker 3 (23:16):
Yeah, absolutely, and my biggest invitation to
leaders that are trying toincorporate more critical
thinking, more proactive problemsolving, more ownership within
their team would be that everytime, you run the play right.
So, whether that is, let's say,a massive client project or a
big deliverable or a failure, afire that blows up, to take 15
(23:38):
minutes, like hop on the thing,fix the fire right, like solve
the crisis, and then take 15minutes with that team and sit
down and ask the question right,we just ran the play.
What went well?
What could have gone better?
What will we do differentlynext time?
Right, I love that.
It's about carving out the time,and so many CEOs are so stuck
jumping from fire to fire thatit feels like there's never time
(24:01):
to sit down and talk about it.
And also, that was terrible andI don't wanna spend any time
thinking about that because thatwas the worst, right, the
problem is, when you don't takethe time, that same exact fire
will just crop up again andagain because you're not
learning from it, versus everyfire again not being bad or just
being data.
That offers you the opportunityto say why this happened and
(24:22):
what we can do differently toavoid it.
That fire should never happenagain, not the same way, and so
every fire actually becomes ifdone well, I think, roi positive
, because you become such abetter business as a result that
you earn more than whateverthat fire cost you, and you can
actually turn it into anaccelerant and a lever for
(24:43):
growth.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
You know, I think, what you that process.
You just walked through for the15 minutes when I call a hot
wash after a failure or after anevent.
Love it Like.
When you do that, you areprocessing your learning so that
you can carry it forward,correct, yeah, and I think so
many leaders don't do that forthe reasons that you've laid out
, and so they continue to circlethe same grades.
Yeah, I wanna learn from it.
(25:05):
I don't wanna circle that drainagain.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
I don't want that.
That fire was terrible.
I never want that fire tohappen again.
But the only way to do thatright, it's like a sports team,
right?
The best sports teams will playthe game.
They'll come into practice thenext day and they'll sit down
and they'll watch the recording.
Yeah, like maybe we won thegame.
Fantastic, why did we win?
How can we?
How can we create more success?
(25:28):
And when we fail, when we lose,how can we do differently next
time?
Everything is a learningopportunity, but to your point
only if you take the moment toevaluate the lived experience as
opposed to just jump straightinto the next experience.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
So good.
A mentor of Maan says it thisway.
He says if you don't know whyit's working when it's working,
you will not know how to fix itwhen it breaks.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
I love that.
That's fantastic.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
That's the beauty you have to autopsy success, just
like you.
Autopsy failure, yes.
So, johnna, if people look atyou online, it's really easy, I
think, for many of us to look atsomebody like you and say, wow,
like her journey is just upinto the right, like she hasn't
really had any of the challengesthat I've had, there hasn't
(26:14):
really been any hard things thatshe's had to go through.
She's just succeeding, successafter success after success.
Now I would imagine you wouldsay that's not the whole story.
Would you be willing to sharesome of the challenges that you
faced as an entrepreneur?
Speaker 3 (26:34):
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean I will share that.
The reason I got into businessto begin with is because my very
first job out of college wasfor this company that I really
believed in and I thought wasamazing.
And they went bankrupt becausethey were a mismanaged business
and it was the most catastrophicfailure I'd ever experienced in
(26:54):
my life.
It ended in threats of legalbattle and it was a proper,
proper explosion.
And I needed that because I hadnever failed that
catastrophically in my lifebefore and it taught me that I
didn't know anything aboutbusiness and that if I wanted to
live in this world, if I wantedto come up with an idea one day
that I thought would make theworld a better place, I needed
(27:16):
to understand the vehicle ofbusiness so that I could
actually make that impact toreality.
It's not enough to just havethe right idea, and so that
really sent me down the path oflearning about business and
entrepreneurship and embracingwhat is now my career, and that
career itself has also beenscattered with so many failures.
I shared the one where I endedup leaving a company because I
(27:39):
lacked the awareness of changemanagement and how to actually
influence behavior and get teambuy-in.
I would say that At every majormilestone of my career, there
is a failure that precedes thenext growth curve.
It is only because of thefailure that the growth curve
can take place.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Man, I'm going to want to process that for the
next day or two.
That's really good at every wow.
I'm thinking, I'm reflecting onmy own journey and I see that
same thing.
I don't know that.
I would have put it quite likethat.
That's pretty brilliant.
Speaker 3 (28:20):
It's interesting.
I actually just dropped a poston this week where I think
moments of crisis are also thegreatest opportunities, because
when everything is going well,there's no incentive to change.
Because everything's going well, people get stuck in their ways
and change is hard and changeis uncomfortable.
But when things are not goingwell, all of a sudden, change is
(28:42):
readily available.
Everybody's on board.
Yes, we will do whatever ittakes to get out of this moment
of crisis.
And so, as a leader trying tomanage your team, as a business
owner, trying to manage marketfluctuations and the ups and
downs and just the things thathappen, if every crisis that
comes your way, is there a wayto turn that into an opportunity
, because it shakes things upand you're able to move faster
(29:06):
and change faster and get by infaster around a change that you
want to make in business.
Moments of crisis are yourgreatest opportunities to do
that, because when everything'sgoing well, no one's changing.
We're just going to continuedown the road of success.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
And too often we drift, yeah, absolutely.
And you never drift intoexcellence, you always drift
into mediocrity.
Speaker 3 (29:29):
Yeah, I love the quote from the book Legacy,
which is when you're at the topof your game, change the game.
And I think that is such a hardthing when you are faced with
perpetual success to recognizethat the thing that made us
successful is about to bite usin the butt and we need to
change something fast.
That's right.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
Yeah, that's good.
I cannot remember who said this, but I love the quote.
One of the hardest decisionsfor a leader to make is
exemplified when you watch aSuper Bowl team's coach go into
the locker room at halftime andhave to change the strategy that
got them there.
(30:11):
Ooh love that that's so good,because you think in those
crisis moments that's not thetime for a new play, that's not
the time to change anything,right, right.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
But it is, yeah, absolutely.
And if we're talking about therole of leadership as a business
starts to grow and scale, Ithink it takes a 30,000-foot
view to be able to takeadvantage of these opportunities
.
Catch these moments of crisis,evaluate the day that your
business is giving you, do allthe things that we've talked
(30:44):
about today, right, and so manyCEOs are genuinely unable to do
that because they are stuck inthe weeds of the business every
day.
It is impossible to work on thebusiness simultaneous to
working in it, and, as startupfounders, yes, we have to work
in our business.
Yes, we have to wear many hatsLike this is the reality of the
(31:04):
game that we've chosen.
And are you systematicallyputting more and more time onto
your calendar that I call itdeep think time, time to elevate
out, time to step back, time togain clarity, time to gain
context, because your businessneeds that from you.
Your business literally doesn'tneed anything else from you.
There is somebody on your teamwho can do literally everything
(31:27):
else except for have that30,000-foot vision and view and
owner's lens, and so the highestvalue thing that we can do as
business owners is to giveourselves that time and space,
but it is also the mostchallenging and what I find
often comes last on a CEO'sto-do list.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
It's so true.
I watch this in so many of theleaders that I work with.
They have the mindset of whattheir job is to do to execute,
right yeah.
And they have such a hard timewhen they have to, when they
begin to hire a team to helpwith fulfillment and operate it,
and so on.
They have such a hard timeletting go of that do mindset,
that execute mindset, becausethat's what they've always done.
(32:07):
That's what got them here.
Absolutely, your job as aleader is no longer to get
things done, it's to get thingsdone through other people.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
Yep, and that is again so much empathy in the
world for that transition,because it comes down to
self-worth Right, that all thatnarrative around the hustle and
the grind and you are the solecreator of your own success.
There's so much power thatcomes from that, there's so much
confidence that comes from that, and that is what makes startup
entrepreneurs successful.
(32:36):
And so to conceive of abusiness that doesn't need you
in that same way is very scary,because if I've got all this
white space on my calendar, whatdoes that mean about me?
What does that mean about mybusiness?
What does that mean about myworth and whether my company
needs me or not?
There is this reallysignificant existential and
(32:59):
identity shift that takes placein the CEOs who are able to
successfully scale.
I shared with you, and I thinkthe stats back this up Most CEOs
who scale their businesses arenot the same CEO who started,
and many startup entrepreneursnever successfully scale a
company.
They just become serialentrepreneurs because that
(33:20):
existential shift is not onethat they choose to go through.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
You know, I think it's helpful to think in terms
of seasons like what you'redescribing too.
You know, I think about as I'vegot two daughters right One is
in college and one is in highschool and I look at both of
them and they don't need me thesame way they did when they were
preschoolers.
They don't need the same things.
For me as a dad, they needdifferent things.
(33:46):
Now I'm not as involved intheir life in a whole lot of
ways as I was back then.
Sure, yeah, I'm leading in adifferent way.
And I wonder if there's notsome parallel there with how
you're leading your company,that there has to come a point
where you're not leading thesame way you did in the
beginning, you have to make theshift, and if you don't, well,
(34:08):
if you want a perpetualpreschooler.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Right, which I think is probably how many CEOs feel
about their team.
At least that's what they sharewith me.
Right Is why can't my teamthink for themselves?
Why can't they just be better?
Why can't they just beproactive?
Why can't they just solve theproblem?
And the unfortunate reality isit's because you have led them
in such a way where they'venever needed to, so why would
that?
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Yeah, you haven't led them to do that yet.
Yeah, yeah, look in the mirror,yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
If we were to go back and you were able to go back
and talk to yourself when youfirst came out of college and
you were able to tell yourselfone thing based on what you've
learned so far, what would youlove to go back and tell
yourself?
Speaker 3 (34:56):
I would tell myself that the only, the only skill I
need is the ability to learnquickly.
There were so many moments inthe journey where I suffered
from imposter syndrome and alack of confidence because I'd
(35:19):
never done that thing before andI don't know how to do that
thing, don't know anything aboutthat thing, and what eventually
gave what I eventually learnedand gave me the confidence to
move through those moments, isthat you don't actually need to
know how to do the thing.
You just have to be willing andable to learn it quickly and so
long as you can approach everyunknown from the place of yeah,
(35:41):
I have no idea what I'm gettinginto, but I trust in my ability
to figure it out.
That becomes the bedrock toconfidence and action, even in
the face of wild uncertainty andfeelings of being out of your
depth.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
That's a great answer .
In my study of leaders anddetermining what differentiates
a leader, that is what I callcatalytic and what's a leader.
That's not the number onenon-negotiable that I see and
the leaders that make that shiftand that become catalytic in
their impact is a teachablespirit and that's what I'm
(36:15):
hearing in you, like that's whatI'm seeing from your story, and
I think that's what we have allbeen able to benefit from today
and what you've shared that'sso critical.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
It is, it is.
And again, like, your businessis just going to be a reflection
back If you don't change, yourbusiness is not going to change.
If you don't grow, yourbusiness is not going to grow.
Again, not bad or good, it'sjust a question of what do you
want?
Speaker 2 (36:41):
You are constantly learning and you've referenced a
couple of different books.
You're in our talk today.
Is there one book that youwould say, hey, if you're a
leader and you haven't read thisbook, you need to put this on
your Treadlist.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
Yes, the book that absolutely changed the game for
me and my own leadership was thebook Multipliers by Liz Wiseman
.
It is a highly confronting bookabout all of the ways that you
are accidentally, with the bestintentions, holding back your
team, and I really needed tolearn that.
As a service-based leader whowanted to do my best for my team
(37:15):
, I needed to learn how I wasaccidentally disempowering them
through my good intentions andmy desire to serve.
Speaker 2 (37:22):
So good.
Liz Wiseman is a brilliantthinker.
He is brilliant Yep.
Oh my goodness.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
As we wrap up, people typically are gonna walk away
from an episode like this withone big idea.
If you were to define what thatbig idea is, if you were to say
hey, this is the one thing Iwant you to walk away with, what
would that one thing be?
Speaker 3 (37:47):
I think, if I'm thinking about the conversation
we just had and how to sum it up, I think my biggest invitation
would be to shift your own frameof your business away from.
This is bad, this is good.
This is happening to me towards.
(38:07):
This is data Becoming, andacquiring that analytical lens
is going to allow you to grow somuch faster, make so much more
sense of the information, takeadvantage of all of the
opportunities your business isgiving you to grow and learn and
feel less emotionally reactiveto the natural ups and downs of
(38:31):
day-to-day entrepreneurship lifeand, I think, everything else
that we talked about today andbe worked on, so long as that
founding mindset is there.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
I know people are gonna want to stay connected
with you and continue to learnfrom you.
What is the best way for themto do that?
Speaker 3 (38:53):
Right now, William is to actually follow me on
Facebook.
I do weekly live training everysingle week on my Facebook page
and in my Facebook group, soyou can find me, Johnna Lee, or
my Facebook group is SpyglassOps on Facebook and I love I
absolutely love providing thiskind of value and education to
entrepreneurs to help them scaletheir businesses and scale
(39:14):
themselves out of the day-to-dayof those businesses.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Well, you have added a lot of value today, so thank
you for that.
Speaker 3 (39:21):
You're very welcome, thank you so much for having me.
Thanks for joining me for thisepisode today.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
As we wrap up, I'd love for you to do two things.
First, subscribe to thispodcast so you don't miss an
episode, and if you find valuehere, I'd love it if you would
rate it and review it.
That really does make adifference in helping other
people to discover this podcast.
Second, if you don't have acopy of my newest book,
catalytic Leadership, I'd loveto put a copy in your hands.
(39:50):
If you go tocatalyticaleadershipbookcom, you
can get a copy for free.
Just pay the shipping so I canget it to you and we'll get one
right out.
My goal is to put this into thehands of as many leaders as
possible.
This book captures principlesthat I've learned in 20-plus
years of coaching leaders in theentrepreneurial space, in
(40:12):
business, government, nonprofits, education and the local church
.
You can also connect with me onLinkedIn to keep up with what
I'm currently learning andthinking about.
If you're ready to take a nextstep with a coach to help you
intentionally grow and thrive asa leader, I'd be honored to
help you.
Just go tocatalyticaleadershipnet to book
(40:35):
a call with me.
Stay tuned for our next episodenext week.
Until then, as always, leaderschoose to be catalytic.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Thanks for listening to Catalytically Leadership With
Dr William Attaway.
Be sure to subscribe whereveryou listen to podcasts so you
don't miss the next episode.
Want more?
Go to catalyticallyadershipnet.
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