EntreLeadership - 14 Minutes of Leadership Fails

Starting point is 00:00:05 We spend a lot of time talking about bad hires and how to avoid them. But sometimes the bigger problem isn't the employee, it's the leader. If you're a leader, stick with me for a second. Most leaders don't wake up trying to be bad bosses. They're overwhelmed. They're moving fast. They're trying to move the business forward. But let's be honest, some bosses just shouldn't be bosses.

Starting point is 00:00:27 So today, Entree Leadership's head coach, John Falcons, is reacting to stories about bad leaders. This isn't about shaming anyone. It's about helping you level up your leadership game and avoid becoming a cautionary tale on the internet. Let's get to it. All right, we're starting off strong by looking at a few of the infamous Tiger Oil memos. These came out of the now-defunct, Houston-based Tiger Oil Company

Starting point is 00:00:53 in the 70s. There's about 22 of them total, all from their CEO, Edward Tiger Mike, and let's just say he was very direct. direct. Here they are. Per Edward Mike Davis's orders. There will be no more birthday celebrations, birthday cakes, levity, or celebrations of any kind within the office. This is a business office. If you have to celebrate, do it after office hours on your own time. I hate this guy already. The second one. The furniture in this office is expensive. Do not put your feet on it.

Starting point is 00:01:35 I kind of get that. I am paying you to work, not slouch in your chair with your feet on a desk or a table. I do not go to your home and put my feet on your furniture. So don't put your feet on mine. He's just a very grumpy person. Okay. Get this one. I swear.

Starting point is 00:01:56 But since I'm the owner of this company, that is my privilege. And this privilege is not to be interpreted the same for any employee. That differentiates me from you. And I want to keep it that way. There will be absolutely no swearing by any employee, male or female. That's an important call out in this office ever. Except for, of course, when you're swearing, lead by example, not. All right.

Starting point is 00:02:24 Last one here. Do not speak to me when you see me. I don't even know if I need to read the rest of this. Do not speak to me when you see me. If I want to speak to you, I will do so. I want to save my throat. I don't want to ruin it by saying hello to all of you SOBs. And he didn't write SOB.

Starting point is 00:02:49 Oh my gosh. He seems like the worst person in the world. Tiger Mike, not who you want to work for. All right, we got some videos to watch. Let's check this out. So I had this boss, and they would call me into their office, and we would start talking the numbers. And they had a really great ability to do quick mental math, to do back of the napkin type analyses. I worked for somebody like that.

Starting point is 00:03:13 Big picture planning, millions of dollars, be able to cut through the noise really quickly. Think at that 30,000 foot level. And I really respected that ability. I didn't really have that ability, though, to the extent that they had. So the first few times that happened, disappointment, impatience, and then finally yelling and berating and how can you not know how to do this? Like, I can do this and I'm not an accountant. Like, you should be able to do this. And just, I couldn't handle it.

Starting point is 00:03:43 I shut down. I shut down from that criticism. And it happened quite a few more times. I got to be honest with you, the picture she's painting doesn't sound great. If you have a team member that can't do mental math, well, did you screen for that on the hire? Were you looking for that? Did you say you need to be able to do mental math as fast as I can? Because if you didn't, you shouldn't have the expectation that they can do that.

Starting point is 00:04:13 If I'm trying to pull a leadership lesson out of this thing, I got to say, if that's your expectation, then put it in your hiring process because unspoken expectations are just premeditated resentments. Get clear in your hiring process if you expect people to be a mentalist on the job. So we all get called into this team meeting, right? He's like, I'm going to try something new to boost performances. So naturally, we're like, oh, is he going to start doing bonuses, some kind of incentives, maybe some PTO, like recognition even? No, no, of course not.

Starting point is 00:04:46 He pulls up a spreadsheet on the screen with everyone's name on it. And he says, I have put all of your names from best to worst performance. performers on the screen. I'm going to go over this with you all here. He then says that we should bring back some public shame in order to better motivate ourselves. He goes through each name on the list and says, this sounds like a psycho leader, to be honest with you. First of all, if you've got a complaint or you've got criticism or coaching for a team member, you do that in a one-on-one. You sit that person down and you say, hey, I've got some coaching for you. I've got some feedback for you. You don't do that publicly. Now, let me say, let me say, we're not afraid of a culture of keeping

Starting point is 00:05:28 score. Our sales team here in Entree leadership, we know who's selling the most and who's selling the least. We don't publicly shame people. You don't do that. And then what kind of weirdo asks them to publicly shame themselves in front of their peers? This is just a toxic work environment. What their strengths are and what their weaknesses are, but mostly their weaknesses. is. Like, Mike closed this one good deal, but he also sucks at X, Y, and Z. You could literally feel the air leave the room. No one could breathe. Everyone was just looking at each other like this. This is not real life. When he gets to the bottom, he says, if your name's on the bottom, you should probably be worried. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. One girl started silently crying.

Starting point is 00:06:09 And then he just ends abruptly. And he's like, well, okay, have a great productive week. Keep this information in the back of your minds. This isn't going to be in the back of anybody's mind. This is what's going to be on everybody's mind all week long, unless they do what they need to do. And that's walk out and not work for somebody like this. Don't spend your life working for a company or in an environment that you hate. We all spend too much time at the office to live in an environment like that. Don't do it. I don't know where, what books, what videos, where the leader in this situation got that idea.

Starting point is 00:06:45 That's about as bass-hackwards of a way to lead people. as you could possibly imagine. Never ever do that. Frankly, this might sound bad of me. I hope he goes out of business. I hope that business doesn't exist any longer, because they're doing damage to people. We'll get right back to our episode.

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Starting point is 00:08:08 NetSuite is an investment in clarity. If your revenue is at least seven figures, go to NetSuite.com slash Ramsey for a free product tour. That's netsuite.com slash Ramsey. Let's get back to the episode. All right, let's watch the next one. Let me tell you about a time I was working for a crazy boss. It was at my first full-time big boy job at a bank working collections and I hate to say it, but my first job there I was really good at. So they moved me to another department where I was working on the really big problem loans. But the silly thing was they didn't provide any training to me at all even though the job was entirely different. So they literally sat me at a desk, put me on a phone and just told me to do what I needed to do without any direction at all. And because of

Starting point is 00:08:50 the fact I didn't get any training, you can imagine I wasn't very good at it. Go figure. I mean, I didn't know what it was expected of me. And since no one was ever willing to show me the ropes, that was what it was like for an entire year. I remember one time I was dealing with a particularly difficult customer and I wasn't sure how to handle the situation. So I turned to a coworker and asked for their advice on what to do. And I did exactly what the co-worker said. And the reason why I went to that coworker in the first place was because my boss wasn't around at the time. But when my boss came back later, discovered what I did. She didn't like how I handled that customer,

Starting point is 00:09:20 and she chewed me out in front of the entire floor. So I replied back, boss, I wasn't sure what to do, and that was why I went to the coworker because I trusted her perspective, considering she had been on the team for so long. So then the coworker starts yelling at me for throwing her under the bus to the boss, and I'm just sitting there thinking,

Starting point is 00:09:35 what on earth am I supposed to do? And that's when my boss doubled down, yelling at me saying, I'm your boss, you do what I say, not where your coworkers see. And so I said, yeah, I totally get that. I didn't come to you first, because you weren't in the building. And so I went to my coworker instead.

Starting point is 00:09:48 And for some reason, my boss didn't like that and just kept yelling, repeating, you listen to me, you listen to me, you listen to me. And it wasn't long after that that I left because what the heck. Yeah, what the heck? Of sitting there at the desk for a year not knowing what to do.

Starting point is 00:10:02 Obviously, the organization, taken like it's described here, needs training, needs better management, doesn't need to be shaming people or yelling or doing the things that this guy is saying is going on, but I got to tell you, this is a two-way street. You're not a victim. If you get hired into position, you get put in a position and you don't know what's going on, you don't know what to do. That's a problem, okay? Leaders out there, don't do that to your team members. Set them up to win. Don't do what he's saying his management team did to him. Agreed.

Starting point is 00:10:36 But I got to talk to all of you out there that have experienced this. Don't sit there for a year wondering what to do. Go to the leader and say, I'm not clear what, winning looks like. Can we talk about this? And don't be a victim. You've got to own your own growth. You've got to own your own your own role. The thing is, if you do that tactfully, you do that professionally, it's actually an opportunity. You have an opportunity when there's chaos to step into it and bring order to it and become the go-to person. Now, you're going to have to lead up. You're going to have to lead through influence. You're going to have to get people to buy into what you're doing you can't just do it by command but it's an opportunity for you unless you sit

Starting point is 00:11:19 there on your butt for a year and just play the victim like it sounds that's going on here both ways both both groups in this deal both people in this scenario have screwed up badly and need to do it differently next one so it's a Monday afternoon and I'm laying on the couch and my six-week-old son is actually laying on my chest asleep when I get a call from my boss and basically what he says is that they are looking at to make some cuts and are apparently wanting to only move forward with the people at the company that are the most committed and the most willing to sacrifice and make sure that the company can succeed and move forward. Two things. One, like I said, I was on my paternity leave and still

Starting point is 00:11:58 working two to three hours a day. And secondly, the person who was telling me this, my boss, had actually recently got divorced because he was working so much at his job at our company that his wife actually left him and took the kids because he was working so much and apparently too focused on money and too focused on his job. So apparently that was now the status quo and the level of expectation that was being set by everyone that was going to be kept at this company. And I did not meet that level of expectation. It sounds like everybody involved in this has got problems, got big problems.

Starting point is 00:12:29 Stop it. Get some help. So let's back up for a second and think about this. How did this get started? How did a company culture get to the point where you have people like this on your team and you have a leader like he describes on your team? That's where you got to start. If you own this business or you're in senior leadership of this business, you have a toxic company culture and you've got to fix that. What are the beliefs? What are the core values? What are the hiring processes that allowed a situation like this to even exist? You got to

Starting point is 00:13:01 get ahead of all of this and do something about it. Being a horrible boss is no joke. The bosses in these scenarios, these stories are bosses. They're not leaders. They're treating their people. They're people terribly and they're creating a terrible company culture. If you're going to lead, you've got to lead. You've got to lead well. So, listen, we want to hear from you. What's your worst boss story? Drop it in the comments and maybe protect a few of the identities.

Starting point is 00:13:30 We don't need any lawsuits in the chat. Remember, people don't leave bad jobs. They leave bad managers. And that's a hard truth for anyone in leadership. So before you start looking around for someone to blame, Take a minute and look in the mirror. Ask for feedback because we all have blind spots. Great leaders don't get defensive.

Starting point is 00:13:51 They get better. And when leaders get better, businesses get stronger. If you enjoyed this episode, check out the next video where John reacts to ridiculous job descriptions. And be sure to like, share, and subscribe for more real world leadership content. I'm your host Dave Ramsey, and this is Entree Leadership.

EntreLeadership - 14 Minutes of Leadership Fails

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