EntreLeadership - #286: Ignore Conventional Wisdom with Charles Duhigg

Episode Date: October 1, 2018

If you ask New York Times best-selling author Charles Duhigg, many of the most innovative ideas today aren’t exactly original—and he’s got plenty of evidence to prove it. Instead, the most creative, ground-breaking solutions are often the result of bringing old solutions to new problems. And ignoring conventional wisdom, he says, is a huge part of that process. Join us as Charles breaks down the highly effective habits of creative people so you can learn how to drive innovation in your own organization. entreleadership.com/podcast Critical Thinking Cheat Sheet from EntreLeadership 14-Day Free Trial from Infusionsoft Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode!   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's when we give ourselves permission to ignore convention to kind of do the crazy thing. That's when oftentimes we have our most creative ideas. 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. Here's what's coming up.

really excited to have Charles Duhigg back with us. Now, for those of you who may be new to our program, Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize, New York Times, journalist, and also bestselling author of The Power of Habit and smarter, faster, better. We wanted to have him back on because the guy's a great thinker. And one of the big thoughts that I got excited about in this conversation and it's going to really stretch you today is the permission to ignore conventional wisdom.

Oh, my goodness, your minds are going to be set free. So that is going to be good stuff. Also, we continue our conversation with you, the audience. Allison, one of our listeners, calls in to talk to Daniel Tarty and myself with a question about, what do I do when I institute the no gossip policy and everybody's rolling their eyes and they aren't listening to me? It's a big question. We're diving in deep.

So speaking of diving in, let's get right to it. Here is our conversation with Charles Duton. Well, this is fun. It's rare that we have a guest on. for the third time, and it's a special treat, Charles, to have you back. And I want to spend most of our time today talking about creative desperation and then innovation brokers. And I think when you hear that phrase, innovation brokers, it might be a little bit intimidating to our small business audio. Oh, who are these people? How much do they cost? And oh my gosh, it doesn't even make sense.

We're going to get into that. But before we get into that, I want to talk about this other term, creative desperation. What does that mean to you? There's this really interesting science behind who gets to be creative, right? Because we tend to think of creativity as something that you're born with or you have some temperament for, right? There are creative artists in this world, and there's folks who aren't creative. And what we found is that science tells us that's exactly wrong. Anyone can be creative. Anyone can be incredibly innovative. It's about learning these kind of mental habits, these tricks that allow you to tap into your creativity. And the first one, as you mentioned, is creative desperation. One of the things that we know is that many people tend to

become much more creative, not necessarily when they're feeling calm and relaxed, but rather when they're feeling like their back is against the wall, when the deadline is coming up. Sometimes, in fact, a number of studies have shown that when we're angry, we tend to become more creative. We tend to see more solutions. And I think what it comes from is that oftentimes when we're facing a deadline, when we're feeling upset, when we're feeling kind of all riled up, we feel this need to ignore convention, right? We give ourselves permission to take risks because we don't have any other options because we're either P-O'd or the deadlines coming up, we've got to do something. And it's when we give ourselves permission to take risks, to ignore convention, to kind of do the crazy thing,

that's when oftentimes we have our most creative ideas. Interesting. Okay, so the anger angle, that's interesting. We're not telling you leaders to go get angry and then walk into a brainstorming meeting, but I'm taking notes. Is emotion overriding the brain at that point with anger? What we know about anger, anger is really interesting. I'm actually writing an article right now about anger for the Atlantic Monthly.

And what we know about it is that when you are angry, we tend to think of anger as an antisocial behavior, right? something that's negative. But what we know about anger is that it's actually pro-social. Anger makes us feel energized. It makes us optimistic about the future. It prompts us to take matters into our own hands and to take more risks, as I mentioned, but also to be able to say, look, there's an obstacle there. I'm going to go overcome it because I'm just so like pissed that it's in my way. One of the things that we know about anger, in fact, is that if you look at brain scans of people who are angry, the closest corollary to that is people who are happy. Now, it's not necessarily that anger is a good thing.

It's exactly right. Business leaders shouldn't go out there and spend their time being angry. If we're no other reason, then we want to save their hearts and their marriages, right? That's right. But we can learn something from this, which is the more you put yourself in a position where you feel like you're in control, the more where you give yourself permission to ignore convention to say, look, this is how it's been done a thousand times. But you know what? I'm just going to try it a different way. Even if that feels risky, if it feels scary, if it feels kind of mad, then oftentimes that's where something successful comes from.

Okay. That I wrote down folks, permission to ignore convention. Charles, that's worth the entire conversation. I'm telling you, that's huge because now we've got to go from some anger does that for us. I'll tell you what else does that for us is fear, that fight or flight. You think about creativity is when your life is on the line. We read these amazing heroic stories. You talk about creative and innovative. I mean, the brain takes over and you're going, I've got to survive. I've got to come up with something. My back is against the wall. Now, what's interesting, though, is that it raises this next question, which is, okay,

so if I'm going to give myself permission to ignore convention, then how should I use convention? What is the wrong convention of my life? And that actually gets us to the thing you'd asked about before, which is these innovative brokers. So why do some people seem more creative than others? What do we know about people who are judged by their peers to be innovative? Well, what we know about them is not necessarily that they have an artistic sensibility or that they enjoyed building Legos more as a kid. What we do know is that people who are most creative, they tend to things. First of all, not necessarily to see themselves as creative people, but they tend to see creativity not as an active expression.

but is an import-export business, taking ideas from one realm and bringing them into a new setting. And this is where convention comes up. Because what is convention? What is a conventional idea? A conventional idea is an idea that is almost a cliche because every time there's one kind of problem, someone brings out an old idea to solve it. But what innovation brokers do is they take that old idea and they say, look, I'm not going to use it to solve the same problem that's always solved. Instead, I'm going to drag it into a new setting. One of my favorite examples of this is the making of the movie Frozen, right?

Everyone knows the movie Frozen. And so why was Frozen so creative? Why was it so successful? It's not because everyone working on it was so artistic. It's because for months and months and months, they struggled with trying to figure out what Frozen it should be about, how the plot should go. And in fact, they were literally months from that movie being released and on the brink of catastrophe because they didn't know how to end the movie.

They didn't know how to put it together. And so they had this big meeting. They brought everyone working on the movie in into one room. And they sat them down and they said, look, let's all go around and just throw out ideas that you like. Any idea at all. It doesn't matter how stale it is, doesn't matter how new. So they go around the table and a bunch of people say, well, look, we're Disney, right? We make princess movies.

We know princesses better than anything else. So one thing this movie should be about is princesses. Cleshed idea, right? Every Disney movie is about a princess. But they say, look, we are the princess company. Then they go around, they say, okay, let's find another idea. And so they go around. And what's interesting about Frozen is there was an unusually large number of women working

on that project. In fact, the first female director in Disney's history was the co-director of Frozen. And so they're going around the table and a bunch of people working on the film, particularly women, say, you know what's interesting to me? Sisterhood. Like, there's a ton of books about sisterhood, right? There's Russian novels about sisterhood. There's teen novels about sisterhood.

But like, sisters are just kind of interesting. right, a little cliched in the literature, but they're interesting. I have a sister. There's usually not like a good sister and a bad sister. Usually it's sisters grow together and they grow apart. And so that one of the people working on the film, he says, look, what if we would just take these two ideas? Princesses and sisters and smash them together? And all of a sudden it opened up all these creative possibilities, right? What if the sisters, the princesses, were to save each other? If you do that, then the prince doesn't have to save the princess, because the sisters are going to save each other. But now that means that we can make the prince the villain.

But we don't need to reveal the princess the villain until the very end of the movie. This is frozen. This is why it became such a hit, why it seemed so creative, not because it was brand new, but because it took these two old, cliched ideas and it mixed them together in a new way. And any business owner can do the same thing. If they need that creative boost, if they need to figure out how do I get beyond convention, Sometimes the answer is you take convention. You take a couple pieces of convention and you just put them together in new ways and it seems

brand new. That's exactly right because convention, we're not saying throw it out. That's not the deal. There's a reason why it became convention. It had its merits. It works on some level. But that's true innovation. That's what you're saying.

That's true innovation. Sometimes it is the total new idea, but most of the time it's a mix. That's exactly right. One of my favorite examples of this actually is I was talking to a design. firm who had been in business in the 1990s, and they had gotten this assignment to develop a new kind of helmet for kids, right? And up to that point, everything that you could buy for a kid, like a safety helmet was like, look like a motorcycle helmet or a football helmet, not that a kid would ever wear. And so they go out and they hire this guy. It's the middle of the winter in

Rhode Island. They hire this guy who's a boat builder. And he actually got hired just because he was like friends with the boss of the firm. And he comes in and it's the middle of the winter. He's not building any boats. Nobody wants to work with this guy, right? Because he doesn't know anything about design. And so they give him this dog of a project, the helmet project. And within the first week of being there, he comes in and he says, you know, the way that you build a boat is you build all these ribs first along the hole. And then you kind of like fill in the rest of the boat with wood. And the reason you do that is because that way, if a boat hits a rock, it distributes the force of the impact. And he said, what if I was to build a boat? And he said, what if I was to build a

boat hole the size of someone's head. And that's the invention of the bicycle helmet. Wow. Right? You own one of these. Everyone listen to this owns one of these. It's one of the best selling products in the last 40 years. And the reason it was invented is because they hired a boat builder to build a boat for someone's head. That's where innovation comes from, not from a burst of genius or creativity. It comes from someone taking an old idea and putting in a new setting. Okay. So that is such a great setup. So we've talked about innovation And I'm going to use your words here. I'm going to let you teach out of this. I want to give the full sentence and let you kind of walk through each of these, let's say, skills that innovation brokers have. Now, the reason I'm asking you this, Charles, is because we've got people listening and going, okay, great, I get all this. This is exciting. How do I find these people? And here's what you say. Innovation brokers are the people most skilled at taking existing information, answers and resources, and applying them as solutions to new problems.

So you gave us a great example. Here's a guy that builds boats, and he goes, all right, I'll take how I build boats, and what if I build a helmet that way? So we get that. But how do our small business leaders, these owners, CEOs, how do they best identify those skills? What are they looking for beyond those skills? Or just walk us through what these people might be looking like, acting like, in their professional role, right there under our noses.

There's kind of two characteristics. And the interesting thing is that I'm sure small business owners listening to this, that they're innovation brokers themselves. They probably have that ability to take conventional ideas and see them in new ways. But there's two things that we have found that innovation brokers do exceptionally well, habits, if you will. The first is that they tend to be curious. They tend to just indulge their curiosity about learning about things that are outside their main wheelhouse, right? They read history books. They go into the accounting department. They ask the accountants to explain what's going on. When they meet someone on the bus, they ask them questions about their job.

They're curious and they allow themselves to indulge their curiosity. But that on its own is not enough because lots of people are curious. The second thing that innovation brokers do is they tend to have daily or weekly routines, rituals almost, that allow them to think more deeply about what they've been exposed to. So for some people, this means that like they keep a diary and they write down sort of what they saw that day and how to make sense of it. Or they write letters or emails to their friends. Or they pull in their assistant and they say, hey, let me tell you about this thing I learned today. Or they say, hey, I read this interesting article. Let me tell you what it said. And the reason they're doing that is not to educate the person that they're speaking to, right? It's to force themselves to think more

deeply about the ideas that they were just exposed to. I do this myself every day. When I come home from work, I tell my wife about my day in excruciating detail, not because of the idea. I do this. I do this myself every day. I do this. I do this because she is interested. She is bored to tears hearing about my day, but I'm not telling her for her benefit. I'm making her listen to me for my benefit. Because as I tell her what I did that day and how to make sense of it, did I do this right or did I do it wrong, as I go through that process, it forces me to think more deeply about my day and whether I used my time wisely, what ideas I was exposed to that I could use in other settings. Now, hopefully she's not totally bored by it, Because at least a little bit interested in what happens to me in my life.

But this is the point, is that the people who are most successful, the people who are most innovative, and we know this from productivity studies, are the people who build habits into their life that allow them to think more deeply. Think more deeply about the choices they're making. Think more deeply about the ideas are getting exposed to. That's how you succeed. Productivity is not about being busy. It's about, in some respects, slowing down so you can think. more deeply. Wow. So it's interesting. I write these things down, curious, and I wrote routine

oriented, if you accept that description of what you said. And I just want to point out to folks listening, Charles, that this is not the flamboyant, creative personality who dresses cool or is who the hipster and they can draw things at the blink of an eye. That's not what you described as innovative people. These could be the people that are right under your nose and you don't realize it. They're very curious, but they're so routine oriented. They're not walking around talking about how creative they are. Well, and it's interesting, right? Think about some of the most creative people that we can point to, right? Steve Jobs. We're the same outfit every single day. That's right. Barack Obama, same thing. Donald Trump, same thing. These are all people who

understand that if you build routines, that in many ways, if you build the right habits, it frees up your mind to think about the things that otherwise you get distracted from thinking about. And they're not the flamboyant people. Oftentimes you lose a lot of your creativity through that flamboyance. What you should look for instead are the people who seem methodically to train themselves to think more deeply and pay attention more to things like, is this a good choice or bad choice? How did I respond to that TV show I saw last night? Why did I respond that way?

Is there something I can pull out of it? there that I can use in my own life or in my own creation. Okay, I want to take another angle on this, too, to get your thoughts. Again, rereading folks what Charles says innovation brokers look like or what they bring to the table. They take existing information, answers, and resources, and they apply them as solutions to new problems. Charles, I got to see something extraordinary happen in the technology space here at our company.

We have nearly 750 people on the team at Ramsey Solutions. and I was the beneficiary of something. They were doing something new to my website, and so they brought all these guys together, designers, guys that code, guys that are problem, they're shooting problems at them to see if they can solve it. It's stuff you can tell I'm already struggling. As I met every one of the,

and I watched these guys do this, and they all came together for a short term to do something cool, and I went around and asked each guy what they did, and they all came together to do it quickly, whereas normally in a workflow, maybe they do their part and then it goes to this guy. They all did it real fast in the same room. And Charles, I looked at them all and I said,

do you guys think you should sit together instead of being in different places? Like, what if you guys all sat together every day and still did your normal thing? Do you think you, because they were all talking about how fun it was to do it in a sprint. And so I just want, that's my context for, because I'm sitting there watching that,

and it just popped in my mind, isn't there great value for these small business owners who are listening to say, all right, let's get some people from different teams over into this team and just have them look at the stuff, the challenges, the problems that this team, their team A is having this challenge. Let's go get some people from Team B and let them take a look at it just to bring their context into it and fresh eyes.

What are your thoughts on that? Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that we know is that simply adding sort of diverse people into a group, oftentimes it helps new ideas bubble up. But what's important about that, though, is that it's not just a matter of bringing someone into a room, you have to have the right kind of atmosphere in that room. And we know a lot about this, actually.

When I read about this and smarter, faster, better, it's a chapter about Google. Because Google had this big question. They were trying to figure out how to build the perfect teams. And so one of the answers that they came up with at first, as a hypothesis, was exactly what you just said. Maybe what matters is the casting. Who's on that team, right? Maybe we want introverts or with extroverts or maybe we just want all introverts.

or all extroverts. Maybe we want someone from accounting alongside someone from engineering. And they tried all this different stuff. And what they found was it didn't predict the success of a team, right? Some teams would succeed, others would fail. They couldn't find any patterns. And then they started looking something different. Instead of focusing exclusively on who is on the team, they started looking at how team members treated each other. Basically, what are the kind of unwritten rules of how that team works? And what they found is if you have to write unwritten rules, then the team succeeds. And there were basically two rules that mattered more than anything else.

They created this thing called psychological safety. The first rule was that people had to speak in roughly equal proportion. Now, that doesn't mean everyone says the same number of words, but it did mean that the team leader who was running that meeting, that what they would tend to do is they would tend to keep notes on a card of who had spoken up, and they would encourage people who hadn't spoken in a while to say something. Because most teams, as we know, there's some people. who like dominate and other people who like kind of wallflowers, but they found the best teams

had leaders who forced everyone to speak in roughly equal proportion. But that wasn't enough on its own. The other thing that a team needed to really succeed is this thing called ostentatious listening. Basically, did the team leader do things like say, let me repeat back to what I just heard to make sure I'm getting it right? Did they demonstrate that they were picking up on nonverbal cues by saying things like, hey, Jim, I see your arms are crossed. Tell me what's going on inside your head. When a team leader would do that, this ostentatious listening, other members of the team, they would start doing the same things. They would actually start listening more closely and signaling to each other that they were listening closely.

And it turns out that if you have a team with these two characteristics, this equality and conversational turn-taking and this ostentatious listening, it creates this psychological safety that makes a team gel together much, much better. So the answer to your question is, it would be great to get all those people from different departments in a room together. But if one person is dominating the conversation, it's not. If people from one department feel like no one's paying attention to them, it's not really going to matter. But it turns out that there's these very simple tactics that really help that entire group feel like they're jelling together and making something new. Okay, folks, the ostentatious listening, that needs to become a new value for your company.

Figure it out, put it on the wall. That's really, really, really strong. All right, we've been talking about all the positive sides of this, but I want to maybe shine the light on the blind spots for leaders when we say, okay, we want to be more innovative. We want to find innovation brokers. And yet real life happens every day in these companies. What do you see, Charles, as maybe blind spots or roadblocks to innovation brokers?

So we might identify them and we try to turn them loose and then, uh-oh, here come their suggested changes, and that's kind of scary. Where do leaders need to be careful not to block these innovation brokers? I think there's two things. The first of which is a lot of coming up with new ideas is coming up with bad ideas. Right? The truth of the matter is that the companies that tend to innovate fastest are the ones who tend to generate ideas, test them, and dismiss them faster than anyone else.

And there's a real cultural cost associated with failure. There's a real cultural cost associated with bringing up a bad idea and having everyone else laugh at it. And so you have to create an environment where if someone brings up a bad idea, if they do something and it doesn't work out, if they test a product and it totally flops, that you celebrate that failure because it's a sign. that you're on the path to success. One of my favorite examples of this is that in the early era of NASA,

there was this real fear of making a mistake. Because, you know, these guys were putting together rockets for the first time. And when they blew up, it's hundreds of millions of dollars of material that just blew up on a launch pad. And so this new guy comes in and he feels like progress isn't happening fast enough. And so what he does is he institutes a new organizational habit, new sort of that happened every single time. Whenever something would blow up on the launch pad, everyone else in mission control would start clapping. And it wasn't ironic, right? They were clapping because he wanted to send a message. Our job is to make progress, and we only make progress by blowing things up

and making mistakes. That's right. That's how we learn how to get better. So at companies, leaders, they have to make it okay to have a bad idea. They have to celebrate. that bad idea because it gets you closer to the next thing. But then the second thing that leaders have to do is they really have to reward people for taking time to think more deeply. Think about what our offices are like nowadays. You walk in and you've got 30 messages waiting for you and you've got 100 emails and your phone is buzzing in your pocket and someone's putting their head through the door and they're saying, hey, can you come sit in on this meeting? You could literally be busy all day long. In fact, you could spend all day just replying

to emails and not get anything important done. Business is the modern condition. And good bosses, good bosses are bosses who help their direct reports overcome busyness so they can be productive. And sometimes that means saying, look, I want you to take a walk every single day for 20 minutes, and I want you to think about how to use the afternoon most productively. Sometimes it means saying, I'm going to send you some emails after 9 o'clock. I never want you to respond to an email after 9 or on the weekends. Sometimes it's just a matter of saying, look, you haven't taken a vacation. Or I want to walk past your office and I want to see the door closed and I want to see you

with your eyes closed, just thinking. We need to give people permission to think more deeply. We know they can be busy. Our offices, our workplaces are designed to make us busy. But the people who do the most amazing things, who are most, most productive and most innovative, they're the ones who aren't just busy, but who have time to think. And we have to give them permission to do so. Yeah. So how do we as the leader, how do we swallow, whether it be pride or fear? Let's take on those. Those are two big enemies of leaders,

pride and fear. So these innovation brokers come to us and they go, hey, this is the solution here. And it is not conventional wisdom. It is that smash up, if you will, that you described so beautifully earlier. How do leaders fight that fear of pride that you didn't come up with the idea or they've taken your idea and made it better or just the fear of investment or the change that comes with it? I think that most people, when they see a new idea, they get excited by it, right? And I think that we can say, look, let's come up with tests to figure out if this idea is going to work. Yes. The great thing about an innovation broker and about ourselves as innovative people is that we tend to be pretty good at trying to figure out ways to prove to ourselves

whether an idea will work or not. And the nice thing about a test is it removes all praise or blame. You can say, look, I have this crazy idea. Here, I came up with a test we can do in one day that's going to cost us $100 to figure out if this thing's going to work. We only have talked to three customers and we'll get some data back. And the nice thing about that is that it's not about whether your idea is a good one or your idea is a bad one, it's about here's one potential solution,

let's throw it against the wall and see if it sticks. There's this way of thinking that's known as agile thinking, sort of agile methodologies, that says, look, the faster you can test and iterate, the more quickly you're going to figure out what you don't know. And there's a lot to be said for that methodology, if not starting with this grand vision or the end in mind, but instead saying, I understand that no matter what I imagine today, there's going to be some problem with it. And my goal is to figure out what's wrong as fast as possible.

And that's the measure of success. Wow. That's a great word. Great way to finish, too. Charles Duhigg, a good friend of ours to come on. This is our third time with you and just really, really fun to talk with you before I let you go. Do you have anything exciting you're working on, let our audience know to be on the lookout?

four? No, I'm actually, I'm spending most of my time on looking, you know, the two books I wrote The Power of Habit, Smarter, Faster, Better. I'm spending a lot of time just trying to figure out how to dive deeper into those ideas. And then trying to figure out, how do you take those and share them with families, share them with kids, really turn these into tools that allow us to think more deeply and build the habits that make us happiest and most successful. Well, that's exciting. I'm sure that's going to yield something that all of us can take advantage of. So thanks for your work, Charles, really, and thanks for your time. We're always better for hanging out with you, man, and we really appreciate you. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Good stuff from Charles Duhigg.

You know why we have him back now. One takeaway there, I hope you caught. There's so much a takeaway, but one of the things that I took away in the conversation was what Charles said. The measure of success is to figure out what's wrong as fast as possible. Folks, that's agility, the idea of, okay, we know it's wrong. Let's not stand there and talk about why it went wrong, how it went wrong. Let's just fix it. Once we've identified it, let's dive into it. Good stuff there. Hey, go to Charlesduhig.com if you'd like to learn more about Charles and connect with what he's doing. Speaking of Agile thinking, critical thinking, the Entree leadership team has a great resource to help you put into practice. Some of the things that you heard from Charles today. This ultimate cheat sheet for critical thinking is going to,

help you think critically so you can move with agility. There it is, the theme again. So instead of instantly reacting to a problem, critical thinkers logically think through an issue and ask questions of their teams, fellow leaders and customers before coming up with the solution. They don't waste a lot of time, but they do come at it from a strategic position. And it's a skill that our leaders at Ramsey Solutions use all the time. With the help of global, Global Digital Citizen Foundation. We've put together a simple infographic that includes questions you need to ask to develop your critical thinking skills. To get the cheat sheet, text the phrase, critical thinking.

That's altogether, no space, critical thinking. Text that phrase to 33444. That's 33444. Now we have a challenge for you. Print this out and review it once a week or more. What we want to know is what are the blind spots you discovered? some new tactics or strategies. And we'd love for you to share how you've used the resource for some wins.

Call 844-944-944-1070. 844-944-1070. Make sure you tell us, hey, love for you to share this if you'd like on the show, and we will do that. We want to celebrate your critical thinking wins. So take advantage of it. Again, to get the cheat sheet, text Critical Thinking to 33444. That's 33-444. And hey, if you get some wins out of this, call us.

Leave a voicemail, 844-944-1070. All right, folks, we're really excited about a new feature to the program. And that is your phone calls. You know, we realized, hey, we're here for you men and women who are leading businesses, growing businesses, starting businesses, growing teams, leading teams. That's why we're here. We want to help you. We've got a great playbook. Thanks to Dave Ramsey and our amazing leadership like Daniel Tarty.

who's our senior vice president, and this guy understands the entree leadership principles, backwards, forwards, sideways, up, down, you name it. So we have launched this, and we are having the time of our lives. 844-94-14-14-14-14-1070. Call us, tell us what your question is. We'll get back in touch with you, and if you'd like to be on the program, we'll get your question answered here on the program. And so we had Allison call in.

this earlier. This is a big issue, the no gossip policy, especially when it's never been instituted and all of a sudden as a leader, you drop the hammer. Well, it doesn't always go so smoothly. And I love that Allison called in to give us her reality. I can't wait for you to hear this. Listen in as Daniel Tarty and myself talk with Allison. Allison, you're on the Entree Leadership Program with Ken Coleman and Daniel Tarty. Hi, guys. How are you today? We're in the time of our life because we're here to help you. So how can we help? Well, I have two questions, hoping that you can help me with both. They're very different in their spectrum, though.

So the first question is, how can I better communicate our no gossip policy to a resistant workforce or resistant team? And then the second question is when is the right time to step on or over a team member who's in danger of losing a very important client? Yeah, let's start with the first one. So tell me about resistance with the team in a no gossip. policy? So I presented the no gossip policy to our team and then how did you present it? What do you mean what did you do when you said that? I basically quoted Dave. Okay. So you got is it like a staff meeting like

hey everybody get together here's a policy and this is how it is now? Yep. Yep and because it was becoming an issue in the office and I saw it becoming an issue so I let them watch the video and then I talk to them a little bit about hey, you know, this is something that I think is hurting our company. This is something that I think that we really need to address. And immediately, eye rolls and all kinds of stuff and not a whole lot happens. So then I went back to, you know, I let it. Well, hang on a second. Let me ask you, if you as the leader are announcing a policy and you're getting eye rolls,

that's a big deal to me. Like, do they respect you as the leader, regardless of the policy? Like, is this a typical attitude with the team? Um, not typical, no. So, um, which is why this was really threw me for a loop. But this issue apparently just struck a nerve, a big nerve. You feel like it was across the entire team or you got a couple of bad apples that are, oh no. It was no. Yeah. There was, it's just, it's just a couple of people. Okay. Have you followed up with those two and, and address the eye rolls and the attitude issue individually? Absolutely. Okay. May I make a guess, Allison, may I make a guess here? Those,

two or three people who rolled their eyes, are they the ones who are the sources of most of the backbiting and gossiping? Yep, absolutely. Shocking. Yeah. Okay. I know, right? So it doesn't sound like you have a policy implementation issue. You've got some people who are not in the right spot. They maybe don't need to be at the company. And of course, you got to address the attitude issues and give them a chance to know what expectations are, give them a chance to step up to the plate. But if you've done that, it sounds like you have, it sounds like the next conversation is talking about this isn't working, we need to have a new conversation, which is we don't have people at our company that are acting like this. And if you're acting like this, you don't belong here.

So how close are we to having that kind of conversation? Well, I mean, and this is kind of why I'm calling today, because I bought this company, so the people that I'm getting this from, so basically I brought my company and we merged it with the company that I bought. And where a lot of this is coming from is from the company that I bought. And they just had a completely different culture and a completely different leadership style and a completely different way of doing things than I do. Makes sense. Do you have any leaders in the other company with a different culture? Do you have any leaders over there, influencers who do have your back and are adopting the new way and the new leader's vision? No. No. As a matter of fact,

I've gotten rid of, I originally took on nine people with the old company. And I have, whittled it down to two. Okay. Allison, here's what you're going to have to do. It's not going to be as fast as you want it to happen. But you're going to need to spend a season educating the entire team, old company and new, that we are now one company. And as one company, these are our values. And some of these values are Allison's values.

I value things like we're going to be unified. And the truth is, no gossip policy, that's not really the value. What you value is unity. Well, why should we care about unity? Well, guys, as a unified team, we're unstoppable, and we're going to hit our goals, and we're going to move faster in the marketplace, and we're going to win, and when we win, you win, and when we win, and your compensation's higher because we're on profit sharing, you get to participate in that. So unity really matters, but you're going to have to sell them on unity and aligning around that value. Now, the biggest threat to unity is gossip, which means if you're gossiping, you're threatening the thing we all care about that's going to take us forward as a company. And this isn't going to be just a conversation. This is going to be a season of you downloading your core values with the entire team, letting them know. And what I would do is say, hey, every Friday we're going to do a lunch. I'll order in sandwiches or whatever it is. And over lunch, I'm just going to talk to you guys

about my values. And I would have a one value per week, one pager printed up, where you talk them through a value and moving forward, this is the expectation, let them do some Q&A, and then start holding them accountable to your value system. And then you're going to be able to have a season after that where you go, all right, now if you're not doing this stuff, you don't align with what our values are and who we are, not who Allison is, but who we are. So take me to this next question about the right time to step over a team member who's in danger, because I'm guessing this may be related to your first question. Probably so. So this employee is responsible for one of our biggest clients. And it's a $40,000, we're an event company, so it's a $40,000 event,

and it basically makes our February. And February is, you, usually a dead month for the event industry. So are they dropping the ball? What's the deal? So the client reached out to our person and said, hey, I need a proposal. We are going to be bidding it out this year, but, you know, I need your proposal and I need it by Friday. This was like on a Monday. So Tuesday came, you know, I went to her and I said, okay, this is great.

I'm so glad to hear this. This is a perfect time for us to collaborate as a team and to sit down and to really you know, to really knock this one out of the park. And she was like, no, I don't want to give, I got this. I can do it. And I'm like, okay, but that's not who we are anymore. We are a collaborative group. And so this is a focus opportunity.

I'm sorry. Are you her direct leader? Yes. Okay. And is she coming from the company you bought or she came with you? Yeah. She's coming from the company I bought. Surprise, surprise.

I know. Believe me. I have to have this conversation and go, look, until I have confidence in your competence and a consistent track record that you're going to do it the right way, I've got to step in as your leader. And we talk about this, you know, entree leadership. We talk about delegation is something you do. You lengthen the rope for somebody when they have the competence to do the job and you trust their, not only their intent, but you trust their attitude and you trust their track record.

And so she doesn't have that with you right now. You got to have that conversation and say, until these things are true, your rope's going to be a little shorter, not because I'm trying to micromanage you, but I want to make sure we deliver for our client right now. I don't feel confident that's going to happen. So I think you guys need to have that discussion. And if you're still getting an attitude issue, push back there, then you're having a discussion about our attitude and how that's a performance issue at this point. Allison, thank you for the call. And if you would like to submit your question to be put here on the show, you can do that two ways. First, you can call 844-944-1070. That's 844-944-107.

or you can email us podcast at ontradeleadership.com. So leave a voicemail with your question or email us, and we'd love to have you on the program. Very excited about these questions, Daniel Tarty. And, you know, it's interesting when you hear questions like these. How common are they? Yeah, here's the thing, Ken. Allison, you're dealing with very common issues. You're dealing with people.

And the hardest part of our job as leaders is getting over. the fact that not all our people are going to like us all the time. Our job is to embrace difficult discussions because there's a standard. We got to deliver for the client. Allison, it's not about you as the leader and your person liking you or not liking you. They're not performing. You don't have the confidence they're going to perform. So you have to lean into that uncomfortable discussion and call that out. That might result in this person doesn't like us anymore. But you got to ask, is my job to be popular with my team or is my job to be effective for the promise that we're delivering to our customers. And if you can rally the team around our customers of the hero of this

story, this isn't about politics, this isn't about me being all up in your business, we have an obligation to our customer. And until we can feel confident in our system, which includes you doing a good job with excellence, then we have to work on that together. And that's our job as leaders. So the encouragement is lean into these situations. If you're not leaning in, you're not leading and your team's going to lead and they might lead it in the wrong direction. Well, as always, my friend, good to have you in studio with us. This has been a lot of fun. We're going to continue to do this. Now, I gave you the phone number. I gave you the email. I'll give it to you again. One other thing I want to point out, we understand the sensitivity by which some of you are facing, asking a question like this publicly.

So I want to put this out there. We'll protect your name. We can even do the Tony the Tiger voice thing. I'm sure that the guys back there can figure out how to distort your voice in post if we need to go that far. I'm having a little fun with that, but I'm also serious to say. We want to answer your questions. This is a safe place where you can come and get some of the most complex, gut-wrenching business leadership questions answered. I dare say that if you've got a personal question, Daniel and I understand one thing that you are not just businessmen and women.

You are also husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, and we're committed to you the full person. So I'm just putting that out there. So we will protect your identity. Just want you to feel comfortable getting your answer when you can. And we know you're busy, so that's why we're offering you the opportunity to schedule the call. That's 844-944-1070. 844-944-1070.

Or email us, podcast at entreleadership.com. Now, one other thing we'd like to put out there. We love your feedback. So if you go to Entreleadership.com and click on podcast and then go to this episode, you can leave your comments or questions about Allison's question, about our comments, whatever you would like. We love your feedback. If you've got some extra advice, you can certainly put that in there as well.

We love the feedback. So do use the comment section at entreleadership.com. Click on podcast and go to this episode. I want to give some big love to our longtime friends, InfusionSoft. We use their products. We love their team. Great leaders. great team and a great service to business leaders everywhere.

We have a lot of you that give us great feedback that you are using their services. And we want to tell you about a free trial that InfusionSoft is offering to you. They're going to help you systematize your sales pipeline, payments, and analytics all in one place. Just click the InfusionSoft link in the show notes at entreleadership.com and fill in the info. That's it. You've got nothing to lose. a free trial. I tell business leaders all the time about my friends in Infusion Soft and say, listen, call them up, tell them Ken Coleman sent you. They're going to take very good care of you.

And they'll give free trials for people to kick the tires. And this free trial is an absolute no-brainer. I think you should feel silly if you don't take them up on it because there's going to be multiple ways that they are going to be able to open up your eyes and help you. So go check that out. Again, the Infusionsoft link is in the show notes at entreleadership.com. All right, folks, It's going to do it on behalf of the entire Entree leadership team. Thank you so much for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon. Hey, folks, I want to make you aware that we have other great podcasts from Ramsey Solutions.

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