EntreLeadership - How to Communicate Effectively to Your Team with Patrick Lencioni

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

Great communication is the hallmark of a great organization—but for some small-business owners, it can feel like a luxury. This is a dangerous misconception! In this episode, you’ll hear Patrick Lencioni, bestselling author and longtime friend of EntreLeadership, unpack why communication is so important—and how the way you communicate is impacting your team. You’ll also hear Ramsey Network Host George Kamel’s conversation with Suzanne Simms, a board member at Ramsey Solutions. During their talk, they break down how to communicate about hard things with your team.   The EntreLeadership Podcast Patrick Lencioni’s website Hear from Patrick Lencioni at EntreLeadership Summit. Death by Meeting by Patrick Lencioni The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni The Six Types of Working Genius assessment Ramsey Solutions' website Download the EntreLeadership Team Communication Field Guide. Schedule a call with Tim, our producer.   Learn more about the offers from our EntreLeadership Partners: BELAY | Gravy | Hite Digital   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

Well, we all know that communication is the lifeblood of any organization. And I got to tell you, there's times as a leader. I've done it really well, and there's times I've totally screwed it up. The times that we screw it up oftentimes are because we get too busy running the business, and we forget that people can't read our minds. From the Ramsey Network, this is the Entry Leadership podcast, where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. I'm your host, Daniel Tarty, and we've got some fun conversations today on the topic

of communication. First up, this guy's amazing, good friend of mine, Pat Lanchone. He's the best-selling author of many books, especially on team health and some of them on communication. He's also a speaker at this year's Entree Leadership Summit event. So that's going to be a big fun. Pat's the president and founder of the table group. And guys, we hand his books around here like candy. I mean, it's just that good. Our leadership team reads them. You got to be following Pat Lanchone. Really, really good stuff. You're going to love that conversation. And then in our our second interview, we've got a Ramsey leader, Suzanne Sims. She's one of our board members, and well, she's great at communication, and she's also pretty good at running great meetings.

She's going to sit down with Ramsey Network host, George Camel, and they're going to have a conversation about what to do when team members are showing up late to meetings and how to kind of, you know, get them back in gear. Pretty important topic that can be a little bit delicate. So let's start out with our conversation with Pat Lanchone. I got to talk with him about the importance of communication and why it doesn't happen the way we want it to sometimes. As Dave Ramsey says, the biggest problem with communication is that we're under the illusion that it's actually occurred. We tend to use ourselves as a baseline.

Well, I understood what I was saying. And I think at the end of the day, it's a lack of empathy for like, what does that person see or hear and how is that different from me? So we often commit what's called the fundamental attribution error, and that's we assume that other people are like we are. And if they're doing something wrong, it's because they have a flaw. But if we're doing something wrong, it's because our environment is causing it. So I think the more that we can follow the advice of St. Francis of Assisi and understand others before we understand ourselves, the less likely we're going to have that communication problem.

You know, oftentimes in business, we're moving fast and there's a lot of work to be done. And so if I'm a business owner and I hear, okay, I need to have more empathy. I need to slow down and understand them more. Even if I want to do that, Pat, I don't have time. I mean, we got to make stuff happen. We got to move. They need to just get on board and figure it out. I'm not here to babysit these people.

They have a job, but pay them a lot of money, they should do their job. Yeah, that's bad economics and bad math because the idea, we have to slow down in order to go fast. I like that saying because it's not slow down in order to slow down. It's slow down in order to go fast. And when we slow down and make sure we're understood and we make sure we understand where somebody else is coming from, we get more done faster. When we're just going fast all the time, we're constantly going back and having to clean up and explain ourselves. And it's like race car drivers. You go into that turn and you're like, I'm going to cut time off during this turn.

You're going to spin out and you're going to end up slowing down going out of the straight. The people that know how to slow down going into the turn come out of it going gangbusters. And so we have to recognize that we think we're going fast, but we're causing ourselves a lot more problem by having to go back and clean up everything afterward. So it sounds like you're saying the key to this is to grow our muscles of empathy, to actually understand the other person and make time to listen. Practically, what does that look like? What do those conversations sound like? Well, and I think sometimes empathy gets taken to be something super soft or gushy. You know, it's like, be curious about where somebody else is in their life or in their day or in that moment.

and it's an intellectual endeavor as much as it is an emotional endeavor and try to understand their perspective. I know that sounds like something you teach people in kindergarten or something on some commercial on TV about being nice. But the point of the matter is understand where they're coming from. And if you understand their personality type or their talents and their gifts in life, you're going to have a lot better understanding of how to communicate to them for impact. And so it's more emotionally and intellectually curious about what's going on with another person and how they take things apart. If we're not curious about others, but we're only thinking about them understanding us, it's just not going to work.

You know, a lot of times the miscommunications come up in some type of, you know, somebody dropped the ball, somebody didn't do what they were supposed to do, and there's conflict. Somebody needs to have a confrontation so that they know, here's this feedback. You didn't do your job the right way. It can be really frustrating as leaders because you're already kind of emotional from the fact that the ball is dropped and now we're behind on the business. And then to take the time and embrace somebody and kind of be curious about where they're at,

I know I've had to really work on not coming to that conversation in a way that's emotional. Like figuring out how I can kind of take a beat, take a breath, and really try to see them and get into their perspective, it's really difficult to do because there's so much frustration tied to, you know, the issue. And that leads to comfort.

actually producing more conflict. I've been the escalator of conflict sometimes rather than the de-escalator. What are some of the keys to making sure that we don't do that? But we also, you know, we're doing it to the point of being solution-oriented. We're actually going to have a breakthrough and a learning where we can both learn from each other in this conversation. Well, I might say something here, Daniel, that's a little bit counterintuitive. I think that sometimes emotion and frustration is the accelerator of clarity. In other words, you and I could be in a conversation, right? And we're trying to understand each other. And it's clear that we're not. Now, there's different kinds of emotion. But if sometimes I can be just frustrated like crap, Daniel, I'm saying this again and

again. I don't know how to get through. And you can be, well, Pat, absolutely, you're not saying it the way I can understand it. And sometimes it's just like letting that happen cuts through it all. And we go, okay, I'm sorry. Now let's let's think about this. If we spend too much time trying to avoid all of the emotion, sometimes that actually inhibits us from going more directly. I think that most of the conversations we have in here in my office, if there's a little bit of emotion there, we plow through obstacles. But the key is you have to have that emotion with grace. So we have to know that I am going to get frustrated with you and you're going to be frustrated at me, but because we're going to give each other grace, that's just going to allow us

plow through this problem. If there's not grace, then do everything. Do everything. You know, everything you can to avoid emotion. But if there is grace and trust, man, I think emotion is sometimes, it's like my wife and I have to make a difficult decision about our family. If we try to do it without any emotion around something that we're truly emotional about, we're probably going to dance around the issue. But if she goes, I'm worried about this and I'm like, well, I'm concerned about this. Okay, there it is. It's all out there. Okay, we're okay now. Let's let's decide. So I think spending too much time trying to avoid emotion can actually create kind of a circuitous route around something that you can be more direct with.

Yeah, the key there, and I love that you're highlighting this, is grace has to be assumed. You know, somebody's never going to feel like it's safe enough to say what they're really thinking or confront the leader or to call out the elephant in the room if they feel like they're going to get smacked, especially if it's going to be personal. Dave Ramsey models this really well. I mean, we argue, man, you've been in these board rooms with us in our board where we're going at it. There's a lot of emotion in the room, but I have never felt like Dave put me in my place personally. I mean, he's told me a lot of uncomfortable stuff, but it's always fighting toward the thing.

You know, it's never like, well, he's actually attacked me as a person. And I think that's a big part of it. Yeah, conflict when you trust people is the pursuit of truth or the best possible answer, and you're always glad you did it. But I like what you just said. I think that, and I've never said it this way, because we talk about teams having to trust each other, but I think what it comes down to is assumed grace. Over time you go, they are going to forgive me if I say the wrong thing.

They're going to accept my apology. Or if I'm arguing for something and I realize I'm wrong, they're not going to hold that against me. When that grace is there, boy, you can have much better conversations. And the very best companies in the world have more conflict and less fear of the fallout from that conflict. Yeah. So, Pat, we've been friends for a long time.

And you shared stories with some of the top CEOs in the world that you've worked with, the ones that you notice that are really good at modeling grace, what are some of the habits or patterns that you see where this really is modeled at the top and then therefore it's a part of the culture? You know, I think, and I'm answering this off the top of my head, and I'm thinking about some of the leaders that are particularly good at this. I think they're not afraid of, I think it comes down to their, they have self, their self-confidence and they're personally secure.

and they know that whatever happens, they're going to be okay and the other person is going to be okay. But when you're afraid of like managing people's expectations and what they're going to think of you, then you're going to be less direct, which is ultimately less kind. So I think like Alan Malalley, the guy who turned the Ford Motor Company around, he actually wasn't worried about people liking him. He was more worried about being honest with people and helping them and them respecting him. and so he would say the hard things, but in a kind enough way, because he wasn't over worried about them misjudging him. I think Dave is the same way.

Dave is like, hey, I am who I am. And people that know me, respect me, I'm not going to beat around the bush to protect the possibility that somebody might misjudge me. And, of course, that's what has to happen on teams. You meet somebody in the grocery store. You don't do that because you don't know them. But a person you work with regularly and your face, family or on your team, worrying about them liking you is going to get in the way of you telling them

what they need to hear. So I think it's personal security and a sense of self-confidence that you're not trying to win a popularity contest. You're trying to care about people enough to get the right thing done. You know, we work with a lot of small business owners, and you've spoken on the stage, entree leadership for years now. You've interacted with these people, just inspiring people, courageous entrepreneurs, but oftentimes when it's really small, there's so much energy going into the work, providing the service, shipping the goods. There's very little time for meetings and communication. And it's pretty normal in a small business that the only time communication happens is when there's a reprimand or somebody's in trouble. I'd like to talk about meetings,

and especially creating the space. You know, this is, I don't want to be cheesy with making it rhyme, but creating the space to experience the grace. You know, we're talking about making sure sure that grace is in that discussion. And what I've experienced here, Ramsey, is we spend a lot of time in meetings where there's enough room for things to breathe. The calendar represents our value and our commitment to communication and making sure that we don't let things fester to the point of now it's a big explosion. But there's a lot of room to set off the bombs, if you will, as there are little tiny conflicts instead of this big thing. Then you do a drive-by reprimand and somebody's just tased by it. How do we get our meetings and our meeting structures into this thing to help

facilitate this really important approach on communication you're talking about? I love that question. First of all, the small businesses are the heart of the country and of society in economic stance. And I want people that are running small businesses. I love people at Entree leadership, the conferences. I mean, this is the backbone of our country. and I want them to realize they represent something really important. And I love the fact that they don't do too much around bureaucracy and overcommunication and over meeting because big companies, it's just mind-numbing and crushing the amount of bureaucracy.

Having said that, erring on the side of not having enough, and that's what we're talking about here, it's still important to have meetings where you give yourself the time and the space to communicate and to listen and to brainstorm. The key to doing this well, though, is recognizing that not every meeting is for the same purpose. Because if we go to meetings and we just, and there are some meetings that need to be quick and specific

and we don't have a lot of time to do things, we just got to make a decision and move. You know, there's a daily minute, for many of your organizations in Entrade leadership, they have a five-minute stand-up meeting every day. That's critical. It's like, what are we working on? What are we getting done?

Okay, let's go, let's go get it done. okay, that's not a meeting where we're sitting back and contemplating life and things like that. And then sometimes we have that weekly meeting where we're just going through, what are our goals this week? What are we going to get done? Let's solve some problems right now. But there's a couple other kind of meetings that we have to have. They are not bureaucratic. They are not a waste of time. But the productivity of those meetings is not going to be seen measured in five minute intervals. It's going to be seen in big issues. There's strategic meetings where we get it together in a room and really roll up our sleeves, grab some beer, some pizza and say, let's solve this. Let's take three hours if we have to solve this problem. Let's brainstorm. Let's argue. Let's wrestle this thing to the ground. So that should never be seen as a waste

of time. If it's a big, hairy issue, take the time to solve it. And then there's one other kind of meeting that I think needs to happen quarterly. And I think God put the seasons in place in the world for a reason. I think once a quarter every three months, you need to step back from your business and you need to breathe. And whether that's you go across the street to a restaurant and sit down for the afternoon or you go to a hotel or go to your living room and sit down with your employees and just breathe and talk about how we doing. Yeah. What's going well? Who's in a good place? Who's not in a good place? Let's gather ourselves up so that we can go back to work for this next quarter and really get as much done as possible. So there's different kinds of meetings that require different kinds of levels of patience and time.

but small businesses should be just as committed to having those meetings as any other. And you'll know when it gets to the time like, that's enough. But yeah, give yourself the time and the space to forgive one another, to work on your team, to review what's happening. And I think you'll get more done in less time. You know, I want to say more about the quarterly meeting, because as you're describing that, it occurred to me that you actually facilitated the first quarterly meeting for the entree leadership team.

You know, we had not been doing quarterlies here on a regular basis, and you were kind enough to invite us out, and we sat in your office for a couple days, and you taught us how to put it on the whiteboard. We started out with some icebreaker things around our personality styles. You taught us how to listen to each other and check in. Then we moved into the issues of the business, and then that second day, we got it all up on the whiteboard and figured out what was going to be our thematic goal and then our big driving objectives. And that It's become something we've done every single quarter since then because we saw the value of how much our alignment and relationships started to meld together in a whole new way. And we had 10x,

the traction and the execution coming out of that than we had previously. Talk us more through the model because we didn't just sit there and just organically talk. You had a vision for where you were going to take us. You were the tour guide. And so if someone is going, okay, Pat, I've got our quarterly scheduled. We've got two days, but I don't know what the format is. What do we do? How do we make sure this is a productive time? Yeah, you know, I have a book called Death by Meeting that kind of goes through some of this. And in my book, The Advantage it does too. And I don't want to mention that because I'm selling. I just want people to know where they can find out more. Hey, sell away, man. Those are great resources. And we hand those around here at Ramsey, you know, with our new leaders and say,

hey, you have to read this because this is how we do it here. So I'm going to double down on promoting it. And both those books are beautifully illustrated exactly what we're talking about here. I'm not a touchy-feely guy. The purpose of those quarterly off-sites is not to get out and pass each other over a rope and blindfold each other and walk each other through a hotel room or something stupid like that. The purpose of those meetings is to slow down to figure out what's going on, to review where we think we're headed and where we've been so we can come out of the shoot and get way more done. And I love your testimonial about it.

It's like you guys got 10x more done as a result of that. That's the whole point. This is not about doing something just to entertain ourselves. It's to, you know, if you're thinking about knee surgery, it's like go up and clean out some of that cartilage so you can come back out on the field and run faster. And there's a rhythm to it. There's a few things you need to go over, but you've got to leave yourself enough space

to heal and to talk about the right things. But it's far from a free-for-all. It's far from just to get together in a room and analyze your navel. You know, there's so much power in that conversation. And some of the last few years here at Ramsey and on our operating board, I've kind of become the biggest advocate and the most passionate person for the quarterly conversations to the point that they handed me the marker and said, okay, fine, you facilitate them. And so, you know, we've got our operating board and I'm up there putting stuff up that we're talking about. But what I've found is there's something about actually putting it up on a whiteboard and that there's a facilitator who's helping kind of, you know, you're not typically in this environment when you're sitting around the weekly meeting. You're sitting around a table and you're just kind of talking about the issues of the week. Say more about the creative space, getting off-site. Can you do this stuff over Zoom? A lot of people are trying to do everything on Zoom now. I'm not sure that the same energy is in the room the way it is with a, you know, a physical experience on this stuff. stuff. So format wise, what's a home run? What's, what are it coming out, kind of the do's and

don'ts of facilitating an offside like that? Great. I love this. You can do it on Zoom, but it's not as good. It's not near as good. There's certain things that Zoom is actually much better at that than I thought. A year ago, I'd have told you before the whole shutdown, I'd just said, I don't know about this, but we've learned how to make Zoom work for many things. Not for this. It's really, now if you can't do it any other way, make the most of it. But there's something about getting together in a room. and getting out of your office. Again, it doesn't have to be a resort. It doesn't have to be a golf course.

It can be a conference room in a hotel or somebody's living room, but someplace where you're not going to be interrupted by the normal day to day. So get out of the office, get away from technology, be together with just enough structure to go through and review where you're at and what's going on, but not so much structure that you're like, okay, every 15 minutes, you're checking something off. because sometimes it's during those off-sights that you talk about something you never even realized you needed to. Sometimes it's halfway through. Let's say it's a day.

You're halfway through that day and you're like, oh, my gosh, we hadn't identified this big hairy issue. Let's deal with that one now. So it's loosely held some structure but not super tight out of the office in person and enough time to socialize but within the context of work. So this isn't, like I said, it's not golfing, unless you have four people on your executive team. Maybe you could do some of this while you're golfing because you're all in that same foursome. But generally speaking, it's work-focused, slightly social out of the office, not overly prescribed. And, oh, there's one other thing. Oh, I want to say having a facilitator can be good.

A bad facilitator is worse than no facilitator. A good facilitator is good so that the leader and the whole team can participate and let that other person just bring it about. Yeah, sometimes if the leader is the facilitator. In fact, when I've tried to facilitate these things for entree leadership, my area, those are the worst because I've got all these opinions. I tilt the room. I can't help but manipulate the whole conversation to kind of go where I wanted it to do anyways, you know, and a good facilitator kind of neutralizes it. So I'm good in the boardroom where Dave sits there as the CEO at the table and he's not up there, you know, with that sense of command because he's got a big personality if you haven't noticed. And I think the key is brings us. somebody in as a facilitator, whether it's from your team or the outside, who's going to help bring objectivity and neutralize any power dynamic that might exist in the team. Right, and free the leader up to actually participate. Yes. I know in years past, I did the facilitation of those, and when I was over, when it was over, I felt terrible. And my team would say, what's wrong? And they go, I don't know. I felt like I had to be kind of an ass. I'm like, no, no, you weren't an ass at all.

You were actually helping us. But I realized, I kind of want to just participate and be one of the team members and not be pushing them forward. It's much easier for me to push and be an ass, if you will, when I'm with a client because that's what they're paying me to do. Sometimes I just want to be on the team. Yeah, that's good. You know, we've all been to off-site experiences where maybe we had a lot of good conversations, but then it didn't actually turn into any kind of new utility and changing how we work. I think there's some keys to make sure that we convert the discussion and the energy into actions. Say more about that. Well, that's where you have. have to have some sort of a structure. Like one of the things, when we talk about an offsite,

this quarterly offsite thing we do, we go in there and we, first of all, we constantly check in, like, how are we doing as a team collectively and individually? And so we have a thing called our online team assessment based on the five dysfunctions of a team. And teams fill that out once, and then every quarter they fill it out again and see how they've changed. And we just compare it. There was a comparison report that said, hey, we've gotten better on trust, better on conflict, still not improving on accountability. So we could talk about that. And it, up the right conversation. It's not soft. It's not weird. It's like, hey, we got to call each other out more. And then we'll go through and we'll say, how are each of us doing on our individual

areas of development? Like, are you getting better at the thing you needed to get better? Are you getting better at yours? Those are good things to do. Then we just look at it and we say, let's review why we exist. Let's talk about what our strategy is. Is it working? Let's talk about what our priorities are. So we kind of do a, we step back and take stock, if you will. And it's in the course of that taking stock that we suddenly realize, oh, there's some things we need to adjust. There's some things that we have to address. But what we're constantly doing is saying, okay, when we get done with this meeting, what specific things are we coming out of here with that we have to go communicate to others or go act on?

And that will work its way back into our regular weekly meeting cycle again. So it's, again, it's enough structure to lead to something happening, but not so much that it prevents you from following your nose where it needs to go. Yeah. You know, I've done so many of these now, the quarterly offside. Early on, they were clunky, and I felt like we weren't doing them well. And I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that 95% of the value over time has been the fact that we've done them. Agree or disagree.

Oh, it's like so many other things in life, Daniel. It's just the discipline of sticking with it. Trust the process, doing it again and again. So many things in my life, my faith life and everything else, I think. I kind of avoid discipline, but the discipline isn't there. for itself, it's there because it puts you in that position for amazing things to happen. And so just continuing to do it, half the time you go into it go, I don't know what we need to talk about during this meeting. And then by just showing up and going through the process,

you're like, wow, we would have missed two huge things had we not stuck to the discipline into the process. So let's take this to Main Street. I was visiting with a friend of mine who has a bakery. Her name's Pam. And what Pam would tell you she's really, really good at is shaping bagels and cooking cupcakes and being at their cash register and smiling when the customers come in. You know, Pam's looking at us going, you guys are professional communicators. Like, it's just what you do. You're doing podcasts. You're on stages.

You're in the book and media space. I'm not a communicator. Pat, I made cupcakes and we got good at it and customers started coming in. I feel a little bit overwhelmed, you know, speaking vision to my team. I feel a little bit intimidated and insecure to get my words to come together the right way. and motivate my team and inspire them. And where do I start? A year ago, I would have said I would have been a little bit stumped, like, well,

you've got to do this. But one of the things I think, is it Pam? You're the baker. Right, Pam. The woman who at the bakery. Pam, what I would say, Pam, figure out what your genius is. Figure out the gifts that God gave you that you're the best at in the world, that you love to do.

Because some of them, like, for instance, we've worked with a pastor. I was telling you the story before we started who. who felt guilty for years because he didn't love writing his sermons, his homilies. He was bad at it. And he said, I must be a bad pastor. And then by figuring out what his working geniuses are, and his working geniuses are what's called enablement and galvanizing. He loves to help people get better and he loves to work with them.

But he doesn't know how to write a homily. He doesn't sit there and ponder things. He doesn't have wonder and invention. He thought that made him a bad pastor, and he felt guilty for years. Pam might very well be good at two things in her business, but it might not be like the strategic plan or inspiring people. And if she figures that out, she could say, you know, I need to borrow some of the skills from some of my team members. And I need to go to them and say, you guys, I don't naturally do some of these things, but I'm great with customers and I'm great getting things done.

And for a leader to recognize what their God-given gifts are and what their God-given frustrations are only allows them to be more vulnerable with their team and not. to feel the pressure to be all things to all people. Here in my company, I don't like pushing the ball for it. I don't like constantly pushing people to do more. And for 20 years, I did that in my own business. And it exhausted me. And it was a year ago, less than a year ago, that we were sitting here in my office saying, why am I getting so frustrated? We realized galvanizing was not my genius. And it was time for me to stop doing so much of it. And I found others in my organization that were good at that, I always thought because I was the CEO, I had to be the chief galvanizing

officer. I actually have other people doing that now. I have to do it sometimes, but it was time for me to stop spending most of my time doing what I wasn't great at. And that freed me up to do what I really was great at. So Pam might like designing cookies and pastries and interacting with her customers. Those are two geniuses. She might not like other parts of her job that she does not have to be the best at. So that's, I would say, go figure out what your working genius is and stop apologizing for not being great at something that's not your gift. Yeah, it's kind of a weird thing. As an owner, you have to figure out how to be responsible for the outcome, but you may

not necessarily be responsible for the activity. Exactly. You're responsible for making sure it gets done, but not you having to be great at it and doing it all the time. And, you know, there are, there are entrepreneurs. entrepreneurs who are great at tenacity. A lot of them are. That means they get stuff down and they don't rest until it's finished. But they're not good at invention. And they might take somebody else's idea and then make it better. Know what that is so you don't put yourself in a position to constantly

some people, you know, when Michael Jordan was playing basketball, he was not a great shooter. Now most teams would have said to him, you're not a great shooter. You need to work on shooting. And that's what you need to focus on. He had people around him to say, Forget about it. Be great at what you're great at. You'll probably become a better shooter as a result of that, and that's what he did. Because he didn't say, I have to be the best shooter on my team. He said, if I'm great at these other things, I'm going to focus on that.

That's going to take the pressure off me. So the times when I do have to shoot, I'm not going to feel like my success is writing on that thing because it's not my gift. Yeah. So in Pam's case, she may not be their best communicator, but it's okay because she's ensuring that the right communication is happening. Right. Yeah. Hey, there's a guy in my organization who I call my chief galvanize. officer now. He runs my morning meetings where he goes, okay, people, what are we working on? You need to do

this, you need to do that. I would come into work wanting to do what my best things were, which is invention and discernment. But every morning I would come in and they'd be dragging me into galvanizing. And by noon, I was pissed off and tired. And I had yet to do the things I was best at. And I finally realized, I don't have to be the only one doing that. I don't even have to be the primary person doing that. I elevated somebody else. It was great for him because he loves it. It's great for me because I don't. Now, my job is to make sure he does it enough.

It's not my job to do it all the time. Let's talk about the galvanizing thing because the team needs to be called into action. And there is a leadership component to this that maybe it's not galvanizing. Maybe you wouldn't call that word based on your genius assessment. But there's something that leaders bring, and I just call it energy. There has to be something contagious where people say, I'm going to follow him or her because I can tell, like, we're going into battle and they've got my back. And I want to be on board with what they're doing. I've been with groups of leaders, and I know you have to, where they're at the offsite or you're facilitating conversation and the energy is just so negative. They're bagging on their team. They're frustrated with all the issues. And there's not a leader really saying like, okay, guys, hey, hey, hey, we're going to have some positive conversations. We're going to be a solution-oriented. we're going to drive forward. How do we do that where it's like,

we need to have real talk. We don't want to be Pollyanna. But at the same time, something matters about being positive. Something matters about bringing energy and belief. How do you describe that? And how is that different than galvanizing? Yeah, that's a great question because I think

that I was starting to get negative in my galvanizing because I was doing it all the time and it wasn't my genius and I was getting burned out. Whereas there's different ways to bring energy. to an organization, it really depends on your genius. Now, that doesn't mean I don't have to do certain things that aren't my genius. You know, nobody gets to do just the things they love to do the most. Right. But if I'm constantly doing things that burn me out, I am probably going to start doing it in sort of a complaining way, which is what I was doing. It's like, why do I have to push you guys all

the time? And they would be like, well, that's your job, isn't it? It's like, yes, but I don't like it. So I like to bring energy to teams through new ideas, which is invention, and through discernment, which is like giving them feedback. And so now my team comes into me and says, we need your I and your D. And I go into a meetings and I help them and I inspire them. But if my job feels like I have to come in every day and just go, come on, go faster, do more. That's just not easy for me. And I'm going to start kind of resenting having to do it. Hey, even at home, what I tell my, wife and my kids is like Sundays are a really hard day for me. You know why? Because getting them on time to church is so distasteful for me, but my wife hates it even more than I do. So we will be

heading out the door. And I'm like, we're not going to make it again. And now in California, there's limited scene. We're going to have to sit outside and we're not going to be as engaged. And it's like Sunday for me is a day of pain and suffering because I'm constantly going, get your shoes on, get out of the shower. Let's go. Now, some people don't mind doing that. They're like, I was in the army. I can make people do that all day long. For me, it's a killer. So I guess the point is, if you can bring energy to your team through the things you're best at, that's good for them and it's good for you. But if you're having to constantly do things that you're not best at, it's going to be bad for them and bad for you eventually. Yeah, I'm the galvanizer.

I'm the, hey, no problem. We can make church happen. We can get everybody ready in four minutes. What's the big deal? And, you know, Emily has figured out, like, okay, well, then that's your job because I'm going to murder our children if you're not the one doing it. And neither my wife nor I like it. So it's, it's both of us go, you do it. How about if you do it? You just don't go to church and you lose your religion on the way to church or something. I don't know. But, you know, this theme in what you're saying is, you know, there's a lot of leaders. And I want us to kind of, as we wrap up the conversation, just encourage leaders who maybe aren't in their sweet spot right now. They don't feel like they're communicating well or things aren't going well with how communication

works on their team or they're not in their sweet spot as far as their genius. What I have figured out, and I'd be curious your take on this, is kind of knowing you're not in your sweet spot as the first step, but then there's a journey that you have to start going on over time. You have to have a plan. I mean, you can't just abdicate your responsibility in what you're currently doing. The environment has been conditioned for you to do this thing. And so you have to start delegating. You have to say, in a year from now, I want to be fully in my sweet spot as a leader and then kind of back out a plan. leaders who are listening to this right now going, Pat, I want our communication to be better. I want to be more in my sweet spot as a leader. I want to implement these structures you're talking about

with these meetings. How do I go from where we are today to, you know, 100 miles an hour on all this stuff you guys are talking about over time? How would you encourage them to go on this journey in a way that's not overwhelming? So here's the thing. It's funny, since the last time I talked to you, we developed something based on customer feedback. And that is, if you and your team go do the working genius. By the way, we priced it at 25 bucks. And Dave said to me when I told me, I said, you could have charged a hell of a lot more than that, Pat. I mean, this is worth a lot. And we said, I know we want every, we want you to take your high school student through. We want you to take your everybody on your team through it. So it costs very little.

If eight people on a team or in a small business sat down and took the working genius, there's this thing called a team map where you all do it and you hit the team map button and you look at this. And it'll right there on one piece of paper show you where you have huge gaps on your team like nobody around here likes to discernment. It's like, oh, no wonder we don't evaluate. Or nobody here likes galvanizing or everybody wants to be an inventor and nobody's in tenacity. It takes like 15 minutes to look at that report and start reorganizing. And people will say, hey boss, so you don't like those things and yet we make you do it all the time. How about if Fred and Mary do that instead of you and we rely you on and the team reorganizes

around the things you love to do? And we see. we had an organization say they saved a half a million dollars in two weeks because they found somebody in the organization that filled one of their gaps and she was able to solve problems that nobody else on the executive team could solve. So I would say start by getting everybody on your team to know what their genius is and their frustrations are and then say, what's the low-hanging fruit? And it is such a relief to a leader to know that you don't have to be all things to all people, but you can tap into your people's skills. It brings them up. It brings you, up. It is a win-win, and it takes literally in an hour. You take that. You get the results back.

You debrief it for 15 minutes, and you're going to be able to start reorganizing, and you're going to solve problems fast. That's really good. Where can people go to learn more about this assessment you're talking about as well as the team mapping? Yeah, go to working genius.com. Working genius, one word, dot com. And it's all displayed right there. It's easy to do. It takes 10 minutes to take the assessment. You get the results back right away. The team can start. And it is, it's a fun thing to watch a whole team going through each other's results and go, I always knew that was true about you. And now I know why you get so grumpy. And now I know we have to ask you all these questions. And it's a, it's a, people just love learning about one another and reorganizing

around their strengths. Our friend John Maxwell says, everything rises and falls on leadership. I like to say every leader rises and falls on communication. As we wrap up, Any final thoughts about communication for our listening audience today? You know, I would say here's one little thing. I'm an over-communicator. And that means that sometimes I communicate and people have to say, I know, I know. My kids say it to me. They tease me about it.

Dad, if you tell me that one more time. My wife says, yeah, I know. And the people at office go, yeah, we got it. See, that's actually the right end point of communication. But sometimes I feel bad for that. Like, oh, I'm communicating too much. well, what do you think is better to have a family or an organization or a company where people know it so well that they go, we got it versus those organizations where leaders don't overcommunicate

and people go, I didn't really understand it. So don't be afraid to over communicate. Don't be afraid, as I like to say, for people to give you a hard time about the fact that you're repeating things because that means they're getting it in their gut and it means there's clarity. And so be the guy that or the gal that people will make fun of for repeating things. The CEO of Southwest Airlines does it. Let me tell you, have you listened to Dave Ramsey radio show? I love it. I love to hear him remind people of things, and it never gets tired for me.

Even when I'm not, it's not about me. It's, I love to hear people remembering the truth. Samuel Johnson said people need to be reminded more than they need to be instructed and be a reminder of wisdom. So that's what I would say. Don't ever fear over communicating. Really good stuff. Yes, oftentimes more powerful to remind people of someone.

something they already know than to teach them something brand new because you're calling them to something that's inside of them. And we believe that what's inside of these men and women listening is a leader who's courageous and bold and has a dream and that they have what it takes. And that's what we believe about our listeners. We meet them and interact with them at our live events. And of course, you've been to those events and we love having you. So thanks for jumping back on the podcast today. You are a fan favorite and give my best to everybody there at the table group. God bless you, Daniel. Thanks. All right, guys, always fun to hear from Pat.

I love how fun he is. I love his energy and just a wealth of wisdom. He has influenced the Ramsey culture and the entree leadership culture in big, big ways. You need to be reading Pat Linchone. So if we've got a team that we're communicating well with and the team is on mission, well, they should do everything with excellence, right? But sometimes they don't, including showing up on time to meetings. So let's get practical.

How do you address team members showing up late for a team meeting? We're going to talk about that. right after this. All right, folks, as I mentioned at the top of the show, back in the Entry Leadership Studio, Ramsey Network host George Campbell to set up our next conversation. Welcome back. It's good to be back. So you sat down with one of our leaders, Suzanne Sims, and you guys had a conversation that's about communicating to team members. Yes, we love communication around here, and Suzanne is one of the best at it. And on top of that, she serves as our senior executive vice president, of all things, business to consumer, also sits on our operating board. And she's had to have

a lot of conversations privately and publicly to our team around some hard topics, things that aren't always fun to talk about, but that's leadership. Yeah, and she's one of the best I know is saying it in a way where it's not awkward. You know, it stings a little bit, but she's so good at being your friend, saying it with a smile, and doing it in a way that makes you better. Yes, she does it because she truly does care. She's passionate. She's on mission, and they're going to love this conversation. I kicked it off with talking about how to address team members who are showing up late to meetings. So I thought it would be fun.

Do a little role play here. I am the team member who is showing up late consistently, and we are in your office, and we've got to have this tough conversation. Okay. And the key word there that you used was consistently, right? Sometimes life happens, and every now and then you might be late because life happens.

But when it becomes consistent, and I mean, I'm probably going to address it with someone after they've been late two to three times. We're going to start talking about it, right? But if you have been consistently late to the team meetings that I'm leading, then we're going to have a conversation that sounds kind of like this. Oh, boy. George, I know that you have a good heart and you have good intentions, and I love working with you,

but you are being very disrespectful to the team and to me and to the work that we're here to do by showing up late. Because what you're saying when you show up late is that your time is more valuable than our time and that you're not valuing the time of anyone else on the team or valuing this mission that we're on and this work that we're doing. And so I've got, I have got to help you understand that you have to make a decision to put whatever changes in your life you need to put in your life in order to be on time. Because that's who we are here Ramsey we talk about who we are and we we describe who we are to keep reminding ourselves and one of the things that we are is on time because you can't be excellent in what you're doing if you're consistently late now that's just common sense to me is that common sense to you absolutely wow i felt that now i i noticed a few things in there that you did really well number one you started off very positively it wasn't right into this reprimandum If we were supposed to do a sandwich, I really didn't put the bun on the bottom.

I felt it, though. You said, hey, I love working with you. I love that you're on the team. I love being, you know, your leader. But, hey, there's this thing over here that's happening. And it's, you also, there was a piece of that where you were kind of partnering with me. You're like, I feel like I need to do a better job helping you understand the vision and the principles. If I did a better job, I might even point out specifically what value you are bringing to the team. There might be a skill set you bring that is very valuable. And I might point that out before reprimanding you because if I hired you and you're doing a good job performance-wise, then I want more of that. And we have to fix your problem with being late. Yeah. Then I'm incentivized because I feel like, wow, you know, I mean a lot to this team, people look up to me.

And that's something I've heard here. People say, you know, people look up to you. Like, you're a leader here. And you've got to do that well so other people see you and follow suit. That's a good thing. That's a good one because a lot of people want to have influence. and most people on your team probably want to have influence. And that's a really good way to couch it.

Like if you want to have influence here, you have to be on time. Because, again, back to the disrespect. Like you're showing disrespect by being late and they won't look up to you and you won't have the influence that you want. Well, something I know to be true about you is that you have the pleasure of communicating a lot of hard things to our entire team. Now, we get to communicate some really fun things. But sometimes they're not fun. And I feel like you're the person they go, all right, Suzanne, you're in. Someone else said that to me this morning.

I think it's a compliment to you, but I want to know from your perspective, why do you think that is that you are the one called to communicate these things? I think, number one, it's because I love this team and they know it. The leaders know it and the team knows it because I really do love them. I have such a passion for this team. And so because that's just innate in me, then I'm naturally going to give harsh information hopefully in the right way. That is always my desire. So I think that's one reason why someone asked me this morning like, why are you always the hammer?

Well, I think that's why because it's a hammer with maybe like a velvet. That is velvet hammer. That is Suzanne. I love that. Well, I feel that. I wanted to make sure that we were on the same page there, because I know that. I know that you are the person who is so passionate about this mission. And if something's getting in the way of that, well, you're going to communicate it to the team and nip that in the butt. Yeah. And if you're trying to reprimend a team and you don't love them, they know it. You can't fake that. And it just won't come across the same way. So. And there was a recent example of this in a company staff meeting, which we have almost a thousand team members now. And you got to go up there and address people showing up late. Yeah, and I think one of the key things here is I actually observed it myself.

We have a second floor that has a balcony that overlooks our staff meeting in Devo times. And so people sit up there to be a part of the staff meeting, which is fine. We have some chairs up there. Well, I got word that there were a lot of people coming in late and sitting where they couldn't even see the stage. So that means they're disengaged. So the first thing I did was I went up there twice for the entire staff meeting to observe. So I would have firsthand knowledge and not be accusing people of things that I was getting secondhand. I will say it weirded people out to see me up there roaming around.

Anyway, I did that. And then when I addressed it for the whole team, I addressed it by first of all calling out to them as a reminder of why we come to work every day. And this mission we're on and the fact we're called. by God to do this thing. And I actually used some scripture that I prayed about it beforehand. I asked God to guide me and how to give this information because if you're going to stand up in front of a thousand people, if you're going to stand up in front of 50 people and reprimand, like, you need to do it the right way to get the point across and to do it in a way that they don't feel shamed, because that's not productive. And so that's the way that I couched it. And I just,

just said, I just let them know how disrespectful it is and how disengaged they are when they're not where they can even see who's on the stage. And by the way, that breaks down unity. We have to be unified as an organization if we're going to pull off the disruption that we feel called to pull off in the toxic culture that we live in. And that is what Ramsey is about. Well, how are we going to have that level of disruption if we're not completely unified with locked arms as a team? And how are we going to be completely unified with locked arms as a team if we've got 10 to 20% of us that don't care to be on time on a regular basis? Yeah. And don't care to sit or stand where they can see the stage engage with whoever's on the stage and that sort of thing. So that's the direction I went

with it. And I got so much feedback. I had multiple team members email me, come up to me in the hallways and genuinely thank me. There was one girl who came up to me just yesterday that I've never even met before. And she just, she kind of shared with me what seasons she's in in her life personally. That's just very difficult. She has a child with health issues and she has to get up at 5 a.m. every morning to tend to her child, get her whole family out the door, get here on time. And yet it's so important to her to be here on time. She makes that a priority. So she gets up at 5 a.m. in order to do that. And she comes into work and she sees people strolling in late all the time. And it's so demoralizing to her. And she was just so appreciative that I would

address that elephant in the room for people like her and call out what she's seeing happening. Yeah, they were just super appreciative of it. It reminds me of the importance of having your mission and your values clearly communicated before you communicate anything else. Because when you can tie it back, to the value of saying, hey, this is who we are, this is what you signed up for. These are the core values. And this is why it's important to our mission that you do these things. It totally changes the conversation. It doesn't feel like a personal attack. It just seems like, hey, we need to be unified in this area. And part of that is doing these actions. I love that. So what are the ways we communicate here at Ramsey? There's obviously our weekly staff meetings,

which we've been doing for a long time, long before we were this big. Yeah, that's where we start. is that the entire team gets in one room every Monday for an hour. And that's where the team is updating each other on what's going on in their area, because we always say we want the right hand to know what the left hand is doing. Again, if you're going to be unified, if you're all pointed in one direction, the right hand has to know what the left hand is doing. And otherwise, people start to assume things. There's confusion and, you know, when there's that lack of communication.

So that's leaders and team members taking turns, getting up in front of a microphone when you've got a thousand people, and bringing an update on what's happening in their area. Good or bad, mostly good. Sometimes we'll point out failures just to show what we've learned from them so that the team sees, oh, everybody here's not perfect, and we do fail at things and we learn from them. So it's not always just a positivity session, but there's always things to be celebrated. There's always things to be learned. And there's sometimes just housekeeping. You know, here's the new health insurance update that we have for you guys so that you're all aware. Important information that people need to know that affects their lives or affects their jobs and keeps us pointed in the same direction.

And then outside of staff meetings, we do kind of company-wide emails, but what is the filter of, hey, what needs to be communicated via email to the entire company? Oh, that's a good one. We don't do as many company emails as we used to because we do have an intranet. we can put important information. We do have a place online that the team can go. But it's kind of one of those things where each situation is different. But our executive creative director, Luke, sends out an email to the whole team on a weekly basis. And he'll type up what he thinks needs to be shared. And then he'll send it to a small group of us and say, hey, look this over. Do you feel like this will resonate well with the team? And it'll have some motivational type stuff that'll challenge the

team and fire them up and it'll have some important information in it too. And so we look at that and we tell him, hey, tweak this or take that out because that's kind of weird or that's awesome. And then he sends it out. Okay. And when it comes to communication, it's tied to gossip in an interesting way. And we have this no gossip policy. And it's interesting. We were talking earlier about the connection between the two. Yes. How does communication actually help curb gossip? If you leave your team in a situation where they don't really know what's going on because you're afraid to quote, overshare with them, then you create a scenario where their creativity starts to go wild. Like the more information you have, the less you get creative with what could be.

And so we have always, and Dave set the standard for this from day one, but we always overshare with our team. We treat them like adults and we tell them each time, hey, we are treating you like adults because you are adults. You're not in high school anymore. You're not in college. Like, you're an adult working at a job. You need to know what's going on here, even if it's a painful thing, bad news, whatever. Because let's say someone of substance in the organization leaves the organization for a good reason or a bad reason. If they just disappear and you don't talk about it, well, what happens? People start to wonder and their curiosity is, you know, in full swing. And then they start getting creative with their, what could have happened, and they can't help but almost

talk to each other about it because there's this big thing that happened that no one's talking about. So remove that from the equation by just telling the team what's going on. And we've always been amazed at how well they take in that information, how well they process it, and then we teach our leaders how to help them process it if it's difficult. Like here's a takeaway for you leaders, like if we're going to share all this information, here's how you can coach them one-on-one when they have questions, right, after the fact. So that's all a part of that. And there's a level of trust that's built and maintained with that constant communication. Absolutely.

Oversharing to where you feel like, you know, I've heard you guys on stage say, hey, we're telling you everything. There's nothing that we're trying to hide here. We're not hiding anything. That's right. We're being as honest as we can with all the information we have. And that creates trust with the team where they go, I trust Suzanne. I believe that she does have my best interest at heart, that she has the company's best interest at heart. And so I love the way that you guys have crafted this over the years. And we haven't always been perfect. But we've gotten better every single year that I've been here. I'm glad to hear you say that. Thank you.

So for the small business owner listening who knows communications an issue, people, there's some maybe tension, there's some different things going on or people feel like they're out of the loop. What is that one step they can take today to increase communication on their team? First of all, if they're not having a staff meeting with their whole team, start doing that tomorrow. If you're already doing that and you still feel like there's some confusion or lack of communication, I would ask the team. I would just ask them, what do you feel like you're missing? What do you feel like I'm not sharing or is not being shared that's causing this confusion? Just ask them. They'll tell you.

You may need to restructure the way you're doing your staff meetings or your team meetings. you may need to do them a little bit differently. I would suspect that you may just not be as vulnerable as you need to be and as open as you need to be because so many leaders are afraid of sharing sensitive information. They don't trust what the team's going to do with it. And so when you don't, you're sending the message to the team that you don't trust them in their ability to be adults and process information. And so that just creates a bad scenario.

So I would ask them what they're missing, and I would really challenge yourself to start sharing a lot more information, even if it makes you uncomfortable. So the themes I'm hearing here communicate early and often and watch that build trust, watch that build unity among the team, which causes productivity, which causes trust in leadership, which is going to end up with a positive net result. You say productivity? Is that a productivity? I don't know. I haven't landed on that yet. I'm so fascinated by that. Swayed on that one. Well, Suzanne, to get back to productivity, I just want to thank you for having this conversation, communicating openly and honestly, and just caring about our team so much. And knowing communication is a huge part of that.

You are so welcome. It was a pleasure. All right, George and Suzanne, great conversation. And a great reminder that being on time makes a statement about how much you care about other people. You know, it's a part of our personal brand. And if you're like me, sometimes it's not. easy to be on time, but it's something that we should always strive to do. It's excellence in the ordinary. Now, in the conversation with Pat Lanchone, he talked about how great organizations have a hallmark of great communication. It's true of their organization that they're really good at communicating. We talked about a lot of good principles and a lot of guidelines on how to do this well, but to make it even more practical for you, our coaching team has put together the Entree

Leadership's Communication Field Guide. This guide's designed to help you get started in creating a culture of communication, and it also includes sections about how to handle difficult conversations and making the most of meetings, really important topics. Chalked full of valuable information, but absolutely free to you, the listener. To get the free guide, just click on the link in the show notes. We'll hope you enjoyed the episode today. If you did, be sure to subscribe and leave us a review. We appreciate that. And if you're a small business owner between about two and 200 team members, we'd love to have a conversation with you to get your feedback on how we can make the show even better. If you'd like to help us out with that,

just click on the link in the show notes, fill out a brief survey to schedule a call with Tim, the producer. Well, guys, you can follow us on social media at Entree Leadership, and we'd always love to hang out with you and chat with you over there. This episode was produced by Tim Hull. It was edited by Zach Bennett, mixed and mastered by Will Rutter. And, man, I appreciate those guys, always working hard behind the scenes to bring you a great conversation, great episode. I'm your host Daniel Tarty and on behalf of the entire team and George Camel, thanks for listening. Until next time, keep learning and keep leading.