EntreLeadership - #246: Creating a Culture Like Netflix's with Patty McCord

Episode Date: February 12, 2018

When it comes to shaping a healthy and vibrant culture, Patty McCord—co-creator of the now viral (think over 12 million views) Netflix Culture deck—says most companies are doing it all wrong. In fact, she contends that commonly held “best practices” like performance reviews or limits on vacation time are surprisingly ineffective when it comes to keeping people motivated and engaged at work. Instead, during her 14-year tenure at Netflix, Patty found that people are far more productive when guided by their own logic and common sense rather than antiquated HR policies. Join us to find out how to create a culture of high performance and profitability in your own business, stat. entreleadership.com/podcast  Patty's book: Powerful EntreLeadership Culture Blog Daniel Tardy White Board Session EntreLeader's Guide to Delegation Attract Worksheet: Identify Your Target Market from Infusionsoft Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message for Ken with the details. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! 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. Coming to you from the Music City, this is the broadcast of leaders by leaders for leaders. Thank you so much for joining the conversation. Our featured guest this episode is Patty McCord, former Netflix HR guru. She's a delightful lady. She's got a new book out entitled, Power.

I'll tell you more about that in just a few minutes. And then Daniel Tartney, our grand pooh-bah, of all things, Entre leadership, pulled some audio from a whiteboard session that he did recently. I'll tell you more about that. And, of course, you know we're going to bring you some great free resources. And we've got several today and something new from the Entree Leadership website. So that's all coming to you right now. All right, I told you about Patty McCord.

She is a former Netflix HR guru. She's actually an HR veteran from Silicon Valley. Phenomenal resume. She got a new book out entitled Powerful, Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility. Her guiding belief is that companies don't need to empower people because they already have power. But there are all kinds of new practices and new ways of looking at the way you and your team are interacting, leading, and executing. I think she's a delight. I enjoyed the conversation.

Here is Patty McGor. Well, Patty, this is very exciting to have you with us, and I want to know right out of the gate. So the intro to the book that talks about the new ways of working, and it unpacks your subtitle, building a culture of freedom and responsibility. And so I want to know what has led to these new ways? What was the environment? What were some cultural trends or trade wins, if you will, that get us to this point. where you say, hey, leaders, the new ways to work, you better understand how to give people

freedom and responsibility. What led to this time? Okay, so I don't think it's a moment in history. I think it's decades of not telling the truth about how work really works. So I'm being interviewed the other day by this reporter in the UK from the Guardian. He says, oh, Patty, you know, you're so profound and it's so new, these things, these trends you've been seeing. And I said, Honestly, I've been seeing that the way we work isn't particularly effective since I started working in the 70s. He goes, no, no, no, it's a much more new phenomena. I started seeing changes in the mid-80s. And I said, dude, it's 2018. Yeah, yeah. Get the calculator out. Decades. And so what's fascinating to me is that, you know, I have spent 30 years in Silicon Valley around

people who are innovating stuff all the time. And honestly, by the time I got to Netflix, I was just kind of jealous. I thought, what about me? How come I don't get to look around? How come I have to do things the way we've always done it? Worse, how come I have to do things the way we've always done it and then call it best practice? Right. So take us there. You get to Netflix and what was the culture like? How would you describe it when you first got involved? Oh, well, so I got there literally at birth. I mean, the baby was, we had 30 employees. Oh, wow. Here's what's more important.

Reed Hastings and I had worked at another company before Netflix for almost five years together. And in that company, we grew through merger and acquisition. So we'd acquire a company and we'd double, we'd be 100 employees, 200, 400, 800, right? And then we got acquired by our largest competitor. We wanted to make a solid Silicon Valley software company. So I'd take their employee handbook and our employee handbook and I'd smush them together. and that would be the new employee handbook. And so when he called me about Netflix,

he said, let's make the kind of company that if we get lucky and it's successful, that we both want to work at. And so we did one thing differently. We decided to write stuff down. So the famous Netflix culture deck that everybody refers to took 10 years to write. Wow. And there are sections of it like the first part is about the behaviors that we value. And the second part is about high performance. So, for example, that chapter took only maybe a month or so to write with me and him and all the other leaders and all the other employees in the company.

But it took about four years to pull off, you know, in terms of internal systems. And I had to have a great recruiting team. You couldn't say goodbye to somebody unless you thought you could replace them. And then I needed to have a different system for saying goodbye when we might grow out of somebody or change the business. that wasn't about putting them on a 90-day performance improvement plan when the issue wasn't their performance, right? So I had to think, if we really have high-performing adults, then more importantly than what do you do differently

is what do you stop doing that doesn't matter. Boy, that's good. That's just the old North Star. Why are we doing this? Really good stuff. I learned it from the product managers. I learned it from the people around me. Because an innovator never starts with, well, let's take traditional TV and make it just a little bit better.

That'll be fun. Right. You say, how do we rethink this whole thing, right? How do we make something so compelling that you'll do it rather than read a book, right? And so for me, it was just, and has evolved now into my book and my talk, I honestly don't care what you do. I just want you to ask why. That's right. What's the purpose?

And then work backwards and say, okay, if that's what you're trying to achieve, does this system do that or not? It's well known. If you read the book, you get more on this. But you, in the leadership, you stripped some things away as you begin to intentionally design a culture. I love that it took 10 years. I think that is, you know, that's not a romantic number when people hear that. You know, it wasn't 10 days or 10 weeks. It was 10 years to get that.

that debt. Ten years. And you know, realistic. Yeah, my entrepreneurial CEOs are like, but I want it now. Exactly. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Well, good luck, junior. Well, it's just, you know, and it's hard work. It is. It is. Well, and one of the things you did is, is you did examine every rule, every process, the bureaucracy, so the flow or positions and all that good stuff. What happened? Take us through some scenarios, some stories that pop up on. When you begin to deconstruct and strip things away? So we had written the chapter on high performance. I had really high performing people on the team. We went public. The auditors come. The socks guys come. You know, there's consultants everywhere and auditors everywhere. And they say, we don't like your time off policy, which what it was at the time was you accrued a day a month

and it was an honor system. So when you left the company, I'd say, what do we owe you? And you'd tell me and I'd pay you. So the auditors didn't like that because, you know, technically it's all falling to the bottom line and I'm paying everybody 13 months a year and they don't like that. The socks guys don't like it because it's not standard issue. You know, you get Christmas off and Thanksgiving off.

And right, so they wanted to say, here's a policy we like, do this. And this true story, I'm sitting in my office and Reid comes in and I'm cranky about it because I don't like either solution. He says, do you have to have? paid time off. And the HRVP on my left shoulder, I really, really used to be an HR person. I want you to know this. Says, of course you have to have paid time off. Read, everybody's got paid time off. And the other person who lives inside of the innovative company called Netflix says, you mean legally? I don't know. So I go and do a bunch of research. And as I'm doing the research, I'm thinking

about time off, right? And I'm thinking, have I ever said goodbye to, you know, a salaried employee because they've been tardy or absent? No, right? In fact, I've said goodbye to people who work all the time and don't get anything done. You know, and the people who work all the time, they're weird. You really don't want somebody who spends their whole life at work. That's right. Because they don't have any other life and then everything gets so drama about it. So I, I say, stopped and thought, and why would I have to hire people on my team to police the time that you spend on your team, right? The real managing of time happens locally, and the real measurement of time is what gets done. That's good. So if you say, wow, this team is consistently laid in

delivering, then you might reverse engineer that, another term I learned from the geeks I hung around with. If I reverse engineer why this team is consistently not meeting its objectives, is it, A, they're not very good at projecting or they're not honest when they say, how long is it going to take for you to deliver? B, do they have the wrong team? C, are they not putting in the time it takes to do it? Right. But all of those answers are legitimate, and they have nothing to do with whether or not you take Christmas off. Yeah, that's good. Plus, I had this huge diverse staff, right? And I'm going to say, oh, yeah, forget about Hanukkah unless it's close to Christmas, right? Or that your culture celebrates something that happens the second week in January.

So that's when I just started thinking logically about it. I thought, well, maybe I don't need a time off policy. And here's what really happened. I stood up in front of the employees and I said, we're thinking that you're grown up enough to keep track of time within your own teams. And what we're going to keep track of is, do you get done what you say you get done? Does it serve the customer? Does it make the company better? Now, if what all the lawyers and everybody else tells us will happen, happens, which is it's going to be chaos, you guys aren't going to do any work, nothing's ever going to happen.

There's going to be people gone all the time. We'll have lawsuits because people are treated differently. Then we'll go back to the way everybody else does it. We'll do best practices. In the meantime, I'm going to trust you to do this. the right thing. And giving people that ownership and that trust, oh, man, that is so much more effective than a policy. Yeah, give us an example. Give us an example of somebody you remember, or maybe you heard a report from a leader who said, Patty, this is how they reacted to that.

When you stood up or however that was communicated corporately, what was the initial response? And then maybe the second part of that question is, what was the long-term response? Well, the initial response was a little bit of confusion. Like, does that mean we don't get time off? Right? Like, does that mean you really just, is this a fake way of just saying work all the time? So I had to tell the story of like people who work all the time are weird and we really don't want you to be weird, right?

And the second part was like, okay, if you're going to give this to me as a team manager, what's the right thing to do in my team? So an example was this person came down and she said, I've been elected to come tell you about what we're doing in our team because we think that when you find out we're going to be in trouble. I'm like, oh, really? You know, what is it? I'm thinking, this can be really juicy. And she said, we have a vacation schedule. We post it inside the cubicle, so you won't see it when you walk by. And it's color-coded. I said, well, why do you do that? And she said, we're on call. Like, well, that makes complete sense to me. Right. I didn't say don't do the

right thing, you know, so that you can get your work done. I said, do the thing that matters to you to get your work done, right? So I had this reporter come in, and he spent the day with me finding out about what he thought was going to be this Google-like perk, right? At the end of the day, he comes in, he goes, well, here's the deal. You know, this is not a good story at all. You know what people do? Like, yeah, what do they do? I don't know. So I don't keep track of it. He said, they take the same time off they always did. If they have kids, you know, they go to their play. and they go to their events and they take some time off in the summer and some time and all the paid holidays. And if they're young and they're single, they save up their time and they go hiking

in Nepal. And I'm like, oh yeah, me, I love three-day weekends, right? I said, so what else, what did they say about it? And he said, they said, nothing's really different. It's just wonderful that I own it. Yes. Right? That somebody else isn't telling me what to do. I'm getting my work done around what I need in my life. And so he goes, there's no story here. So I said to him, I said, hey, you know, you've been hanging around with me all day. And you could go back to the newspaper and they might think you've been at the beach. So how are they going to know that you did what you were supposed to do?

He's like, excuse me? And I said, because you're going to write this story and it's going to have the right amount of words and it's going to be well edited. And it's going to pack a punch and it's going to be a good story like you always turn in. that's how they'll know it's done. I said, do you ever go to the newspaper office? And he turns her in and he says, yeah, I do occasionally. And I said, to do what? And he goes, to submit my vacation request for.

Oh, wow. That is rich. So you think about that, particularly journalists now. When I turn it back on them, it's like, oh, yeah, that's right. I'm completely independent. Yeah, that's right. And it makes good sense. Well, Patty, I love the book because it's very practical.

Eight principles is what you highlight throughout the book. We don't have time to touch on them all, and I want people to go get the book and read it. This isn't a bunch of theory. It really works. And so one of the principles is radical honesty. And I got to tell you, when I got the book and started flipping through it, and I've told our audience this, but I'm the ADHD speed reading guy, and I always go, I ignore all the PR stuff. and I go right to the table of contents. And so I'm looking at it going, all right, what's this book about?

How does it fit our audience? All this kind of stuff. And the two words together, radical honesty jumped off the page of me. So I'm really, really excited. I want to turn you loose here to really answer the question this way. We all know what the words mean, but I want to know what it looked like at Netflix. How did it manifest itself? And where did it manifest itself?

We tried to make it manifest itself in all the ways that we operated. And here's how we trained people to do it. There wasn't a course that you took. We as leaders called upon each other to demonstrate it all the time. You can't be what you can't see. So an example might be you and I have been arguing about a decision that needs to be made. in, you think that what management is doing is really kind of stupid. And you wish that somebody would listen to you. And so you've bent my ear about this for months. Now we're going into the meeting

where we're going to make that decision. That's the purpose of the meeting. And we talk about it for an hour. And we're about to make the decision. I look at you and go, seriously, you don't have anything to say? Like, what about the part that you think this is the dumbest idea that we ever came up with. We've been here for an hour and you haven't said a word. Did we change your mind? And you jump in and say, actually, kind of you did. There were some facts that I didn't have when I was opining to you that I have now. And so then I could say to you, hey, next meeting, can you start off with your position? So we don't have to circle back around and waste all that time. Or if you say, honestly, I still disagree, but here's what I have to say, then,

everyone else in the room can watch us have that exchange and watch you live and walk away and, you know, be part of the team for another day. Right. And it's calling each other on those things in the moment that creates the culture of giving people the freedom to do that. Here's another thing. If you are radically honest on behalf of the product or the customer, then you can say almost anything.

If I think you're just being mean or you want to. attention or you want something more for you or your team, then I don't trust you very much. And then I start keeping things from you and you start keeping things from me. So the thing about being really truthful is it's very efficient. It is. And I want to stay here for a moment because I'm curious how you begin to develop this with people. Because when you first launch into a policy like this where you were modeling the way for people, there are some people that don't handle it as well as others.

So in order to be radically honest, you have to know how to deliver that honesty because there are ways to deliver it and there are ways to not deliver that. How did you deal with that? So I want to comment on a word that you used. You used the word policy. And it wasn't a policy. A policy is a rule that you break or you don't break. You got me on that. I can't believe I just said policy.

You did. And what I meant was this is a way of. being and it's a way of interacting with other people. So that's thing one. Thing two is it does not mean that you have to be loud and you have to be pushy and you have to be aggressive. That's right. You know, I'm a lot of those things. But there are examples in my book of people who are quiet and introverted and very influential because they spoke up when it was important to speak up. People confuse it with arguing. That's right. Right. Radical. honesty means constant debate, right? It doesn't. It just means being truthful.

You know, I mean, there's simple things like when you opine about something, I can say, oh, what leads you to believe that's true. That's huge right there. You just modeled what my next question was. So I'm just interrupting to just give you a ball and let you run with it, okay? And keep going where you're going. But I want you to address what I think you just modeled for us there. and that is you're establishing trust with people. I think one of the major reasons people don't tell the truth is because they're scared of what could happen to them or what will happen to the person who receives their truth. Absolutely. And that's part of it.

Here's the other part that I found over all the years of doing it. You don't know how. That's right. Right? You just don't have the words. I worked with geeks my whole life. And I would get this 15-page, you know, rae. email and I would sit down in front of them and, you know, look them in the eye and say,

can we use words here together? Right. So when the engineer comes in my office and starts raging about how their managers mistreating them and they're doing this and they should be doing this, I let them rage until all the energy is gone. And then when they finally run out of steam, I look at them and say, wow, what did she say when you told her that? Right. And they are like, well, you know, Oh, I was sort of hoping that you would tell me and I would go tell her that. That's not going to happen. Right?

You work for this person. I don't work for this person. But we can practice, right? We can figure out a way so that you get down to what it is that upsetting you. And, oh, by the way, just saying to someone what you did upset me is not very helpful. Right. You have to say what you did upset me. And here's the reason I think why.

And here's what we could do differently to make it better. better. So problem finders are not very valuable. People think that, especially people who are rebels. I'm the one that said this was an idiotic idea. Nobody listened to me. Well, actually, I didn't say it, but I knew it was an idiotic idea, and then it turned out to be. Right. So just pointing out that something isn't a good idea is really not useful at all. Yeah. So when people would do that, I would ask them two questions. You know, management's making a decision. It's a dumb decision. I say, okay, question number one, if you were in management, what decision would you make? Question number two, which is even more important, what information would you want to have to make a

good decision in that area? So that's the part I'm leading into the next chapter in the deck, which is around, you know, after freedom and responsibility, there's context, not control. And so one of the ways to be really honest is to make sure that the person you're talking to understands the context of your position. You know when you're talking to somebody and they're talking to you opining about something and you think to yourself, this person is completely clueless. They don't know what the hell they're talking about. Close your eyes, count to ten and say to yourself, this person is completely clueless. They don't know what they're talking about. They don't have all the information.

And when you open your eyes again and look at them, then your job is not to show. them down, but to inform them so they're better clued in. That's a great exercise right there. Yeah. It's fun, right? And if you start looking for that, and if you assume this is another, everybody wants to call it trust in kumbaya, but if I'm assuming that you're disagreeing with me on behalf of the product or the

customer or the betterment of the team, then I'm more willing to listen to you. That's right. That's exactly right. And I'm curious about your perspective, right? I learned this from the geeks when they roll their eyes because I did something dumb. I would think, I probably did something dumb. I should listen to what they have to say. That's right.

That's so true. I'm taking some notes here. I've got to share with the audience here. As leaders, we overvalue listening and we devalue learning why you're listening. Or at least we're all like, oh, I'm a good listener. Well, I think, Patty, what you've laid out there is, you better be learning, not just listening. Yeah. And how fun is that?

You know, it's how I had the courage to change the things we did in the culture because I would apply the learnings I got from my teammates in product. Right? My teammates and product engineering don't say, hey, I know what. Let's create something that's a little tiny bit better than what we do today. Yeah, that's right. Right? They step back and go, what problem are we trying to solve?

Is it a big enough problem to solve? Will it matter? If we started over, would we do it this way? Hey, I know what. It doesn't work very well. Throw it away. Yes. Yeah.

It's brilliant because you're not just getting knowledge. You're also building empowerment with that one person who's giving you some information. Now they go, hey, I respect that. She listened, actually, and did something about it. So this whole truth thing really does work. And so now it's just, it's like this momentum you're building. Yeah. Okay.

So we don't have time to cover all eight. I said that I'm only going to get to. two. I'm picking the one that I, again, the two that I think were most compelling to me to just tease you fine folks with why this is such a good book to read. Proactively say goodbye. Yeah. I love the way you phrased that. What did that look like at Netflix? Let's first set the scene on what it look like and then we'll unpack how to do it, why to do it. Well, the job of management is to build amazing teams that do terrific work on time with quality that serve the customer. Okay, that's my basic premise. So when you look into the business in the

future, so one of the things I think we do very poorly with people is we manage people's performance based on past performance, right? What you did last year, that's what I'm going to measure you on, that's what I'm going to pay you for, that's what I'm going to create a job that you'll be successful in so that you can continue on that trajectory. That's sort of our basic premise right now in most companies. I recommend sort of a radically different way to approach it. So we're at Netflix, where he had three huge quarters. We'd grown like 30% quarter over quarter. It was amazing. And we're at our executive staff meeting and Reid wants to talk about disaster planning or something he loves that. And I said, oh, couldn't we just like imagine like what if it kept up?

So our CFO goes to the whiteboard and he does top line revenue, you know, 30% growth quarter over quarter compounded three quarters in a row and he starts doing that happy dance yeah that's a lot of money and our head of content ted serendos we used to say back that when we did that um someday someday will be as big as HBO and and ted looks at it the number and he goes gosh you guys we could be HBO next year yeah right and we all thought like in our lifetime so now we're all of, whoa. And the head of product says, you know, that's a third of the U.S. internet bandwidth. And I'm like, oh, what? Yeah, crazy times.

Like, whoa. So everybody leaves, and he and I stay. I'm like, who knows how to do that? And he goes, I don't know. So then we're like brainstorming which companies are moving the most amount of data over the internet. right? As a Yahoo, is it Amazon, is it eBay at the time, right? And so then I said, do we have anybody that knows how to do that that works here? And he goes, no. So we sit down with our IT team, and I explained the situation, you know, this could be nine months. And they say to us, you know what, guys, we got this. Why don't you go exact something? And we'll build a clap. I go exact something. Yeah. And I looked at them and I thought, you know, if any team of people

could do this, it would be you. Because this is a really, brilliant group of people, but not in nine months. Right? It had to be somebody who had had experience. No one had the level of experience working with cloud computing that we needed, but there were other teams that were a lot farther along. And so I remember one of the people looking at me and he said, well, what does that mean for me?

And I said, I don't know, but we got nine months to figure it out. That's the honest truth. And so when you know these things are inevitable, then have people participate in what's going to happen to them going forward. Because what makes you feel ashamed when you get fired is your victim. It came out of the blue. You were high performing. Now all of a sudden you're not performing anymore.

You're not not performing anymore. The job changes. So that's my radical. honesty around goodbyes. I call it that I'm the queen of the good goodbye. And my two rules of goodbye are you have to keep your dignity and you can't be surprised. And I've found that even though it's hard, because you know, it happened to me too. And even though it's sad to leave something that you've been part of for a really long time, you have to do the right thing for the organization. And so, you know, and that turns out to be the right thing for you too. Because we keep people who aren't

performing in roles and set them up to fail. Why would we do that if we knew that was going to happen? Why would we put you on a performance improvement plan when you simply don't have the skills to do that next job that's different than the one you're doing? Well, let's stay here for a second. Let's call our leaders out. Why do leaders do that? I think they don't know any other alternative. I think that, A, they don't know how to have these conversations, and B, they run to HR so that HR will do it for them. And HR pulls out of their suitcase of things we've always done the way we've always done it so that we can protect ourselves from the evil employees that might sue us.

So we have to put this person on a 90-day performance improvement plan because that's how we roll. Instead of both parties stepping back and going, boy, you know, we need to tell this person this is coming. Yeah. Right? We need to tell them, you know what? We're going to start looking for the right person that isn't you.

I want you to know that when you see me interviewing. somebody. They're not interviewing for your job. They're interviewing for the new team member that we don't have. And then again, saying goodbye to people who have been great, but they just aren't needed anymore. This is also a big giant pill for leaders of swallow, isn't it? It depends on your organization. You know, if you have a corporation of 250,000 people and a product line with 152 products, then you can stay in the same company and have a beautiful career for a long, long time. Right. Right.

And it happens all over the place, not as often as it used to, right? Because teams, small, collaborative teams work pretty dynamically now in the world. So that's part of it is that's kind of why leaders don't do it because they assume the company will always have an opportunity for everybody. At Netflix, that wasn't true. When we were done with DVD by mail, we didn't have a lot of opportunities. for DVD by mail people in the streaming business. Yeah. Right.

And there's not a huge need for people who understand the deep technology of streaming when acquiring original programming right now. Right. It's completely different businesses. And so for Netflix, it was literally changing businesses. But I want to say something else about this. We always talk about managers and saying goodbye and people getting fired and all the employees.

motion around that, but we don't talk about the fact that people themselves move on all the time. Absolutely right. And I want to give that power back to all of us as individuals. It's your life. It's your career. And if you start out your career knowing that and saying, this is going to be a great adventure, I'm going to learn a lot, I'm going to get in places where I learn what I love to do and I learn what I don't love to do, I'm going to make some mistakes, I'm going to have some wins, and I'm going to know that I'm going to be on this journey for 50 years. So nobody can plan 50 years. That's right.

Yeah. Right. So when you own it too, I mean, I do this particularly with women a lot. I'm like, look, if you think you're underpaid and you're undervalued and you're sitting around for 10 years in a company waiting for someone to notice, and they haven't noticed in 10 years, it's highly unlikely they're going to wake up and notice now. It's true. You know, you're just swimming in the system that we've created.

And so there's just so many great opportunities to fix a lot of stuff by just questioning it. That's it. The power of a question, it literally can unlock so many things. The book is powerful, building a culture of freedom and responsibility. She is Patty McCord. Patty, I want to give you a chance to just encourage our audience. A lot of people that are in small business, entrepreneurial ventures, personal growth junkies. I believe they should read this book.

I did it as kind of a how-to manual to rethink a bunch of stuff inside of your company. So at the end of each chapter are a series of bullet points that are sort of what's this chapter about. And also a series of questions to ask yourself about what's going on in your organization. So you can go back like you did and say either these titles or, interesting or look at that at the end of each chapter and say, oh, this is something I might want to explore further. Well, it really is good stuff. Patty, we know you've got a lot going on. Congrats on the book and really thankful for your time because our leaders, our listeners,

our viewers are going to be better for this conversation and for reading the book. So again, thank you for being with us. Thanks so much for having me. It was great fun. Hope you enjoyed Patty McCord again. The book is available wherever books are sold. Powerful. building a culture of freedom and responsibility.

Just full disclosure, after the interview, I tried to get her to comp my Netflix subscription, and she was unable to do so. I was disappointed about that. Take that however you may. I told you at the top of the program that the Entree Leadership blog is bringing you something fun. Let's just say this. The blog is new and improved. Will the producers very, very excited about it?

and I think you should be as well. Here's what we're doing. We are helping you the small business owner because here's what we know. One of your biggest battles is not the competition or just fighting for more customers. It's for the hearts and souls of your team members. That is your most difficult and quite frankly your most important battle. If you don't have these folks fighting alongside of you and completely bought in to the mission of the organization, you are not going to succeed to your full potential.

So this relates to every single one of you. Take our culture quiz and find out where do you stand? Where is your culture? Do you truly have your finger on the pulse? This is important stuff. Go to the blog, entreeleadership.com slash blog, entreeleadership.com slash blog. And you can get this remarkable, remarkable resource to help you

grow remarkable culture. Hey, Daniel Tarty has started this new thing. They're testing it. I think it's going well. It's a whiteboard session. The guy is a real ninja on the whiteboard. I've been in means with him before where we've been brainstorming. And he grabs one of those Expo markers.

And you can hear the lid squeak as he pulls it off. And then he screws it into the bottom. And he goes off on the whiteboard. And it's always fascinating. So we've got a lot of guys. good questions in from our Entree Leadership All Access Facebook page. And so we thought, what if we take some of these questions and we throw them at Tarty and we film it and we put it on our YouTube page?

So we did that. So I want you to go check this out or if you don't want to check it out as an audio forum. Fine. Go to the Entree Leadership YouTube page and watch this. It's really great fun. And he does a wonderful job. But I also wanted you to hear what he says because for those of you who can't get to YouTube, you need to hear this. So this is Daniel Tarty answering your questions from the All Access

community. Well, hey guys, this is Daniel Tarty with the Entree leadership team. And today we're talking about one of my favorite topics, delegation. We've got a question in from one of our customers, Randy, and he says, hey, I think I've over-delegated to some people in the past. And it's starting to cost me in the form of mistakes and drop balls. And our business is a little bit off track because I've given people too much rope to use the metaphor that we teach in Entree leadership. Well, let me tell you about delegation and why I love it. There's three big wins that come from delegation. First of all, you no longer have to do something that someone else can do.

So it frees you up as the leader to spend more time working on things that you love, things that you're good at, things that you're called to do where you add the highest value. Secondly, it gives responsibility to somebody who actually really is good at that thing. It's probably what God wired them for. They get out of bed and they get excited about doing that. And so if you delegate to the right person, you're giving them dignity and passion. I'm looking at the guys behind the booth right now and they're turning the knobs and the buttons. And I would be miserable in there.

I have no idea what's. I would probably start a fire. It would probably cost us a lot of money. We'd have to buy new equipment. They do not want me in that booth. But those guys love it. They were made for it. They're passionate about it.

And they do it with excellence every day. So it's a win-win scenario. And then the third benefit is your business. business wins and your customers win because you're building a system, you're building a machine, you're building a template where these things start to kind of get automated and you know who's going to do what and when are they going to do it. And some of these things don't have to be thought through and be original every single time. So you definitely want to delegate, you want to make it a part of your culture because it's better for you, it's better for your team,

it's better for your customers. Now, I can hear Randy's pain in this. I personally have over-delegated in my journey as a leader. thing about delegation is it is tough to find that sweet spot. You don't want to overdelegate and you don't want to underdelegate. Okay, so think about this in the terms of if you were going to go water skiing on a lake, the relationship between the skier and the driver is very important. The skier and the driver, they have to communicate. And all they're communicating about prior to the boat taken off is about how much tension is in that line. Now, if there's a lot of slack in the rope and the boat just takes off and guns it. By the time all the slack comes out, that rope's going

to be flying so fast that it's going to jerk the rope right out of the hands of that skier, and they won't be able to get up and do what they're supposed to do, which is go skiing. Now, on the other end of the spectrum, if the driver is going too slower, the skier is up and there's tension in the line, but then all of a sudden the boat slows down, all the slack goes into the line and the skier ends up falling because they don't have enough speed and momentum to stay with the boat. And so if you've over-delegated, if you've thrown somebody too much rope,

you're not serving them. And at the same time, if you're holding all the rope right up against the boat the whole time, they don't get to ski, they don't get to get out there in the wake and bounce around and have a good time. And that's what this whole thing is about.

So a lot of times in those peaks, when things are going really, really well in business, that's when we tend to let out too much rope because we just think, well, everything's fine. We had a record month, so give people more responsibility, and we forget to do training. We forget to do hands-on teaching of why did it work?

And then when things fail, why did they fail? If we skip those steps, we've not set our team members up for success. We've given them too much responsibility without the training and the competency to go with that. So it doesn't actually help them. And we end up having these valleys that we regret, which it sounds like that's kind of where Randy's at right now. And you think, man, we could have avoided that had I not given that person that much rope. So just look at where you are today. come back and tell your team, say, look, we're going to get really good at this.

We're going to start being intentional about it. We're going to keep score. We're going to check in with you. I'm not going to micromanage you. But moving forward, your rope might be a little bit tighter that it's been in the past, but it's because we need to have a symbionic relationship between the driver and the boat and the guy's skiing. So if I'm checking up on you, don't feel like it's because I'm trying to say to you that you're doing a bad job or that I don't believe in you or don't have confidence in you.

It's just that I want to make sure we've got good tension on that line so I can stay in touch with what you're doing every day. And then you can also know what I expect so that as a team we can win together. Randy, hope that helps. Delegation is a lifelong pursuit to master this thing. So don't beat yourself up too much. Know that we're all in this together. And as we learn to delegate and teach our teams to delegate, you really can run faster as a business. So don't ignore this one. If you're the leader, it's your responsibility to figure out how does delegation work? How do I train the team and then ultimately how do we build leaders who are delegating more to other leaders. You guys are doing a great job out there. We believe in what you're doing. If there's anything we can do

to help you guys here at Entree Leadership, just let us know. We'll see you next time. All right, big fun there. Nice job to Will the producer for giving us that. Speaking of things that help you, how about the Entree Leadership tool for this episode? It's entitled the Entree Leaders Guide to Delegation. The 10 basics of what is. an art form if you can figure it out as a leader it really is an art form it's done poorly and then it is done very well i don't know that there's any in between there and so we're giving you the entree leader time tracker what this does is it lays your week out in 30 minute increments per day and you're writing down every activity so you're tracking and writing within this time tracker

An I for important, an L for less important, a T for time waster, and an H for, I hate this. Please shove my face in an oven. So, you know, it's very, very simple. So all you got to do to get this is text the word delegate to 33444. That's delegate, one word, text that, to 33444. Or you can get the link in this episode's show notes, episode 246 at entreleadership.com. And speaking of good stuff that will help you, our friends at InfusionSoft, have a worksheet that's going to help you identify your target market. You know, all the time I talk to people, business owners, I love to ask them questions, and I'm truly just trying to learn about their business.

But I find out pretty quickly they're not sure who their customer is. And it's so tragic. And I tell you, if you get this tool from InfusionSoft, you're going to see your blind spots, you're going to get the clarity that you need. This guide is going to help you identify who your ideal customers are. what their pain points are, why they should buy from you, and who is not your target customer. So go to infusionsoft.com slash target dash worksheet. That's infusionsoft.com slash target dash worksheet. Or if you can't remember that because you're like me, we have the link for you in this

episode, show notes at entreleadership.com. Well, that's going to do it. It was jam-packed. Hope you got as much value out of it as we had. fun bringing it to you. On behalf of Will the producer Jim the engineer and the entire Entree leadership team. Thank you so much for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon.