[0:05] The best CEOs lead great teams. What does that mean? It means the team helps make decisions on what is strategic and important, they get stuff done, and they contribute to creating a learning environment so the team grows and gets better over time. As a leader or manager, how close are you to that standard? 

My name is Rusty Gaillard, and this is Do Something Different. It is a podcast for smart, ambitious, high-achieving leaders to help them get to the next step, to crack that nut of what is standing in their way so they can be even more successful. You have to start by looking at your team because you can only be as successful as your team. One of the ways I discovered this as a leader when I worked at Apple was after reading The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss' premise of this book was to create a different business. But I applied those concepts to the corporate world and I said, how can I only work four hours a week? What does that look like? One of the things Tim Ferriss suggested is you have to create systems and people that can take care of most of the work that you need to do. And so I thought about that question. How can I get my team to do most of the work that I need to do? And the answer was actually quite simple. It was empowerment. I had to create a team that was capable of operating at the same level that I was.

[1:34] Going back to the three things that a CEO needs, which is you need smart people who can help you decide what's important. They can actually get it done, which is the second part, execution. And the third part is they can continue to improve and learn and grow as an organization. Let's break those three down.

[1:51] Number one is you want thought partners. You don't want to be the only one on your team figuring out what's important, what are the priorities, what you should be focused on. You want your team stepping up to deliver value against that.

[2:05] How do you create that if you don't have it? I'm going to give you three simple steps. Number one, of course, is you hire the right people. But you may have great people, but you may not be cultivating that in them. You may not be building them into the kind of people who have an opinion and express that opinion and advocate for that opinion. To create a thought partner, you can do three simple things. Number one, ask more questions. And the simplest question is, tell me what you think. Rather than giving an answer, whenever someone comes to you with a challenge or a request or a question, don't answer it. Ask for their opinion. What do you think? Turn it back on them so that they bring an opinion. Teach that, encourage it so that it builds over time. The second thing you can do is hold a meeting with a specific goal of developing priorities and strategies. I like the start-stop-continue framework. It's very easy to use. What are the things you want to start doing? what are the things you want to stop doing, and what are the things you want to continue doing? All three of those categories are important, but particularly start. What are the things we're not doing that we should be thinking about and spending time on? And stop. What are the things that we're doing now that are no longer worth it? If I were making a decision about whether to start this activity today, would I start it? Or am I only doing it because I've been doing it in the past? And then, of course, the continue are the things that fall out and that are left over.

[3:32] That's the second thing have a specific meeting to discuss with your team what is worth doing, and the third thing that you want to do is reward success recognizing people is such an easy thing to do it is a free thing to do and it is one of the most powerful motivators because we all want that pat on the back when we do a good job one of my clients was leading a change effort and one part of the change effort was, how do you deal with all of the incoming requests? This was the kind of organization that worked very cross-functionally, and they had a lot of requests coming into them. And it was unclear what those requests were, who were they coming from, how do you think through prioritization, who is the expert, who has knowledge, who should be working on this. All of those questions were unclear, and they did not have an organized way for dealing with this flood of requests for information coming at them. One of the employees on the team recognized this problem and brought a solution forward. Not only did they bring a solution forward, they implemented it. They trialed it. They put it in place. They did a little pilot. They brought a bunch of people together. They had a discussion. They identified, answered some of the key questions, identified an owner and a timeline and how that project should move forward. And they built a little process. Then they brought it to management and said, hey, we built this process. This is how we're doing it. What do you think? The leadership team actually said, we don't like the solution you've built. We want to build something else.

[5:00] Wow, that could be seen as a total black eye for this person. This person stepped forward, recognized a problem, and brought a solution forward, even piloted the solution before bringing it forward. So do you let that person walk away feeling like they failed? No, you celebrate that person for their initiative. You want strategic thought partners on your team. And if you don't have them, you cultivate it by asking them more questions, by having discussions as a team, and celebrating it when it happens, even if you decide it's not the right direction. That's what I love about this example is the solution brought forward was not the solution that was ultimately adopted, and yet they still recognize the person for taking the initiative, for bringing something forward, for identifying the problem, having a solution, testing the solution, bringing it forward. All of those are behaviors that you want to encourage on your team. This is a way that you can build more strategic thinking among your team members because you want that in order for you and your team to be successful.

[6:07] The second principle that CEOs use, not only to have strategic thought partners, but also people who can get things done, people who can execute. And the name of the game here is delegation.

[6:20] When you think about delegation, where are you on the spectrum of delegation? Do you delegate tasks, projects, or objectives? Tasks are small, narrow, well-defined, go do this thing and come back to me. Projects are a little bit broader. There's a timeline involved, there may be multiple steps, and there's a goal. You give that goal to the person with the timeline and the project plan, they come back with the result. Objectives, on the other hand, are not well-defined, and there's no particular solution defined. These are things like, we need to grow revenue by 15%. We need to become more efficient. We need to streamline this process. Those are objectives. They're vague. They're not well-defined. There's no clear, identified solution in place yet. How do you delegate? Where are you on that spectrum?

[7:08] When I thought about the four-hour workweek, I was willing to take a little bit of a risk in creating that on my team because I tended to see myself as smart and capable and having a lot of experience, a lot of information. And so I always had something to add. Whenever one of my team members came to me, I always had an opinion. I always gave them some input and I tended to be more on the task end. I wasn't all the way at tasks, which is tends to be more like a micromanager, but I was closer to the project end of the spectrum. But I thought about what would it look like to really empower this team? How would a CEO lead their team? CEOs give objectives. They say, these are the things that are important, which is discussed as a team, because that's part of the thought leadership and the thought strategic thinking. But once that's decided, they assign those objectives to members of the team. They don't micromanage it. They don't give them the answer. They say, here's the goal. Go out and figure out how we're going to deliver against that. So I stretched myself to say, how can I do that?

[8:09] Now, that could be a scary experience. And honestly, there were times when I was nervous because I wanted my team to fully own these projects. So we're going to do an executive review. And I said, you go build the executive review. I'm happy to review it if you want before we do it, but I don't need to because this is your project to own. Would you be comfortable giving one of your team members an executive review and showing up in that meeting without having reviewed it first.

[8:39] You need to develop that level of trust and belief and delegation in your team. Now you still may want to review it, but that review is going to be much more about you gaining information and being prepared as opposed to you holding the standard and making sure that it's good enough before they go do the presentation. Because you've already want to have built that level of success so that you fully trust the person they're empowered to go deliver the result. That is an uncomfortable step for most people. And it's that discomfort that stands in the way. This is where delegation is as much mindset as it is skill set. You most likely got to where you are in your career by being on top of the details, by making sure things go well, by having a high standard and holding that high standard, making sure that anything that comes from you or your team meets that high standard.

[9:39] But you want to be in a position where you can lean into the discomfort and start to experiment with it and see how can I give my team more and more accountability and more and more empowerment and leeway to own this project end to end. To be wildly successful, to take the lumps when it doesn't go well. How can you as a leader build the confidence so that you can be successful in doing that? That's why so much of what I do is not just the clarity on what do you need to do differently? How do you delegate differently? How do you move from delegating tasks to projects to objectives? But to get the mindset to find what is it in you that's holding you back and how can you be bigger than that? How can you conquer that, step through it so that you can be more effective as a leader in giving people substantial, important work to do?

[10:35] That is what delegation is about. Of course, the third element is creating a learning environment and creating a learning environment. This is all good CEOs do this. And the learning environment is not just for the sake of learning. But think for a moment, would you rather have a team of people who's really smart, but not getting any smarter? Or would you rather have a team of people who's maybe not quite as smart, but they are working on, they're on fire and they're working well together and they're getting smarter and better and more effective every day. In the long run, which team would you want? Which team would you want to be a part of? So creating that learning environment is key. And the most important thing to do to create a learning environment is to be effective at accountability and feedback, which requires trust.

[11:19] A lot of that comes top-down. And I want to share with you a model for giving feedback that I actually heard in a parenting conference, but it applies 100% to the work context. And it's this idea of whether you have high standards or low standards and whether you're highly supportive or not supportive, low level of support. I'm going to give you a couple of different models here. One is high standards and low support. I read an article in the Wall Street Journal a couple months ago about investment banking entry-level people who hated the email that would come back from the senior investment banking partner that said, not good enough. Go fix it. That is a high-level standard, high standard saying, hey, this is what we expect from you and your work did not meet the bar. But it's a low level of support. There's no information in that. It's simply go fix it, which is not very helpful if you're an entry-level person. If you knew it was wrong in the first place, you would have addressed it up front.

[12:15] That's high standards, low support. The other extreme also happens, where you have low standards and high support. What that sounds like is, oh, great job. I so appreciate the work you did on this. Wow, you're such a good team player. Thanks for driving this effort. Meanwhile, the work does not meet your expectations. You're holding a low standard. You're highly supportive, and you're giving them a lot of positive feedback, and you're telling them how great they are and how much you appreciate their contribution, but you're not holding them to the standard. And what that means, especially for a lot of high achievers who personally have high standards, is you end up doing the work, which of course is not a recipe for success.

[12:56] That situation is probably a little more likely to happen in the parenting sense, but it can happen at work when you want to be liked. When you want to be liked, you're very positive, you're supportive of people, you're giving them positive feedback, but you're not telling them when their standards are not up to par. That is also not a successful way of learning and holding people accountable. You may have already guessed the best solution is high standards and high accountability. You want both to be elevated. What does that sound like? It sounds something like this. I appreciate the hard work that you put into this. There's some areas where it's not yet good enough. I'm going to have a conversation with you about this because I want to invest in you. I know you are capable of doing even better work of polishing this and getting to a level where your work is 100% top notch. And I want to work with you to get there. Here are the specific things that I want you to address.

[13:52] When you have that conversation with someone, you are supporting them because you're telling them that you believe in them, that they can get there, that they can improve supporting that learning environment. And you're giving them the very specific things of what they need to do to do differently. Now, of course, when you do that, you want to be a little sensitive that you don't get into the micromanager area. But when you get specific about what they need to do differently, it can be, for example, the analysis that you did had some errors in it. I could point out one or two, but I want you to go back through the analysis and do a double check. And I want you to build into your process a way of presenting this in the future. What do you think a process could look like that would help prevent you from bringing analysis with errors in the future? How could you build that process? Now you're having a conversation that guides them through not just fixing the, issue one time but establishing a way to fix it in the future.

[14:44] Many people think about these kind of conversations and get uncomfortable, and i want to encourage you to think about it differently don't think about sitting across the table from someone in an adversarial conversation and saying that's not good enough and they're going to get defensive and you're telling them where it's wrong and they're going to argue with you. If you anticipate that kind of across-the-table dynamic, you're going to help create that dynamic. Instead, think of it as sitting next to each other, working side-by-side to achieve a goal. I'm going to bring back the parenting example, much like you would with your kid when your kid is learning to ride a bike or throw a baseball or doing anything that they're learning that is new. You expect there to be a learning journey. Expect the same thing with your team, but hold high standards of what your expectations are and be supportive of them. Tell them that you believe in them, support them and say, I want to work with you to address this. And I want to work with you so that next time we sit down together, you've already gone through a process to make sure that your work is as high quality as possible so that this conversation can continue to elevate that higher and higher, creating that learning environment.

[16:02] Carol Dweck wrote a groundbreaking book in about 20 years ago now called Mindset. And she defined the two primary mindsets that people have as a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. Of course, today we use that word much more broadly, but think about it. The fixed mindset is I'm as good as I'm going to be. And everything that I do is an assessment of how good that is. And so I only want to do things that I can do and be successful at. I don't want to stretch because if I stretch and I fall down, well, that's it because it just means I'm not good enough. The growth mindset, on the other hand, is the mindset that says I'm continuing to grow and learn as a person. And I encourage you to embrace that growth mindset for yourself and for your team. Think about how a CEO manages their team. They've got strategic thought partners. They've got people that can drive objectives, that can execute against objectives, not just tasks. And they create a learning environment where they hold the team accountable and the team holds itself accountable so that everybody learns and gets stronger and better and you perform at a higher and higher level. That is a growth mindset from a CEO. How are you applying that in your team?

[17:20] Where do you need the most work among these three ways that a CEO manages their team?

[17:26] Thought partners, execution, learning environment, and accountability. Where do you need the most help? And what is the step that you can take? Because you are learning and growing as a leader. It's so easy to measure ourselves against the people around us and to assess ourselves and say, oh, I'm just not good enough and that's a weakness of mine. Right? So far. Maybe that's a weakness of yours so far, but it's not permanent because you are growing as a leader. You are growing as a person. And if you zoom way out and you think about why am I even doing this work? Why am I in this job? My hope for you is that you're not just doing this job to get the paycheck. Sure, that's a part of it. But you're also doing this job because you care about it, because it gives you some pride in some way. You take pride in your work and it's some part of how you're contributing to the world. There's some meaning in it. And the third dimension of that, I might suggest, is how it transforms you. How this work presents you with challenging situations, things you haven't confronted before, opportunities to try something new, to learn, to grow as a person and build skills in the workplace that can benefit you throughout your life. Think about if you get really good at these high expectations and high support at work, how you can bring that home and use it raising your children.

[18:53] All of these things all flow together. And so think about how can you grow as a leader? How can you become more effectively effective? How can you manage your team like a CEO manages your team? Identify a step you can take and go out and do it do something different is not a podcast for education i hope you learn something but more than that i hope you do something as a result of this because it is in the doing that you change as a person that you grow that you learn and you become an even bigger and better version of yourself and it starts by doing something different.