EntreLeadership - #222 Patrick Lencioni—Getting Hiring Right

Episode Date: September 18, 2017

Best-selling author and leadership expert Patrick Lencioni has high standards when it comes to hiring, but the qualities he looks for might not be at all what you think. Join us to find out his three non-negotiable characteristics—and why the combination can be a total game changer for your team, your business, and your bottom line. Plus, we make an exciting, first-time-ever announcement about our upcoming EntreLeadership 1-Day event in Nashville. You’re not going to want to miss this! entreleadership.com/podcast EntreLeadership Digital Swag Bag EntreLeadership E1D Livestream Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is Andre Leadership. Now, here's your host, Ken Coleman. From the Music City, this is the broadcast of leaders, by leaders, for leaders. Thanks for joining this all-important conversation. Our feature conversation is with Pat Lynchione, one of our all-time favorite guests. I told you about this last week. We're going to go really deep.

I'll tell you about that in just moments. Daniel Tarty, our senior vice. president of Entree leadership. He's going to stop by after our conversation with Pat. We're going to go specifically into a couple of health checkups for your business. These are real pain points. Checking up on your business is important. We're going to walk you through that. And then we bring you one of you. It's our Main Street interview. We always love to do this. We have three team members from Absolute Technologies out in Anaheim, California. And we wanted to hear a team talk about growth on their team from a team perspective.

Really, really fun stuff. And of course, we have some goodies and they're free. All that's coming to you. But first, Pat Lynchione. So we're going a little bit deeper than we have gone in the past. If you were new to our broadcast, I did an initial interview, if you will, with Pat on his book, The Ideal Team Player. It was Episode 155.

So if you haven't heard that, I would highly recommend you go back. and listen to that at some point to give you what I think is full perspective. We really pave the road for you. But we brought Pat back in. He was in our offices recently, actually working with our team. And we feel like, as Pat has said on this broadcast, that repetition is absolutely important. If you want something to stick, you've got to constantly touch it, repeat it, repeat it. And we've done that here.

I've told you that Ramsey Solutions, we've taken the ideal team player, and we have institutionalized it. But since Pat was here, we wanted to go a little deeper. We're going to dive right in. You'll hear the conversation. It happens. I mean, it's just, there is no setup. Pat and I know each other so well. It's just, boom. How do we use these big three, the hungry, humble, smart? Those are the qualities of an ideal team player. How do we take that philosophy and how do we think about hiring these people on the front end? How do we allow it to color everything we do as relates to getting the right people. And then once they're in, after we've found early on, before we've hired, we think they can be an ideal team player. How do we continue to build

into these ideal team players? I'm going to tell you an example of this is Eric the producer's leader, Blake Thompson, who was on last week, has been coaching Eric on the smart element, specifically. They've been really working on that element. Now, Eric, let me share that with you. There's nothing to be ashamed of there. We all have areas of growth. So he's really working on that. Specific stuff on email communication, bringing new ideas to the table. And it's been effective. I've seen it.

If you ever run it, Eric, by the way, at one of our events, just ask him. What did it look like? What did it feel like? How did it come to fruition? Folks, we're not just given Pat a platform just because we like him. This is really great stuff. You need this. This will really help you in hiring.

And stay tuned because as soon as we're done. with the conversation. Daniel Tarty comes in and we're going to talk about that health checkup that you need to be thinking about on a regular basis and then making these health checks a reality in your business. And hey, a special shout out to Daniel Tarty. He stepped out of his office and let us record in there with Pat when he was visiting. It was a lot of fun, very relaxed and so, without further ado, here is Pat Lentzioni. So when you look at humble, hungry, smart. You just laid those out for us. And you're thinking through all this and you're hiring somebody in their 20s, fresh out of college, or maybe they've only been out three to four years.

And you're going, well, how smart could they be? I want to be realistic here on this conversation. The reality is I think they can be very smart. They may need a lot of experience and seasoning. But if they're raised well and they've got some great self-awareness, you really can hire a smart millennial, correct? You definitely can. But if they're humble, they're going to acknowledge when they're not. What I would say to somebody is this, you're going to come in here and you're going to make mistakes. Here's three things we really value. Humility, hunger, and smarts. Give them the answers to the test. Here's how you're going to succeed here. You're going to do these things. If you don't or you struggle with one, be the first to call it out. Be humble enough

to say, I think I just pissed somebody off and I really shouldn't have said that. Or did I, was I rude to you just now? If a person has that kind of presence and that starts with humility, you're going to teach him. Yes. But if they come in and they're too afraid to when they make a mistake, or they're too afraid to speak up because they're afraid they might not be smart, then I think you got a problem. But, you know, I have millennials in my office, and first of all, I don't even like to refer to them that way because they're butt kickers. In fact, wait, I have one, two, three. Yeah, I have three right now of the 10 in our headquarters office. And they're like right out of the 1950s. They're the hardest working people we have. They're earnest. And I just think, why in the

world would I label them is that? I think sometimes we use these labels because they're just young. And they're young, and we raised them. I mean, I'm old enough to say we raised millennials. And if they don't have qualities that we love, it's probably our fault. That's right. And so when I look at my kids who are 19 years old, I think, well, if they have some of those stereotypical millennial tendencies, as a parent, I have to encourage them to address that. But I don't think it's actually true.

I think some of the millennials I know are the hardest working people. I know people in their 60s who are lazy. So I tend to discount that. I really don't think age is a good indicator of anything. Yeah, if you don't know a person's Myers-Briggs type, you don't know their background, you don't know their history. I suppose if that's all you got going, you can use that. All those other things trump what their age. Absolutely. I love that. All right, so obviously we've been talking about the humble, hungry, smart. These are the qualities of an ideal team player. We believe in it. We've institutionalized your book here at Ramsey Solutions. You know that. We also are kind of famous, and I shouldn't say we, but as an organization, we are. But Dave has created this very intense interview process.

here. And I mean, entree leadership, they roll it out. We teach it to our entree leaders. It's a 12-step hiring process can take weeks and weeks and weeks to get hired here. All right. With that being the context and the three qualities. Right. I want to kind of single out a couple things we do and then have you just kind of teach on that. And I've seen the list. It's pretty, you've seen the list. It's pretty countercultural in the world, which I love. It really is. And it should be. So it starts with a 30-minute interview. It's a quick thing. It's not in-depth. It's just kind of a get-a-feel for the person, will and get a sense. And then we go through all these steps. And then towards the very end, in fact, usually it is the last part of the process. It's what we call a spousal interview. And that's

where the leader who is hiring said team player does a meal with the leader's spouse and the interviewee's spouse. And the idea is you break bread. And it's, again, not usually an intense process, but a new environment to have more conversation. When you heard about our process and looked at it and the spouse will be in the specific one I'm putting you kind of on the spot for. Sure. Why do you think that's so valuable? Well, I mean, because you want to know who they are at their core and probably the way they treat and interact with their wife or husband is going to be a better indication of how they act in the world than how they did in a formal interview. Now, I'm from California, so just know that I twitched a little bit because I'm not even allowed

to make eye contact with a candidate anymore. Right, exactly. But I think it's a great thing because remember, you want them to love it there. When you're hiring somebody, it's not that you're trying to convince them. You're trying to make sure there's a match. And I want the wife or husband to say, honey, you shouldn't work there. You know, they probably are going to have a better perspective of whether or not you're going to like it there and be successful. Why not involve them in that?

Because we did the same thing at our company, and it really helps. The other thing is it helps them buy into the decision that person is going to make, and that's going to make them more successful. So to me, for all that, there's so many good reasons to do that. And it jives with something we teach in the book, which is do non-traditional interviews. Get a person out of their normal situation. Take them shopping. You know, take them to your soccer practice and have them help you with a practice.

You're going to actually see how they deal in different situations. So a woman, a friend of mine who runs a business, she needed to hire somebody. And they were so determined to hire somebody quickly. And they found a woman who had the right skill set and wanted the job. And instead of taking three weeks to hire somebody, which you should, they made an offer to her because they were so like, we're desperate, we need somebody to get in here, we're drowning. They hired this person. She didn't work out at all, behaviorally.

Two of the executives from the company quit because of her. When they finally let her go, they had to pay her a huge severance. It set the company back years and cost them thousands and thousands of dollars. And you know what my friend said to me? She said, Pat, I never took her shopping. If I just would have taken her shopping, I know I'm not. I'd have seen this stuff. If I did just take it in an environment where she had to deal with people in a real world situation, I'd have noticed her behaviors, but she came in for the interviews

and she acted a certain way because anybody can learn to fake that. So do those other things. Take them out to dinner with their spouse. See what they're like in a different environment, you know? I'm listening to you here. And I'm wondering what your thoughts are on this idea of a segmented interview experience where you could actually put the candidate in a position to really assess if they're humble, if they're hungry, and if they're smart. But they're unique situations, or is it just, because I wonder. Like testing them? Yeah.

I'd almost like to put people in a situation to test their hunger, because as you know, I think hunger is the most important. I don't mind saying that for me. If I was, for me, I go, I want the, because I've the humility, I can teach and we can correct. But I'd want to put them in an experience where I go, how hungry is this person just generally? Like, are they a go-getter? I think there are things you can do to test hunger.

I think there's also good questions you can. can ask and people you can talk to you, but probably there are, I think a great way to interview people is to let them work there for a while, by the way. I mean, I think it's like, why don't you come and do some stuff? You're right. Hey, here's an assignment. Why don't you do this? Hey, we'll pay you. I'll tell you what, we'll hire you as a temp for three days. That'll be part of your interview. That would be a great idea. Do you know of anybody doing that? No, but I don't know why they wouldn't. Yeah, I think that's actually brilliant. We're going to give you the gig for one week. Don't guarantee it's beyond that. Right. And by the way, if that bothers them, if you really want a job,

you'd be like, well, there's your hunger issue. That's my in. Right. You know, we tell people in consulting, just start doing stuff for your clients, and then they'll become a paying client. But consider them a client the first time. Don't sell to them. Just do something for them. And most people are like, I really want to work here. All right. Work here. We'll see in five days, how you'll pay you by the hour. I think if you can see that, that's a good thing. The other thing is, find out if they follow up. If they're hungry, they're going to send you a note. You know? And if they don't, I was just in a situation where somebody was getting hired by a firm

and the person after they did their interview never called back. They said we're going to extend you an offer and they didn't hear from them. So before they even started, the hiring manager called them and said, I'm having concerns about the offer I just made to you because we never heard from you.

And here's the beautiful thing. It's not just about whether we should rescind the offer. It's sending a message to that person if you do work here, you will never be unresponsive again. And sometimes I think after we hire somebody were done shaping them. But the things you do in the first three days or three weeks of that person's job experience, if you catch them doing something and call them out on it,

they'll never forget it. And so this person got hired. Wow. I want to go back to human. She will never be irresponsible again. Oh, no. No, I think that's incredible. Yeah. All right, back to humility. It's kind of flipping back and forth because this hunger, humility, obviously, those are so, so, so huge. Yes. Here's what I want to get to, because I want to try to help the leader understand you might hire somebody who's young, and inexperience, and so they've not had a lot of experience trying to be truly humble. But I love that because they're also more resilient. Yeah, but how much does self-awareness play into humility?

Yeah, humility. I think that, like I think of my kids, my sons are 19. We have tons of kids in our house all the time. And I think I can assess their friends for humility when they come to my house. I think that self-awareness is not just a function of age. It's kind of a function of curiosity about others. Right. Do they ask questions about you?

Do they seem interested in other people or is it all coming back to them? So I think that's one, and maybe I'm just intuitive, but I think there's behaviors you can look for in interviews and interactions that would get at that. The hunger one is very interesting. I would love to test somebody and actually have them work for me and see how they do it. Yeah, it really would be interesting. And how much could competition maybe reveal some of that? Yeah. I'm curious.

I don't know that. See, you're asking an ENFP. I love relying on this, you know. Right, right, right. And I love, oh, but here's another way to do that, by the way. So a big part of interviewing is interview as a team. Do an interview with four people interviewing one. People go, well, that might make him nervous.

Like, well, they're going to work that way, so they're going to have to get on. I can do that. And so here's what happened. We just hired one of our best people. And I remember during the interview process, we were trying to understand if he was humble. So after four or five of us interviewed and we debriefed. And one of the people said, well, I think there's a humble humility issue there. And we were like, really, what is it?

And they described something that he had said. The other three people said, oh, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. That's not what he meant. In fact, I think what he meant was this, and that's what made him humble. And everybody else said, oh, yeah, we totally interpret it. And the other person said, oh, gosh, I misread that completely. Interesting. If they had not been in the same room, that person would have come out of the room and said,

I've got a humility issue, red flag. Wow. So I think that we need to debrief as a team so we can actually say, do you remember when he acted like that? How did you interpret that? And I think sometimes we don't realize you're interviewing team players, interview them as a team. It's a team sport. So you can actually deconstruct what you saw together. All right.

So a lot of the conversation has been around bringing somebody in and kind of making sure we get the right people on board. But the reality is you come across this book, through Ontario leadership, whatever. Maybe this is the first time you've heard about the book. And you read it and you go, okay, this is absolutely light bulb, got to do it. And you begin to institutionalize it like we have here at Ramsey Solutions. let's be realistic. For a leader who now wants to make sure I've got a team full of ideal team players, but my reality is that's not the case.

How do we begin to institutionalize this? And this is not a pitch to sell a bunch of books. It's how do you begin to, from a leadership perspective, throughout the leadership structure, and then down into the team, how do you make this really marinate? I think the best way to start, because we're also dealing with developing people. Like you have current employees. And you don't go through there and go humble, hungry, not smart, they're out.

You know what I mean? You say, well, who do we have? There's exercises in the book that people can use that are really helpful and structured. But essentially what it comes down to this, if you can start at the top of your organization, if you want to institutionalize something, start at the top, and have the executive team go around the table, the leadership team, and have them evaluate themselves, ranking themselves, not rating, ranking their first, second, and third best areas in terms of humble, hungry, smart.

So what are you best at, natural? What are you second? What are you third? I'm amazed at when teams do that, that they'll call themselves out on things. And I've had teams where people start laughing during the exercise. I said, what's so funny? They said, well, clearly, I'm not humble. And it's like, wow, okay, so you're comfortable with that.

Because they know people know. And then after everybody has said, this is my third of three areas, and maybe you're bad at all of them, maybe you're good at all, but still your third of three. Then we say, okay, brainstorm with the other people who share your thing about what you could do to address that. And so like we had these people, could these executives come back in the room and go, okay, we talk about ourselves a lot.

We know that. We know that we're not all that interested in other people's work or pretty much their personal lives. And we need to sit in meetings and actually invest in other people. And so we're going to do that, and we want the rest of you to call us on it when we don't do that. And it changed the tenor of the team completely. So they're like, so we can call you on that.

You have to call me on it. If I want to get better at this, that will start to institutionalize. it, and then they'll go to their teams and they say, we're going to do the same thing. So it's not so much about structure as it is about making it something you're allowed to talk about. And saying to somebody, hey, you know, we talked about humble, hungry, smart, you're leaving early every night.

Other people have worked to do. I don't think you volunteered to help anymore. That's really a violation of hunger. I want to make it part of the social fabric more than just the structural fabric. Now, I think if you can build it into your performance reviews, that's great. Certainly into your hiring profile process, that's great. But I want it to be something that when somebody violates it, people are quick to point it out because they know it's just who they want to be. Okay. So when you sit down as a leader and you decide, okay, we're going to make this a part of the culture, we're going to talk about it, call each other out as leaders, and then we're going to make the team accountable as well.

Right. When you address it, clearly, and I know you talk a lot about this, the idea of how to address it, constantly address it. And if they don't fix it, either they're going to leave because they're just tired of you nagging at them, if you will, or they're going to be. or they're going to leave because you've laid out a clear plan and they didn't get better. Right. Is there, I mean, that's clear. I mean, that's a good process. And leaders need to understand that.

That's what comes out of this. Yes. You know, in 5% of the cases, when a person isn't going to improve or leave, then you've got to get HR involved and do that. But I find that too many companies spend 80% of their time dealing with difficult employees like that. The problem is most leaders don't have the courage to constantly remind people. And I would say to encourage those out there to do that. If you love somebody, you have to do that.

If you have an employee who's not hungry, you know you don't want to lose your hungry employees because they're frustrated that you're tolerating them. Are you okay tolerating that? Even if it means you're going to lose your best people, even a wussy manager like me will go, okay, I can't do that because I can be a wuss. Every time you see it, you're going to be tempted to walk away from it, to not say anything, to complain to somebody else, to vent about it. If you care about them and you care about your team, catch them every time. Kindly do it, but relentlessly. And it is amazing when you do that, 95% of the time people, I think more people improve because

they're like, man, I really have nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Or they say, this is not fun for me, because this is who I am. And if I can't be a little bit of a slacker, or I can't be kind of egocentric, or if I can't be rough around the edges, I can't get away with that, I'm going to work someplace where I can. The problem almost always comes back to the leader not having the courage to have that difficult conversation again and again and again. And then for the leader, you got to make sure there's other leaders that will have the

conversation with you so that, you know, you can't be constantly relentlessly on everybody else if you've got no checks and balances either. Our best coaches are the people that are sitting in meetings with us every day. People like to be held accountable when there's enough trust there. But if we're not vulnerable enough to call it out on ourselves first, though, other people aren't going to do that. And when you see an ideal team player develop, out of maybe somebody who was maybe marginal,

maybe they were average, and all of a sudden they become an ideal team player. What does that do for the rest of the team when that happens? Oh, my gosh. I mean, when you get to work with ideal team players, first of all, work is just a blast. And I walk around these offices here, and I'm just hugging everybody.

Because these are amazing people that just want to do a great job and they're positive and all that stuff. When you create that culture in your organization, productivity and morale go through the roof. No amount of compensation, bonus, rewards, stock options can do things. that. Coming to work and working with people that are not ego-driven, that really work hard and they

don't short-arm things, and who actually can deal with you in a way that's socially appropriate and encouraging, it is the greatest tool for employee retention. And when you see a person do that, the other people around them rally around them, champion them, brag about them all the time, and tell everybody else about them. And boy, hiring and attracting good people becomes a lot easier. Yeah, you just said retention. It's also got to be huge for recruiting because people say, hey, this is a great place to be. You wouldn't believe what it's like. And everybody wants to be on a winning team. Kevin Durant walks away from the Oklahoma City Thunder because he wants to be on what he perceived as the best team possible. Yeah, and you know something that's interesting because

some people will say, and I get this, like, oh, he went to the winning team, but actually the culture of the team is quite good. That's right. And even if they're not, so a friend of mine is Eric Spolstra in Miami. Sure. You know I've talked about this. And they had a great year last year. He got Coach of the Year in one of the polls, but they weren't on the top of their game because they lost a bunch of players, but they have a great culture. And they're actually attracting people to go there. It's not just because they're probably going to win the championship this year. It's because people want to work with other good people. That's right. And that's the most attractive thing possible. Well, to play this out, so Durant goes, wins a world championship, and then just

took a massive pay cut. Because he wants the team to stay together. Think about he could have left again. Sure. And cashed out even more. Yes. Exactly. That's what's huge. And that's what I want people to understand. And the truth is, the best companies, you know, Southwest Airlines, people are dying to work there. People get out of school and they want to get a job there. It's not that they're not like looking at, well, do they pay more than the United States? They just know, I'm going to actually like being there.

The people I work with, when I fly in the airline, the people seem like they're having fun. I want to work there. We tend to over quantify things and think it's all about pay or all about stock options and things like that. And I just think we over-emphasize that. I want to put leaders on the spot because I think there's some. some leaders that are watching right now who, if they're very honest, they would say, Pat, I'm not hungry. Ooh.

What would you say to them? If they're sitting with you here one-on-one like I get to, and they say, Pat, it's a confession. They're like, I'm not hungry. Or as hungry as I used to be. Right. What would you say to that leader? Well, I would say, first of all, good for you for having the courage even to yourself to

admit that. And secondly, find a way to get hungry again. And there's different ways to do it. We talked about this before. either the mission, think about the mission, think about your customers, how you changing their lives, or think about the people that work for you, and what a difference it is to work for a manager who cares and who wants to growth. And if you can't muster up the courage, or, no, I shouldn't say the courage, but the ability to find hunger in something, then sell your business to somebody

who is. Because that is not going to be a good situation for you. And maybe you need to do some soul searching, too, about what you want out of life. Because I've seen, people get bored. I got bored for a while in my business, I have to admit. And it was a, it was related to humility, though. And I kind of thought, why am I here? Is this just to entertain me? Is this just to challenge me? Or am I actually changing people's lives, including my employees and my colleagues and the customers? And I had lost connection to that. And so sometimes a lack of humility will lead us to a lack of hunger as well. Oh, that's good. And that's what I love about what you've done with all these qualities. You've just pulled out

some obvious things that you've seen, and they all work together. That's all I do. I mean, I'm not rocket scientist. I think that God gave me the ability to see simplicity among other people that are really smart, and they might complicate a little, and just go, I think these are the only things that matter, and it seems to work, so I'll take it. Well, God gave you as a gift to all of us, and we certainly love your friendship here. You've been so good to us and just spend a few days with some of our top leaders without giving away the details, but this is fun.

This is behind the scenes on the scene. All right. Without talking about the details, what was it like working with Dave and our top of leadership, just knocking around ideas for the future? So the thing about it is, is Dave is real. It's raw. Oh, yeah. And I love that.

And because I've become a friend of his and some of the people on the team, I was able to be raw, too. And it was hilarious at times. Just being in there with the team and wrestling with this stuff, nobody held back, and it's completely real. And then at the end of, like, arguing in a good way, because they talk about healthy conflict. We went to dinner and had a glass of wine and laughed.

And so it's very real, very raw. He eats his own dog food, folks. It's a good thing to see. That's maybe not the prettiest way. He lives these principles. How about that? We say at our company, we've got to eat our own dog food. I liked it.

And he does. That's great. It was fun. It was fun. All right, folks, always exciting when we have our grand pooh-bah of all things, entree leadership. That is Daniel Tarty. We have great fun when you're in studio.

And boy, oh, boy, did we not have great? fun, but we also had great feedback. Did you know this? Have you heard that people really liked it? Well, I'm wondering if great fun is unique to me showing up or if you're just always having fun and you're saying that to flatter me. I think it's a combination of both, honestly. I'll take it. You're very perceptive. But it's good to have you back in here. And so we want to do something fun today. All right, folks, you know, we have to get health checks, you and I these days. You got to get the annual health check. And that's for our bodies. That's for longevity. But you know, the same thing applies to businesses. So I ask you to come in the studio today, Daniel Tarty, because you've come up with, I think, a very important

three-part health check for the business. The first one is customer satisfaction. You've talked about that before, but practically, quickly, how do we do a health check on customer satisfaction in our business? Yes. Well, and here's the theme with all three of these things. It's asking questions. If you ask good questions, you're going to get good answers. And the quality of the questions we ask has everything to do with the quality of the business that we're running, Ken. So health is largely about getting perspective by asking questions before we just start taking action. If we know what to do, then we know what to do about it. And so when we ask good questions from our customers and we say, hey, help us understand

what can we do to serve you better? What are the things that you hope that we would build for you? What are the services that we could provide that we're not providing yet? And here's kind of a scary one, but you will be surprised how much you get out of this. What are our competitors doing? Who are we at risk at losing your business to right now? And some of the most powerful, groundbreaking products and ideas that we have built in Entree leadership have come from asking those questions to real business owners, real people in the

marketplace who really want to tell us. They want to help. So don't go to the whiteboard and have all the brilliant ideas and depend on originality and genius. And you being the expert on every single thing. Now, you've got to be the champion. But let your customers help you. They want to go with you.

They want you to have a great business because they're going to benefit from it. So listen to them. Ask those questions. All right. Next is profitability. Boy, that's important. Boy, if we're not health checking profitability, then we are checking for new jobs.

Ken, this is the thing we see more than anything else that kills a small business. It's the lack of cash flow. And here's why it happens. We get into small business because we have a passion about a product or a service, something that we love providing for our customers, and we do it really, really well. And we put all of our time and energy as entrepreneurs into building a great product, building a great service, selling it,

getting our customers excited about how it's going to change their life. And we do that so well that if we're not careful, we'll look up and we're doing all of this work to create revenue, but then it's all going back out the door and we don't actually have profit. We don't have viability as a business and we can't scale that. Eventually, that can put us out of business. So it's not fun. It's not ever the thing that we look forward to in business, to discipline ourselves,

to sit down, look at the numbers. But again, we're asking questions. Numbers, what are you telling me? Marketplace, what are you telling me? hey, profit margins really low, what's that telling me about my cost of goods, about my price points, about how our sales acquisition rates going? Like when we ask those questions, the data can speak to us, and we have a healthier business as a result. I've heard it said that top line is all about vanity. It's what you talk about on Saturday morning at the old golf clubhouse. But the reality is the bottom line is where it is about sanity. So take that, write that down.

Top line is vanity. Bottom line is sanity. Tweet that, give Daniel Tarty credit, please. All right. Third one, team health. culture, culture, culture, Peter Drucker once said, culture eats strategy for lunch. He's right. Well, the reason that's right, Ken, is because once we try to scale our organization beyond just the personal time that we can put in as the leader, we need people. We need people to help us. And we need the right people doing the right things at the right time.

And when we put energy into building the culture of our team and empower them to lead, we empower them to take care of customers, then the business can grow, the business can flourish. And so we really ultimately don't have a healthy business if we don't have a healthy team. And we don't have a healthy team when people are gossiping, when people are spending all their energy around drama issues and stand around the water cooler and yak in and not getting work done and productivity goes down and morale's down and no one's looking forward to coming into work. There's so much more that can get done when people are excited. They come in every day going, we are making a difference and we can't wait to get after it. That's an entirely different kind of

business than the one where everyone just has a job. Oh, it's Monday. I got to go to work. Everybody's looking like Eeyore and you as a leader going, come on, guys, we got to do this. And they're looking at you like, why do we care? So all of that rises and falls on culture. And so what we recommend is check in with your team, figure out how they're feeling. Do they enjoy their job? Are they satisfied? And not just satisfied, but are they thrilled to be coming to work every day? Because if you've got a bunch of people who are thoroughbreds, it's so much easier as the leader. And because this is the issue that we hear about the most from leaders and the challenge that we have a lot of times as entrepreneurs is just getting our team to get excited about what they're doing, that's where we've put all of

our energy right now and the products and services coming up this fall, organized around helping business owners, build better teams, have better team cultures so that they can win again, so that they can enjoy coming to work, so that their teams come together and they go, this is what we're here for, this is why we're going to do it, and we're going to have fun as a result. So that's what we got coming down the pipe. All right. So the way we're doing that is our next entree leadership one day event, which we've been talking about. We got a little exciting thing here. We've tinkered a little bit. And it was already a great event. We've done something a little extra special that has a lot to do with what you just said. What is it? Well, we brought in the king of culture

and team health. And I'm so excited because this guy's been a friend of entree leadership for many years. And this is the first time ever that at a one day event, we're bringing in an outside guest who is a complete stud in their space to join Dave Ramsey, Chris Hogan, and Christy right on stage. And that's none other than Pat Linconi. Oh, it's exciting stuff. Pat's a dear, dear friend, and you just heard from him. And now you're going to get a chance to hear more from him. And folks, I've been telling you about this event. So here's the details.

It's October 27th. And I'm just going to be, this is kind of fun because we've got the grand pooh-bah in here. And they don't ask me to make these decisions. But if they had, I would have charged way more than your country. charging. I'm just going to tell you, I get to host this event. I travel all around the country. I've hosted many, many events. This event is worth way more than you're charging, but that's good for you people out there. I can't believe you're giving it to them for $29. And that's not $29 a person, Daniel. It's $29 for basically your whole team. Right. So this is a live stream event. So our team got

together and we just said, guys, look, we are doing fine as a business. What's the best way that we can get this information to the most people who really want it. And we said, what would it look like to have 100,000 people tuning in at the same time watching this live stream? That's Neeland Stadium, by the way, it's 102,000 people. So imagine that many people all on one day watching this event, improving their team culture, improving the team health, learning how to communicate better. And so for us, this is about a movement. This isn't about profitability for entree leadership. We got our thing taken care of. This is about you guys getting empowered and having a chance to bring your whole team together and experience this event. $29 basically covers the administrative part of it that you can

get your whole team in there and get the streaming straight to your office, straight to your computer, your device, your home, wherever you're at. If you've got an internet, you got it. This is coming out of you. So the deal is, this is a special discount for you people. That's how much we love you. And so here's the deal. The price is going to go up other places, going up, has gone up. This is for you. And we're going to give you some bonus content. Okay, this is really, really fun. The team has put together an E1D swag bag. Okay. That's your early bird stream passes. Only $29. We just talked about that. You're going to get bonus content from each of the speakers. And then Pat Lincione is doing some special training above and beyond what he's going to do on the

stage. And in this special training session, Daniel, he's going to break down, go deeper into the three qualities, right? The three essential elements of a great team player. That's humble, hungry, and smart. Going to go deep there. about self-awareness, maybe the most important tool of anybody who's trying to live on purpose, you need to be self-aware and then burnout. How do you avoid it? How do you get out of it? Those topics coming to you in this special bonus training series. So how do you get it? You're going to text E1D bonus. That's all one phrase, no spaces. E1D bonus. You're going to text that to 33444. That's 3344. Or you can click the link in the show notes at Antreli.

Leadership.com. Now here's what's great about this, Ken. Remember the old days when you would sign up to go to a concert, you buy your tickets, and you couldn't get the album on Spotify. You had to actually go to the store and get the album. And you sign up for the concert and you're like, I got to wait until the concert and saw this time. This is like getting the album right then and you get to go to the concert. The swag bag you get right now.

You get to download it. You don't have to wait. And then on October 27th you get E1D with your team. It's the best of the world. It's going to be a great event. I'll be on stage hosting this phenomenal event. So jump on this. And again, as I said before.

folks, $29 for anybody that you want to come. Get the mailman. You know what I mean? Get them all. Get them in there. You want your gym to be better? Or you go to work out? Go get the manager from the gym. Say, hey, come along with me. I'm bringing my dentist. He needs this really bad.

See, this is great. This is great. It's the gift that never stops giving. So great stuff. Daniel Tarty, thanks for stopping by. Thanks again. Folks, I absolutely agree with Daniel. E1D is absolutely the best team event in America. If you haven't brought your team to an entree leadership one day event, I think you need to. It's so easy to bring the whole team and everybody's learning the same thing together.

Now, they're all taking away different things and that's what's great about it. I'd bring your whole team and then schedule a working, fun dinner afterwards. And everybody just blurred out everything they took away. What does that mean to us? I think that would be one of the most powerful days of investment in the growth of your team that you can make. I'm telling you, you need to do it. And speaking of which, I told you we were going to bring you real conversation from three unique team members from absolute technologies out in gorgeous Anaheim, California.

Now, the owner is Brittany Beverage, and she brought 38 team members to our Los Angeles Entree Leadership one day. Did you hear what I said? She brought 38. And you know what, listen, I've seen many, many teams come. That's why I just said what I just said about how important it is because I've seen it. but I've never seen anybody bring 38. I remember seeing them.

I hosted that event, and they were fired up. So whatever Brittany did to get these folks to the event, they were not there just because they had to be there. Now, they may have had to be there, but that's not what their attitude and posture was. So you're going to hear from Allison, Robin, and Sammy on Brittany's team. They were there. That day at our Los Angeles,

Entree leadership one day. And more importantly, entree leadership has become a part of their culture. So what do they think? What do they see? What do they feel? What do they do? Never done this before.

This is a lot of fun. So listen in as Allison, Robin, and Sammy share what they've learned and what they have enacted because of entree leadership. My name is Allison Tovar, and I have been at Absolute Technologies for almost 10 and a half years. I am the Quality Assurance Manager.

And I have been a fan of Dave Ramsey for a really long time. And then this past April, we actually took about 35 to 40 of our team off the production floor into the Entree Leadership one-day event in L.A. So that's kind of how it all got started. Just a few of us started at the Entry Leader Summit in a couple years ago. And I think the upper management saw the value in it and saw how much it could do for us as a company. Bringing the whole team was just a way to expose. many, many more. Most of them were leads or people that had some influential roles throughout the

company. So they could hear it, you know, essentially from the horse's mouth and take it back to their respective departments and kind of their sphere of influence and hopefully get the ball rolling even faster than we could, you know, by ourselves as just a few on the leadership team. We've seen lots and lots of good things. One thing personally from my department, and I have a team of about 11 is we were struggling, a lot of conflicts, people not getting along, clicks, going to entree leadership. There were a couple of key things that we implemented once we had gone to that. So one of them was the no gossip policy. And then another principle was sanction incompetence. So we basically stopped sanctioning incompetence, started holding people accountable.

And as a result, did have to let go of a couple of people, which was super tough. but overall, the health of my department improved, you know, almost immediately. So now we're at a place where we share highs and lows each week as a group. We started our own book club where we've read Entree Leadership, and now we're finishing Patrick Lanchioni's Advantage. We celebrate, you know, life events, marriage, as babies together. It's really been really great and we've become, you know, a cohesive team. Like we've always been a company that has had, you know, continuous improvement at its core.

We've been really focused in the past, though, on production or our manufacturing processes. But after Entree leadership events, we've attended, I think we've really extended that to continuous improvement of our people and the health of the company. My name's Robin Alvarez. I've been with absolute technologies for about two and a half years, and I'm the HR manager here. On the HR side, I think a big change has been to our hiring process in general. We used to do the quick interview, use the standard,

questions, choose the candidate with the best experience. Now from the entree leadership, we've definitely taken more time doing multiple interviews, ask questions to ensure the candidate has the same values and character we're looking for, specifically the ideal team player for Patrick Lanchione, and definitely stopped settling for candidates to fill a position. So if it means that we have to wait a while to find the best candidate that fits our culture, so be it, even if that means the department might be short-handed for some time. And it's just amazing how having multiple interviews has helped out. We've brought some candidates in who we love the first time around,

and then the very next interview, we start to see the red flags, and we realize it would never work for our culture. So using this process has allowed us to bring on some really great people for our team and on the HR side, a huge takeaway in how this has affected our company. It wasn't an overnight change. We started small just having tinkered with the questions to make sure that little by little they are bringing in the, the right people. So we really try to dig into the humility side of things. So we ask about their

personal weaknesses, things that they're improving on. And when they say they have nothing to improve, when we ask about a weakness, that's obviously a big red flag for us. We want to hear that people are able to self-reflect. I think that's imperative to being a part of our team. Another one that really stands out is just somebody that kind of flew under the radar. They were really great, but they just kept moving away from communication. We really wanted to see that they're people smart, being able to engage and really work with others, and they would just kind of dance around the questions.

And again, if it doesn't feel 100% right in our gut, it's just not a good fit. And we're not really willing to take the risk to bring on somebody that just doesn't have great answers to any one of those ideal team player questions. My name is Sammy Prump. I am the manufacturing manager of Absolut Technologies. I've been with the company for 19 years, going on 20.

Like Allison explained, she introduced the company to Ontario leadership about two years ago. That first year, there was definitely some hesitance and some resistance to what she was bringing to the company, you know, whether this was a one-off thing or if it was just one of those like little mini title waves that people ride it for a little bit and then it kind of dissipates. But it's been going strong. It's been really encouraging to see somebody that we respect, like our owner and the management team, really dive and wholeheartedly, you know, have a lot of faith in this movement that, you know, it has influenced the rest of the team to be a part of it. You know, it's join or be the one that's left alone. With the manufacturing manager, I have 13 leads under me, and I run the rest of the shop of about 100. 60 to 170 person in the shop.

The culture change was a little bit more drastic out there than it was for the inner office, I would say, just a bunch of warehouse working type of people and to actually pay attention to them, to actually treat them more than just a day-to-day worker and actually call them team members and everything. It made a drastic change out there in the shop culture. The biggest thing that we heard out there was that, you know, managing, never communicated to the shop. And when management made decisions, it would be kept internally, and they wouldn't hear about it. So one of the things that Tom has put out there is an all-hands meeting that we run monthly,

that he actually goes out and or other managers will go out there and have these big group meetings where it's an open discussion more than it is just a spewing forth information. So that's become a really good communicating tool. We've changed to daily stand-ups with our leads for the morning and the night shift, which has definitely increased communication. There's no assumed communication anymore. Everything is kind of put out there. You could definitely tell that communication has been worked on,

and it has been one of the biggest gripes that we've had for many decades. I think the biggest thing that we've seen is just pure feedback, back to our HR group, back to myself, back to the other managers where our employees are going, you know what, I'm really a part of this company that really cares about me. They think of me as a team member and I'm not just some number anymore. Well, folks, that never gets old. It never gets old hearing from real people that are making progress and we get to be a minutia of influence on that.

But that is just so, it just fires my soul up. And folks, I'm really excited about our Entree leadership live stream coming to you this fall. We've been telling you about it. You just heard Daniel and I talk about it earlier. If you want to jump in on that special offer, don't forget. Text E1D bonus. E1D bonus. Altogether, no spaces.

E1D bonus. Text that to 33444-4-4-4. Or you've got the link in our show notes at entreleadership.com. Well, I'm excited about next week's episode. It is with Mike Irwin. Mike is a former Army officer. And he's the co-author of a book that I had never. heard of before my life, but I'm glad I heard about it, and you will be too. It's entitled

Lead Yourself First. Inspiring leadership through solitude. Some of you are squirming already. You don't even like the idea of being alone. Trust me, this is so good. On behalf of Eric the producer, engineer Will Rutter, and the entire Entree leadership team, thanks for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon.