EntreLeadership - #291: Lead for the Right Reasons with Patrick Lencioni

Episode Date: November 5, 2018

If you think being a leader is all about personal glory, fame and wealth, best-selling author and leadership expert Patrick Lencioni says you have it all wrong. Join us to hear Pat explain what he calls the only valid form of leadership, as well as the four things that only a leader can—and must—do. Also joining us is Ramsey Solutions Senior Vice President, Daniel Tardy, to answer team-related questions from two All Access members. As Dave likes to say, “Business is easy until people get involved!” entreleadership.com/podcast Patrick Lencioni's Unconference Buy the book: Death by Meeting EntreLeadership Summit 2019 How to use lead magnets to promote your business: Collect and Consult from Infusionsoft Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If a leader says I don't really like going to meetings, they are saying I don't like leading. 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, four leaders. Thank you so much for joining the conversation. Excited to have back for our feature conversation, one of our dear friends and one of our our most popular guest, Pat Lincione joins us.

It's going to be great stuff. We're talking about some new content from Pat, and you're going to love that. Also, bringing in the popular new feature that we've been testing and you've been liking, and that is our phone calls from you. That's right. Listener phone calls, Steve and Joey join us on this episode, so you don't want to miss that. Let's get right to it. Pat Lincione is probably one of my most favorite conversations I get to have in the interview context.

And we're going to talk about conflict, meetings, and organizational health. We're so excited about this and him rejoining us back at Summit in 2019. So here is our conversation with Pat Lincione. Well, Pat, good to have you back. It's always fun to have you with us and excited to talk with you today about several key leadership topics. The first one is this is really interesting. You have over 20 years of working with CEOs and other executives and teams. there's a big misconception that leadership is a reward as opposed to what?

The responsibility. And one of the things I've looked at in my career is like, why do some leaders just, are they not willing to do the basic tasks of their job? They abdicate their role. And I realized, in a funny way, it's because they're being leaders for the wrong reason. They do it because they see it as the end of the road, lifetime award. for working really hard. And so they think, well, now that I've arrived,

and I'm the leader, I'm the CEO, why should I have to do anything I don't want to do? Whereas other people realize, oh, now that I'm the CEO or the leader of the organization, now the responsibility and the burden is greater than ever for me to deliver for the good of these other people. And if you have a motivation that this is a reward and I've arrived, you're not going to do all the hard stuff.

And if you have the idea that this is a huge burden and a responsibility, then you're going to be willing to do whatever's necessary. So that's very interesting. So how do we as humans balance this reality that if you ascend into leadership, usually that's got some more money attached to it. Obviously it's got more responsibility, which you're talking about, but it also has a little bit of status. And all those things are good if kept in check. And so how do you make sure that you don't make it about, all right, in order for me to advance financially, in order for me to advance and influence, I got to go higher up the ladder. How do you keep yourself in check when it brings obviously some value to it. You know, I think the main thing is, I don't know if we can ask the people who are going through that process. I mean, what I'd like to say is if you want to be a leader, but you really want to do it because you want to be personally glorified or look like you're successful, don't do it.

Like I say, when we give graduation speeches, we shouldn't be telling people, go out and be a leader, go change the world. Because if the reason they want to do that is because they want to be rich, famous, or powerful, then that's a bad reason to be a leader. But what I'd say is let's stop promoting people. Let's stop allowing people into positions of leadership that is really only about them. And from now on, when people talk about servant leadership, we should stop talking about servant leadership because it's the only kind of leadership there is. It implies that there's another kind that's valid, and there is no other valid kind of leadership. So I think that what we need to do is make it unacceptable for people to be leaders if they think it's about them. And that's in any kind of organization. The way I found out about that is I was sitting in this room that I'm in right now. And just over here, to my left, was Alan Mullalley, the former CEO of Ford, the one who turned

around Ford from its darkest days and really turned the organization around. They're struggling a little bit again. But he did an amazing thing. So he was in this room with us for two days. And he said to me, Pat, the one thing I disagree with that you teach is that you say that people need to be sacrificial as leaders. He said, I don't see leadership as a sacrifice. I see it as a privilege.

And I said, Alan, you're not in Kansas anymore. Most young leaders are not doing it for that reason. They're doing it because they think it's for them. And he said, you're kidding. And I said, oh, no, Alan, the days of I want to be a leader because I want to serve and I realize it's lonely and it's hard, most of these people in the Silicon Valley, for instance, think it's cool and they want to be famous and they want to be rich. And so the truth is very few leaders.

today are doing it for the right reason. And we need to restore the correct reason for wanting to be a leader in the first place. Okay, absolutely. I think that's airtight. How do we do that? How do our listeners contribute to this worthy cause? Well, if you are a leader, first of all, always check your intentions. Always purify our intentions and don't let yourself get caught up in the status. Remember that if you're not doing the hardest things in your organization and the things that only you as the leader can do, then you're not doing your job. If you see another leader who is abdicating their job, and I'll talk about what those activities are, call them out on it. For their sake and for the sake of the organization, humbly and kindly say, you know something? You have to embrace this

part of your job. Otherwise, I'm not sure why you want to be a leader. We have to take that risk if we want our organizations to be healthy and successful, and we want our employees to be well-led. And those activities, Ken, are you've got to take an interest in meetings in making them great. You can't say, I hate meetings and I don't like to go to them and I'll let somebody else handle them. No, the leader of an organization has to be the chief meeting officer. They have to be the person that makes meetings great, intense, good conflict, and driving toward the right outcomes. The other thing is, you have to manage people. Too many CEOs say, I don't want to manage people anymore.

You know, I hire adults and I shouldn't have to manage the right. them. The CEO, more than anyone in an organization, has to manage his or her direct reports, or no one else in the organization is going to do that well. Another one is, you have to repeat yourself constantly. Like I say that the CEO is also the CRO, the chief reminding officer, and if they're not constantly repeating themselves, if they get tired of that and say, you know, I'm bored with that message, the people in the organization are not going to hear it. The other thing is they have to confront people and have difficult conversations. They have to really be into messy conversations. And if they avoid them like so many leaders I meet do and say,

oh, I don't want to get into that. I don't have the time and the energy for that, then nobody else will. If leaders aren't willing to do those messy things, they shouldn't be leaders in the first place. Wow. There's so much here. Okay, so you know, Pat, we've had so many of these conversations. Let's go back through these because you had a beautiful job setting those up. Okay, interested meeting. So you wrote a great book called Death by Meeting, where you address a lot of things, I'm sure, around this. But I want you to take us right there.

Okay, so we've got a CEO, we've got leaders that are listening in here, and they're going, what does that mean, Pat? Tell me specifically, how am I supposed to take an interest? And then once I'm taking an interest, what captain role am I playing in these meetings? Well, one of the things we've just discovered, Ken, it sounds weird to say we've discovered it, because you said I wrote a book about this.

Meetings are even more important than we had ever thought. If a leader does not have great meetings, he or she is not an effective leader. The most important moment in a leader's day, week, month is when they're leading people in meetings. Because if you think about it, what is leadership? Where does it occur? Is it walking down the hall and saying inspiring things? Is it giving a speech at a conference or something like that? Those are anomalies.

Most of leadership is when you're sitting with your team in a room and either holding them accountable, challenging them around decisions, being vulnerable, making difficult decisions, and moving the organization forward. And if a leader says, I don't really like going to meetings, they are saying, I don't like leading. And what that means is if their meetings are boring, that's on them. If their meetings are unfocused and they wander, that's on. them. If nobody is really engaging and pushing on each other in a meeting, that's on them. If they're not driving to closure and clarity, that's on them. And so what leaders have to do is say, this is my number one job. And I have to learn everything I can about how to make this meeting,

focused, compelling, honest, and driving to closure. And so it really is about saying, this is my job. If you're a surgeon, you better be reading, books about how to do surgery well. If you're a football player, you should be studying other people that are good at football and learning about how to do that. If you're a leader in an organization, you should be reading about how to make my meetings great because that is where you lead. I can't emphasize that enough, Ken. Yeah, I agree. So let's stay here for a minute. So what would you say to somebody, let's just say they're sitting here with this thing, go, Pat, okay, you're stepping all over my toes. My meetings are all over the place. I can't even describe the last five meetings we had

because maybe I was half asleep. I was just there. I contributed a little bit. They're admitting, okay, my meetings, I'm not doing a good job leading them at all. How do they start? Those little attributes that you just listed out, do they look at that and go, okay, I got to make sure every meeting's got a little bit of that. Is that how they start? Here's what they have to realize first, Ken, and that is this. You can't have meeting stew. Meeting stew is when we take every different kind of meeting and throw it in the same one and wonder why it doesn't turn out good. They have to realize there's actually four different reasons for having a meeting and you have to separate these.

One purpose to have meetings is just to catch up with people on what's going on. You should do that for five minutes every day. If you work in the same location, just get together in a room and go, what are you doing? What are you doing? How's the game last night? What did you think about this? Hey, where's Fred? Oh, he's traveling.

Great. Enough. Don't sit down. Don't have an agenda. It's just shooting the stuff and getting on the same page and kind of getting in touch with each other. Five minutes a day, no more. Don't do that at your other meetings and waste time. If you're doing that every day, when you get together for meetings that need to be more focused, you're going to go there. The second kind is to move the ball forward, if you will. It's to make

tactical decisions to keep moving the ball down the field, using a football analogy. This is what we call a weekly staff meeting. You and your leadership team are getting together saying, how are we doing? What's going on right now? What do we need to be doing this? week to make sure that things are getting better. You're not there to go over administrative details. That's what you do for five minutes a day. You're not there to talk about the strategy and whether or not it should be changed

or what's going on in the industry and all these other things. That's for a different meeting. Have a focused, tactical meeting that's all about the priorities we have, how are we doing against those priorities, and what adjustments do we need to make this week? Okay? That has to be completely tight.

If we're letting administrivia and strategic issues and brainstorming and other things leak into that meeting, that's how it gets unfocused. And that meeting right there, that weekly staff meeting is by far our most important one. We need to limit it to tactical subjects. We need to have a very limited number of things we're going to talk about. We need to go there and assess how we're doing first before we put together an agenda. Then we need to say, now we know what we have to talk about. Let's talk about the right things. That's a whole bunch of stuff.

And before we get into that, the next kind of meeting we need to have is occasionally, and maybe it's once a month, maybe it's a couple times a month. It really depends on what's going on. We need to have these bigger picture, strategic, thematic meetings where we're talking about one big, hairy topic, a competitive threat, a big change in the market, a need for a new strategy. Instead of talking about that for 15 minutes during our weekly meetings, we need to go off, create enough space, a couple hours to roll up our sleeves, do a little bit of pre-reading and research, and come to that meeting ready to have wonderful arguments and brainstorm and push

on each other and solve that problem. But too many leaders try to include strategic topics, because they're the most interesting, and they mix them in with tactical topics and administrative ones, and it just doesn't work. And then there's the fourth kind of meeting we need to have, and that is sometimes we need to step back and breathe and just check in, are we doing the right things as a team?

Is the culture right? This is something we probably have to do once a quarter. We have to get out of the office, go across the street to a hotel, get a room for four hours, and sit there as a team and just take a breath and evaluate. Now, everybody's like, man, that sounds like a lot of meetings. First of all, if you do those meetings correctly,

every one of them will be enjoyable, compelling, and productive. Nobody will complain about them. What they complain about is mixing it all up together and wondering if anything is really getting done. Secondly, if you have all of those meetings, it's going to add up to about 15% of your time. Now, if a leader complains about spending 15% of his or her time with his or her team in working meetings, getting things done, then I think they've probably lost sight of what their job is about. So that's a long conversation.

But if we don't separate out those four different kinds of reasons for getting together in meetings, it's never going to work. Now, I'm looking at all the notes that we took as we talked with your team ahead of time. And I've listened to what you've said so far. you laid out beautifully the four types of meetings we need to have. But again, even if we're strategic to have those meetings, if the meetings aren't run well, they're going to be a big waste of time. That's the big takeaway. So let me ask you this. It seems like I'm just pairing down some of the things that you've said. It seems like meetings need to be focused and then need to be fun. Can we say that? Focused and fun? Yeah, absolutely. But fun is fun in terms of like a movie

being fun to watch because it's actually compelling. And there's tension. Not fun because nobody really cares and they're just blowing it off. Right. Yeah. I would say engaging even more than fun. Right. Yeah. And so the idea there is that people aren't nodding off. They're like, you're keeping my attention. Because sometimes we think entertaining is popcorn and silliness.

No, entertaining means engaged. I'm engaged. You've entertained my mind. My mind is not wandering. I'm locked in. At the end of a meeting, you should be tired. You should feel a sense of accomplishment. But you should feel a sense of exhaustion. because you've put your mind and your heart out there and you've taken risks and you've been vulnerable and you've focused on things and you've been frustrated and you've communicated that

and you've received that. This idea that meetings should begin on time, end on time, and nobody should ever get upset or emotionally challenged is part of the problem. Okay, so now that's an interesting point, Pat. So it's not about being focused into 60 minutes. If you have 60 minutes allotted, you don't care if it's 70 minutes as long as it's focused, as long as the conversation and what's happening is happening. It's such a weird thing. It's like, why in the world would we take the number one job we have, the number one moment in an organization,

and limit it in some way, so that we can go do email or go to a less important meeting? That's right. I mean, think about it. That's what we do. It's like my wife and I saying, okay, honey, we're going to go on a date every week. And this is really important because, you know, our relationship is important to our children and our family.

But let's just make sure that it starts on time that it doesn't go. minute over and that we don't really get into anything very, very uncomfortable. Yes, exactly. That's ridiculous. And that's what we do in the corporate setting and in an organization. It's so true. You could be having tremendous momentum in the 58th minute. And then everything winds down because everybody's going, oh, we got to be out of this room because somebody else is coming in in two minutes. So what are you going to go do that's more important than this? I mean, that's the question that needs to be asked. What is it that you want to get out of

here for that you have going on, which is why I say when an executive team has their weekly meeting, don't schedule anything for the hour after it. It might need to keep going or you might need to go sit down and follow up on something. That's the most important thing you do. If you were to ask most leaders, they would probably say it's their least favorite and therefore becomes their least important priority. It becomes like corporate penance. It's just something we have to do. Let's run time off the clock so we can get back and do real work. That's a huge, huge indication that you have problems in your organization, that you're not close to reaching your potential.

Okay. Let's just for fun, let's say that you could become invisible Pat and you could zap yourself into corporate meetings, small business meetings all around the country, just randomly and then give us a report later. What are you looking for? What do you want to see in a really important meeting with leaders? I want to see that whatever they're talking about in the meeting, everybody around the meeting around the table is glad they're talking about it.

I want to know, I want to see that bubble in their heads where they're not thinking, what the hell are we doing listening to this presentation for? We should, and you know how you avoid that? Is at the beginning of your meetings, you don't have an agenda. You start the meeting by saying, let's go over our top priorities and let's evaluate them. We like green for good, yellow for it's doing okay, red for it's bad.

And let's make sure that we're choosing the topics we're going to to talk about during the rest of the meeting based on our evaluation of what's going on. Just because people want to talk about green things doesn't mean we should. We're probably going to spend most of our time talking about things are red or yellow because that's what we need to do to make sure that everything is trending well. So what I would say is I don't want to see an agenda that somebody came up with beforehand. That's the sign of a bad meeting. I don't want to see people sign in frustration that we're listening to a 25-minute presentation

that's taking away time from other things. I don't want to see anybody checking their devices or looking at the clock or checking out of the meeting. I want to see them sitting on the edge of their seat and engaged. I don't want to see a meeting go by where nobody gets frustrated, not at each other necessarily, but that could be, but around an issue. I want to see them have angst, you know? Hold on. I want to interrupt there. I know where you're going, but I want to stay here because this is something that you like to promote this when you can.

And there's a reason for this. And it's not because you like stirring the pot to watch people get angry, but there is something there. You're looking for some passion. So let's wrestle here. You like to see people wrestle. Why? Because it means that they're taking it seriously and they're aware of the fact that things

could change. Let's look at laser football analogy. You and I always do that. Your dad is a football coach, wasn't he? No, but you and I just love sports. We're just maniacs. Yes. Oh, you talked about the lessons your dad.

taught you in athletics about working hard. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. So he was your coach, personal coach. So at half time of a game, the coaches should be like, okay, even if you're up by two touchdowns, you should be going, what do we need to do to make sure that we continue this and we're aware of other things going on? If you go in there and you're just like, hey, things are going great. This is fantastic.

That is a sign that you're going to get surprised in the second half. And every company should be appropriately concerned about are we still on our game? That staff meeting is like you're going at halftime. If we compared meetings to football games, we would say that the huddle is the five minutes a day where you get together and you just say, how are things going? And my friend Vern Harness, who has an organization, Gazelle, some really good stuff, he talks about the daily huddle, which is just a short meeting.

Half time is where you go in and you go, okay, how are things going? What tactical decisions do we have to make? What adjustments do we have to make so that the second half is a good one? what you talk about after the game is over when you go to practice, that's your strategic meeting. It's like, hey, what should we change? Should we insert some new plays for the new opponent coming up? Do we need to trade for another player or bring somebody up off the practice squad? That's a strategic decision.

That's fun. And then in the off season, that is your quarterly offsite where you say, how are things going? What we too often do is we don't really have a good weekly season. meeting where we're looking at things and saying, what do we need to be angsting about so that this week is better than last week? Just like a team, what should we be angsting about so that the second half is better than the first half? If we're too complacent, if things just don't go well. Now, I've got to ask you this because you have a, I know your personality type. It leads much closer to mine. And so I know this that when I'm in a meeting and I'm fired up about something,

I mean, it's just all over me. And yet there are other personality types that they go, whoa, what's happening? Is you really, whoa, whoa, you know what I'm saying? I mean, this is just the reality. So you're saying, hey, we don't want to be mad at each other. We don't want to be frustrated at each other. However, when you get in a meeting like that, if we're being honest, Pat, and you're promoting this idea, how does the leader make sure and how each individual member in that maybe executive meeting

and go, okay, we're going to start going this route and we're not going to be disrespectful, obviously, but we are going to wrestle, we're going to debate some ideas and not take it personal. I just think it's important that you address that because you do have different personality types who take this stuff differently. Yeah. Well, first of all, all of this is predicated on the fact that you have a team that trusts each other. What I mean is they're capable of being vulnerable with each other and therefore conflict is never taken as a attempt to make me feel bad. everyone knows that they'll admit when they're wrong or they'll apologize if they go over the line. So you have to have that trust. If you have a group of executives that don't trust each other

and you go to a meeting and say, I want you guys to really push each other, they're going to go, well, I'm going to push because I want to get my way and I want it to benefit me over the team. So this really does rely on the fact that people are trusting each other and they understand that conflict is the pursuit of truth and the best possible answer. Now, having said that, I'm Italian and Irish and an ENFP. So I'm pretty emotional. Now, I will say this, not everybody needs to be that way, but let me tell you what, the leader, regardless of it's his or her natural type, the leader should be leading the way on energy

and enthusiasm and commitment to what you're talking about. And here's the thing. Even if you push people outside of their comfort zone, because I do that a lot at meetings, and after every meeting I have, Ken, just about every meeting I have, I turn to my staff after when I go, I hope I wasn't rude. And they're like, no, not at all. We need this. And I realized that I have to be a little uncomfortable

in pushing people. And if I'm not willing to push myself out of my comfort zone as a leader, they're not going to come out of their comfort zones as the people running the organization. And here's what it came out to. And I was explaining this to my 12-year-old son the other day. To be a great leader, I don't know who said this. You have to be slightly unreasonable.

I love that quote. slightly. In other words, if you're reasonable about everything, you're never going to push people beyond what they can do. And I sat down with my 12-year-old and I said, you know, I'm your dad and I love you, but I have to be a little bit unreason. I have to push you a little further than you want to, because if I only push you where you're comfortable and I never make you get a little bit frustrated in the moment, I'm probably not getting you to stretch. And he gets that. He gets that. Even though in the moment it might be a little uncomfortable, we all look back at our parents who made us do that and we say thank you thank god they did that and in meetings as the CEO of my company

i have to push people a little harder than they'd probably want to when they came to the meeting and they always say afterward that was a great meeting i'm really glad we did that i feel like we got a lot done that was a little uncomfortable at times but i'm glad because i'm always feeling like are you sure i wasn't a jerk and they're like no you have to quit saying that i always think i was a jerk at meetings yeah another thing i like to say ken is that to be a great leader sometimes you have to be we call a little J jerk, jerk with a small J. That just means you're a little bit difficult. Not a big J jerk where you're an ass and you're disrespectful,

but you have to be a little bit like, I'm going to push you where you don't want to go. Anyway, that's a long explanation, but it's one night. I say that with lots of passion and repetition because I want leaders to realize. If you're never going up to that line or stepping over it, you're not leading the way you need to. We've talked about this with you before, but it bears repeating because it is fact, your content on how important it is for leaders to repeat themselves. And I can just hear people, Pat, going, all right, Pat, seriously? Enough. Because they're adults for crying out loud. Like, I do that at home. I mean, I got three kids. I got to remind my 12-year-old every stinking

day to put deodorant. I'm about ready to jump in front of traffic. Or this just to me personally, right? So everybody's got that, right? With like, okay, Pat, I'm a parent. I repeat. myself. If I've got to repeat myself at work, I'm going to go absolutely loony. Pat, come on. Why do I have to repeat myself so much? To really step back from it, I'm guessing more than a couple of your people listen to this might go to church. And I'm a follower of Jesus Christ, and he repeated himself all the time. You have to do it in different ways. It's not about making the message new in terms of changing it all the time. It's about helping people realize that we lose our way. And if our kids lose our way, and we lose our way, and we lose it.

our way in life, our employees also get distracted. Alan Malalley, the CEO of Ford, he talked about how overcommunication was so important. And so many executives I work with hate over communicating because they're afraid that, one, they're going to insult their audience, like, well, they already heard it, I said it once. They're like that husband whose wife says, why don't you ever tell me you love me? And the husband says, I don't know. I told you when we got married, I'll let you know if it changes. We assume that people, they listen intellectually, but there's an emotional listening too, and we need to reinforce things. So Alan Mulally got together at Ford and said, okay, we're going to turn the company around. He put together a very simple plan. He could put it on a single little

card, like a business card. And he said, this is how we're going to turn the company around. And so the Wall Street Journal invited him there, and he presented that to them. They thought, okay, this is great. A year later, he had already begun to turn the company around. And they said, they brought him back in for an interview, and they said, okay, what do you got for us? And he pulled out that card. And they said, well, yeah, we saw that last year. What do you have? Give us something new. And he goes, no. He goes, this is the plan. And they go, yeah, but we already covered that. He goes, I'm not talking about something else. See, his job isn't to entertain people or himself. His job isn't to prove that he's smart and constantly come up with a new idea. We drive our employees

crazy when we think we have to come up with a brand new idea every time we communicate. His job was to constantly keep people focused on the simple things that was going to turn that organization around. And if you talk to any great football coach or basketball coach or leader of any kind, their people will be able to lovingly do a fantastic impression of them because they know what they're going to say. And though that sounds painful, it's no different than being a parent. You know, Ken, I don't think you're frustrated by the fact that your kids might say, you know, my dad keeps telling me that drugs are bad for me and pornography and that I should really, you know, be a kind person and say my I don't care if my kids think I repeat that a lot.

If they remember it and they know I mean it and it sticks with them, then I may not be the world's most clever and entertaining parent, but I'm going to make sure they have the best chance in life to be successful. And our job as leaders is to give our people and our companies the best chance to be successful, even if it means we have to say things seven times before we know they believe it. It's true. I'm so emboldened. I get to tell my 12-year-old tonight.

I talked to my palpatt, and I know you're sick of me telling you put you to your owner on, but one of these days is going to click on your own, and here's the win, son, you're not going to stink. It's just huge, just huge, folks. Always learning here. Always learning. Ken, I heard a great story from a guy who's in the faith world, and he talked about how leaders need to do things that are hard for the people that they lead sometimes. And in the moment, they're not going to love it. And he talked about he was taking his family when they were young.

He had three kids at the time. He has more now. to a baseball game, and they were crossing a busy street across from the stadium in Pittsburgh. And he grabbed his daughter by the arm, and they were going across the street, and a guy started to ran a red light. And the daughter let go of his hand and pushed herself away and was in danger. And he grabbed her really hard and pulled her back so the truck wouldn't hurt her. And so they got to the other side of the street, and after the mom stopped yelling expletives at the truck driver, the girl started crying and said, Daddy, you hurt me.

And he said, honey, I saved your life. And he goes, no, you are. She said, you hurt me and ran to the mom. And it wasn't until the fourth inning that she came back to her dad and crawled up in his lap. And then she said, it's still red here, Daddy. Right. The point of the matter is, if we love people, we have to do things that are hard for them. Yeah. Because we're more interested in their well-being and the organization's well-being

than our own popularity in the moment. That is so easy to say and so hard to do. Yeah, it really is. It really is. Well, good stuff, as always, Pat, before I let you go, I'd love to ask you, what are you working on that you can tell us about? What's coming up from the table group or from your mind? Yeah, well, we are refocusing our company on the bigger picture of why we started. I started this company because we really want to make work fulfilling.

And that goes right along with making an organization fantastic and effective. And we're going to embrace that a little bit more. We're going to retell that story that this is about, giving people dignity in their work and helping their organizations be successful in serving their customers. And so we're going to reembrace that. We're having a big conference that's sold out already. I can't believe it in January to kind of celebrate this. It's called the unconference. And we're bringing together 800 CEOs, consultants, employees, managers to talk about how they've done that in their organizations. We're rebranding and redoing our website. I'm writing a book on leadership.

And I'm also writing a book for churches about how to make a church extraordinary. We're launching a new education program through Santa Clara University that's going to allow executives to go online and do a, like a badge program to learn about organizational health. We have a lot going on right now. Yes, you do. And you know that we are here at Entree Leadership and Ramsey Solutions. We're big friends and we love what you're doing. You've done so much for us. And we're going to always be here to let people know what you're doing because it's worthy of them knowing about it.

Hey, get this, Ken. I was at the department store late last night with my son who's going to Homecoming. So I had to get him prance and blah, blah, blah. And I saw another parent doing the same thing. And she said, hey, I went to see Dave Ramsey in the city last night in San Francisco. And I was like, he didn't tell me he was in town. I guess that's the first time he's done a session in San Francisco. That's right.

And if I'd have gone there so I could have heckled him. But anyway, it's fun to hear other people learning from Ramsey Solutions. That's right. It's fun. It's an honor to be a part of that. I'm going to tell him that you're offended that he didn't give you a shout out. when he was in town. Yeah, but I understand. I think that was the first time we've ever done any live event in San Francisco, and that was our smart money event. So yeah, fun stuff there.

That's great. Well, we'll be with you soon, and we always love being with you. But Pat, thanks again for hanging out with us. We're always better for talking with you, and we appreciate you greatly. Thanks, Kim. God bless. Big thanks to Pat. Always love when he joins us. I told you before the conversation that Pat Lynch, he's going to be joining us at our Summit 2019. This is our premier event. April the 28th through May the 1st, 2019 at the Grand Hyatt in San Diego. Our speakers, Dave Ramsey, Chris Hogan, Pat Lynchione, Sarah Blakely, Jesse Itzler, Simon Seneca, Payton Manning, Carrie Lawrence, Marcus Buckingham, Dr. Henry Cloud, and yours truly going to be given a talk. This is our most exciting event. I just got to tell you, I absolutely love it.

It's just a huge event. It's the largest attended event that we have, and it's like the Super Bowl. of leadership. And get your tickets at entreleadership.com slash summit. That's entreeleadership. Dot com slash summit. It's going to be great. And who doesn't want to go to San Diego and get better? All right, folks, we're excited about this new feature where we take your phone calls. And always fun when Daniel Tarty, my good friend and our senior VP of business and leadership, the guy who has led Entree leadership from the ground up, joins us. He knows how to answer the questions. he knows the playbook well, we're having a great time with us. So as you enjoy these phone calls and learn alongside our callers,

know that we are here for you. Give us a call and we'll help you out. Joey, you were on the Entree Leadership Program with Daniel Tarty and Ken Coleman. How are you? Good, thanks. Good. How can we help today? So I've got a guy that I brought on board.

I think it's been around a year, 18 months ago. And first, let me say it was my mistake in a hiring process in that. I hired him from a competitor, so I really wasn't able to. able to check his references, so to speak, but he kind of sold me that he was much better than he is. I needed him, and I plan on moving into more of a management role. But anyway, he's not living up to, he's capable of. So what's the challenge? To reduce his salary, I know that won't go. Are you changing his responsibilities? Are you changing his role? So does he have people at his level that are making the cut? Like, do you know what, do you know your expectation just reasonable based on

what other people are doing? Same role. So it's, I mean, I'm confused on why you would lower your standard if you know people are capable of doing the thing that you're expecting him to do. Let me ask you this, Joey. You're asking, should you lower his salary, his compensation package based on the fact that you hired him in at one level thinking he would go into management, but he's not management material. So now you want to lower his comp package to be equal to the others that are in the similar role? I mean, I've warned him after, you know, reviewing his work and just said, look, that you're not worse.

What are you worried about? What are you worried about? If you do this, what are you worried is going to happen? I can hear the fear in your voice. Yeah, but Joey, hang on. Hang on, man. You don't want a guy hanging on your team that's like, fine, I guess. If he stays, if he goes, no big deal.

I mean, we want somebody in that seat who's fired up and driving your company for it, right? Yeah. And it doesn't sound like that's who this guy is. Yeah. So we're not talking about whether we change the comp or not. That's a safe way around not having to deal with the real issue. The real issue is you have expectations of somebody in that role who is going to lead this area forward, whether they have a title or it's just by getting killer results as a rank and file guy. He's not ringing the bell.

You've overcommitted on bringing this guy in. And now we aren't talking about it. And we're going to kind of come around the side door by giving the guy a demotion. I think you've got to get down to the real issue and say, hey, your performance. isn't there. We need to talk about if you really need to be here or not. Then if he comes back and says, dude, I love this place. I want to be here. I'm teachable. I'm humble. Show me what I got to do. Now we can talk and we can say, hey, we need to get your pay align with your performance for the season and then bring you back up. But if this guy's going to be defensive and react negatively

to a conversation about performance, he may not need to be on the team to begin with. Well, that may happen, but if I'm you, I don't want somebody on my team who's just kind of fine, whatever in any particular role. I want champions who are driving the whole thing forward. And if he's playing kind of passive and going, all right, I guess I'll do this, you know, fine. I don't want fine anywhere on my team. I want fired up. And so I, if I'm you, I'm really pressing to figure out, where is this guy's heart at? Does he want to be in the company? Does he want to be a part of the solution? If not, I don't want to flirt around with let's tweak your comp and let's kind of bring you down in terms of lowering my expectations for the person in that role. I want to,

I'm going to keep my standards high. In fact, I'm going to raise my standards. I'm going to give you grace to get up to that standard. But I'm not going to acquiesce because you don't bring the results. And then we've got to figure out how to just kind of tolerate this by messing around with your pay. Listen, Joey, you're worried about manpower. You're not going to miss payroll. You're not going to go south because you get rid of this guy.

That's a common fear that we hear here. So you can't let that fear drive you. You talked yourself into the solution right here with Daniel Tarty. And that was, I just hired a gal. so maybe she could step in and fill the void, I would suggest that your instincts are right. So again, Dana Tarty, great advice. Yeah, and we see this a lot, Ken. And if you're listening out there, just remember that desperation, if we give ourselves one solution,

this is the only thing that will allow us to fix this problem, then we're going to make the wrong decision. If we go, hey, look, there's options. Somebody else can fill this role. If I didn't have this person, would I put them back in this role? No way. Then get rid of the person, suffer through the pain for a month or two until you find the person to fill that seat. It's uncomfortable, yes, but it's way better to do it that way than out of desperation, hang on to a loser. The whole time you know they don't need to be there. Let them hit the

door, fill the seat. This happens all the time in business. You can do it. All right, if you want to get your question answered, there is no limits here. You've got a business question, Daniel Tarty, and myself, we are here for you. We're excited about this new opportunity here on the show. So here's how you get in 844-944-1070. That's 844-944-1070. Leave a voicemail and our team will get with you. You can also email podcast at entreleadership.com. Podcast at entreleadership.com.

Say, hey, I need help. I need the pooh-bah. That's what I call Daniel Tarty. He can give you the answer as if Dave Ramsey were giving it to you himself. So we're excited about that. And we're also excited that Steve is on the line in Wisconsin. Steve, you're on with Daniel Tarty and Ken Coleman.

Hey, guys. How's it going? Hey, Steve. How can we help today? Well, what practical steps should be taken with legacy reps who may not be fully on board with the new direction or initiative or even a vision of where the company is going? Let me clarify. Legacy reps is you're talking sales advisors who have been with the company for a while? Correct, yeah. Five plus years. How big is the total sales team? We have 16.

Okay. And how many fall into this category of legacy reps? I would say 10 or 11 of them would fall into that category. So I hear this all the time with sales team, so I'm projecting a little bit, correct me if I'm off, but I'm going to try to read your mail a little bit. New direction, company needs to drive some new initiatives forward. Better for the company, but maybe a little bit more challenging for the guys that cut their teeth there. And you get into a whole slew of issues of the comp and how we get paid or how we get paid or how easy it used to be, now we're having to hustle a little bit more, or the expectations are changing,

and you've got some people that are digging in their heels, not want to get on board. Is that, is that kind of the situation? You're in my head. Yeah. All right. I've been in your shoes, so that's why I can get in your head. We've dealt with this, and the next question I have is, how good is your relationship with these 10 players? You personally, how many of them can you take to launch and just have a heart-to-heart conversation in terms of you have a relationship? with those players? I would say that that's one of the strongest areas that I have with them. I can give them direction.

I can show them how to do it, that type of thing. But really the rapport and the trust, I have a very strong relationship with these 10 reps for sure. Good. You obviously don't want to just fire them for multiple reasons. One, you want to honor the fact that they've been loyal and they've helped bring this place to where it is. Two, you're cutting out a huge part of your production. I mean, they represent a lot of business coming in the door.

we want to be wise and make sure they continue to produce for us. But you're raising the standard, and at some point, if they're not on board, you're going to have this whole issue where they're what you're sanctioning and competence at that point. We talk about that in Entree leadership. And so that's demoralizing to the rest of the team. It's demoralizing to you as the leader who's trying to take this thing somewhere. So my advice would be approach this with caution and do it delicately and do it through these

great relationships that you have. if you will take them to lunch and say, look, I need your help. We have a new vision. We are doing this. We are going this direction. I need you to be on board. You're not on board right now. Why are you not on board, Joey? Well, because my commission thing and blah, blah, blah, blah. And hear Joey out. Let Joey vent a little bit. Let them get all his concerns on the table and take them all to lunch over a period of a couple weeks, hear their concerns. And they may have some legitimate things you haven't considered. And you go, oh, we can flex on that. That's not a big deal. But what you're also doing is making sure they know that you're committed to them, but you're also committed to the change for the greater good of the

company. And what I'm going to tell everybody in that bucket is, hey, in six months from now, everyone on the sales team is going to be at this standard. They're going to be believing in where our vision is at. They're going to be bringing the metrics and the results that we're expecting in terms of call volume and activity. They are going to do what this company is doing. And we want that to be you, all 10 of you. We want you in that seat doing this thing. In fact, your leaders here for the rest of the team because you were here first. I'm counting on you. I need your help. But in six months, we will all be doing those things. And if you can't rise to the occasion and step up to the plate, we're going to have to have a different conversation, which is why are you not going

where we are going? Because we are going here. And you can maybe get it down to just a couple guys who have bad attitudes and maybe they have to churn out. But it's not a big drastic cut at that point. And a lot of them have had the chance over a period of time, you continue to turn up the accountability and get them there gradually. If you try to do it too fast, like you said, you'll kind of cut your nose off in spite of your face. But do it over a period of a few months. Do it through relationships. And I think you'll be surprised at how much of them you can get on board.

Good stuff. Thank you, Steve, for the call. And for those of you that are listening in, you're going, hey, man, I've got questions. I need the Entree Leadership Play. We'll open up that playbook and tell me what I'm supposed to run. That's why we're doing this. Daniel Tarty going to be with us on a regular basis. We want to do this every episode.

So here's how this works. You've got a question. Two ways to submit the question. Our team will get it lined up. and we will put you on the program. 844-944-9-44-1070. That's 844-9-44-1070. Or you can email us podcast at entreleadership.com.

Daniel Tarty, thanks for stopping by. Enjoying this. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to having you in and answering more questions. Our friends at InfusionSoft have got a great resource for you this episode, the Collect and Consult E-Book. So have you ever created an email campaign? Some of you're saying yes, some of you're going, no, because the idea is just dreadful.

Well, here's the good news. This will absolutely help you create an email campaign that will turn into leads, and that is the whole point. This is an e-book, and our friends at Infusionsoft have forgotten more about email campaigns and lead generation than most people will ever learn. This e-book is going to teach you how I collect and consult campaign works, how to create your own lead magnet, and how to set up an email series. This is the way to get started. You can get the link in the show notes at episode 291. All right, folks, that'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. Here's a sample of Christy Wright's Business Boutique podcast. Hey, I'm Christy Wright, and I help women all over the country take their ideas and passions and hobbies and turn them into profitable businesses. If you have an idea in your head or a dream in your heart, and you've ever wondered if you could make money doing it, I'm here to help.

Join us on the Business Boutique podcast where we are equipping women to make money doing what they love. If you'd like to hear full episodes, just search Business Boutique in iTunes or go to businessboutique.com.