- We need like a stick that you can just slam in a boom. I think there's sound effects on this app someplace that we can push and we can have like booms going on. - That would be cool. We'll put that right on there with the strobe lights for your studio there in Bampton. - If I hit this table with a boom stick, the table would be gone. - No, it'll flip over. I don't have to take a time out. All right. This is Unleashing Leadership. I'm Travis Massillo of C Planning Group with my co-host here, Dave Nerchier, Chief Operating Officer of C Planning Group as well. And this podcast is all about, I was going to say booms, but they want to mess up the intro, right? Because it's a work of art, but it's all about how we implement takeaways from great books into our business. Today, we're working on the book, Build by Tony Fidel, and our takeaway, if we so choose to use this one, Dave, it's up to you, thumbs up or thumbs down, individual contributors tend to over rely on the management and executive team think tank. They need to periodically look up and become aware. All right. And as always, those favorite like or subscribe to us wherever you are listening or watching every time you do that, somebody else is going to be able to find the show because it makes the algorithm God's happy. And our sponsor for the day is Cutthroat College Planning podcast helping people avoid going broke because of the cost of college check them out at nqrmedia.com or wherever podcasts can be found. If you're driving and you can't remember that, you should pull over and you should write it down. Cutthroat college planning, you might just be able to find ways to get hundreds of thousands of dollars of scholarships for your kids, maybe avoid $70,000 mistakes because the kids like the cookies on their visit or stuff like that. I don't know. Check out the podcast. You get some pretty good pointers from K a lot and Hector, the co-hosts on that show. All right. So back to us today, Dave, are we thumbs up on, uh, individual, so we did individual contributor last time we can find that yesterday. Yep. Wow. I don't know if it was yesterday. It could have been Friday. If this is Monday. Whatever days you're listening, we did that on the last episode. So now we're kind of, uh, going the next step, individual contributors tend to over rely on the management and executive team think tank, they need to periodically look up and become aware. I remember this passage in the book, do you want to cover it or, or is this kind of like redundant? I think, I think this is a good continuation. All right. That's why we need the boom button. If we want to like bury it, just like explode it. It's gone. All right. Well, then let's, let's cover this. And I remember in the book, they were, um, uh, really just talking about, okay. So I've decided I'm not going to run the show. I'm comfortable being world class producer guy. Yep. Individual contributor, world class though, I'm going to be as, as good as they come. And I'm going to lead from within. Come on. Everybody. These are standards. We're going to hold everybody accountable. This is where we're going. Help management out. You know, I'm going to be the biggest cheerleader in the room to as far as supporting the mission. Yep. The point about you have to periodically look around and become aware is you have specialized knowledge. You know things. You're in the weeds and management, they're trying to do the best job that they can. Leadership's trying to do the best job as they can. But if you start to see all these fissures and cracks and problems and you go, nope, I'm sure management's got it. I'm sure. And you never bring up the problem until there's an absolute chaotic meltdown. Not only, you know, could that destroy the business or hurt the business really bad? It could cost you your job, not because you didn't bring it up, but because simply from the fact that, well, I guess it could be because you didn't bring up, but more likely because the company could suffer so badly as to lay people off. Right. And so the whole point is is, oh, it's okay, you're not challenging leadership or challenging management. If you look around and go, why are we doing that again? Where are we going? I saw this thing over there happening. Just make sure everybody's aware of seems like we're getting, you know, a lot of complaints over in that section, or it seems like our retention rates are running down or I'm talking to the customers. And this is what the customers are saying. Things that maybe the rest of your team or your management or your leadership group might not know because they're maybe not touching the same things that you're touching. Yep. Yeah. I mean, it's important. I think the message here is that you still have the responsibility to the company, to your colleagues, if you see something, say something type of thing, right? Like, hey, this isn't working, or I know there's a problem here. Why isn't it been addressed or what's going on, right? You have this specialized knowledge more than likely. Yeah. Yeah. Use it. The management team does not. Right. And I think the flip, the other message here to, to a management or leadership team would be make sure you get look at, I see what you're doing here. Yeah. Make sure you're not just making all the calls without knowing all the knowledge, right? Yeah. Talk to your damn people. Yes. In fact, a couple episodes we talked about not having hero worship and being able to, you know, I have mutual respect. I mean, the leaders got to have enough respect to their people to say, Dave, it's important to me what you see. Exactly. Talk to me if you see something like this, you know, or look, I may not, you might make an observation and I might have already accounted for it, but I don't want you not to tell me about your observation. Yeah. Right. That builds so much trust, right? Yeah. I trust your knowledge. It builds respect two way, right, because we're, it's always a two way street and you don't, you don't come in as a manager or leader and say, this is how we're doing it, right? Because that, what's that going to do? That's going to, you know, they know everything or they don't, they don't talk to us or listen us. Come, you know, hey, here's, here's what we're thinking. Yeah. And, and, and throw it out there, right? Sometimes it's good to get that feedback before you come in with the hammer and make the decision. Let's talk about giving and receiving that and you and I did a new, new hire meeting on this one time where we were talking about giving and receiving feedback. And I think that there's leadership that can be narcissistic and there's a problem with leadership that is just overbearing. But I also think that there's an issue with individual contribution, in this case, trying to speak up and bring things to the point about making sure that you're properly putting together your arguments or your observations when you bring them forward. Yes. Because when we say, hey, you need to make observation and bring it forward, that's not an invitation for a bitch fest. That's not like, oh, give me every degree. They looked at me wrong. They're too loud. That guy was playing music in his cube, you know, it's too cold in here, too hot in here. Right. I don't understand why people, you know, stayed late yesterday and kept working or, you know, like, we've heard every complaint under the sun. And what happens is when people either can't back it up, like if you're going to complain about something, somebody else, the first question I'm going to ask you, I'm going to say, have you talked to that other person about your issue with them? Right. And, and if you go, well, no, it's like, well, then why are you wasting my time? You don't like the fact that they interrupt you and it's distracting, you know, when you're trying to work. Have you talked to them about the fact that they do that and it's frustrating? No. Why are you taddling on them? You go back, stop being part of the problem. You go back. And this is like that whole, I saw a meme and it was talking about there was a lion and a donkey or a tiger and a donkey. And the, the donkey was like, the sky is green. The sky is green. And the tiger was like, it is not, it's blue. It is not as blue. And he's like, well, let's go to the lion and let's, let's have the king of the jungle decide. And the tiger says, fine, we'll go to the lion and have him decide. So they go to the, and I'm probably telling the story wrong, but this is the gist of it. They go to the lion and the lion says, um, uh, what did he do? He somehow the donkey was very happy with the results. I can't remember if he agreed with the donkey or if it's, so let's say he agrees with the thing. He goes, yeah, as you're right. This guy is green and the donkey is excited and he runs away. And then the tiger says to the lion, like what, you know, I mean, why did you do that? And he's like, why are you bringing this shit to me? Like this, this is not worth my time. You're bigger than this. You're better than that. You know, like, why are you even bothering to have this argument with the donkey type of thing? You know, and it's just like, we, we've, we've seen it before. People have a beef with somebody and they never addressed the issue with somebody. And a lot of times it's little issues that manifest in the bigger issues because we're afraid to take care of our own business. Um, or like, okay, so you say a problem and I know like with Ben Harro, which when we did the hard thing about the hard things, he's like, I want all the information to come up, whether you have a solution or not. But I also want you to think about what you're bringing up because if all you do is ever bring up problems, this problem after problem, after problem, and it's not constructive at all. It's, it's like the known issues. Yeah. If it's the same stuff over and over again, and all you're doing is just dragging every meeting down into the toilet, eventually when you do talk, you're just going to get cut off and put back in the corner. And then you're going to say, nobody respects me and it's like, you haven't, you've done enough now to damage the respect in the room towards you. Like this is you, you own part of this problem. Could people be more patient? Yes. But you know what? We're at work. We have X amount of minutes in the day. And if we have to continually waste minutes to give you context about the same issues over and over and over again, then you're going to lose people's respect. That's how that goes. So it's not that you can't bring up an idea, but read the room a little bit. You know, and, and, and, and, and make sure that you're, when you go into meeting and you want to bring something up, make sure you're prepared. You know, don't be like, I heard so and so said this, that somebody else said that. That doesn't, come on. You know, what can I do with that? There's nothing I can do with that, right? And why am I entertaining like the donkey and the, the, the tiger with the lion? Why am I entertaining this garbage? Yep. And talk about it ties back and like over relying on management. If you're, yeah, you're relying on them on, on this, this management team and this, you know, example you give to make these little, like decisions on stuff that shouldn't even be brought up in that audience or that meeting where, like what you then teach is, yeah, you know, handle these things amongst each other because that's where the, that's where the solutions are going to come from. Not somebody who's not even part of it saying, yeah, do that because then you're never going to win, right? One side wins. One side loses. If you could come to an agreement within the group or whoever's affected by this, that's how you saw it. And the other thing I would say too, because again, being in many and many of these things and developing this perspective over time, you know, also pick the battle or pick the hill you want to die at, you know, like, um, if you've got issues or you've got concerns, you know, like, if you're going to be a showstopper, make sure it's something we're stopping the show, you know, and I've seen people do, you know, stop meetings for very frivolous things. You know, this is an issue and they're bringing up and it's like, okay, we're going to deal with the issue. But this is, you know, and they kind of just dig in and it's like, okay, stop it. You've now wasted, if I've got 10 people on this call and you've spent 15 minutes, you haven't spent just 15 minutes, you spent 15 minutes times 10, yeah, you know, who's writing the check for that amount of time? If it's something that could have been handled in two minutes outside of the call. And then the other thing is don't be a freaking hypocrite. If you've told me, like, let's say that you and I have talked about an issue outside of a meeting and you have a certain perspective, you better show up at that meeting with and not contradict yourself. No blindsided. Yeah, because if you show up to that meeting and you try to, you know, spring a trap, you know what I mean, or maybe you don't do that, but you completely change your perspective on it and taking a conversation that we've developed. And then, you know, represent it differently within a meeting like that and it derails a meeting. Again, you're going to lose respect because you lose trust, you know, it's like, I can't trust you to have situational awareness or understanding, you know, what's appropriate when it's appropriate. And you know, we used to, for our shareholder meetings, you know, we'd call all the shareholders at a time. Hey, before you show up to the meeting, do you have any questions? Make those opportunities and use them. And that's going to help you actually set up more meaningful and better conversation when you do want to bring something up because you can bring it up knowing that you have support to bring it up or knowing that that's not the time and the place to actually bring it up. But you know, leadership has to foster that type of communication, but you know, the individual contributors, you also have a responsibility to not be idiots about this stuff. Yeah, ultimately, I mean, like a lot of things, right? Leadership sets the tone and it's a balance. You want people at the company to feel like they can bring issues and problems to you because that's helpful, right? Things don't fester or become bigger issues. But you also want to set the tone that we're not, we're not going to be dealing with like petty stuff or little things in there that could be handled outside of this venue. Yeah. Yeah. Stay out of the petty stuff. The leader is down into a petty disagreement or something like that without forcing the employees just to sit down and deal with it. Yeah. The more you just become permanent, you know, date your partner. Yeah. Yeah. So just stay out of that shit right from the beginning. [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]
