November 26, 2024 • 28 mins
In this engaging episode of Schmidt List, host Kurt Schmidt sits down with leadership expert and author Bill Mills to unpack the intricacies of effective leadership. Drawing from his vast experience with business owners, CEOs, and presidents through masterminds and consulting, Bill reveals why traditional leadership development often falls short and introduces the powerful idea of conscious conversations.
Throughout their discussion, Bill and Kurt tackle some of the most urgent challenges in leadership today, such as the dangers of promoting high-performing individuals to managerial roles without adequate training and support. They highlight the crucial role of self-awareness, the development of coping skills, and the cultivation of a unified team culture.
Bill offers insights from his book, Breakthrough, emphasizing the importance of crafting a healthy, collaborative work environment where leaders are committed to building a better future. Understanding organizational design and workflow can dramatically enhance leadership effectiveness and team performance.
Whether you're an experienced leader or embarking on your leadership journey, this episode is packed with valuable insights and practical advice to help you grow and empower your team. Listen in and transform your approach to leadership!
Visit Bill at:
www.mnexecutivegroup.com and www.theleadershipprocess.com
Check out https://www.kurtschmidt.me for more show info.
Visit Kurt’s coaching site at https://schmidtconsulting.group
Subscribe to The Road Map Newsletter and unlock the secrets to achieving a harmonious work-life balance as a leader. https://bit.ly/RoadMapNewsletter
New Book! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D2C61THR
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/schmidt-list-entrepreneurial-insights--2664825/support.
Throughout their discussion, Bill and Kurt tackle some of the most urgent challenges in leadership today, such as the dangers of promoting high-performing individuals to managerial roles without adequate training and support. They highlight the crucial role of self-awareness, the development of coping skills, and the cultivation of a unified team culture.
Bill offers insights from his book, Breakthrough, emphasizing the importance of crafting a healthy, collaborative work environment where leaders are committed to building a better future. Understanding organizational design and workflow can dramatically enhance leadership effectiveness and team performance.
Whether you're an experienced leader or embarking on your leadership journey, this episode is packed with valuable insights and practical advice to help you grow and empower your team. Listen in and transform your approach to leadership!
Visit Bill at:
www.mnexecutivegroup.com and www.theleadershipprocess.com
Check out https://www.kurtschmidt.me for more show info.
Visit Kurt’s coaching site at https://schmidtconsulting.group
Subscribe to The Road Map Newsletter and unlock the secrets to achieving a harmonious work-life balance as a leader. https://bit.ly/RoadMapNewsletter
New Book! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D2C61THR
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/schmidt-list-entrepreneurial-insights--2664825/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Schmidlist Today. We're excited to have leadership expert
Bill Mills with us. He'll share insights from his book Breakthrough,
exploring why many managers fail and how to build high
performing teams. Stay tuned for transformative ideas you won't want
to miss.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
How are you today, I'm great, Great to see you.
It's good to see you. Thank you for joining me. Bill.
Tell me about the work you're doing these days and
who you focus on working with.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Primarily my day job as I work with business owners, CEOs, presidents,
I have a Mastermind group for folks that owner run companies.
I think I've got, between that and our key Leader
group close to fifty companies I work with every month.
And then I'm also involved in some consulting around creating
high performing leaders and teams inside of companies. Those are
(00:49):
the two major areas I focus on.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
That's great, and I would imagine the need for this
sort of coaching and consulting is more prevalent today and
it's ever been because a lot of changes have happened
over the years in terms of how businesses are run,
but also how employees expect them to be running. One
of the things I want to mention to the group
(01:11):
is that I read Bill's book Breakthrough, which you should
definitely check out. He's got a lot of other great stuff,
but I want to mention this because I want to
ask him a couple of things about this. Breakthrough is
about the power of conscious conversations. I can imagine thirty
years ago, Bill, this wasn't as big of a subject.
Why is it today, conscious conversations or leadership in general.
(01:32):
I just want to make sure the focus on leadership development.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
Okay, So I just googled this last week for a
letter I was writing, so you can check this out.
But there's fifty seven, one hundred and thirty six books
on Amazon right now with leadership in the title. Wow,
And I'm thinking, well, maybe we just need one more book.
Maybe that'll get us over the scales. How did we
get along this far without fifty seven thousand books? It
(01:58):
just seems like we don't underst I think we're solving
the wrong problem when we're trying to think about leadership
rather than behaving as a leader. I think the way
we deliver leadership development is the problem. It's not the content.
It's not the books are fine, nothing wrong with your books.
But but that's and so why is it such a
(02:18):
big issue today? Every generation I'm a boomer, and then
we've got the X and the Y and the Z,
and I don't even know what's coming. But every generation
goes through the same angst. Every generation goes through the
same challenges of starting out. I don't know, as much
as I want to know. I have big aspirations, and
then somewhere in there they are linked up with in
(02:41):
all probability, if Gallup is right at eighty two percent
probability that they're going to be linked up with a
bad manager and delt so then bad management becomes the norm. Right,
If eighty two out of one hundred are bad, then
that's the new normal, and that one really good manager
over there that the anomaly. And so I just think
(03:02):
that we are looking at the wrong things when we're
thinking about leadership, and they are not trying the wrong
things when we try to instill what we wouldn't call
a good leadership. I think we're just looking at it backwards.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
I agree, and I think there's an inherent problem with
how some companies are structured. And I want to get
your take on this bill because I experienced this throughout
my career. If certain people were offered a promotion, the
only promotion available is to manage people. A lot of
these folks were not interested in managing people, but they
(03:37):
were interested in more respect, more money, more position, more tenure,
more safety in their position. So they would take those
positions because that was the only available forward movement for them.
Not because they wanted to become bad managers. They just
were because they didn't have any interest in managing people.
(03:58):
Is that something you've seen over over again throughout your career. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
In fact, Gallup calls it out too. They said, that's
the number one problem in America is we take a
strong individual performer and then we make them the manager.
I got to push back on Gallop a little bit.
Oh really, we were supposed to take the low performing
individual and make them the Gallup has been all over
this stuff for years, and I think they even have
a book called It's the Manager where they lay the
(04:22):
whole thing at theer's feed and say, your company's form
they have as bad managers, and hey, we offer we
offer a leadership course too, but everybody offers a leadership course.
When I look at them, I don't think they have
changed the way that they think. We tend to think
about leadership as a trickle down economics, so eventually it'll
(04:43):
get to their front lines.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
But and but excelf releasing.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
You look at Navy seals, you look at professional sports teams.
The way they develop leaders is completely different from the
way businesses do it. I don't know why we didn't
take a page out of their playbook. What makes my
apologies to gallop, But I disagree that the problem is
promoting high individual performers. The problem is not working with
(05:09):
them in a way that allows them to take their
natural ambition and drive and work it with a team
to produce an outcome.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
I find that what I learned when I started my
own business was that intentionally trying to grow leadership versus
trying to hunt and find it right like truffles right,
like hopefully it's out there right. But if I was
actually like laying down a garden and making the rose
and ice and water regularly and getting sure if I
(05:41):
was paying attention to it, it made such a huge difference.
But in my history and a lot of the businesses
I've been a part of, that idea of that you're
just promoted because you're good at your job means you're
going to be good at leading and managing people. But
they provide no support, right, there's no training. Now that
we've moved you into this role, this whole level of
support engages with you never happened. And then they were
(06:04):
surprised when people would fail at this stuff, and they'd
be like, oh, that was a mistake promoting them.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
Here's the other side of that. Eighty two percent of
managers or mishires, wrong people, wrong seat.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
We don't fire them, we leave them. So what's that about.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
On the onboarding thing, what we do is not with everybody,
but at the higher echelons of an organization, we send
them off the leadership classes, or we help them go
to Wharton for a week and hang out with some really,
really high performers and we do role plays. And the challenge,
of course, is nobody knows what they're doing in those classes.
(06:39):
They're actually just thinking about leadership. They aren't doing it right,
even with the philosophers. Yeah, and if you're at Wharton
or wherever and you're doing role plays with other one percenters,
that's not leadership. That's just reciting a play to one another.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
So we.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
The other thing is now you got and now I'm
on a road. Because here's what happens. They go off
to these quos ill it.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
Nobody knows what they're learning. They come back, nobody asks
them what they learned. They don't tell anybody what they learned.
They don't try it out with their teams because Bernie
from their team was not at the workshop and Bernie
isn't having any of this, and they don't know what
to do with Bernie, and so they go right back
to their old behaviors. This is like trying to change
(07:26):
an alcoholic. You send them off to rehab and they
come back to the exact same environment that created the
problem anyway, So that's what's insanity.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
We just keep doing it over and over and over
again and it doesn't change.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
To your point, because there isn't. There isn't. There's fifty
seven thousand different ways to do it, and we're used
to if you just give me the one way of
like how you do this right like a computer, just
plug it in and do it. I can't tell you
how many times I've talked to leaders and they're like, oh,
if it wasn't for the people to be so great.
(08:01):
I've always been the opposite because that's what made me
excited to work with people. See them grow and see
how far they go, it's amazing. I can definitely see
people who had bosses that were just horrible. They were
great people, but they were just so bad at And.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
That's the right distinction. This isn't about bad people. It's
about managers who have an effective leadership process that they follow,
or good people who have an ineffective process. If you
think of leadership as a process, you start to think
about it differently, because a high performing leader, how do
(08:40):
we determine if you're a high performing leader? What would
be our measurement? I'm going to say you've got a
high performing team. I think most people would say, yep,
that's the metric. Okay, So why aren't we solving for
high performing teams? Why are we sending individuals.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Off to class.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
You wouldn't being a quarterback and send them off to
learn a new play and then leave the team behind.
Would the team and the quarterback practice to play together
until it becomes natural behavior, just automatic? To your point,
we don't give anybody the skills. You actually have the skills.
The skills are talking to people. But it's the way
(09:16):
we talk and what we talk about. Do we let
them push back and all those little conversations that make
for a great relationship. It's the same thing in business.
The team isn't the enemy here, it isn't.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
A power over.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
I'm the boss. Here's a word, you're the subordinate. I mean,
what the hell we.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Human collud obill Yeah, human capital.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
That's what the Nazis said.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
It feels like something they would say they were the
human resources. Human resources.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
Yeah, we pulled a gold out of their teeth and
the hair off their head. You know what I mean.
That's right, I'm going down a bad path.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
I get where you're going with this. So speaking of though,
I want to talk about because I did read your
book Breakthrough, and what I found interesting about it was
how much you need to focus on knowing yourself before
you start to engage with other folks, Having a good
(10:17):
understanding of like your triggers, the things that the behaviors
that you that you that you show up with before
you start to worry about everybody else.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
Yeah, and not to get all into a therapy mode here.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
I could use some therapy. Bill.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
The whole world apparently is is multidisparray right now? Coping skills.
When you have good coping skills, you don't need a therapist.
That's typically what you're going to a therapist for. Is
I'm not coping well with this submit situation my life.
But we don't call it coping skills. We call it
I'm stressed out or I've got a bad relationship. But yeah,
(10:55):
you are stressed out and you have a bad relationship.
The challenge is you just need some skills to cope
with it. In the book, we talk about some of
the coping skills, of coping mechanisms. It's important and it's
helpful to understand your triggers, but it's just as easy
to know, oh, I'm triggered right now. I don't need
to necessarily know if it goes back to my childhood
(11:18):
or not. I just need to know right now, I'm
not in my best place for having a conversation what
I like to share with the people. It's not in
that book, but I don't know. If you've read Victor
Franco's book Man's Search for Meaning, it's a classic. He's
an Austrian psychiatrist in World War Two. He gets captured
(11:39):
by the Nazis because he didn't want to leave his
parents behind. He had a chance to emigrate to America
and escape, but he stayed with his parents. He ends
up surviving both Auschwitz and Dacow, and in the odds
of that are minuscule. And he writes this book called
Man's Search for Meaning. He talks about this idea that
(12:01):
we walk around going what's the meaning of life? What's
my purpose in life? And these gigantic questions that we're
not equipped to answer. What we should be asking is
what's my purpose in this moment? And so when you're triggered,
if you're a manager or a spouse, or a mom
or a dad, what's my purpose in this moment? And
(12:23):
I can tell you it is not to yell at
your kid. That purpose is not to vent all of
your stress onto your employee. And my son was mowing
the lawn when he's five years old. He's finally old
enough to mow the lawn. And I don't know how
he was able to turn the corner so fast, But
on the edges of our lawn where you go around
the corner, all the grass was cut at an angle.
(12:44):
Old two wheels that.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Were coming off the ground.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
You stand there and you're getting stressed out because he's
not cutting the lawn properly. I'm all focused on the
result rather than on the human being. And I realize, oh, okay,
my purpose is to have a healthy, strong, independent son,
not to have perfect grass. But we get so focused
on the thing that we forget what my purpose is
(13:09):
with the human being.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
I love that perspective for me. That's been a big
part of my journey looking inward and understanding how I'm
showing up and how I'm presenting myself to folks. I
really appreciate about your perspective with this, is that really
you're really trying to be honest about what your goal,
what you want, Like, what do I really want? Not
(13:33):
that's what I really want?
Speaker 3 (13:34):
What I want, and I'm all letdless to blow my sack.
What I really really want is a healthy, loving relationship
with my spouse.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Yes, And you tell a great story in the book.
I loved because I've been in the timeshare vacuum before,
where somebody grabs you and pulls you in and is,
come on, let's go do this. Don't you want to
give your wife a free meal and swim with the Dolphins. Yeah,
I've been there. But again back to your point, if
my part, whether in my relationship with my wife or
(14:03):
my peers an organization, you don't really understand what my
goals are and what I'm trying to achieve, it can
be chaos. It can literally be chaos because I see
this happen over and over again, especially in very siloed
organizations where each silo has different metrics on what success
is and a lot of times they compete against each other. Yeah,
(14:24):
the leadership above them doesn't understand why they can't all
just swim the same way. It's easy, and there's.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
The human element to that which you're getting at is
we all have our own agenda. Yeah, and we all
have our own goals and we're working them as hard
as we can. And then marketing or OPS or customer
service makes a request of us, and that's just an
inconvenience now.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Yeah, and get off my lawn.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
So think of this. We design an organizational chart this way,
We've got yep, we've got vps and managers and all
the way down. But work goes through the organization from
marketing to sales. Those two operations customer services in there
all of that, right, we don't draw our organizational charts
the way work is actually processed.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
No, we do not.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
We draw them around a hierarchy of power. I don't
have a problem with understanding who I report to, but
we all have our own agendas. We have these hierarchical silos,
and then we wonder why we have silos. It seems
to me that the challenge in that And if you
want to really read a great book on it, it
would be any books by Tom Foster. He's got one
(15:31):
on hollering talent, but he talks about the strata level
of decision making. Right at the front lines of the organization,
life is pretty consistent and stable. As you move up,
the hierarchy gets less knowable, less predictable, less it's it
has more surprises. I'll just say for sure, that's all fine,
(15:53):
and you can figure that out. You hire to that
level of complexity. The problem is now you've got silos.
If operations is falling behind, can they tell sales to
slow down?
Speaker 4 (16:07):
No?
Speaker 3 (16:09):
Can sales say, hey, operations work the weekend to catch up.
They could say it because nobody has defined who has
the authority and responsibility to create this collaborative effort. That's
the fault of the leaders who don't understand organizational design.
They just did what everybody else did. Here's your job description,
(16:31):
you report to this guy, etc. And nobody is thinking
about what's the actual work to get done. How does
that work happen? Some organizations use racy charts our ASPI
and that kind of helps you on a project by
project basis. But I don't know that enough organizations think through. Okay,
when push comes to shove, if manufacturing says we need
(16:53):
the VP of sales to come in and sit in
on this meeting, can they require the VP of sales
to come in and sit on the meeting?
Speaker 2 (17:01):
For sure?
Speaker 3 (17:03):
The answer is no, and.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
So we have silos. Yep. To your point about the racy,
I've seen people where they think these things are just
set in and forget. It's sort of things right, we
made the racy. Why is marketing acting all crazy now?
Two months later.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
You said it's a partnership with your spouse or it's
a partnership with my peers, and you get a silo
when there isn't partnership.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
No they're not, And people will address it like that
because I see it happen I've seen it been so
many times. Bill. I speaking event the other day and
I was talking about how to engage with your team remotely,
and I'm sure this is something I want to get
your take on the remote leadership sort of world that
(17:45):
you've seen happen over the last few years. But they
asked me, We'll set up like a Slack channel or
a team's channel, and then a few people will show up,
but then they kind of dwindle off and they don't
stick around. And I was like, you've got to get
leadership in those channels, because just like when you start
a new job, you're looking for cues from leadership on
(18:07):
what is good, what is bad, what is acceptable, what
is unacceptable. So for myself, I remember starting at Unite
Health Group and I'd watch when my boss left for
lunch or when he took a break, and I'd be like, okay,
those are the times I can take a break. I
wouldn't go up and ask him like what time knock off? Here?
I would watch and pay attention what are other people
(18:29):
doing around me? Because I don't want to ask too
many questions as a new employee, I don't want to
seem stupid. If the leader isn't aware that when you
bring somebody new into that situation they're going to be
doing those things. They just kind of willy nearly do whatever,
and they're like, here's a slack channel for you guys
to build some culture. Let me know how that goes. Yeah,
(18:49):
it's a nightmare. So that's my rant.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
So two thoughts popped into my mind. One is when
we say leadership, what do we really mean. I kind
of landed on this phrase leaders take action to create
a better future. In all of my workshops. That's what
we talk about. Everybody can be a leader if they're
willing to take action to create a better future. What
(19:13):
does that look like on a team's call. It looks
like if you disagree, you got to say something. It
looks like, well keep your camera on. How about let's
start with that. Oh ye, that was what I was
reading A Mackenzie study that said something like, I mean,
if it was Harvard, if people routinely leave their MIC's
muted and their camera's off, there's eleven percent higher probability
(19:36):
that they're going to leave your organization.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
I would imagine to be higher in percentage.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Everybody has like a forty percent chance and this is
another eleven.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
You just tag it on top yelps. Right, everybody's something
right now.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
Yeah, So I think leaders take action. But also, here's
a tool, here's your slack, here's your team's tool, here's
a here's your I get to tell us how you
feel once a week about life.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
We don't do anything about it.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
At least we know the vibe is going up and
down and athong gets to crackle, so you won't. We
get to check that box off, and the tool doesn't
change culture. Here's another thing I think we get wrong.
We keep saying culture is the way we do things
around here. You look at what everybody's doing, and then
you do it too. We're per to animals. Sure, that's
why we get along with horses and dogs so well.
(20:24):
I have come to believe just in the last few years,
I get it. Culture is what we talk about all
the time around here. And if what we talk about
all the time is leaders who take action to create
a better future, professionalism, commitment, humility, helping one another, offering
help and asking for help, keeping one another in the loop,
(20:44):
if we talk about that all the time, then we
start doing it. And so the precursor to what we
do all the time is what we talk about all
the time. If you just look at what managers mostly
talk about. I was working with a company years ago,
Allied Tech Systems, and I was working with a bunch
of their leaders and he said, Bill, some of your
concepts are great, but every Friday we have a meeting
(21:07):
called things Gone Wrong.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
Put an Opportunity.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
Everybody walk around like they were in a funeral home.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
It was amazing, I'm sure. And that's the other thing.
It's funny because, especially with the rise of tech companies
or tech led companies, an engineering mindset has always been
sort of if it's broke, if you don't know how
to use it, don't use it. And it's not an
inherent leadership approach. And we've got Henry Ford to thank
(21:36):
for the assembly line, right, just like you were mentioning,
things go through stages. Somebody touches the thing, and then
the next person touches the thing, and then it spits
out and it's all good. And that's how we assume
we can engineer all of our products and all these
different things. I did a speaking of it a couple
of years ago at General Mills, and I got to
spend some time with the CTO of this giant company.
(21:57):
I asked them, there's so many moving parts here, like,
how how did things get done here? And he just
looked at me and he said, it's who you know, yeah,
And I was like, that's amazing to.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
Me because that's the mechanism that they figured out works.
And if you're willing to take action and build some
key relationships, you can get stuff done outside of the bureaucracy.
But a lot of people just get stuck because there
isn't a process. So here you bring up the engineering.
So I'm a recovering engineer me too. I think there's
a process for everything. Frameworks, processes, there's a mathematical equation
(22:32):
if it describes why your car doesn't fly off the
road when you're driving around the corner. Absolutely, it's amazing
what you can understand. And so I have this. Maybe
it's a naive thing, but I just kind of think
there's a process for everything. And that's why I started thinking,
what if leadership were a process and you're either are
following an effective process or an ineffective process that has
(22:52):
nothing to do with your personality. You don't have to
be steep jobs if you read the leadership books, they
fall into two category, how I did Steve Jobs, Attilodehunt,
Abraham Lincoln, or they fall into some academic here's the
fifty seven high anchor behaviors and the forty eight low
anchor behaviors. There you have solved it, and none of
that actually translates into a change in behavior. If a
(23:17):
team has a process for quality and they followed the process,
they produce a quality part. Why don't we have a
process for a team to resolve or breakdown? We have
a process for delegating responsibility. Right now, you walk into
any organization and if anybody has a process for delegation,
(23:38):
they're the rare person. Everybody else just sort of we
just wing it out there. We don't know how to
make good agreements. Can you imagine if attorney was documenting
an agreement to it would be dotted down to the
last and you know exactly what you signed on for.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
We don't know that far.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
No, we already have a process. We do it with
our customers every day.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
What do you want? I want this out?
Speaker 3 (24:01):
Well, you want it in green or blue? Yeah, I
want it in Greece.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
When you say as soon as possible.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
Does that mean this week or the next three weeks
would be good.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
We negotiate with.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
Our customers all the time, and we end up with
agreements and then we fulfill those agreements. But for some
reason we don't use that process with our employees.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
It's just silly. Yeah, that makes sense. Object to your point.
People have culturally determined they're over there, we're over here,
and neverthe two tall cross because something might happen.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
So Abraham Maslow, he's got a book welled after his death,
but it's called Maslow on Management. Yeah, and there's a
couple of things that will just rock your world. One
of them is, he said, churches are pretty cool organizations.
They inscribe to a higher level of being on value
and who we could be in this world, he said.
But churches, if they're lucky, they get their parishioners one
hour a week. We get people forty hours a week
(24:55):
in business, maybe more. We are squandering the opportunity to
create an environment that allows people to play at the
top of their game. I think if we took our
responsibility as managers and leaders appropriately, if we really shouldered
that responsibility, we would look at who am I being?
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Right?
Speaker 3 (25:15):
Now, And how is that impacting you? When you had
a great leader, Kurt, how did you show up?
Speaker 2 (25:25):
I was there early and I left late. It was
and I was all in exactly.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
And then when you had a bad leader, and again
we're not saying bad people, we're just saying they had
a bad leadership process. But then were you there early
and stayed late?
Speaker 2 (25:39):
If I was ducking behind corners, nobody'd see me.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
You have all these avoidance strategies. I don't want to
talk to this person. You'll more or less do what
you need to get done because you're a good, decent person.
But that extra effort, that's just not going to be there.
One of my mentors was Larry Wilson. He was a
phenomenal guy. Wilson Learning was the company he created eineteen
seventy five. They were a fifty million dollars training company
(26:03):
in nineteen seventy five. That'd be like a half a
billion today or something. Larry understood that there's a biblical
analogy here too. He says, the culture is the soil
and the human is the seed, and you can't blame
the seed by putting them in unhealthy, toxic soil. And
I think we don't always fully appreciate our responsibility is
(26:26):
we need to create the environment where people can play
at the top of their game. We tease legal, here's
this human being. It was either not willing or not
able to do his job. Next rightly, unwilling or unable.
We just talked about maybe it's because of the environment
that they're in, or maybe it's because this toxic teammate
that they got to work next to. You put them
(26:48):
right next to the walkway where everybody interrupts them all
day long and they have to do really critical thinking.
Then way you say, this is the wrong person, wrong seed.
But we did it completely backwards.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
Again, that's basy Bill. We have to cut it short.
But you got to come back on the show. I've
learned so much and I really appreciate your time. If
I want to touch with you, if I want to
learn more about the work I do and follow it,
where do I find you?
Speaker 3 (27:11):
Easiest way is go to our website, The Leadership Process
dot com. You'll see case studies, testimonials, hear how we
think differently about leadership and produce jaw dropping results. So
that's the best place. The Leadership Process dot.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Com awesome, Bill. I really appreciate the conversation and I
hope it's one of many more.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
That's my pleasure, and I hope you have me back.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
We appreciate you taking the time to listen to this
episode of schmidt List. The stories shared by our guests
are genuinely inspiring and offer insightful knowledge. It's important to
remember that success doesn't happen overnight and requires collaboration, learning,
and perseverance. If you want to broaden your professional connections,
(27:54):
check out Kurt's book The Little Book of Networking, How
to Build your Career One Conversation at a Time on Amazon.
Please stay connected with all things schmidt List on social media,
leave a review for the podcast and join our community
of like minded entrepreneurs. Thank you for being part of
schmidt List. Keep innovating, collaborating, and chasing your entrepreneurial dreams.
Welcome to Schmidlist Today. We're excited to have leadership expert
Bill Mills with us. He'll share insights from his book Breakthrough,
exploring why many managers fail and how to build high
performing teams. Stay tuned for transformative ideas you won't want
to miss.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
How are you today, I'm great, Great to see you.
It's good to see you. Thank you for joining me. Bill.
Tell me about the work you're doing these days and
who you focus on working with.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Primarily my day job as I work with business owners, CEOs, presidents,
I have a Mastermind group for folks that owner run companies.
I think I've got, between that and our key Leader
group close to fifty companies I work with every month.
And then I'm also involved in some consulting around creating
high performing leaders and teams inside of companies. Those are
(00:49):
the two major areas I focus on.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
That's great, and I would imagine the need for this
sort of coaching and consulting is more prevalent today and
it's ever been because a lot of changes have happened
over the years in terms of how businesses are run,
but also how employees expect them to be running. One
of the things I want to mention to the group
(01:11):
is that I read Bill's book Breakthrough, which you should
definitely check out. He's got a lot of other great stuff,
but I want to mention this because I want to
ask him a couple of things about this. Breakthrough is
about the power of conscious conversations. I can imagine thirty
years ago, Bill, this wasn't as big of a subject.
Why is it today, conscious conversations or leadership in general.
(01:32):
I just want to make sure the focus on leadership development.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
Okay, So I just googled this last week for a
letter I was writing, so you can check this out.
But there's fifty seven, one hundred and thirty six books
on Amazon right now with leadership in the title. Wow,
And I'm thinking, well, maybe we just need one more book.
Maybe that'll get us over the scales. How did we
get along this far without fifty seven thousand books? It
(01:58):
just seems like we don't underst I think we're solving
the wrong problem when we're trying to think about leadership
rather than behaving as a leader. I think the way
we deliver leadership development is the problem. It's not the content.
It's not the books are fine, nothing wrong with your books.
But but that's and so why is it such a
(02:18):
big issue today? Every generation I'm a boomer, and then
we've got the X and the Y and the Z,
and I don't even know what's coming. But every generation
goes through the same angst. Every generation goes through the
same challenges of starting out. I don't know, as much
as I want to know. I have big aspirations, and
then somewhere in there they are linked up with in
(02:41):
all probability, if Gallup is right at eighty two percent
probability that they're going to be linked up with a
bad manager and delt so then bad management becomes the norm. Right,
If eighty two out of one hundred are bad, then
that's the new normal, and that one really good manager
over there that the anomaly. And so I just think
(03:02):
that we are looking at the wrong things when we're
thinking about leadership, and they are not trying the wrong
things when we try to instill what we wouldn't call
a good leadership. I think we're just looking at it backwards.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
I agree, and I think there's an inherent problem with
how some companies are structured. And I want to get
your take on this bill because I experienced this throughout
my career. If certain people were offered a promotion, the
only promotion available is to manage people. A lot of
these folks were not interested in managing people, but they
(03:37):
were interested in more respect, more money, more position, more tenure,
more safety in their position. So they would take those
positions because that was the only available forward movement for them.
Not because they wanted to become bad managers. They just
were because they didn't have any interest in managing people.
(03:58):
Is that something you've seen over over again throughout your career. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
In fact, Gallup calls it out too. They said, that's
the number one problem in America is we take a
strong individual performer and then we make them the manager.
I got to push back on Gallop a little bit.
Oh really, we were supposed to take the low performing
individual and make them the Gallup has been all over
this stuff for years, and I think they even have
a book called It's the Manager where they lay the
(04:22):
whole thing at theer's feed and say, your company's form
they have as bad managers, and hey, we offer we
offer a leadership course too, but everybody offers a leadership course.
When I look at them, I don't think they have
changed the way that they think. We tend to think
about leadership as a trickle down economics, so eventually it'll
(04:43):
get to their front lines.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
But and but excelf releasing.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
You look at Navy seals, you look at professional sports teams.
The way they develop leaders is completely different from the
way businesses do it. I don't know why we didn't
take a page out of their playbook. What makes my
apologies to gallop, But I disagree that the problem is
promoting high individual performers. The problem is not working with
(05:09):
them in a way that allows them to take their
natural ambition and drive and work it with a team
to produce an outcome.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
I find that what I learned when I started my
own business was that intentionally trying to grow leadership versus
trying to hunt and find it right like truffles right,
like hopefully it's out there right. But if I was
actually like laying down a garden and making the rose
and ice and water regularly and getting sure if I
(05:41):
was paying attention to it, it made such a huge difference.
But in my history and a lot of the businesses
I've been a part of, that idea of that you're
just promoted because you're good at your job means you're
going to be good at leading and managing people. But
they provide no support, right, there's no training. Now that
we've moved you into this role, this whole level of
support engages with you never happened. And then they were
(06:04):
surprised when people would fail at this stuff, and they'd
be like, oh, that was a mistake promoting them.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
Here's the other side of that. Eighty two percent of
managers or mishires, wrong people, wrong seat.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
We don't fire them, we leave them. So what's that about.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
On the onboarding thing, what we do is not with everybody,
but at the higher echelons of an organization, we send
them off the leadership classes, or we help them go
to Wharton for a week and hang out with some really,
really high performers and we do role plays. And the challenge,
of course, is nobody knows what they're doing in those classes.
(06:39):
They're actually just thinking about leadership. They aren't doing it right,
even with the philosophers. Yeah, and if you're at Wharton
or wherever and you're doing role plays with other one percenters,
that's not leadership. That's just reciting a play to one another.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
So we.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
The other thing is now you got and now I'm
on a road. Because here's what happens. They go off
to these quos ill it.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
Nobody knows what they're learning. They come back, nobody asks
them what they learned. They don't tell anybody what they learned.
They don't try it out with their teams because Bernie
from their team was not at the workshop and Bernie
isn't having any of this, and they don't know what
to do with Bernie, and so they go right back
to their old behaviors. This is like trying to change
(07:26):
an alcoholic. You send them off to rehab and they
come back to the exact same environment that created the
problem anyway, So that's what's insanity.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
We just keep doing it over and over and over
again and it doesn't change.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
To your point, because there isn't. There isn't. There's fifty
seven thousand different ways to do it, and we're used
to if you just give me the one way of
like how you do this right like a computer, just
plug it in and do it. I can't tell you
how many times I've talked to leaders and they're like, oh,
if it wasn't for the people to be so great.
(08:01):
I've always been the opposite because that's what made me
excited to work with people. See them grow and see
how far they go, it's amazing. I can definitely see
people who had bosses that were just horrible. They were
great people, but they were just so bad at And.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
That's the right distinction. This isn't about bad people. It's
about managers who have an effective leadership process that they follow,
or good people who have an ineffective process. If you
think of leadership as a process, you start to think
about it differently, because a high performing leader, how do
(08:40):
we determine if you're a high performing leader? What would
be our measurement? I'm going to say you've got a
high performing team. I think most people would say, yep,
that's the metric. Okay, So why aren't we solving for
high performing teams? Why are we sending individuals.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Off to class.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
You wouldn't being a quarterback and send them off to
learn a new play and then leave the team behind.
Would the team and the quarterback practice to play together
until it becomes natural behavior, just automatic? To your point,
we don't give anybody the skills. You actually have the skills.
The skills are talking to people. But it's the way
(09:16):
we talk and what we talk about. Do we let
them push back and all those little conversations that make
for a great relationship. It's the same thing in business.
The team isn't the enemy here, it isn't.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
A power over.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
I'm the boss. Here's a word, you're the subordinate. I mean,
what the hell we.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Human collud obill Yeah, human capital.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
That's what the Nazis said.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
It feels like something they would say they were the
human resources. Human resources.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
Yeah, we pulled a gold out of their teeth and
the hair off their head. You know what I mean.
That's right, I'm going down a bad path.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
I get where you're going with this. So speaking of though,
I want to talk about because I did read your
book Breakthrough, and what I found interesting about it was
how much you need to focus on knowing yourself before
you start to engage with other folks, Having a good
(10:17):
understanding of like your triggers, the things that the behaviors
that you that you that you show up with before
you start to worry about everybody else.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
Yeah, and not to get all into a therapy mode here.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
I could use some therapy. Bill.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
The whole world apparently is is multidisparray right now? Coping skills.
When you have good coping skills, you don't need a therapist.
That's typically what you're going to a therapist for. Is
I'm not coping well with this submit situation my life.
But we don't call it coping skills. We call it
I'm stressed out or I've got a bad relationship. But yeah,
(10:55):
you are stressed out and you have a bad relationship.
The challenge is you just need some skills to cope
with it. In the book, we talk about some of
the coping skills, of coping mechanisms. It's important and it's
helpful to understand your triggers, but it's just as easy
to know, oh, I'm triggered right now. I don't need
to necessarily know if it goes back to my childhood
(11:18):
or not. I just need to know right now, I'm
not in my best place for having a conversation what
I like to share with the people. It's not in
that book, but I don't know. If you've read Victor
Franco's book Man's Search for Meaning, it's a classic. He's
an Austrian psychiatrist in World War Two. He gets captured
(11:39):
by the Nazis because he didn't want to leave his
parents behind. He had a chance to emigrate to America
and escape, but he stayed with his parents. He ends
up surviving both Auschwitz and Dacow, and in the odds
of that are minuscule. And he writes this book called
Man's Search for Meaning. He talks about this idea that
(12:01):
we walk around going what's the meaning of life? What's
my purpose in life? And these gigantic questions that we're
not equipped to answer. What we should be asking is
what's my purpose in this moment? And so when you're triggered,
if you're a manager or a spouse, or a mom
or a dad, what's my purpose in this moment? And
(12:23):
I can tell you it is not to yell at
your kid. That purpose is not to vent all of
your stress onto your employee. And my son was mowing
the lawn when he's five years old. He's finally old
enough to mow the lawn. And I don't know how
he was able to turn the corner so fast, But
on the edges of our lawn where you go around
the corner, all the grass was cut at an angle.
(12:44):
Old two wheels that.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Were coming off the ground.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
You stand there and you're getting stressed out because he's
not cutting the lawn properly. I'm all focused on the
result rather than on the human being. And I realize, oh, okay,
my purpose is to have a healthy, strong, independent son,
not to have perfect grass. But we get so focused
on the thing that we forget what my purpose is
(13:09):
with the human being.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
I love that perspective for me. That's been a big
part of my journey looking inward and understanding how I'm
showing up and how I'm presenting myself to folks. I
really appreciate about your perspective with this, is that really
you're really trying to be honest about what your goal,
what you want, Like, what do I really want? Not
(13:33):
that's what I really want?
Speaker 3 (13:34):
What I want, and I'm all letdless to blow my sack.
What I really really want is a healthy, loving relationship
with my spouse.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Yes, And you tell a great story in the book.
I loved because I've been in the timeshare vacuum before,
where somebody grabs you and pulls you in and is,
come on, let's go do this. Don't you want to
give your wife a free meal and swim with the Dolphins. Yeah,
I've been there. But again back to your point, if
my part, whether in my relationship with my wife or
(14:03):
my peers an organization, you don't really understand what my
goals are and what I'm trying to achieve, it can
be chaos. It can literally be chaos because I see
this happen over and over again, especially in very siloed
organizations where each silo has different metrics on what success
is and a lot of times they compete against each other. Yeah,
(14:24):
the leadership above them doesn't understand why they can't all
just swim the same way. It's easy, and there's.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
The human element to that which you're getting at is
we all have our own agenda. Yeah, and we all
have our own goals and we're working them as hard
as we can. And then marketing or OPS or customer
service makes a request of us, and that's just an
inconvenience now.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Yeah, and get off my lawn.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
So think of this. We design an organizational chart this way,
We've got yep, we've got vps and managers and all
the way down. But work goes through the organization from
marketing to sales. Those two operations customer services in there
all of that, right, we don't draw our organizational charts
the way work is actually processed.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
No, we do not.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
We draw them around a hierarchy of power. I don't
have a problem with understanding who I report to, but
we all have our own agendas. We have these hierarchical silos,
and then we wonder why we have silos. It seems
to me that the challenge in that And if you
want to really read a great book on it, it
would be any books by Tom Foster. He's got one
(15:31):
on hollering talent, but he talks about the strata level
of decision making. Right at the front lines of the organization,
life is pretty consistent and stable. As you move up,
the hierarchy gets less knowable, less predictable, less it's it
has more surprises. I'll just say for sure, that's all fine,
(15:53):
and you can figure that out. You hire to that
level of complexity. The problem is now you've got silos.
If operations is falling behind, can they tell sales to
slow down?
Speaker 4 (16:07):
No?
Speaker 3 (16:09):
Can sales say, hey, operations work the weekend to catch up.
They could say it because nobody has defined who has
the authority and responsibility to create this collaborative effort. That's
the fault of the leaders who don't understand organizational design.
They just did what everybody else did. Here's your job description,
(16:31):
you report to this guy, etc. And nobody is thinking
about what's the actual work to get done. How does
that work happen? Some organizations use racy charts our ASPI
and that kind of helps you on a project by
project basis. But I don't know that enough organizations think through. Okay,
when push comes to shove, if manufacturing says we need
(16:53):
the VP of sales to come in and sit in
on this meeting, can they require the VP of sales
to come in and sit on the meeting?
Speaker 2 (17:01):
For sure?
Speaker 3 (17:03):
The answer is no, and.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
So we have silos. Yep. To your point about the racy,
I've seen people where they think these things are just
set in and forget. It's sort of things right, we
made the racy. Why is marketing acting all crazy now?
Two months later.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
You said it's a partnership with your spouse or it's
a partnership with my peers, and you get a silo
when there isn't partnership.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
No they're not, And people will address it like that
because I see it happen I've seen it been so
many times. Bill. I speaking event the other day and
I was talking about how to engage with your team remotely,
and I'm sure this is something I want to get
your take on the remote leadership sort of world that
(17:45):
you've seen happen over the last few years. But they
asked me, We'll set up like a Slack channel or
a team's channel, and then a few people will show up,
but then they kind of dwindle off and they don't
stick around. And I was like, you've got to get
leadership in those channels, because just like when you start
a new job, you're looking for cues from leadership on
(18:07):
what is good, what is bad, what is acceptable, what
is unacceptable. So for myself, I remember starting at Unite
Health Group and I'd watch when my boss left for
lunch or when he took a break, and I'd be like, okay,
those are the times I can take a break. I
wouldn't go up and ask him like what time knock off? Here?
I would watch and pay attention what are other people
(18:29):
doing around me? Because I don't want to ask too
many questions as a new employee, I don't want to
seem stupid. If the leader isn't aware that when you
bring somebody new into that situation they're going to be
doing those things. They just kind of willy nearly do whatever,
and they're like, here's a slack channel for you guys
to build some culture. Let me know how that goes. Yeah,
(18:49):
it's a nightmare. So that's my rant.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
So two thoughts popped into my mind. One is when
we say leadership, what do we really mean. I kind
of landed on this phrase leaders take action to create
a better future. In all of my workshops. That's what
we talk about. Everybody can be a leader if they're
willing to take action to create a better future. What
(19:13):
does that look like on a team's call. It looks
like if you disagree, you got to say something. It
looks like, well keep your camera on. How about let's
start with that. Oh ye, that was what I was
reading A Mackenzie study that said something like, I mean,
if it was Harvard, if people routinely leave their MIC's
muted and their camera's off, there's eleven percent higher probability
(19:36):
that they're going to leave your organization.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
I would imagine to be higher in percentage.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Everybody has like a forty percent chance and this is
another eleven.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
You just tag it on top yelps. Right, everybody's something
right now.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
Yeah, So I think leaders take action. But also, here's
a tool, here's your slack, here's your team's tool, here's
a here's your I get to tell us how you
feel once a week about life.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
We don't do anything about it.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
At least we know the vibe is going up and
down and athong gets to crackle, so you won't. We
get to check that box off, and the tool doesn't
change culture. Here's another thing I think we get wrong.
We keep saying culture is the way we do things
around here. You look at what everybody's doing, and then
you do it too. We're per to animals. Sure, that's
why we get along with horses and dogs so well.
(20:24):
I have come to believe just in the last few years,
I get it. Culture is what we talk about all
the time around here. And if what we talk about
all the time is leaders who take action to create
a better future, professionalism, commitment, humility, helping one another, offering
help and asking for help, keeping one another in the loop,
(20:44):
if we talk about that all the time, then we
start doing it. And so the precursor to what we
do all the time is what we talk about all
the time. If you just look at what managers mostly
talk about. I was working with a company years ago,
Allied Tech Systems, and I was working with a bunch
of their leaders and he said, Bill, some of your
concepts are great, but every Friday we have a meeting
(21:07):
called things Gone Wrong.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
Put an Opportunity.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
Everybody walk around like they were in a funeral home.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
It was amazing, I'm sure. And that's the other thing.
It's funny because, especially with the rise of tech companies
or tech led companies, an engineering mindset has always been
sort of if it's broke, if you don't know how
to use it, don't use it. And it's not an
inherent leadership approach. And we've got Henry Ford to thank
(21:36):
for the assembly line, right, just like you were mentioning,
things go through stages. Somebody touches the thing, and then
the next person touches the thing, and then it spits
out and it's all good. And that's how we assume
we can engineer all of our products and all these
different things. I did a speaking of it a couple
of years ago at General Mills, and I got to
spend some time with the CTO of this giant company.
(21:57):
I asked them, there's so many moving parts here, like,
how how did things get done here? And he just
looked at me and he said, it's who you know, yeah,
And I was like, that's amazing to.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
Me because that's the mechanism that they figured out works.
And if you're willing to take action and build some
key relationships, you can get stuff done outside of the bureaucracy.
But a lot of people just get stuck because there
isn't a process. So here you bring up the engineering.
So I'm a recovering engineer me too. I think there's
a process for everything. Frameworks, processes, there's a mathematical equation
(22:32):
if it describes why your car doesn't fly off the
road when you're driving around the corner. Absolutely, it's amazing
what you can understand. And so I have this. Maybe
it's a naive thing, but I just kind of think
there's a process for everything. And that's why I started thinking,
what if leadership were a process and you're either are
following an effective process or an ineffective process that has
(22:52):
nothing to do with your personality. You don't have to
be steep jobs if you read the leadership books, they
fall into two category, how I did Steve Jobs, Attilodehunt,
Abraham Lincoln, or they fall into some academic here's the
fifty seven high anchor behaviors and the forty eight low
anchor behaviors. There you have solved it, and none of
that actually translates into a change in behavior. If a
(23:17):
team has a process for quality and they followed the process,
they produce a quality part. Why don't we have a
process for a team to resolve or breakdown? We have
a process for delegating responsibility. Right now, you walk into
any organization and if anybody has a process for delegation,
(23:38):
they're the rare person. Everybody else just sort of we
just wing it out there. We don't know how to
make good agreements. Can you imagine if attorney was documenting
an agreement to it would be dotted down to the
last and you know exactly what you signed on for.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
We don't know that far.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
No, we already have a process. We do it with
our customers every day.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
What do you want? I want this out?
Speaker 3 (24:01):
Well, you want it in green or blue? Yeah, I
want it in Greece.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
When you say as soon as possible.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
Does that mean this week or the next three weeks
would be good.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
We negotiate with.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
Our customers all the time, and we end up with
agreements and then we fulfill those agreements. But for some
reason we don't use that process with our employees.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
It's just silly. Yeah, that makes sense. Object to your point.
People have culturally determined they're over there, we're over here,
and neverthe two tall cross because something might happen.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
So Abraham Maslow, he's got a book welled after his death,
but it's called Maslow on Management. Yeah, and there's a
couple of things that will just rock your world. One
of them is, he said, churches are pretty cool organizations.
They inscribe to a higher level of being on value
and who we could be in this world, he said.
But churches, if they're lucky, they get their parishioners one
hour a week. We get people forty hours a week
(24:55):
in business, maybe more. We are squandering the opportunity to
create an environment that allows people to play at the
top of their game. I think if we took our
responsibility as managers and leaders appropriately, if we really shouldered
that responsibility, we would look at who am I being?
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Right?
Speaker 3 (25:15):
Now, And how is that impacting you? When you had
a great leader, Kurt, how did you show up?
Speaker 2 (25:25):
I was there early and I left late. It was
and I was all in exactly.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
And then when you had a bad leader, and again
we're not saying bad people, we're just saying they had
a bad leadership process. But then were you there early
and stayed late?
Speaker 2 (25:39):
If I was ducking behind corners, nobody'd see me.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
You have all these avoidance strategies. I don't want to
talk to this person. You'll more or less do what
you need to get done because you're a good, decent person.
But that extra effort, that's just not going to be there.
One of my mentors was Larry Wilson. He was a
phenomenal guy. Wilson Learning was the company he created eineteen
seventy five. They were a fifty million dollars training company
(26:03):
in nineteen seventy five. That'd be like a half a
billion today or something. Larry understood that there's a biblical
analogy here too. He says, the culture is the soil
and the human is the seed, and you can't blame
the seed by putting them in unhealthy, toxic soil. And
I think we don't always fully appreciate our responsibility is
(26:26):
we need to create the environment where people can play
at the top of their game. We tease legal, here's
this human being. It was either not willing or not
able to do his job. Next rightly, unwilling or unable.
We just talked about maybe it's because of the environment
that they're in, or maybe it's because this toxic teammate
that they got to work next to. You put them
(26:48):
right next to the walkway where everybody interrupts them all
day long and they have to do really critical thinking.
Then way you say, this is the wrong person, wrong seed.
But we did it completely backwards.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
Again, that's basy Bill. We have to cut it short.
But you got to come back on the show. I've
learned so much and I really appreciate your time. If
I want to touch with you, if I want to
learn more about the work I do and follow it,
where do I find you?
Speaker 3 (27:11):
Easiest way is go to our website, The Leadership Process
dot com. You'll see case studies, testimonials, hear how we
think differently about leadership and produce jaw dropping results. So
that's the best place. The Leadership Process dot.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Com awesome, Bill. I really appreciate the conversation and I
hope it's one of many more.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
That's my pleasure, and I hope you have me back.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
We appreciate you taking the time to listen to this
episode of schmidt List. The stories shared by our guests
are genuinely inspiring and offer insightful knowledge. It's important to
remember that success doesn't happen overnight and requires collaboration, learning,
and perseverance. If you want to broaden your professional connections,
(27:54):
check out Kurt's book The Little Book of Networking, How
to Build your Career One Conversation at a Time on Amazon.
Please stay connected with all things schmidt List on social media,
leave a review for the podcast and join our community
of like minded entrepreneurs. Thank you for being part of
schmidt List. Keep innovating, collaborating, and chasing your entrepreneurial dreams.
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