(upbeat music) - This is unleashing leadership. I'm your host Travis Moss with our coat. Well, I guess I'm your cohost, not your host, but cohost. This guy over here, he's Dave Nirchey. He's our chief operating officer seat planning group. I think he left me out. I'm the CEO at seat planning group. - You are? - The only reason why that's important is so that you know that we actually are doing this stuff every day that we're talking about. It's just to tell you and make sure that you're aware that if we're talking about it, we're actually doing it. We're fighting the fight every day. We're going out there trying to figure out how to get better, how to get people around us better, how to put the right teams together, how to get them to be more efficient, more effective, more adaptable, that kind of stuff figuring out how to better serve our clients. So we're trying to bring that information to people, you know, what we go through. One of the best ways that we do this 'cause we do it within the businesses is literally through book reports. So we kind of, we take books and we have all of our new hires through book reports. A lot of them continue to have it as they continue to develop within our company. But to prove to them that this is so valuable that learning from books and implementing ideas is so important, this is something that we just keep doing. And we wanna show them as an example how you can take these ideas and implement them into business and make a better business. So the key there, you said the key there is and implementing, right? A lot of people can read a book and learn from it. So what we're also teaching them right from the start is you can read all the books you want, but if you just keep kind of learning and you know, keeping it somewhere in your head or just, oh yeah, that's a great idea. I'm on the next book. How do you actually implement that? Like what is the process there? Who do you have to get on board? How do you sell that idea or get people aligned with you? So the and implementing is the key there. - Well, the three dimensional part, right? Getting yourself involved and in deep with an idea. And you know, the funny thing about ideas, they don't have to work. You're gonna do ideas and they're gonna fail. It doesn't mean you don't try it again. - Right. - So many people are afraid of failure, screw that, you know? You should, your victory should be how many times you've tried an idea or different ideas. - Right. - Now how many have been successful? How many have you tried from start to finish? - How many times have you taken action on something? - Yep. - All right, so to finish our introduction. - Okay, those. - I took us on a tangent there. That's new. - Wow, I'm so impressed. I am impressed, actually. I didn't mean that facetiously, I am. Thank you. Thank you for interrupting. I like how that worked out. - You got it anytime. - There you go. We're working on "Takeaways from the Book Build" by Tony Fidal. One of our, they've, you know, speaking from both of us, from our favorite books. And for me, very personally, a book that has really helped me through some of the challenges that we've worked through with our business. Our key takeaway for today, and we have not pre-looked at this, this is like a fortune cookie. So Dave, your fortune today is... - Yeah, that was a week we, I was trying to... Okay, anyway, what do you do, where you work, who you work with, and learn from matters? Sound good? - Sound good. - We want to keep this cookie or we want to smash it into everyone? - It's a good one. - Do this one. - Will we eat this cookie? - All right. And before we do though, we do have a sponsor. Ditch The Stute Podcast, a 2023 podcast of the year by Quill Podcast Agency. Check them out on Ditch The Stutes. I'm actually a co-host there with Steve Campo. We focus on getting more out of your money in life. You can check it out at DitchTheStutes.com or wherever else you can find podcasts. And I did forget, it was a favor. Give us a thumbs up, a like or subscribe to us. It helps other people find the show. If we can get enough people finding the show, we can build an entire community about personal and professional development, maybe checking out books, get some back and forth on other books that we should be reading or could be reading that type of stuff. I think it can really help move the needle for a lot of people. All right Dave, so what do you do, where you work and who you work with and learn from matters? I think we agree with this. I think we actually tell our new hires this. When we changed up our hiring about our whole process, what was that about a year ago? When I think about any issues we've had with hires, I can go back to the fact that we have short changed that hiring process. And what that hiring process does is it actually puts this front and center to potential employees. It's about culture, it's about personal development, it's about professional development and it's about our commitment to those things. And there's no, like you can't be an imposter on this. Like you are coming into an atmosphere where you will be pushed, you will be talked to with correctness and frankness. We are doing it to try to help you grow and develop because if you can grow and develop, you can help the other employees, you can help the clients, you know, like that's what we need. And I think more importantly, what the world needs is more people who can grow like that continually. And it's not like a hardship. A lot of people growth is a hardship. It's distress, it's like, it's not fair. Growth isn't supposed to be easy and it's not supposed to feel good all the time. Sometimes you need that other party, they're saying, get back up, let's go. It's funny, Jess Blake has been on our show before as a guest, one of our wealth managers as he planning group. She was saying her favorite quote today was from an episode, a couple episodes ago where it was, fuck your feelings. If you want to feel like a winner, something like, if you want to feel like a winner, you need to go out and just win or something like that. I forget the exact quote, but I absolutely love the fact that that got back and she's like, best quote ever. You know, if you want to feel like a winner, you need to go win, right? That's what you want to build. And I think it really matters if that environment is designed on purpose to support that. Yeah. Doesn't matter, you're going to be a product of the environment you're in and some fashion, right? Some people can, some people have the ability to improve that environment, right? And maybe change it a bit, but there's going to be something that is part of you when you're in that environment. So, number one, I would say that what we said, what you do, where you work, who you work with and learn from matters, it matters if you're interested, if you want to win, right? Like what you said before, if you're not interested in all the distractions, if you want to win, you want to get better and develop, be the best version of yourself, that's when it matters. So that's number one. There's kind of like a prerequisite there, right? It doesn't matter to everyone. The people who want to go through the motions or just kind of fill a number, probably doesn't matter. But if you're not that type of person and you want to make a difference, all of this does matter because that's the influence you're going to get from the people around you. And it is going to create the environment for you to grow and hopefully be someone who steps up in some sort of leadership role or whatever it is, you're going to learn from people the way they act and approach things, especially the people you work with, right, like it says here. So what you're doing at that company or the role you're in is going to shape your growth and development. So it's probably one of the most important things. - Well, I mean, we've done, what was the back to the ideal team player, I think it was? The virtues, humble, hungry and smart, right? If you're going to learn from somebody, if you have certain values or virtues, right, values to refresh everybody is what you talk about, virtues and what you actually do. - Yep. You want to be in an environment that supports those positive virtues as much as possible. That actually says when you don't show up, why didn't you show up? - They care. You know why people in a strong environment challenge you is because they care about you. - Yep. - And they care about the other stakeholders. They care about the customers involved. They care about the employees involved. They care about the business involved. They care about the families involved, the people at home. They care about that and they know what it takes to be successful. Most people don't know what it takes to be successful because we kind of are building this entitlement society. But the people who really go on to do amazing things, they are people who figure out what it means to be successful. And I think about it like this, I think you could draw a line for work environments. And I haven't thought too deeply on this. There's probably much more complicated in this, but this is the first thing that came to mind to me. You have two sides to this. You have two ways that you can go. You can go to a soft environment or a hard environment. And in a soft environment, there's really maybe two legs of that stool. And you have depression and you have victimhood. And because when you go about your business as, we need to worry and make sure that nobody's feelings are ever heard. And we don't talk about certain things. We don't try things because there might be failure. And when it's a very soft environment, when you're walking on pins and needles all the time, in my opinion, that's where depression comes from. Because if everybody's special, nobody's actually special. It's just a bunch of everybody. And we've seen this. And we had to, in our growth, we've had moments in our history where we had to look at it and say, "Look, the environment is so soft. It's all about the drama." And people being depressed about their lives and everything that we can't even functionally do the work that we need to do anymore. And it's a slippery slope because once you go down, there's really hard to come back, especially with the same people. And then you have victimhood. So you have people who are feeling depressed and feeling like, "Why can't I be promoted because I've been here longer and somebody else or something?" Then it's like, "This is why, because you judge me because of xplazy." And it's like, "No, it's because you're not good at that job. You don't have the skillset or the experience that we need." And then the other side of that line, so that's the left-hand side. If you want to think about it just from, I'm right-handed. So if I draw a line down the middle, left, and then right, just how my mind works, then you have the hard side. And on the hard side, I think the danger with that, because people say, "Well, I don't want to be hard." On the hard side, you have kind of two halves of that too. You have strong and cruel. So you can be so hard that you can be cruel. And I'm not talking about that. We don't want to be cruel, but you can be hard in a strong way. Let me give you an example of what it means to be prepared, what it means to be responsible, what it means to be accountable, right? When you say, "Yeah, my bad," what happens? Not, "Yeah, my bad." Okay, as long as you admitted it, we don't want to hurt your feelings anymore by actually administering any kind of corrective action or anything. Let's just kind of like dot the eyes and cross the teeth and get you moving on. No, what does that mean when you screw up? Do you understand the ramifications of that? Does that cost you anything? You know, those types of things. So that's strength. That's not cruel. Yeah, and that all of that aids in the development of all parties involved, right? Not only like the person giving that type of feedback, the person receiving it. And it just creates a different level of trust, right? I mean, anyone who's been in these situations and has had these type of conversations with employees, you start to understand the more direct and straight forward you are with somebody. They know your intention. I think that's probably what I'm trying to say is, if I go to somebody and when you have a direct conversation and it's, and they know your intention is to help them, that's much different if they don't, right? If you're kind of just hide behind or you want to spare feelings and all that, and all of a sudden one day you just blow up 'cause you had enough, right? And you dig into someone. Now they're like, whoa, is this person out for me? They're not going to be able to understand it. Yeah, because there was no trust built along the way and there was no intentionality behind it. But if you get that out there, it makes everything smoother because you just know, you know that, hey, I'm doing this for your own benefit, for the company benefit, let's move on from it and move forward from it. Well, when I think of people who win, if you think of athlete to win, if you think of people who have really been successful, they come from a hard environment, a hard on the strength side, right? And so those are winners. So by process of elimination, that's where the winners live. Right. So if you want to develop, if you're a young person and you're looking to develop, where would you want to work? You would want to work with the winners 'cause that's how you learn to win. You don't learn to win from people who aren't winners. I don't want to call anybody a loser because that would be rude. But if it's the people who don't win, you don't learn much from them other than how to lose. Right. You learn to win from winners. (upbeat music)
