EntreLeadership - How to Develop Leaders in Your Business with Sarah Sloyan

Episode Date: March 29, 2021

There’s no better way to strengthen your business than to develop leaders from within your team. And if your business is growing fast, it’s a must—or else you may look up and find that you’ve got too many responsibilities and no one to pass the baton to. So, how do you find the time and resources to train your top-performing team members? And what kind of leadership development is effective? Our very own senior vice president of EntreLeadership, Sarah Sloyan, is here to share the ins and outs of leadership training, building trust with your team, and setting new leaders up for success so you can delegate with confidence.   entreleadership.com/podcast EntreLeadership's website Weekly Report Tool The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni Leadership Growth Assessment EntreLeadership Partners Schedule a call with Tim, the Producer   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

Hey guys, I say it all the time. Healthy things grow and growing things change. And change requires us as leaders to grow, and it requires us to grow and build leaders on our team. Because if the organization is changing and if it's growing but we don't grow our leadership bench, we're going to get stuck. 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 my guest today is Sarah Sloyen. Now, Sarah and I've worked together for almost a decade. She's one of the top leaders here at Ramsey Solutions, and today she serves as the senior vice president of Entree leadership with almost 60 team members, and they are growing.

She's seen firsthand how change can affect leadership. And she's been extremely diligent to stay ahead of that curve by growing and developing her leaders. She's one of the best in the building at constantly pouring into her leadership bench. She's seen a lot of change here at Entree Leadership, and she's seen a lot of change here at Entree Leadership. And she will acknowledge that just like you and just like me that one of the hardest challenges when it comes to developing leaders is finding the time to do it. I did not start doing this until I had a major pain point around this. So let me just admit this was an area that I royally screwed up. And so then I made time.

So when I shifted, you'll remember this, when I shifted into VP, you had already shifted up to the board and I was shifting into VP. I had no bench depth. I turned around and there was nobody I could replace myself with as director of sales. And it was like an oh crap moment. And so then I felt spread really thin because I'm trying to learn my new role, but I'm still solidly in my old role. And then I raised up some people, but I hadn't taken the time to train them because I was too busy and I thought, well, they've seen me do this forever.

Surely they just already know. And it did not go well. And it was all my fault because I had not focused on leadership bench depth when I could have. The nice thing about developing your leaders is it doesn't have to be this big, huge thing that sucks all of your time. You can just parcel out time for it. So right now on Entree, we have, gosh, probably 15 leaders. And so we now group it where once a month we get together and do a leadership training. And then their direct leader is working individually.

with each person each week in his or her one-on-one. So this doesn't have to be a big long thing, but what I will encourage people on is taking some time prior to those meetings to think about, and I'll tell you, this is the biggest thing. If you can carve out time to think, where do I want that person to be

in terms of leadership in one year or by the end of this year? What are the things I want them to be doing? What's the thought process I want them to have? What are the decisions I'm making today that I want to feel confident that they can make? And then really looking at quarter by quarter, how can they start picking up that stuff? What are some non-fatal ways that they can experiment with that?

So let's say one of the things that I want our leaders to be good at is communication and influence. Well, an easy way is they can get up in our stand-up meetings once a week and they can give the update about their area. And that gives us a chance to give them feedback afterwards on did that connect? Did that make sense? Was it the right amount of information? Was it too much? was it too little? How they communicated, was it affected? So really what you and I have always called those are the 20 pound weights. What are the things that they can start picking up? And a lot of times

what I will do with someone is I will say, hey, a year from now, here's what I want to be true about the kinds of leadership that you're doing, the decisions you're making, et cetera. So in order to start working towards that, here's the thing this quarter I'd like us to focus on. I want you to start picking up these three things. Before they are, your responsibility, I'm going to, for example, lead the sales meeting, you're going to watch me, and we're going to debrief afterwards about what you observed, specific things that I did that you may not have noticed, and maybe how people reacted to me, how I was reading the room. Then, after X amount of time, you're going to do it, and I'm going to watch you do it, and I'm

going to give you feedback afterwards on. And some of this is going to feel so little or petty, but it matters because it adds up, because I want to set you up to win. And if I don't call this out, we're going to look up in six months and it will have gotten away from us and you're going to be really frustrated and your team's going to be frustrated. So don't get caught up that some of this is going to feel minor. And so I'm going to watch you. We're going to debrief. And then you're going to own it. So you're going to own that sales meeting.

You're going to lead it. I'm not going to come every time. I might check in with you, check in with some of your teammates. I might jump in once in a while and kind of see how it's going and give you feedback. But otherwise, you're off to the races on leading that sales meeting solo. So there's kind of these three steps. You're going to watch me. I'm going to watch you. Then you're going to own it. How do you sense when you're ready to go from one step to the next? When I feel confident that they are observing and can mimic the right things. And there's certain guardrails. Here's what I want to say. I am not expecting any leader to do things exactly like I have done. But there are guardrails and principles to what I'm teaching them that they need to stay within. I'm okay if stylistically they want to switch things up and, You know, instead of a hour meeting once a week, they want to have a daily stand-up.

As long as they are effective in the principle of what I am teaching them, stylistically, they can make it their own. In fact, I prefer that they make it their own and they feel good about it and they're not just trying to mimic me because that's going to feel really inauthentic. The most powerful thing is when they believe in what they're doing, they understand their why and they're effective because of that. Yeah, that's good. You talked about the 20-pound weights, and the metaphor is if you're going to have somebody that, It's never done the bench press, all of a sudden get under the bar and put 300 pounds on. It'll kill them. They don't have the muscle strength.

But if you start with 20 pounds and then add another 20 pounds, like over time, they can get to 300 pounds, you know, given enough discipline and focus on that goal. And so you're trying to give your team something as they are able to stand up under the weight of that particular responsibility. I have the tendency because I'm impatient and because I feel the urgency and pressure of everything else going on to throw all the weight on that person. Just like figure it out, sink or swim. You've got it. I believe in you. And I'm sure I've done that to you plenty of times. And you probably still have the scars to prove it.

But how do you keep from, you know, when you feel the pressure of the organization's growing and I want to go through these three steps, they're going to watch me. I'm going to watch them and then they own it. If they're not coming along as fast as you need them to because of everything else on your plate, how do you have the patience to stay with that process? Well, part of it is I communicate that to them along the way. So in the beginning, I will communicate my urgency. Like, hey, I've got these new things that are coming up now, and I need you to be solid in this by next week so that you are running this thing. So we need to do everything in these short discussions so that you feel ready to do that. And here's the signs that I'll know you're ready to do that.

And then if we get to that point and leading up to that point where they're not, I'm telling them, like, hey, we need to be at this point, this threshold for you to lead this meeting. and here's what I'm still seeing, what are you going to do to fix that? Obviously, I'm here to help, but they need to drive also their own leadership growth. It's not solely on me. They want to grow in their career. They want to grow in their influence. They need to also put in the work and put in the thought. The biggest thing that I see that leads to success in a growing leader is critical thinking.

I am never going to be able to give you a checklist that tells you step by step everything you're going to encounter in this role and how to handle it. So I need you to nail some of these principles that I'm talking about and know that you understand them. And then you can apply them to any situation that comes up. Yeah, that's an important conversation. You know, it occurs to me that you are really good at making sure you've got your regular one-on-ones with your leaders. And oftentimes, if we're not careful, the one-on-one can get consumed and just talking about whatever's on fire right then. I call it the work. Issues, fires to put out, tactical stuff, ankle biters.

And you've got to hit that stuff, right? But there's also talking about how they're doing the dynamic of the broader team and then how they're doing in their own development as a leader. And I've noticed that you really guard that space to make sure you're giving them that feedback. Because when you kind of drove by, well, I just make sure they know the signs of success of how we're going to progress. But you have space in the calendar to have that conversation with that. We also now have a form. So we have a form that says 20 pound weights that we literally write down what those are going to be. and we do that quarterly. And I think that helps create that space so that we don't forget or think,

oh, yeah, we just talked about that right. And then we found out, oh, that was six months ago. So that helps me. What does that look like? I think when a lot of people hear form, they think, like, corporate. It is so simple. What does that look like? Okay. Well, it does two things. Part of it is the form is we write down what core value they want to work on this upcoming quarter. And it is literally like core value. And then, five lines because it's also how are you going to do that and then under that it says 20 pound weight and then low lines and we just we just handwrite it in there that's just to make it actionable so they can actually have something that even kind of to have a stake in the ground that says okay we committed to this so every couple of weeks we check in and say how are we progressing on that thing are we making

time to do that are we actually seeing progress or are we going to look up at the end of the quarter and we will not have mastered that skill yeah I really like that and I know as a leader I'm the first one to get away from talking about their development and get sucked into the issues. You know, like I just, there's almost a dopamine hit of putting out those fires and solving those problems. And I can look up and we've had months of checking in and solving issues, but we didn't have a leadership development conversation. I love the accountability of that. Well, why it's so vital is if you get so, it is more important to me to work on long term than being a solid leader who can solve these problems solo. because you're never going to get out of those fires.

You're always going to have to be in those conversations. And if I'm still talking about the same stuff a year from now with these team members and they haven't learned how to solve them themselves, that's a major problem. You asked earlier, okay, we're really busy. How do we have time to do this? How do you not have time to do this? You're never going to get less busy or be able to work on new stuff. I mean, if your business is growing or you want it to grow, you're never going to be able to focus on those new things. If you haven't backfilled people that can individually make,

decisions without you on these things that you're doing today. Do you remember that staff meeting that Dave said that? He said, if you don't replace yourself, you're never going to grow or you're never going to get promoted. That's it even as a business owner. Your business will never grow. You're never going to grow. If you do not take the time to teach these people, I would forego some of telling them about these fires and actually take a little risk and let them solve some of the small fires of today solo to create the space to train them on the principles of how, you make decisions so that long term you're not continuing to be in this treadmill. You know, part of replacing yourself is you're helping your people think about really how to think like an owner, how to think the way that you think.

And your team is going to bring you things. You know, they're going to knock on your office door and you have a minute. And for a long time, whatever they brought me, I would just react to. And we figured out at one point, hey, it's good to ask them why they are bringing that. And I just got in this habit and it was a game changer. I've done this with you. And I see you do this with your team. I want you to talk about it more. Hey, are you bringing me this because you feel like I need to approve it or because you just want me to know or because you want advice or you want a sounding board? And, you know, sometimes they'll say, well, I feel like you want to approve this.

And maybe that was true six months ago or a year ago. But you have the opportunity when you ask that if they say, I think you need to approve it. You go, I don't need to approve that anymore. You got it. And it's little, it's dozens of times, you know, throughout. the week as they bring those things up, you're going to start to learn, you know, where their head is at and what they feel like they need to bring you. And you really get to kind of calibrate the length of the rope, if you will. Yes, that's exactly it. And the only thing I'll add to that is sometimes instead of,

if they're looking for an answer, instead of telling them the answer, what I'll say is, how do you think we should handle that? And sometimes they will surprise you and build your confidence because they'll already be so insightful and it will actually boost their confidence. And it allows you to edit also what they say versus you getting in this habit of just telling them the answer. Like I'm just serving it to you versus them doing the critical thinking and you kind of shifting it just a smidge based on your experience. That really is a better way to handle that. I like that. Well, don't you think even if they don't have a great answer, just forcing them to think, it may be very uncomfortable for them, but it's like, this is leadership. Like you have to start solving your problems, right? It goes back to the idea. I

can't give you a checklist, you can't be an order taker. I'm not paying you as a leader to be an order taker. I'm paying you to solve problems so that I don't have to solve them. Yeah, you're really teaching them how to think critically and how to think like a leader. And it's kind of a big shift because many times when we start our job, you know, we're asking, what do I do? Tell me what do we are order takers, essentially in the beginning. And you have to do that. Yeah. But to be a leader at our level, you can't really, I mean, it's like you've got to bring your vision. You got to bring ideas. We still have to play as a team and we can check in and I'm here to support you. But if you're not thinking for yourself, you're going to have a hard time really leading. That's right.

You talked about your monthly meeting. So once a month, you guys do a leadership training. What does that look like? Okay. So we get together in a room. I usually schedule it for an hour, but there's no pressure because the topics may take a little less than that and that's fine to end a little early and I prepare for that in advance and I look at is there a pattern that I'm seeing a topic that people don't know how to handle or a pattern of things that I don't feel like as a team we're doing very well at leadership wise or is there just did I hear of an really great talk recently that I would want to ask that person to come in and give to our leaders so it really depends on which one of those things I'm sensing for that upcoming month and then I

I will either I will teach it and I'll outline like here's the four things that I need you to know about this topic and we'll dive into it. We'll make it very conversational and they'll ask questions and try to apply it to their day to day. Or I'll have someone like our dev leader. He just taught something fantastic around difficult conversations. And I thought, we all need as much content as possible around difficult conversations. It is part of the day to day, whether it's around an idea or a problem with a team member or whatever. And so he had a great process for that.

And so he's coming in not tomorrow. but the next month to give that talk. Is that Brendan? Oh, we're going to do a podcast about that. No. Okay, so people came back from his talk. I think he gave it to our marketing team, and they raved about it. And there was a handout, and so I thought, this is fantastic.

And so he's going to come and do that in a month. Nice. And I'm very excited about it. You know, it occurs to me that, as I've talked to thousands of business owners out there, many of them will say, I don't feel like I'm qualified to lead. And when they say that, I think, me too. I've never felt qualified. I've never felt ready. I've never felt like I've mastered it. There's a very real imposter syndrome that gets in our head. And I think when we're kind of imagining

ourselves training our teams, there's kind of this fallacy that we have to be an expert at the thing we're training them on. How do you lean in even when you aren't all the way there yourself? Well, there's two things here. One, if I truly do not feel qualified, I grab a buddy like Brendan, and I mean, I feel very good about teaching on difficult conversations, but I don't have an easy format mapped out. I'm not going to have time to do that right now. He already has it. So phoning a friend is always okay. Or grabbing up, if you've heard a podcast or watched a YouTube video that you feel like is impactful, that's okay. You can be the facilitator. Your job is to connect the content to the people who need it as the leader. So you can grab that TED talk and you can watch it as a team. And then you can say, hey, I want to hear your guys's thoughts on that.

And that might be an easier approach versus you feeling like you're having to write some training from scratch. But the second thing I want to say about that is you are more qualified than you think you are. People just want to hear about your real life experience with things. And so spending some time thinking about, well, they're going to be up against having to have difficult conversations or having effective one-on-one meetings or whatever. How have I done that? Or what did I royally screw up on and learn from that I can share with these guys? Just like I just shared with you the leadership bench depth total catastrophe where I had no director of sales candidate. That's all people want to hear.

And telling a story is the best way and then talking and going, gosh, this is what I learned. This is what I wish I'd done differently then. Hopefully you guys see that I'm doing that differently now. This is not some formal leadership thing where I've Xeroxed worksheets. This is a conversation. Yeah, and they can tell if you're faking it too. Absolutely. They just want you to be real and be in it with them and say, hey, let's learn this together.

Yeah, that's what you're saying. If you grab a TED talk or a book, let's go through a book together. Yes. I'm going to facilitate how do we think this should look in our team. And it's really about having those meaningful conversations more than monologuing at them all the time. That's right. That's why I love it when people bring some of their key leaders to one of our events, the conversations, when you carve out the space, especially when you get out of the office and carve out that space that you will have with people is so powerful that when you're in the office and you're

in the grind, it doesn't just happen. You have to carve out that space. And ideally, I love it if you can go to something like an event or watch a video or whatever. And it creates those conversations naturally. I've watched you for almost a decade. Be very intentional about experiences with your team. Getting off-site, finding new ways to kind of shake it up, going to a restaurant, just having a meal together, going on a retreat. You've done that very intentionally. Say more about why that's important versus just getting in the next office and the next Tuesday at two o'clock meeting. I realize if we don't like each other and trust each other, we're not going to be able to lead the team. If your leadership team is dysfunctional, your team is going to be dysfunctional.

You're not going to get the stuff done. We talk a lot about you move at the speed of trust and you have to do work. That trust doesn't just happen. It's not like on day one of being a leadership team, everybody automatically trusts and like each other. And we actually had a situation as we were forming a couple of years ago where two of the people on my very small leadership team did not trust and like each other. And so I said, you know what? We're going to have breakfast every week. Every Friday morning, we're going to have breakfast together. And what's cool is you start to really understand people's hearts. And that way when stuff goes wrong, because it will. It's not going to be perfect. There's going to be situations that flare up where

were like, why did they do that? But when you know their heart, you don't get mad at them the same way. You don't, because you trust them and you go, okay, we must have had a misunderstanding or I can see how this went sideways. And that's, that breakfast became the highlight of everybody's week after a couple of months. They would say, man, I love having this time together. And so I really saw our ability to get to the last 10% of truth fast, where we actually say what we feel in leadership meetings because we had built this. trust and rapport by having breakfast together or by, you know, like you said, once a year I like to go over and do a little two-night retreat where we talk about what we dream for the future and we talk about some strategy stuff and we play a lot of board games and get silly and have meals together. That's fun. I've been on some of those. I think you were the OG of instigating those.

They do get silly. You know, I can imagine there's leaders right now going, oh, I've got two leaders and they don't trust each other. Good. We're going to have breakfast together every Friday. Now what are talk about. Well, and I tell people at front my goal, I say, okay, so in that situation, I said, all right, listen, you guys, our team is only going to be as effective as we are. We have to have trust and rapport as a leadership team, or we are going to be the lid holding this team back. And I feel right now like we're not running at 100%. So what I'd like to do is start having breakfast together once a week. And I just want to, that time, there's not going to be an agenda. So it's just organic. It's just organic. We're going to talk about if there's something in your

week that you want to talk about, like something came up and we need to help you problem solve, or if we just talk about what vacation people are going on, it does not, we're not going to have this like agenda. We're literally just going to get together for an hour. We're going to hang out. And there are a lot of times where stuff will pop up where it's like, oh my gosh, this thing happened. What should I do about this? Or have this team member. And just that problem solving together. And we did talk about funny stuff that happened, especially when we were all home for a period during quarantine. People's kids were running in the background, so we still laugh about that stuff. You know, like, it's just a time to have shared experiences and get to know each other.

But it sounds like the premium is on FaceTime with each other, not that you as the leader are trying to be the counselor or create intervention or cause them to have. It's just over time, having more FaceTime creates that trust. And you'll really learn things about people that'll create a lot of empathy. We were on a retreat. I think it was two weeks ago. And we did personal histories, if you've ever read Pat Lynchione's Five Dysfunctions of a team. He talks about this exercise. So personal histories, it's usually like maybe five questions where it's like, how many siblings do you have and what is your birth order? What's the first job you had? What's something that was really tough for you growing up?

Something kind of like that. Nothing like crazy deep, but stuff that is insightful. And we found out that one of our new leaders is one of 13. children. And it just gave me perspective on this person and I saw them outside of just our leader of our development area. It's cool. Yeah. And if you hear about how somebody grew up in their story, you start to learn like their struggles and challenges they had growing up and that kind of thing. It creates a lot of empathy. Yes. Empathy and understanding where you're kind of like, okay, I can see why they might be sensitive to that thing or there's this baggage that they have around this and that's probably what's causing. I mean, let's be real, we're all broken people.

The beautiful thing is daily you can work on that. And so when you kind of understand someone's brokenness, which we all have, you do have that empathy, but you also understand how to, to what we were discussing earlier, how they might edit or automate or see life. You know, I think that every human's deepest desire is just to be known. Absolutely. And to be accepted. And say you're significant and I know you, but you can't really know somebody if you don't know their story. That's right. And you can't know their story if you're just frantically running through and getting all the work done all the time.

And if I'm going to lead someone, I have to have trust with them. Otherwise, they're not going to accept feedback from me. If I don't understand where they're trying to go and if they don't trust that I'm trying to help them get there, why would they listen to any of my feedback? Yeah. You know, as you're developing leaders, a lot of this stuff works really well when you're bringing people up from the team because you've already got a foundation of trust and you've got some of these shared experiences. But sometimes you've got to hire somebody from the outside. And even just saying that, I'm like, oh, it's so hard.

There's so much. And you and I have had several backfires in doing that where we're like, this was not good. But we've had some successes too. So let's talk about that. What have we learned on when you got to bring someone? First of all, how do you know when you need to bring somebody from the outside versus bringing somebody up from your bench? Well, my preference is always to bring someone up from the bench. What I've realized is, you know, this. Our business, one year grew 40%. So sometimes the business need and the growth of the people here don't line up. And I need someone in that higher role faster than someone on my current team would be able to shift up into that. And for me to really help them win, they would shift up into it and bomb, you know. So when I have to hire someone from the outside in that situation, I'm really looking for somebody that there's two areas.

It's like hard skills, soft skills. Can they come in and can they build the rapport with the team? And one thing I've learned with that is allowing them an onboarding schedule where I put that first. So I'm not saying for eight weeks all they do is walk around and have coffee with people. That'd be dumb. But do I give them adequate time to build the relationships with the people on their team? and then the leaders that they would be also working with cross-functionally, how do I build that into their onboarding?

And do I think that they'll be able to do that? The other thing is, do they have that critical thinking thing that we were talking about? And are they intuitive? I can't spell it all out for them. So I need them to be intuitive and figure things out, and I need them to be able to have the rapport built with other people to ask them also. They also need to be self-driven. So are they, do I have to kind of tell them to giddy up?

or you and I joke about this all the time. I'd rather steer someone's energy than try to make them hurry up and have a higher sense of urgency. So are they going to get it? Are they going to understand the why? Are they going to get after it without me telling them?

Are they going to be able to... There's three things I guess it really boils down to. And you came up with these. So this is so funny for me to say them to you. But... I actually don't know what you're about to talk about. So if I came up with them, I forgot them. You know it.

It's what we use here at Ramsey. You know, does this leader Are they able to have vision? Are they going to crush it at results? And can they also kill it at relationships? So all of those things I just mentioned really boil down to those three things. Can they have a vision for their area and where they're going? Can they make results happen?

And are they going to have great relationships? Or are they going to have dead bodies all over? And there's so many things that file under each one of those communication, their communication skills. So when I talk about hard and soft skills, I'm really searching for, can they nail it at those three areas? It's good to call it those three areas because oftentimes in other organizations, people will get to a level of leadership purely based on results.

So if you're just looking at their resume, they've crushed it and they've got this big, fancy title. And so you're kind of brought to think like, oh, well, they know how to lead because clearly they're the SVP of blah, blah, blah, over here, this other organization. And if you don't really dig in on the vision piece and the relationship piece, for us, that's where it's bit us. Because we saw that they were able to get results. And they were even really good at interviewing. And so we thought they were going to be strong on this stuff.

And they get in. And all of a sudden, people don't respect them. They don't have a vision for where they're going. They can't communicate. It's just a mess. Yes. And in leadership, they're trying to get results with a team that doesn't. The way you get results with a team in leadership is they trust you.

And so it's, I mean, the game. A way two results in leadership is relationships. Right. You have to be able to influence your team to get the results that you want them to get. I think we learn to slow down even more. I mean, we're already very diligent in the hiring process with any team member. But from some of our battle scars, we just really, anytime it's a leadership role, we take about three times longer and are that much more thorough. Not that it has to take that much longer in the calendar. You know, it doesn't have to take six months.

But we just have that many more interactions because we're really looking for are they going to be able to hit the ground running? and lead an existing team. That's right. There's a lot at stake. That's the biggest thing recently. We hired a director of sales. And, you know, you and I are like, get on the phone, make things happen. Cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, you know.

And I really had to, from things we learned the hard way where we brought someone in, didn't discover stuff or didn't set them up well, I really had to slow down and say, okay, for the first 30 days, I'm not going to put any pressure on you to create results with the team. I'm going to take that 30 days. You're going to build rapport with the team. You're going to start observing stuff. I want you to get knee deep in these calls and understand the process and the products that we're doing. Then as we're getting towards the end of those 30 days, I want to hear your insight and what expectations should look like for this next 60 and 90 day period so that we really understand, do you have the foundation to start running? Because then we're going to start really having. And I had some tough conversations with this dude in the interview process.

I think he's still scarred. He'll bring them up where I said, listen, this is the budget we're going to meet without you. If we just meet this budget, that's not a win for me. We need to be well past this budget now that we're investing in you coming on board. So I'm not being soft on this person and then just letting them, like I said, walk around and have coffee with people. It's like, this is the 30 days where we're getting all the foundational things where you understand what we teach, why we teach it, who we serve, what's going on over here, so that then you can hit the ground running and make results happen fast. having people around you who are leaders and get your culture, they need to be really involved in the interview process, especially if it's a leader.

Let's talk about our relationship and kind of how we've learned to do this dance a little bit better through the years. You know, used to, I would go get so excited about somebody. And I'm like, Sarah, we're hiring them, right? They're awesome. You're like, okay. And the next thing you know, like, they're sitting by you. And you're like, I didn't really say yes, but tardy's moving so fast.

I meant that as like, we'll talk more about this. We're going to keep talking, right? And I heard, yeah, hire him now. And it took my doofest brain about seven or eight failures on this to realize. And later you're like, hey, remember when I was trying to slow this down? And I had to grow in my trust level to be able to say and in my confidence to be able to say very clearly, I don't feel like we're there yet to hire this person. Here's the three things I'd like to dig in on to build my confidence.

So it really was a two-way. I had to grow in my voice also to be able to. to talk about that. Well, I mean, I think the point is if you will get really good at how as a team of leaders, you're going to work in each other's strengths in the hiring process and really go, hey, my tendency for Tarty is always going to be to move a little too fast and get excited about a candidate. Sarah's tendency is going to be to slow it down. Courtney's tendency is going to be excited about a certain skill set they have. You know, Falcons is going to have a tendency to say if they're fun to be around and they love barbecue, they're in. You know, like we each have kind of our own. And

All those things actually matter, but none of them can stand alone. That's right. And so we've had to create kind of a culture of trust among our leadership team to say, hey, we really have to, if somebody's feeling uncomfortable, if somebody doesn't feel a piece about this, we expect you to speak up. We want your wisdom coming because they're going to be a part of our core team when they get here. Yeah. And at the end of the day, you have to make that decision.

So you might talk with five people on your leadership team and three people really like them and two people would don't. We just had this situation. And I did sit down and say, okay, I know we're not all in alignment on this. Here's why I feel differently on these things. We're going to move forward with this hire, but here's my commitment to you. My commitment to you is I'm going to dig in on this hard in the first 30 days. I'm going to make sure that these areas that you're concerned about, here's my training plan for that thing.

So I don't want people out there to hear like, well, it has to be a consensus or we don't hire them. The reality is at the end of the day, you are the leader. and you have to make a decision, and you're not going to have a full consensus every time, but to sit down and take the time and say, I hear you, and here's what I'm going to do to help offset that risk. Yeah, that's a good clarification, because it's not consensus. It's making sure everybody's voice is heard. That's right.

And I think when you explain that you have heard them and why you're going to go forward anyway, most people, that's all they respect that. Right. And people can disagree and commit. I think it's Lynch-Ioni that talks about this. As long as you acknowledge, like, I know we don't agree on this thing, but here's why we're going to go in this direction and here's what I'm going to do to make sure we offset this risk. Then they can say, okay, I feel heard, I'm okay going in this direction, even though I didn't initially agree with it. And then they don't, what he calls alligator arm it, where they say they're going to make sure that this person is set up to win, but they're actually not falling through on that stuff.

It's kind of like false promises in a way and they don't even know they're doing it. They give it lip service. So as you build a leadership team and there's more layers of team members and there's more growth, you know, you really shift in your own schedule over time where more and more of your time is investing in and building leaders and not doing the tactical things. But this is a really big tension for small business owners, especially if they're the founder or if they're the one that creates the product or if they're the top salesperson. What advice do you give to somebody about not becoming that bottleneck so that they are free to actually. invest in their leaders. Yeah, I think it goes back to what we talked about earlier a little bit where you are stubbornly committed to the vision that you have and the principles and the standards.

But tactically, how people choose to skin that cat, as long as they're aligned on those things and they get the results that you say are mandatory in the way the guardrails of the principles that you've told them to do it, they can get creative a little bit within that. And I think we all need a little bit of autonomy as humans. And that'll start to free you up because where I really want our business owners to live is in the visioneering and the strategy, partnering with their leaders on the strategy. I want their leaders to be focused on taking that strategy into creating a plan with the team and holding the team accountable for execution. So at Ramsey, we have a leadership development program. So we've got about 300 people now that are

in leadership. It's wild. When I started, we had 300 people as a whole. whole company. It's bananas. That's so crazy. So you're on our leadership development committee, and I know a lot of small businesses aren't going to have a leadership development committee, but the point is there's a lot of intention. There's a lot of focus that we put on making sure that our leaders know how to represent our values, that they understand our strategy. They know what the vision is, and that there's a lot of alignment at the top. Because the bigger you get, and the more leaders you have, one inch off in leadership is a thousand miles off in the trenches. And so that just becomes more and more critical, the more leaders that there are.

And so I'd love for you to say a little bit about, so we now have 100, 200, 200, 400. These are different tiers of leadership. And we got to a point where we realized we can't effectively train our newer leaders in the same meeting that we're training are more seasoned leaders. You know, we need to all have alignment and collaboration in some context, but we also need to customize some of the feedback and the coaching that we're doing based on really their tenure in leadership or the maturity would be. know the way to look at it. That's exactly right. So how within your team or how within leadership development committee, how do you tackle that? You know, and what's important when you're looking at maybe you would call it the stages of leadership? I think it's really important to meet people where they're at in the journey and to not assume, as we were talking about earlier,

that things are obvious or that they already know them. So with that 100 level group, we are really laying out the basic foundational pieces of leadership. 101 of communication, 101 of conflict. And then as you are going up the chart of leadership and you're getting into the associate directors, the directors, the senior directors, depending on, you know, 200, 300, 400, then we're really getting deeper and pushing in more specifically on those topics. So at the most, you know, when we have someone in one of the lower levels of leadership who has to have a hard conversation, right now they're usually not having that conversation by themselves. So what is it important for them to know?

And then what is it that leader who joins them to be able to have that upper leader that joins them? What do they have to know in that conversation? So we just kind of intensify the level of information that we give people. Does that make sense? Yeah, and I think it's kind of funny how like a hard conversation for your very first hard conversation. Exactly. You know, five years later, it's like, that's just one o'clock on a Thursday. Exactly.

It doesn't feel like this all-consuming thing. What would keep you up at night for your first hard conversation would not even, you wouldn't even think twice about it. You could just roll right into it after you've had 80 of those. So it's kind of about giving people, again, back to those reps, is giving them exposure to a 20-pound weight or a challenge. where they're at. One of the things you, the wording you used for it a couple of years ago is dosaging. What's the right dosage? Because if I, if you are a 100 or 200 level leader and I flood you with all the information at once, you're only going to absorb a certain percentage of that. It's going to feel overwhelming. Your confidence is going to be low. You're not going to walk

out of there having mastered that level. But if I can dosage it out and give you the right level for where you're at, then later on I can come back around and build on that and you feel very confident and you can tackle that next thing and it's not overwhelming. So I know a lot of small business owners that may be hearing this going, man, this sounds great and I'm not doing any of it. I mean, we're just running the shop and I've got leaders and I want them to think more like owners, but Sarah, not only do we not have a committee or a monthly meeting, I don't even have one-on-ones with my team.

It's just as we go, we're just talking and, you know, flying through this stuff all the time. Practically, where do I start? What can I do next week? and then maybe in the months following that are just going to be steps towards getting all of this stuff in place. One of the things that is easy just in real time is you can tell them

something you learn in real time. I mean, I don't know about you, but I make stupid mistakes every day. Hour late for me. So taking one of those and going, hey, I want to continue to pour into you just in real time walking over and going, hey, I really see a lot of potential on you

and I know you've told me you want to grow. I want to start if it's okay with you telling you some of the stuff as I'm learning it. So I just had this conversation and I asked this person to do something and I didn't give them near enough instruction. So I just kind of want to share with you that as you're working with your coworkers or team or whatever, make sure you're really thinking about what's all the information that they need or what's a good majority of the information they need to be able to do their job. So just little things like that where you're, and I still do that. We'll have a staff meeting or leadership meeting and afterwards. I'll snagged somebody and I'll go, hey, I want to mention something to you that was on my mind.

And just in real time, I'll just tell them like, or here's something I was at this event the other day. I read this book and something kind of caught me. And I just felt like I'd like to share it with you because I feel like you're going to hit this situation at some point. And I'll just in real time, tell them the thing. So real time doesn't have to have a lot of structure. Say I wanted to start adding some structure.

Is it a weekly one-on-one? Is that the best place to do that? Is it a leadership meeting? If you have nothing right now and if you have a lot of it. five leaders. What I would start with is I would have a once a week or every other week group discussion and I would pick one topic or one video or one podcast and I would play it and talk about it. And it doesn't have to be long. You could take 30 minutes for this. If you only have one or two leaders, I would start a regular one-on-one. And the most important thing is

the consistency. So if you can only fit it into your schedule every other week, that's okay. But make sure you do it. And in that, take 30 minutes, take part of it to see how they're doing, and take part of it to talk about, hey, here's where I see you growing. Is that where you want to grow to? Okay, here's one thing that I think we're going to need to work on. Are you okay with me giving you feedback so that, you know, in a couple months from now, you are killer at this skill? You know, it occurs to me when you say pick a video or a podcast, people might think, okay, where do I find those? And, you know, I'm just, just such a growth junkie. And I think this goes back to one of those, like, just can't help

that do it. I've always done it this way. Every training that I've done, everything I've taught my leaders, I stole it from somewhere, you know, and I don't necessarily even know where it all came from. But if you're not growing yourself, if you're not listening to podcast and watching videos, which, of course, the irony is we're on a podcast. So they're at least listening to this one. So get on you. But as leaders, we have to be consuming content and growing ourselves in order to, you know, to pour it into our team. It's like if we don't fill up our own cup, we don't have something to pour into them. So say more about the importance of doing that over time and then maybe some things that you do personally to find fresh content and keep your own leadership sauce sharp. Well, I would assume that most people listening to this podcast are not content staying at status quo.

I'm guessing that we all want to grow towards something. And the reality is the leader that your business needs you to be in a year from now, three years from now, five years from now is not the person you are today. Today, you don't have those skills. And so if you're not out there growing yourself, I mean, we talk about this, right? You're the lid on your business. Maxwell talks about this. You are the limiting factor. And so what I have learned over time, I have three young kids.

I'm a working mom. My husband works full time also. And so the way I learn is different than the way you learn. You might love reading books. I am so slammed. I just don't have a lot of time to sit down and read a book. My kids are constantly coming up and needing something or wanting to play a really competitive game of Uno. So I find that like listening to a podcast on a drive or sitting down and grabbing lunch with somebody else who's really good at a skill that I need to learn, you have to find your own way of learning those skills.

Your way of learning, it is okay if it's not the same as someone else. Some of the things that I might recommend, if you're looking for a really easy book, for example, I love Linchione's books. They are really good, fables, easy to read, and then he breaks it down in the back. They're very short. If you have a little more time, obviously there's some additional books through our blogs that you can find, really meaty by topic. I would say go with a learning path that you most connect with. Obviously, I'm biased because I love our podcast, and I also love our Entrae Leadership books. So to me, that would be the number one thing.

Well, I really like that because it's just reading books is not the only answer, but it's getting things into your pathway. Even just as simple as on Instagram, go in and follow a hashtag leadership, hashtag team, hashtag unity. And in your feed, stuff's going to show up that's going to prompt you. It's not going to be a training in a box, right? But you just need that spark. You need it. Maybe it's a little meme or a quote and you go, oh, that's a principle I could talk to the team about today and have a little five minute huddle. But I need that constant inflow of those sparks to keep my brain engaged with like, yeah, okay, I need a. And it gets you out of the tactical thing that you're doing and into more of a strategic business, visioneering, what's the future? And that is only you can do that for your business. So if you're not doing that, you're litting your business. Yeah. What's your biggest leadership challenge right now? This is a bad answer. Let me just own this is a bad answer. And then let's see where it goes.

I doubt it. My biggest leadership challenge right now is I have a high sense of urgency. There's such a gap in where I want to be and where we're at right now. There's so much I want to do to help our tribe and our people. And it is really difficult sometimes for me to slow down and pick. So I want to do all the things all the time. And that is very stressful for our team. Yeah. So really slowing down. So is it like the demand of the ideas versus the resources and time to pull them off? That's right.

And I want them all done yesterday. Yeah. How do you do that? Well, I mean, you know, you just hire lots of people. You turn through them. You make them all work over time. Just kidding. Never.

We never do that. I think that what it takes is for me to carve out time to prioritize and then think about what are realistic expectations. And how do I communicate and hold people accountable so that we are, working towards that and hitting expectations. And I'm not just constantly waking up every day, feeling behind. Because that's how I feel. I feel behind every day. I imagine you talk with your leaders about that challenge. Like how are we going to... Now we've gotten so big that I can't solo gauge what's realistic expectations and what our team can do. So there's so much that we do

that I would call operational now, our summit event, our master series event, our podcast. And it is not that it doesn't take effort. It takes a ton of effort. A lot of our team. has to work on those. And so I don't have a ton of team then to point at new stuff. So really sitting down with our leaders and strategically saying, okay, we're going to continue to do these pieces because this is how we believe it best works into our mission. And here's our list of additional things we'd like to do. Now let's really look at what are the knobs or filters that we're going to use to decide which of these things we can do and how many we can do based on our resources, that is now a team effort because we've just gotten so big. I can't

solo assess that. Yeah, that's good. You've gotten really, really good. And I've watched you do this super intentionally over the years of getting more leaders in it with you and constantly making sure that you're not out too far on your own without bringing your bench along and making sure that you have a great, not only a sounding board, but people that can actually then go execute. Well, again, probably because I did it poorly. So I realized I don't want to emotionally carry this alone. And when I get out too far, when they're not part of the process, they're not bought in and they don't understand the why. And it takes a lot of effort on the back end. Take some of that pain that you had in learning it poorly. And I was with you in it. We both did.

And I really want you to sell our listeners right now and give them the conviction that it is time to not just be working on your own leadership, but to start developing leaders. Because it's kind of one of those things like you don't know it's too late until you. It's too late until you you're there and it's super painful, encourage them on, you know, proactively getting ahead of this thing. Well, I think what it comes down to is with any change, the pain of staying the same, when it is greater than the pain of change. Any change, carving out time to work on this, feels painful. But what's more painful is that your business is going to be stagnant, that you're going to be carrying the load alone, that you're not going to make progress in helping

more people. When that pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change, that's when you're going to change. And that's just a reality, whether you're trying to lose weight, develop leaders, whatever it is, I mean, none of us like change, but we all like improvement. And so if you don't want to improve it, if you just want to stay status quo, if you only want to help the number of people you're helping today, if you don't want to make more money, if you don't want to help hire more people and impact more families, then yeah, don't develop leaders. Stay the same. Stay the same. As we wrap up, I want them to hear from the captain of the ship. You are entree leadership. You run the whole show. You've got an incredible team. But so much of what happens that

entree leadership comes out of your heart to help business people. What do you want them to know about what we're doing here at entree leadership and what you care about them knowing why we're here as a brand and as a team that's supporting them? Well, at the end of the day, we exist. to help these folks win. It is so exciting. I love hearing people's stories. It is incredible. Half of our businesses are family-owned businesses. It is just, you are all up in it. It feels like a big family. Our events feel like you get on this camp high. You see old friends. I want to help businesses in America succeed and grow. And now more than ever, we need that as a country. We talk about this all the time. Big corporations, they get all the press, all the news. But the

reality is small businesses are the backbone of our economy. They are what is keeping most of us employed. And without people like you guys who are listening to us, our country is in deep trouble. And so we want to do everything we can to help small businesses win big. I love it. Fantastic. Inspiring. And I would double down on all of that. I love your heart, love your passion. Your leadership is inspiring. And it's always fun. I don't know how many times this is. We're always glad to have Sarah Sloy in the Entry Loachey's Studio. Thanks for coming back. Thanks for having me.

You bet. All right, guys, lots of good takeaways there. And you know, the big one is you just got to think about where do you want your business to be in a year from now? What does growth look like for you over this next year? And what is it going to demand of your leadership? What should your org chart look like in a year from now? And are you paying attention to those emerging leaders on your team? The one that they're leading through influence right now, they haven't formed.

been put into leadership and you're going, okay, I've got to develop that person. You know what? It's not going to happen on accident. It's going to happen because you have a plan. And I recommend that you start with a baseline assessment with people on your team to figure out what their strengths are, where their deficits are, and then have a meaningful conversation with them about how they can start picking up those 20 pound weights. What can they practically do next week in the following weeks that you can hold them accountable to and coach them on? Well, it starts with the baseline. It starts with them and you. checking in on where they're at. And this is what our coaching team uses when we're assessing leaders and we're encouraging business owners on how they can assess their leaders or people that maybe want to be in leadership. And so today, absolutely free, we're offering to you guys the tool that we use, the leadership growth assessment. To take this assessment, all you have to do is text the keyword leader growth to 33444. Again, text leader growth, all one word in those spaces, to 33444 or just click on the link in the show notes. All right, folks, I hope you enjoyed today's episode of the Entry Leadership Podcast.

If you did, we'd love it if you would leave us a review and share it with somebody that might also be interested in this topic because that's how this thing grows. You make it happen. So thank you for helping us out with that. Now, look, if you're a small business owner between about two and 200 team members, we'd love to have a live conversation with you. We'd love to get your feedback on the show, ask you a few questions, and learn how we can make this even better. If you want to help us out with that, click on the link in the show notes and fill out a brief survey to schedule a call with Tim, the amazing producer. He would love to have a chat with you. Thanks for helping us out there. Also, follow us on social media at Entree Leadership.

Follow me on Instagram at Daniel Tarty. We'd love to hang out with you over there and message with you if you'd like. Be glad to answer your questions and I'll try to follow you back. Hey, this episode was produced by Tim Hull. It was edited and mixed by Will Rudder. I'm your host, Daniel Tarty. And on behalf of the entire Andre leadership team, thanks for listening. Until next time, keep learning and keep leading.

If you enjoy this podcast, you should check out other great podcasts from the Ramsey Network, like the Rachel Cruz Show. Hey guys, it's Rachel Cruz, and I'm so excited to tell you about my podcast. A lot of people are living paycheck to paycheck. They're in debt. They don't even know where to begin, but they have this need, this want to get in control of their money. And if that's you, you have come to the right spot. So in each episode, you're going to get a ton of inspiration and practical advice.

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