(upbeat music) - This is Unleashing Leadership, and I'm your host Travis Moss, CEO of Seed Planning Group with our co-host Dave Nurchi, our Chief Operating Officer. And this podcast is all about how we implement takeaways from great books right into our business. And today, we are working on the takeaway from the book, Build by Tony Fiddell. In our takeaway, we're getting into, we got more management stuff here. We're like on a manager kick. A company doesn't need managers until it grows, and then it is clear that it needs high quality management. I've mentioned before, Build is one of these books that I feel like I've seen my own story. And so I definitely want it to well, and this one a little bit today. - Let's do it. - I think this is a good one for all small businesses to think about. But as always, there was a favor, like or subscribe, give us a thumbs up, give us five stars, put some comments in there, saying that we're great. And Dave's got, you know, he's drinking vodka out of his thermostat, again, there during the podcast, vodka water. - Comment what you think is in the-- - There you go. If you get it right, you get a nest thermostat. And you get a nest thermostat. (both laughing) Only if we can get it donated from best. - Right. - Probably is an expert. All right. But anyway, our sponsor for the day is NQR Media Inc, parent company of this podcast where we unapologetically bring to light things that need to be talked about. NQRMedia.com or look for NQR, wherever you find content, and you'll find out our production. So instead of looking for unleashing leadership, type in, not quite right media, like on Spotify or Apple, wherever you'll see all the different shows that we do. - All right. So Dave, a company doesn't need managers until, so when we were little, like there's six of us or something. I was like, no, the titles don't matter. We've talked about this before. Titles don't matter. And, you know, everybody can be a chief and in charge of stuff and because we're all professionals, I expect everybody to take care of business. - Yep. - And that works when you're little because there's nobody to manage. And then you get bigger and you get people who are more and more dislocated from the top of the food chain. And that all seems to kind of, when you get all chiefs and what's it? How do they say it? All chefs and no bottle washers? Something like that. - Or all chiefs and no Indians or something like that? I don't know. When everybody's the boss and, you know, number one, you can't have consistent leadership because if everybody's the boss, everybody's making their own rules. And if one of the bosses infringes on the other one, you just have a turf war. The other thing that happens is once you figure out you need management, which will kick in right around 20 to 25 employees, the next issue will be you'll put management potentially in place that's not real management. It's somebody who was there, who was one of the original bosses, you know, of themselves. - Right. - And you'll say, well, you know, since you've been here, you can be in charge of this group or this team over here now. And it doesn't mean that they're prepared to be a manager or that they're a good manager. They can, in fact, be your top individual contributors. But you said, look, you know, you've been here the longest. The management job, we're gonna pay you a little bit more to be responsible for that. We trust you, so we're gonna put you in charge of it. And then you find out down the road, okay, well, that doesn't work. And now we have to bring in management. Now all of a sudden everybody's getting their nose back because, you know, who are these other people coming in and telling the former bosses, you know, what to do now? And so it's just like this spiral or this cycle. But I think in PWC language, you'd call it gateways that you pass through that are just natural phenomena. I don't think it matters what business you're in. I think that when you get 20 to 30 employees, you're gonna hit this wall. If you're a growth firm, if you're just like, you know, if you're a mom and pop shop and you're not intending to grow, you're not trying to grow, you could probably hang out and not have structured management. But if you're growing, if you're a dynamic business, you're not gonna survive if you don't start building a management team and a high quality management team at that. - So what do you think, like, what is the biggest reason management is needed? Like you hit that number of people, like what is like the biggest reason because of the, there's like this connect now or because there's people who aren't. - If you hit that number, presumably you're doing a lot of business, right? So there's lots of things moving through your systems. And when you only had 10 things moving through your systems, it was easy to keep trackable. Now all of a sudden you've got 100 things moving through the system at a time. You can't keep track of it all. So things start to fall off and disappear. And people who maybe could get away with doing things on spreadsheets and stuff. Now the system has, or maybe not even with spreadsheets, maybe just by like, you know, writing it down a notepad. Now all of a sudden it has to become a systematized process and it has to be archived. And it has to be in a way that other people can look at it and communicate about it without actually coming and talking to you. And that's got to be built and designed and structured and managed. And so it becomes less and less about, well, I'm doing my job and I've got three or four people that kind of support me doing my job. And more and more about, I've got three or four people that need to do their own job, which is different than from my job. And I have to keep them all headed in the same direction. And at the same time, we have to build out systems and processes and other structures so that we can have, I mean, communication is the lifeblood of a business, I think, so that we can have better communication so we can be more effective and more efficient. - Yep, yeah, communication's probably the biggest, I would say is that now you need a more formalized method for communicating changes, right? And updates and processes or whatever. - Or decision making process. I mean, that's another big one. So if you're used to, and this is how it works for us for a while, you've got five people, you get around the table and you all agree on what you're doing. And maybe one of you's got a little bit more information than the other ones. And so you're kind of like just passing that around the table. Now, all of a sudden you've got 30 people, you're trying to make decisions. You've got decisions that subsets your team or putting together materials where there's very specialized knowledge. And then you've got other people at the table, who are at the table because they've always been at the table, but they want to influence the decisions, but they're not respecting the information and where that, there's some internal politics and internal personal opinions that get involved with the business because you have no hierarchy of actual management. Management is decision making. So it's, when you think about management leadership, it's like the nervous system of an organization. It's the decision making apparatus. Who makes that decision? Okay, I don't make that decision. Somebody above me makes a decision. So it comes to me, I send it up, they make a decision, they send it back down, right? Or somebody else makes a decision and sends it down. If you have to fight every decision, no matter what level it's on, because there's no management structure, or people are constantly outside of their lanes. You can't get anything done. And all you do is you end up with infighting and stagnation and people quitting and people miserable and silos and people sitting off by the water cooler, again, bitching and moaning because somebody didn't, you know, somebody got in a fight over their idea. - Yep, yeah, it slows things down, right? 'Cause now you need everybody on board to do something or I don't know who to go to. I don't know how to make this decision or who is making it. If you need sign off from every level in the company, every time you wanna do something, no matter how big or small it is, your growth is gonna suffer tremendously. I think the other part that we've noticed and that has developed quite a bit at seed is as you start getting bigger, it's the, we'll call it like the career path kind of thing, right, you start bringing in more and more people and hopefully if you're doing a really great job recruiting in that process and you're a company that is, you know, causing a revolution and doing all this stuff differently, you're gonna attract really great people, right? And when you get these really great people, they're gonna wanna know, well, what's my path? What am I doing? What am I responsible for? How do I grow here? So that's very different than, like you mentioned when you have the six people, everyone's already kind of, you know, either making their own title or kind of already in charge of something and they're just doing their job. That's not the case with 20, 25, 30 people or more. So you need to be able to communicate as a manager. Here's the career path. Here's what we have in store for you in this position, right? And in this role and does that look right to you? Like how do we get you to that point? What is this tour duty that you're gonna do? What is the next? Do you wanna shift somewhere else? All those kind of conversations with people who come to your company and want to perform and develop need to happen. So you need management to do that. - Well, the other thing too, we did the book Surrounded by Idiots. That was one of our earlier seasons. And in Surrounded by Idiots, there's four primary personality types and they're represented by colors, blue, red, green and yellow. Red is somebody like me who's basically fast forward. Blue is somebody who's very calculated, you need to all the information. Marine is somebody, maybe a little bit more of a procrastinator, a little bit unsure, but a very good support type of person as long as they have confidence and whatever they're following. And then yellow is like the cheerleader, right? And they're typically the ones too that you gotta keep getting back on track because old shiny ball gotta go. And not all those colors are ideal for leadership and management. And that's one of the things that happens. You can start a company as a blue personality or as a green personality, or even as a yellow personality. And when it's small, you can get away with it. You can get away with it with charisma. You can get away with it because, you know, you only need to support a couple of people, you know, type of thing and you can sell enough product or service to get there. But as it gets bigger and it has to become more than just you. And you have to have an infrastructure and a system that can provide a living and provide profit and all this type of stuff for multiple people that are not you, that you can't compensate for. You can't overcompensate to that degree to kind of cover up any deficiencies and productivity or something like that. That's where I think the type of person that's in leadership or management becomes very, very important versus just, this is a great guy. This is somebody who's always wanting to be in management. This is somebody who took classes, they've got an MBA or whatever, it's like great. But also, is it the right type of person? Is it a, you know, if you put somebody in charge of a team and the team has to make quick decisions and has a lot of deadlines and they're a blue personality, you're never gonna hit your deadlines. And you can't if you need somebody to be aggressive and to move the ball and to fight the battles and need to be fought, you can't put a green in charge because they're passive and they avoid conflict normal. You know, and they tend to hold grudges, that type of stuff. So you have to really understand as the company grows, I need to get professional management. We need to get people who understand how to actually handle a company that is as dynamic and at this phase that our company is in. - Yep. - Or we won't ever get to that next level. - Yeah, that's why it's so important. The leadership team that you do build, right? You mentioned like the colors, like you need a good, it's good to have some. - Sledgehammers? - Yeah, and to balance that out, right? You need a good, a team, you have a bunch of pure rads just going forward, right? You might need to hit the brakes here and there and think about the direction sometimes. So it is, it's building that team and in the right way when you need it, not before you need it or not with the wrong type of people. (upbeat music) (record scratch)
