EntreLeadership - How to Run a Resilient Business with Marcus Buckingham

Episode Date: August 30, 2021

How do we keep going despite what’s going on around us? Resilience. How do we build resilience? We take challenges head on. In this episode of The EntreLeadership Podcast, we’ll sit down with world-renowned speaker and bestselling author Marcus Buckingham to discuss what makes an organization resilient and the strategies we can implement to build a more resilient organization. Then in our second segment, George Kamel sits down with Executive Vice President Daniel Ramsey to discuss some of the challenges he’s faced in his career and what he’s done to foster a culture of resilience on the EntreLeadership Team.   The EntreLeadership Podcast Marcus Buckingham's website Learn more about EntreLeadership Summit Recent episode with Ken Coleman: How to Develop a Promotable Team Download the Executive Summary of the Workplace Resilience Study Schedule a call with Tim, the producer   Learn more about the offers from our EntreLeadership Partners: BELAY  |  Gravy  |  Hite Digital Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If I had a nickel for every time I've heard unprecedented times, I'd have a whole bunch of nickels. Unprecedented times aren't new, and problems will always exist for you as a business owner. So the question is, how do you thrive in the face of them? From the Ramsey Network, this is the Entree Leadership Podcast, where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. I'm your host, George Camel, and in today's episode, we're talking about building resilience on your team, which connects to our business driver of people. Our first guest is Marcus Buckingham. He's a best-selling author and the world's most prominent researcher on strengths and leadership at the ADP Research Institute.

And I sat down with him to talk about why building resilience on your team is so important to the success of your business. In our second conversation, I talk with Ramsey leader Daniel Ramsey, our executive vice president of Entree Leadership, about how we do this at Ramsey's Solutions, how we create resilient teams. So up first, my conversation with Marcus, around a first of office. defining resilience for your team. All right, Marcus, it's so good to have you back on the podcast. How you been?

I'm good, George. How the heck are you? Oh, my goodness. We're having a good time here in Nashville. Last time I saw you was on the Entree Leadership Summit stage, probably one of our both first events back with real people, and we had a great time. And you had this amazing talk about resilience that I want to dig into. And you have a very different definition because your team, you guys have done so much research on this topic. And I want to hear from you. What is your definition of resilience? Well, resilience is a subject that is on everyone's mind at the moment, isn't it? It's like, how do we keep going in the face of everything that we're all facing? And so whether you call it

stictuitiveness or whether you call it persistence, we all on some level know intuitively that it means do you have the will to absorb everything that's hitting you and yet still keep contributing. But we wanted to dive into things in more detail and actually find out what other components of this thing called resilience. So our definition of resilience was simply, it's a reactive frame of mind that enables you to withstand obstacles, bounce back, and give of your best. A reactive frame of mind that enables you to bounce back and give of your best. Different than engagement, by the way, employee engagement, engagement is a proactive frame of mind that enables you to contribute your best. So it's a proactive frame of mind on what are you focused on and

what are your strengths that are in play and how you collaborate with others. That's what engagement is. Resilience is a very different thing. It's a reactive frame of mind. Is that because change is outside of our control as business owners? You know, we can control some things. We can be proactive with our strategies and our tools. But when it comes to change, that's really where resilience comes into play. Why is that important for the business owner? Well, of course, today, changes a constant, isn't it? Everything that you set up in your goals at the beginning of this year, where the third week of the year, they were irrelevant. And it's true all the way through this year. It's like you make a goal and then God laughs, right? So as business owners,

you are constantly trying to ensure that your people and your business stays in touch with reality. There's nothing worse than trying to run a business on theories or suppositions that aren't true. So you're always trying to keep in touch with reality, and reality keeps changing. So resilience, really, is a measure of you and your employee's ability to withstand those changes. And not in an I'm just coping sort of way, but in a way that enables you not just to bounce back, but bounce up, there's all sorts of research that suggests that one of the ways in which you find meaning in life is through your response to unavoidable suffering.

So your ability to withstand changes and then bounce up to a new level of strength or a new level of contribution, that's the quintessence of resilience and the best businesses and the best teams, frankly, are doing everything they can to build that. are in their people. As you say that, I can't help but think of our CEO, Dave Ramsey. I mean, his story of crawling from the rubble of bankruptcy and bouncing up, as you said, to build this amazing business that's had such a far-reaching impact. He defines resilience in my mind. When I think of who's a resilient guy who's been through some things, who has the experience, who's been

knocked down, who got back up, it is Dave Ramsey. And I think you're absolutely spot on with that. And you're saying resilience, it's not just this character trait. It's something that you could measure. How do you measure resilience? So some parts of resilience are traits. If you've got a kid, well, actually, if you've got two kids, you'll know this immediately that some parts of resilience just seem to be baked more into that child than in that one. And undoubtedly, some aspects of your ability to withstand obstacles and bounce back or bounce up is just part of who you are. It's a bit like happiness. In all the happiness research, it's pretty a point. that some of us just have a higher happiness set point. Some of us are just happier every day than

other people. And the same is true with resilience. Some of us have a higher resilience set point. That's the trait aspect of resilience. But clearly, there are some state of mind aspects of resilience. States of mind and states of mind can change. There are some skills that you can develop if you want to build your resilience. So whatever your resilient set point is, you can get more of it or less of it around your set point. Same with happiness. You can be happier or sad around your set point. So our focus was on what are those aspects or resilience

that you could change in yourself or change in your team. Wow. And our focus here was to ask lots and lots of questions. We interviewed about 25,000 people around the world, experimented with lots and lots and lots of different questions, and we ended up with 10 really simple questions that measure that state of mind-like aspect of, of resilience. So it sounds like what you're saying is some people do have more resilience kind of

built into their DNA, but it's also a muscle that you can build. Like it's something that you can practice. Is that right? Yes. There are all sorts of things that you could do, that I could do, in order to make myself more resilient or to make my people more resilient than they were before. And so what we were trying to get at are those parts of resilience that are learnable, that are skills, based rather than just natural talent based. And they're clearly awesome. And they seem to cluster, by the way, around three core sources of resilience. In a sense, your resilience today is an ecosystem.

And there are three core sources to that ecosystem. Yourself, what do you do for yourself and with yourself every day in order to build your resilience? What does your team leader do with you and for you? Clearly, some parts of your resilience are a function of the particular person that you work directly for. And then lastly, your senior leaders. There are some things that people three or four levels above you can do in order to make you feel more resilient. So your own resilience is a function of those three sources. And what we found is, as a part of our research,

10 really simple questions that you could ask yourself right now, or you could ask your team right now that would help you give yourself a reliable measure of just how resilient you are. Let's go through those because I think it's a good kind of checkpoint for the listeners. to go, okay, I see myself as a resilient person. I think if you're an entrepreneur out there and you're still fighting and you're still run a business and you're still listening after all this time, you are a resilient person to some extent. So I want people to kind of take this quiz in their minds as you walk us through these 10

different questions to kind of ask yourself. And I'm curious, if you're listening, get a pen and paper out and start to check them off and go, yeah, that's me or I got to work on that. So walk us through these, Marcus. Yeah, every single one of these questions has only one thought in them. They're very simple. and each one of these questions as you'll hear, they're just asking you to rate your own experience.

They're not asking you to rate somebody else. They're not asking you to project into somebody else's life. They're just asking you to report in your own. So the first four questions all just deal with you and how you feel about you. I have all the freedom I need to decide how to get my work done. We ask that question on a scale of one to five with five strongly agree, one strongly disagree.

Question two, no matter what else is going on around me, I can stay focused on getting my work done. done. Question three is, in the last week, I felt excited to work every day. Doesn't say all day every day. But the everyday part seems to matter, George, if you take every day out of that question because you think, ah, well, you know, who gets to be excited every day? The question doesn't work anymore, by which I mean, who strongly agrees and who doesn't, seems to show no relationship at all to actual resilient-like outcomes, like lost work days, like accidents on the job, like likelihood to sue if you have an accident on my job, like first year voluntary turnover, all sorts of

things that you and I would think about as like resilient-like outcomes. You take the words every day out of that question. It doesn't work anymore. Question number four is, I always believe that things are going to work out for the best. So those four questions all deal with you and how you feel about your own personal experience. And there are some skills you can use to get better at those four questions. But those are the four questions that relate to you. The three questions that relate to your team leader are these. My team leader tells me what I need to know before I need to know it. I trust my team leader.

And then the last one is I'm encouraged to take risks. So each of those three relate to kind of what your team leader is doing with and for you. And then the last three questions, George, are all about the senior leaders of your country, of your company, of your community. we didn't really define senior leaders. We just let people run with it. But here are the three. Senior leaders are one step ahead of events. Senior leaders always do what they say they're going to do.

And the last one, I completely trust my company's senior leaders. So those are 10 questions that you could use to figure out how resilient you are right now and how resilient your team is. That's fascinating. Now, going to the research, by the way, I thought, this just speaks to your point about Dave,

Ramsey, I thought that the countries that would be most resilient. Using these 10 questions, because using these 10 questions, we could put people into one of two categories, highly resilient or vulnerable, just two. Highly resilient, we know you're going to be able to bounce back. Below that threshold, we just don't know. So we just said you're vulnerable. We don't know. We're not saying you're less resilient, slightly less resilient, really, because below the threshold, it's like a boiling point. Below the threshold, we just don't know how resilient you are. So my theory going into this research was that those countries who had responded to COVID best, that means they had smaller jobs in unemployment, they had fewer cases, they had fewer deaths,

countries like, I don't know, New Zealand, they would be more resilient than countries that had higher falls in unemployment and more deaths, more cases and so on, like, say, Brazil. But it turns out when you actually run the data on 25 countries, there is no difference between Brazil and New Zealand on resilience. So my whole theory was like blown up, which was kind of annoying. But that's why you do the research, right? But what we did find was really intriguing. We found that we asked people like, what's been your experience with COVID? Have you had it? Someone on your team had it. Your family had it. Friends have it. Someone you know in your community have it. If you said yes to one of those questions, you are almost three times more likely to be highly

resilient. Wow. So the more intimate you were with anything sort of difficult associated with this whole pandemic thing, the more likely you are to answer those 10 questions positively, three times more likely. Then we asked what sort of changes might have happened to you in the workplace. And 97% of people around the world said that they had some sort of changes in their work as a function of this last year and a half in the pandemic and so on, which is not surprising. But what is surprising is if you had five or more changes, like fewer hours or promotions put on hold or work remotely or more reliance on tech or whatever the list of changes were, if you had five or more changes, George, you were 13.7 times more likely, so almost 14 times more likely to be highly resilient. The more changes you'd face, the more resilient you are, which suggests, frankly, exactly what you said about Dave, the more challenges you face and the more intimate you are with those challenges,

the more resilient you become. And so what it says for leaders and entrepreneurs is your people don't fear change. Don't imagine they fear change. They don't. What they fear is the unknown. If you tell your people what changes are going to happen and why and you give them four, five, six, seven, eight changes that are happening and why, they are fine with that. In fact, they're more than fine. They're 14 times more likely to be highly resilient. Your people don't fear change. They fear the unknown.

And so the biggest mistake you can make as a leader or as an entrepreneur is to be vague. People want specificity about these changes. And when you tell them what's happening and why, they're fine. They're more than fine. Wow. That reminds me of the Dave Ramsey quote, to be unclear is to be unkind. And it sounds like a lot of the questions they tie to communication.

they tie to clarity, they tie to trust, and it all ties together to create that team culture, to create the team that goes, hey, I'm on board with this leader because I can trust them to take us through those unknowns. Is that right? Yeah, if you think about those three questions that focus on the senior leaders, senior leaders are one step ahead of events. Senior leaders always do what they say they're going to do. I completely trust my company's senior leaders. I mean, on some level, as a senior leader, you look at those questions and you're like, good grief. I mean, like, how do I stay one step of a head of events? Well, I don't even know what's going on next week.

How do I always do what I say I'm going to do when sometimes things change even in the course of a couple of days? And the solution, as you said, George, the solution is if I'm a follower of yours, don't pretend you know everything. Don't pretend you can project out into the future nine months from now and tell me exactly what things are going to be like. Because you don't know. And I know that you don't know. So instead, if you can't do that you. want to make me think that you're one step ahead of events, tell me what around the corner isn't

going to change. I know there's a lot that will change, but can you vividly bring to life for me what won't? Will our values change around the corner? Will who we are serving around the corner change? Will what our competitive advantage is around the corner change? Will the scores that we use to measure our progress into the future? Will that change? If those things aren't going to change, Yes, maybe our methods will change, maybe our processes will change, maybe our systems will have to change, fine. But tell me what won't change. Use stories. Use vignette.

Use anecdote. Point to heroes that embody what our values are or embody who we're trying to serve. The more vivid you can be about what around the corner won't change, the more likely it is that people are going to feel resilient around you because you've shown that you're slightly wanting to be. step ahead of events because you're identifying what around the corner won't change. So yeah, leading is about helping people know what they need to see because you're trying to get them rally to a better future as a leader. That's your job. And the problem with the future, of course, it's unknown. So yeah, I couldn't agree more. The research would back Dave up 100%. The lack of clarity is lack of kindness, but it's also lack of leadership.

Yeah. And just recently, Dave got on stage and told our team, hey, I don't have all the answers. Leading through COVID, we were all figuring it out. I'm still figuring it out. And I felt like that let the team kind of just release and go, oh, okay. I actually trust Dave Moore now because I felt that vulnerability and that honesty. And I trust that he's going to lead us every day. He's going to show up.

He's going to keep showing up. And he's going to do the right next thing. So I love that you're talking about this idea of living through change. And it's kind of one of your four principles when it comes to resilience is this idea of living through change. And no one likes change like you're talking about. It's a constant we have to deal with as a business. And like you're saying, it's not that they're scared of change. They're scared of the unknown. So do you have a time where, you know, your team or a leader that you've worked with had to kind of navigate that change with the team? Because that seems to be one of the biggest

issues that a business owner might struggle with is communicating that change and dealing with all the feelings of real people who have strong opinions. Well, yeah, but it's funny. It's a juxtaposition between leading and managing. If you think about the senior leaders and what they have to do versus the team leaders and what they have to do, if you think about Dave, Dave's got to stand up in front of you all and say, look, I don't have all the answers, but I tell you what I do now. He better finish by saying, here's what I do know. I do know what we're trying to do isn't going to change. I do know who we're trying to serve isn't going to change. So he's got to bring that to life for you all so that you can still keep some sort of direction together. What team leaders have got to do in the face of

change. And we sort of miss this as a principle, but as a principle for team leaders, frequency trumps everything. Frequency. Frequency trumps intensity. Frequency trumps quality. So if you want to help people navigate through change, the best way to do it is ensure that every team leader meets one-on-one, could be over the phone, could be through text, could be in person. But one-on-one, 15 minutes every week one-on-one, in which they ask just a couple of questions. What are your priorities in the coming week and how can I help? What are your priorities in the coming week? How can I help?

If your team leaders are doing that every single week, it will give every single person the opportunity to raise anything that they're thinking about for next week. What's important? What's not? Is it changing? Am I worried about it? Do I feel comfortable moving forward within this coming week? Or am I struggling?

What am I struggling with? All those things happen in the course of a particular. employee's life every week, every week there's a little something. And I don't mean that we should be checking up on people. I mean that the best managers and team leaders realize that frequent one-on-one, slightly future-focused check-ins are the best way to help anyone manage through change. Because the frequency, and you don't have to have some sort of brilliant Mike Cheshowski coaching moment every one-on-one. The point isn't to imagine that you've got to be the perfect high-quality coach every time because that's crazy. The point for,

frankly, is to be a release valve for every employee for 15 minutes, one-on-one, 15 minutes every week, talking about near-term future. You think about that question. Question number five, actually, is what it is for team leaders. The question, my team leader tells me what I need to know before I need to know it. And as a team leader, you might be thinking, well, how the heck do I do that? I don't even know what you need to know. Before you need to know it, what does that even mean? Well, what it really means is you are meeting with each person frequently enough so that they get sense that you are slightly out ahead of them. Why? Because you keep asking them every week, what are your priorities of the coming week? How can I help? Just imagine if you just did that.

If you're running a business and you've got two or three teams, the single most powerful ritual that you could tell your team leaders to put in place right now, not just during the pandemic, but forevermore is a one-on-one touch base for 15 minutes about the future. It sounds so simple, George. But because we don't do it, things build up. And they build up and people's anxiety and people's frustration. And it builds up and then they wait for the once or twice a year kind of individual development plan conversation in which no one wants to do it at this point because all the frustration in the employee side is built up. All of the sort of frustration on the manager's side is built up. And so no wonder those kind of once or twice or three times a year

career conversations are so fraught. It's so much baggage in them. So best solution to manage through change frequent one-on-one touch basis about near-term future. Gosh, sounds so simple, but if you do it, it makes a massive difference. Yeah, that's so huge. And what it does is it avoids people going, well, I don't know if I can trust them. Now I'm wondering what's really going on because they're not asking me, they're not telling me. So to create that open flow of communication weekly keeps creating that trust and that bond. Absolutely. And by the way, speaking of, well, let me go back to one second. That little check-in, what it really is doing, it's creating an intelligence system in the team. Not a planning system, an intelligence system. So you're constantly bringing intelligence in from the

outside world. Change is what's happening in the outside world. So if a manager is checking in with each person every week, that person, that employee is telling you about their real world all the time. My priorities are this. This is what I'm focused on in the coming week. And so the team leader, every week is getting real world intelligence from the real world. Gosh, if you have a company with many teams and you're constantly bringing intelligence in through these check-ins, that's the way in which the company builds tensile strength and ensures that you don't get out of sync or at a step with the real world. By the way, last point on trust, George, is we ask people, do you strongly trust your senior leaders? Do you completely trust your team leader? We also added, do you

completely trust your colleagues. And if you strongly agree to all three of those, you're 42 times more likely to be highly resilient. Wow. So I probably should have started with this, but you're absolutely right. The trust is you can't build resilience without trust. If somebody's always looking over their shoulder, waiting for the knife to be plunged into their back, there is no resilience. When your whole life is spent being vigilant so you don't get nailed, you are always this close to cracking. It's like panic attacks and stress are a function of your brain just giving out to the constant vigilance that it's under. So the opposite of that, of course, is deep abiding trust in senior leaders, team leaders, and your colleagues.

So as an entree leader, everything you can do to build trust in the workplace, even if it means, as Dave did, confessing. that you don't have all the answers. If that increases the overall level of trust in the company, do it. Do it. Because trust and resilience are so intricately linked. So we cover these first two here, living through change and trust and leadership and the importance of those.

I want to move into this last section because it's so powerful. You talk about feeling loved at work. And a lot of business leaders are going, oh my gosh, Marcus, I'm not their mom. I hired them to do a job. I pay them to do the job. That's all there should be here. I shouldn't need to kind of baby them.

You want to make my team feel loved? How do you actually do that in a way that doesn't feel like overly personal? So there's two answers to that question. First of all, a brief, like, comment on love. I know we all think that love is soft and work is hard, you know. Love is ineffable and work is really defined. There's no place in work for love. And yet, if you're not.

if you really push on love, people who feel loved at work, people who feel safe at work, but also people who love their work, or find love in their work, they're just better. There's no excellence without love, is there? You think of anyone who's doing anything at excellence, and you imagine there's no love in there at all? No, there's love always alongside excellence. There's no collaboration without love. There's no precision without love.

There's no creativity without love. there's no resilience without love. Love is the most powerful human emotion. And so for us to have excellence and resilience at work and to try to do that with absolutely no conversation or no curiosity about love, that doesn't work because we're humans. And love for humans is like, to quote that song, love is like oxygen, right? I mean, it's what we need. So two ways to bring love into the workplace. The first of course is that when you say that a team leader loves somebody, you're really saying they see them. I see you. You can't love what you can't see. And so the thing that most people want from you as their

leader is see me and really see me for the best of me. That doesn't mean you don't correct me if I do something wrong or if I get a fact wrong. Correct me. But in terms of what you see in me, I want you to see me for my best. I want you to be able to see the particular strengths that I might bring. I want you to see what's unique about me. I mean, let's face it, that's what a team is for. A team is not for a bunch of homogenous robots to do something together. You bring a team together because you've got these different people

who will bring something different to the team, and the team does something together that each individual couldn't do alone. That's why we made up teams 50,000 years ago. Teams are the place. in which you make use of each person's individual qualities. Well, that means that for you as a leader, you've got to start by seeing the individual qualities. So love and seeing are really tightly linked.

So that's really what it means for you. See the person. See the person for what they do best. It's the most loving thing you can do. By the way, with your kids, it's the most loving thing you can do. We spend so much time with our kids, trying to make sure that they jump through the right educational hoops and pass the right grades and so on,

that often we lose sight of who our kid actually is. Anyway, most loving thing you can do is to see a human food who they really are. The second thing, though, is interesting. Look at that question, the third question. In the last week, I have felt excited to work every day. What this suggests is that for people to feel resilient, they've got to find love in what they do. That doesn't mean they have to love all that they do.

There is actually banishingly little few people who say they love all that they do. that's kind of an idealistic pipe dream. But if you study super highly successful people, you do find that they say they find something that they love to do each and every day. Not all day every day, but each and every day. And in fact, the Mayo Clinic can put a number on that. Like, what percentage of my day should I spend doing something that I love?

Well, they were studying doctors and nurses because even pre-pandemic, there was a crisis in burnout and resiliency for doctors and nurses. so they studied doctors and nurses, and particularly the ones who didn't burn up or burn out. I mean, emergency room nurses have PTSD levels twice as high as veterans that return from war zones. So you've got like, that's a problem.

But some nurses and doctors have strong and high levels of resilience and no burn out, so they studied them. And it turns out that if you say that you have 20% of your day is activities that you love to do, just 20%, you are far less likely to burn out. And if you go down 19, 18, 17, 17%, 16%, 15%, with each percentage point reduction in how much time you spend doing something that you love at work, there is a commensurate one percentage point increase in burnout risk. It's a perfect linear relationship.

So 20% George is like a threshold of doing what you love. But interestingly, above 20%, let's say you have 30% doing what you love, 50% doing what you love. it doesn't seem to drive more resilience. It's like 20% is a threshold. You get further above that, fine, but it doesn't seem to bump up your resilience. It's like a little love at work goes a long way. So what this really says for you or for the people you lead is help them or help yourself figure out every day. What are the particular activities that you love to do today? Because it won't be every activity and you don't need it to be every activity. but you can't have it be below 20% because then you start getting into really bad territory.

You've got to get every day, have some sort of intentional attention on what are the particular activities that I look forward to today or what are the activities where when I do them, time seems to fly by. Like there are some activities for every one of us that feel like that.

That's love. Okay, then I'm sorry. The world doesn't know what you love and you can't expect your manager necessarily to know what you love. So you've got to figure out. I call these red threads. Everybody's job is made up of many different threads. Some are black, some are brown, some are gray, blah, blah, blah, but some are red. These are the activities that you really look forward to and that you vanish into when you do them. The Mayo Clinic research says, you don't need a red quilt in order to

be resilient and productive. You don't need an entirely red blanket. You can just have 20% red threads. But in order to do that, you better wake up every day and say to yourself every day, like a mantra, what are the red threads I can weave today? You know, if that feels like a strange thing to be saying to yourself, because no one's ever told you to do that, all right, then no one's ever told you to do that. But the truth is, the most successful people and the most resilient people do that really religiously. Marcus, that is a mic drop moment right there. I love these concepts. We've got living through change, trust in leadership, feeling loved at work, and finding love in work, which all lead to this pinnacle point of resilience. So this idea of red threads is so powerful.

And I want you to unpack how the leaders listening out there can make sure that they have these red threads, their team have these red threads in all of their work. How do you go about finding that? Well, the first place is put your own oxygen mask on first. you can't lead people effectively if you are this close to breaking point. You can only lead people effectively if you know how you weave threads in your work. Everyone is so uniquely different. Every single entrepreneur is different. In all my work on studying the traits of highly successful entrepreneurs,

the really annoying thing, frankly, George, is that you take the best entrepreneurs and you line them up and you interview them and you interview them and you interview them and you find out, they don't share that many traits. Entrepreneurs are really different. And there's no sort of standard set of talents that a particular entrepreneur's got to have. Every one of them is unique. But I tell you what they all do have, same with all leaders.

They do know which bit of themselves they love enough to lead others. It's like we all have bits of us that we don't like very much. We all have bits of ourselves that we're not that proud of, actually. We'll have bits of ourselves that we don't want to shine a bright light on. But we also have bits of us, activities or moments or situations or our responses to those people and how we did that and thing and that thing, that we go, I loved myself while that was happening. I was my most me when that was going on.

That's what a red thread is. So to begin with, it starts with you as a leader. You better take your red thread seriously. The simplest way to do this, by the way, and there's lots of ways to do it, but one of the simplest is just take a blank pad around with you for a week and draw a line to down the middle of the pad and then put loved it at the top of one column and loathed it at the top of the other column and then take it around with you for a week. And anytime you feel one of the signs of love, like before you're doing something, you sort of instinctively look forward

to it. Or while you're doing it, time seems to fly by and you feel like you've been doing it for five minutes, but you look up, it's been half an hour. Or when you're done with it, you don't feel drained. You actually feel invigorated. Like you feel like you've taken a leap of learning or performance. Like, ooh, that was, scribble it down in the Loved It column. And then the inverse, scribble down the loathes. You know, if before you're doing something, you keep trying to procrastinate it and shove it off to the new guy, because it'll be developmental or something, right? Or when you're doing it, you've been doing it for half an hour, but for you, it's just dragging on and on and on, and it feels like five hours, scribble it down in the loathed. Now, there's going to be a bunch of kind of gray and

white and sort of brown threads in the middle, but if you can, use the regular activities of your life, your work, to try to figure out what your red threads are. The activities in the Lovedick column are the starting point for you inquiring about what your red threads are. And that doesn't mean that you should have a job where every single thing is a red thread. You don't need that. As I mentioned, the Mayo Clinic data says you don't need that, but you can't have nothing in that Lovedic column. I'm sorry, if you've got nothing in that Lovedick column for two weeks in a row, you won't be able to lead well, and people will sniff you out. So the simplest way to do it would be to do a Love It Loat Activity, George, doesn't cost anything. No one's ever done it for you,

and no one can do it for you. But if you do it yourself, you'll sit there looking at that Loved It column, and you'll basically say to yourself, how can I make sure that every week has some of this stuff in it? And then frankly, simplest way to help your people do this. First of all, you've got to set it up, right? But you have to say, look, I want your work here to be a place in which you feel like you're at your best. And part of being at your best isn't just rah-rah. It's going, what are the particular activities that you love to do? I want you to find some love in what you do.

I do. And come back to me in a week. and we'll just talk about what you put on the loved it list. And you don't have to have a job with everything in it. That's not the point. The point is, do you want to share with me some of the things every week that you get a kick out of? That's not nothing. In fact, it's a huge ingredient to high performance and high resilience.

That's huge, especially with what we're seeing in the job market right now. A lot of people discontent in their work, a lot of people quitting. And this is huge for leaders to go, hey, I'm actually. control. All of the questions you've laid out for us, all of the concepts, put the power back into the leader's hands to go, these are things I can do. I don't have to be born with this. These are practices. These are things I can instill into my business to encourage my team, to create that resilience, to grow my business. It's fantastic. Marcus, it's always a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much for taking the time, and we hope to see you at an entree

leadership event real soon. Thanks, George. Huge thanks to Marcus for taking the time and to his team for that research on the idea of resilience. So are you convinced yet? Are you convinced that you need to build a resilient team to succeed? Great. I'm going to assume the answer was yes. So you might be asking yourself, how do I do that? How do I build a resilient team? We'll have a conversation about that and how to build trust in leadership right after this. Our second conversation is with Daniel Ramsey, our executive vice president of Entree leadership. We talk about how to make your team feel seen and how to build trust that leads to resilience. Daniel, it's good to have you back on the podcast.

Thanks, George. Good to be here. So you're the executive vice president of all things, Entree leadership. And you've seen a lot of roles in your years here at Ramsey, a lot of different leadership roles, and there's been a lot of resilience in that process. What is the most recent example you can think of when it came to you having to be resilient in the face of change? Yeah, so my wife and I actually just brought home our first child. So his name's Eli, and that's been a ton of change, and it's been so much fun.

Obviously, it's so different than what you expect, right? Like, you try to prepare mentally, and everyone says there's no point of doing that, but you do it anyway. And as you prepare mentally, you expect, I think, the highs to be higher and the lows to be lower. And so that's definitely been very different for me. But here at work, I mean, gosh, I feel like God has tended to bring a lot of change all at once in various seasons for me. And so there was a time when a couple years ago, me and Allison were on our honeymoon. And as I was gone, my leader who I used to report to resigned. And then I had a new leader that took over the area and loved him.

He was a great friend. So I was really excited about that change. But with that change, I took on a new department that came under my leadership. And so my team size doubled. So I got home from this trip from this honeymoon. I had a new wife, a new leader, and a new team completely I was leading. And so that was a while back. And then more recently, joining the Entry Leadership team was a big change as well.

And so that was incredibly fun, incredibly exciting, and really thankful for the opportunity. But with that came a lot of things I wasn't expecting, things I wasn't ready for. And so I had to be resilient as I made my way through those different changes. I love that. And, you know, talking to Marcus Buckingham, we talked a lot about this idea of how adversity creates resilience. You really can't be a super resilient person if you haven't had to face adversity. and change. So I think there's a beautiful relationship there when you really look into it. So one of those steps that you've taken that have led you to be resilient. Have some of them been by accident and some of

them intentional? Gosh, about 18 months ago, honestly, I started meeting with an executive coach. I have really great mentorship and leadership here at Ramsey and have for a lot of my life. I've been very blessed in that way. But I started meeting with an executive coach outside of here just to gain additional perspective and try to grow further. And I remember the first session I had with, with him. We spent like an hour of me talking about all the problems I had and all the situations I was dealing with at work and outside of work. And it was basically just me venting and complaining. And he stayed quiet and he asked some good questions. But at the end of it, I remember him saying, you're ready to make a change. And I said, sure, sure. What is that? And he said, well, the first thing

we're going to work on is increasing your pain tolerance. Wow. So that was kind of a funny moment. I mean, I stepped back and look at that. I'm like, oh, he was telling me I was being a wimp and to suck it up. but he was challenging me to step up to a new level. He was asking me to transform to be a stronger version of myself. And so two of the big things he pointed to, and we can break these down maybe on another podcast, but two of the things he really pointed out that help you gain pain tolerance or resilience,

in this case for this episode, is first experience. And when you have life experiences, when you go through various hardships, the things that used to hurt you don't hurt as much. And so, for example, just recently we had a key person, our team, resigned, and they left. And that was hard. We were close with them.

I had a great friendship with them. And so that was hard for them to leave. And yet, you know, it wasn't the end of the world. I've had crazier situations happen. I've had people leave where it was much harder for various reasons, whether they left on not great terms or they were in various key roles. And so, yeah, situations can still be hard. but experience allows it to not hurt as much because you can look back and see how you got through it and how it wasn't the end of the world as much as you thought.

The second thing I'd say is in addition to experience comes perspective. And so taking time to really step back and look at the big picture and gain perspective on a situation is huge. In the moment, it's easy to let emotions flood the situation. It's easy to let your mind run in so many different directions, but our emotions and our thoughts aren't always the truth. And so if we can take a step back from a situation and look at it objectively, look at it as if like you're looking down on a situation. So say you're in the middle of a heated argument or you're in the middle of a hard sell

or something that you're trying to convince your team of something or a client, if you can take yourself out of it for a moment and really objective, look at the situation and see what's working or what's not working, you can be way more prepared to actually deal with it in the moment versus getting swept up by the emotion or, you know, the thought patterns going through your head. Yeah. Telling the truth to yourself and having that experience and perspective in relationship there. That's huge. And that brings me to my next question. It's funny you say that is what advice would you give to that leader who maybe doesn't have the experience of a lot of change? I don't know that you can become resilient without having to be resilient.

And there seems to be a symbiotic relationship there. So what advice would you want them to know about the journey ahead? If maybe they're a new leader and they're going, hey, I haven't had to deal with a lot of reorgs or resignations or a pandemic or all these different things. Yeah, I'll use a running metaphor here. You know, if you're going on a long run and you're in pain because, you know, your muscles are cramping or it's really hot out that day or whatever, you have a tendency to look down and just to grind the way through that workout. But if you can take time to stop, not stop running, but just lift up your eyes, lift your gaze, and look around you, you actually start to forget about your pain. You actually become more aware of the situation. And so my advice to another leader would be in the middle of adversity, in the middle of change, in the middle of hardship, don't just try to grind through it. Actually take a moment to stop and to be aware of your surroundings and to look around because you're going to see both the good things about the situation and you're going to see other things that you may have missed. that can help you better get through the situation. If you're just trying to get through life,

you're going to miss a huge opportunity to transform. And so transformation is all about being willing to change yourself and not just your behaviors. And so, yeah, I guess I'd say slow down enough to look around and to actually grow and be transformed by the hardship instead of just getting through the hardship. And I talked to Marcus about this being like a muscle that you build because we talked about not every person is built resilient.

You know, it's something that you can practice, and it's something that you can flex that muscle and grow that through experience and through that perspective like you're talking about. And so we talked about living through change, and the next kind of section was this idea of trust in leadership, creating resilience. And this is something I think you've done really well over the years, fostering the sense of trust on your teams during seasons of change, especially.

How have you done that with, you know, even the Entree leadership team? Yeah, so Marcus talks about this of really making your team feel seen or feel known. And that really hits a nerve. I mean, I think as humans, one of our deepest, deepest needs is to be known. And not just to be known, but to be love for who we are. And so growing up, we create all of these different mechanisms and tactics to defend ourselves from being known and from protecting ourselves. And so as a leader, if you can know someone, showed them that you see them, showed them that you notice them and not judge them for it. So, for example, just taking a moment to look somebody in the eyes and to ask them questions and to be with them presently.

I had a leader, Brian Williams, who's, man, he was incredible for me as a leader, and he really was great at showing this. often are one-on-ones when I was talking about something or, you know, we were working through a problem together. He did such a good job at not just telling me what to do, but listening to me, making me feel known, hearing me out, and then responding. So, you know, when you talk to people, sometimes you can see that when you're actually talking to them, they're not really listening. They're actually thinking about the next thing they want to say, which you might be doing right now in this podcast. No, no, I wasn't. In that moment, I thought, I'm not doing that. I'm doing really good. But you notice, like, you can pick up on body language when people aren't actually really listening. So when you genuinely stop to listen to others and to watch them and to notice them, it makes a huge impact.

Yeah, that's a skill that I think a lot of leaders that running and gunning and the meetings can be transactional and what fires we have to put out. And it's easy to forget to just kind of take that pause and go, Daniel, how are you doing? Like, no, seriously, how are you doing as a person? Not what fires do we need to put out on the work side, but really showing that you care about them. and that they're a valuable person on the team, not because of the results and their output because of who they are. So I love that idea, and I think, you know,

we talk about all the time on the podcast how we move at the speed of trust. And that's a huge part of resilience. Things are going to move a lot slower. There's going to be a lot less clarity. There's going to be more ambiguity. The team's going to have a little more frustration without that level of trust in the leadership.

That, hey, I trust that you know what you're doing. And we talked about in the Marcus interview that Dave went on stage and said, hey, I didn't have all the answers. I don't have all the answers still, but we're trying to get up and do the right thing every day with the right people on our leadership team. And that made us all go, oh my gosh, that level of vulnerability just made me trust him more, not less. And so I love this idea of being vulnerable, being authentic, being genuine to show your team members that you are seen. The next section that we covered was this idea of feeling loved at work. And we talked about how,

you know, we're not your mom. We hired you to do a job, yes, but there is a level. of taking care of each other and having this kind of family mentality. And we do that well here, Ramsey. There's so many examples. I'm sure there's one that sticks out in your mind of a way that you go, this is how we make our team members feel loved at work. What is that for you? Yeah, one of the first things that come to mind is the story I told about Brian, my leader,

and just taking time with me and our one-on-ones to really, like, know me and dig into a situation. Another thing I think that leaders here at Ramsey do a good job is availability of just being available and making it known to their teams that they're there for them. Early in my career, I remember someone making the comment to me that I walked really fast everywhere I went. And I was like, well, yeah, I got places to be. I got things to do. Like, I got to move.

And as I sat back and thought about that later, it hit me that, oh, the vibe that that gives off is that I'm not actually available to them. I'm not free. I'm so busy that they don't have a connection to me or they don't have availability with me. And so, you know, what did I try to do about that? Well, I tried to create an environment where even though I may be very busy, I try to create the illusion that I might be available or that I am free.

And I think just creating the vibe that I may am approachable or that leader, you as a leader are approachable, that it can create a lot of trust there. So I see leaders across Ramsey do this everywhere, and that's where I've picked up a lot of those skills of learning how to really make myself available. Yeah, and it reminds me, you know, Jeremy Breeland, who leads our personalities team, he has open office hours every Friday to where he's just available. And just to me, that creates a level of trust. It creates this level of, oh, I can go talk to Jeremy if there's a problem. He's not this invisible, you know, overlord that I can't get in touch with.

And so being the accessible leader will create that trust, will show that you care about them as a team member. So I love those examples. And this really goes into, you know, speaking about love, finding love is. in work. And obviously, you know, we've had Ken Coleman on the podcast to talk about this idea of, like, where does your purpose and your talents and your mission all come together to create this meaningful, deep work. And Marcus talks about this idea of red threads, which I love. And we talk about this a lot. And I know you love your job. What are those red threads for you that you go, man, this is where I find love and work. If I could do this stuff all day long, I would do it.

man um there are so many aspects that i love about what i get to do i think i'm such like an optimist that i block out some of the things that i don't enjoy and i i remember more of the the highs than the lows of the day or most of the highs i guess some of the things that pop up to me are just interactions i get to have with people i love coaching people i love working with leaders i love i love big picture strategy talking through directional things creating clarity around things so much of leadership is just the simple things, the fundamentals of, you know, having a vision, creating clarity, being dedicated to those things, saying no to other things. I really enjoy that sort of stuff of being able to, when an idea pops up, it is so much fun to brainstorm around that

idea. But I always have to ask, hey, how does this fit into the direction we're trying to go? Or does this distract from our time or resources from the direction we're trying to go? As one example. I used to be much more involved in the, the marketing side of things. And I used to be much more involved in helping to write the ad copy for things. And now that's one thing I've loved to hand off because I do not enjoy writing ad copy. I don't enjoy being very detailed with things like that. So those are things that I've loved to be able to delegate as our team has grown. And I don't have to be involved in those things. So it gives me more time to work on strategy and direction and coaching of people.

Yeah. That reminds me, you know, in my five or six, roles I've had here, you know, and I was doing email marketing, I loved email marketing. And then I stepped away from it, and I went, man, I didn't love that as much as I thought I did. But it's incredible how once you step away from it, you go, oh, I don't miss that as much as I thought, even though you didn't mind doing it. And you went, oh, this is a good time. And I think finding those things, you know, Marcus talked about having the notepad and just walking around going, I like this, or I love it, or I loat this. And then going, what are some ways that I could offload the stuff that I loathe? Because someone out there loves it. Someone loves the numbers. Someone loves the administration.

Someone loves the sales. Someone loves the budgeting and HR aspects. So that's huge, especially for the small business owner who may be the kind of the chief everything officer. They may not have all of this leadership team in place to offload that to. What are some ways that the small business owner listening can go, man, there's a lot of things I don't like. What are the steps? Is it delegation? Is it making the right hires? Is it going, I'm just going to stop doing that? Well, I think it's a combination of all those things. Yeah. I mean, if you cold turkey stop something, somebody has to pick it up. And so you may see someone, rise to the occasion who actually loves that or enjoys it or it might be a red thread. I know for you and I both, a lot of times we found red threads and things when we had the opportunity to step up into something that we didn't realize that we enjoyed. There's a lot of things I love now that I had no idea that I liked. I mean, think back to like when we were in high school and everyone asked what you're going to do for the rest of your life. I mean, we didn't know until we stepped up into new opportunities. And so I think one great way that you can help your team find their red threads

is by giving them opportunities to step up. Obviously, you can ask them, hey, what do you enjoy? What are the things you like doing? And then give them opportunities that may suit that and see if it fits. If it doesn't, then give them new opportunities. But you're never going to really elevate yourself

unless you can hand off things that may be better done by someone else, which is oftentimes hard to imagine when you're the one that's always done it. Yeah, it's hard to offload that and trust that it's going to get done the way you want it done. And we've talked recently on podcast, episodes about finding the right seat on the bus. And this kind of alludes that of finding love and work.

They may be in the right spot. They're at the right company. I love Ramsey, but I may not be doing the right thing here. And so for the leader to have that awareness to go 30,000 feet up and go, oh, I see opportunity. When they do that thing, I see them light up. And when they're that meeting and they're starting to talk about the marketing ad copy, man, they just, they get fired up about that. I want to give them opportunity in that area to shine. And it's amazing how that trickles up to the last three things we talked about of creating that trust, making them feel loved at work, making them resilient. Because when you love something, you don't care. You could fight through all the change in the world because you just want to get up every day and go do that thing. Yeah. That's

absolutely incredible. That was impressive. You just took us full circle. I just did it. It was incredible. Well, Daniel, I just love this conversation. I love how you've been leading the Entrail leadership team through a lot of change and how you've continued to do that in your different roles and your spirit that you bring to this of just caring first and making that the forefront. Before we talk about work, just caring about the team and showing them that you're the type of leader who's there for them. So I love that.

I appreciate you being on the podcast, and thanks for what you're doing at Entree Leadership. Thank you, George. Always fun to sit down with Daniel Ramsey, a lot of gold in that conversation. And as Mark has talked about, there are 10 components of workplace resilience. And his team at the ADP Research Institute

published their workplace resilience study, We've included the link in the show notes to the executive summary of that study. It's like the Spark Notes. And you and your team can self-evaluate your resilience by reading through those 10 workplace resilience items that are on page four of that PDF. So if you want to download that executive summary, just click the link in the show notes. Hope you enjoyed today's episode of the show. If you did, please leave us a review, subscribe so you don't miss the next one. And if you're a small business owner with two to 200 team members, we want to hear what you think of the show.

what you like, what you don't like, and what we could do better. Give us your feedback by clicking the link in the show notes to schedule a call with Tim, our producer. If you want to keep up with us on social media, you can follow us at Entree Leadership. This episode was produced by Tim Hull, edited by Jacob Harrison and Bob Orquez, and mixed and mastered by Will Rutter. I'm your host, George Camel, and on behalf of the entire Entree Leadership team, thanks for listening. Until next time, keep learning and keep leading.