EntreLeadership - How Trust Determines the Speed of Your Success with Daniel Ramsey and Simon Sinek

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

Join us as our host, George Kamel, talks with Executive Vice President of EntreLeadership Daniel Ramsey and Director of Ramsey Events Joe Leavitt. They start this episode with a leadership roundtable segment where they discuss why food and fun are foundational to building trust on your team. Later, George chats with Simon Sinek, a brilliant thought leader and bestselling author. He shares how high-performing teams achieve a high level of trust and how you can get that level of trust on your team. You’ll learn: •      The easiest way to build trust on your team •      The truth about toxic leadership in America •      Why Simon Sinek thinks you should have a spy on your team •      The major disadvantage to working remote Sign up for The EntreLeadership Podcast Takeaways—a weekly email where you’ll get three tangible takeaways and a tactical action step related to each episode: https://bit.ly/podcast-takeaways Support our sponsors: •      Hite Digital: https://bit.ly/HiteDigital •      NetSuite: https://bit.ly/NetSuiteEntre •      Trainual: https://bit.ly/TrainualEntre •      BELAY: https://bit.ly/351P9AE Links mentioned in this episode: •      The EntreLeadership Podcast: https://bit.ly/TheEntreLeadershipPodcast •      Questions for Humans Conversation Cards: Workplace: https://bit.ly/3MOIsnz •      Give us your feedback by leaving a voicemail at 844.944.1070 or emailing [e-mail] •      Simon Sinek’s website: https://bit.ly/3CT7OfB •      How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish: https://amzn.to/3TonPRx •      Sign up for your 30-day free trial of EntreLeadership Elite: https://bit.ly/3QQ0E1l Learn more about EntreLeadership Events: •      EntreLeadership Master Series: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipMasterSeries •      EntreLeadership Summit: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipSummit   Learn more about EntreLeadership Coaching: •      Elite: https://bit.ly/3tI2fN8 •      Advisory Groups: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipAdvisoryGroups •      Executive Coaching: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipExecutiveCoaching •      Workshops: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipWorkshops Listen to all the Ramsey Network podcasts anytime, anywhere in our app. Download the Ramsey Network app: https://apple.co/3eN8jNq Learn more about your ad choices. https://www.megaphone.fm/adchoices Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On today's episode, we've got a leadership roundtable talking about a shockingly easy way to build a team that trusts each other. Spoiler alert, it involves food. Then, how high-performing teams achieve a high level of trust. Welcome to the Entree Leadership podcast from the Ramsey Network, where we help you learn the proven principles for winning as a business leader. I'm your host, George Camel, and each week here on the podcast, I sit down with some of the best leadership minds out there to help you grow yourself, your team, and your profits. Before we get started, I wanted to say a quick thanks to all of you who have sent us your feedback on these new segments we've been trying. Keep them coming with your voicemails and emails. One of those segments is a leadership roundtable.

We've got one this episode where I'll be joined by Daniel Ramsey, EVP of Entree Leadership, and Joe Levitt, director of Ramsey events. We're going to talk about why food and fun are foundational to building trust on your team. So grab a snack and enjoy this conversation. Daniel, Joe, thanks for being here. Thanks for inviting me. Great to be here. Did we invite you? Who invited you?

Showed up on my calendar, so I thought I'd show up, and then you guys were all here. I thought it was kind of cool. Well, when we think about food and fun, we think about Joe Levitt. Oh, that's very sweet. And then when we think about great leadership, we think of Daniel Ramsey. That's why he's here. I kid. But seriously, most leaders think that trust falls are the way to build trust in our team.

We decided early on to go with a different strategy, and that is to eat a lot together. What is the power on that? Where did that come from? For me, it sounds super cliche, but there's, something about breaking bread together. There's just something about sitting across from someone having that shared experience, just discovering what somebody likes in food, the conversations that happen. Your guard is just down when you do that. Now, if you just do it like once a year, like then I think you're, you create some awkwardness because it's like, hey, it's our annual time.

I can't screw up. But just if it's these kind of casual interactions, a quick lunch, those kind of things, that's where you can start. And it just becomes real easy. And that's where I think begins to be available to everybody. Definitely, definitely. You know, we made the decision when we moved into this office building, I don't know, a few years back, that we weren't going to allow our team members to eat lunch at their desk. And at our old building, we kind of was a free-for-all. People did whatever they wanted.

A lot of people, you know, went out, or we didn't really have great space to actually eat lunch together. And this building, we actually have the opportunity to do that. And so one thing I love, like, at first I complained about that. Because I occasionally wanted to crank through some emails while I, you know, much down on my lunch. And now I really value going downstairs and sitting in our lunchroom and just hanging out with the team. I think there's something so valuable in just being present and being seen and being around your team. And honestly, we try not to talk about work when we're down there.

I mean, sometimes you do. It obviously comes up. But we just try to, like, catch up on, hey, George, what's happening in your life? What are you excited about? What's hard? You know, whatever. and we talk about, you know, whatever fun stuff is going on in our lives. There's Bachelorette tables, people that just talk about the Bachelors.

That's true. There's gaming tables. There is gaming tables. And, like, that's what's cool about it is that because we've said you're not eating at your desk, all the gamers, they would just sit at their desk and play games by themselves. But now there's a safe place for them. It's like high school except I'm not getting bullied, so it's great, really enjoying that. But it is fun to just plop down, you know, Dave will just walk up and plop down at a random table and freak everyone out. And they're like, oh gosh, Dave's here.

But he's just shooting the breeze having a good time. People are used to it by now, I think. Most of the time. What's your favorite thing in the cafe, Daniel? What's your go-to? Honestly, I just get a sandwich. Just a sandwich. Pretty boring.

Yeah, it's hard to be Taco Tuesday. Oh, yeah. Taco Tuesday is like, it's a thing. It's really good. I like it. So part of eating together, we do that in our cafeteria, but we also have a lot of team events where we'll get food catered in, we'll do food trucks.

What is your favorite team event that involves food. Man, everything we do involves food. Like if it's, if it's, uh, like one of our big events, like Battle of the B, Spelling B, those all involve food at some level. So I mean, I think if we're talking about those favorite events, I mean, for me, spelling B is great. It's super fun. And I think we've talked about this, even on this podcast here in the past. Like, it's something so easy that teams can implement and do. It's not big production, like Battle the Bands. But yeah, food's a part of it. Food's a part of everything we do. And generally spelling B, we do like Chick-fil-A catered. Yeah, something simple like that.

Nothing fancy. Not a four-course meal. Right. For our team, it doesn't have to be fancy. It doesn't have to be three courses. It's Chick-fil-A. It's a food truck. It's a dessert truck.

It's a snow cone truck. Sometimes we even do things where it's just, hey, bring your own lunch. You know, we just ask teamers, hey, we're going to do this thing. We're just going to self-organize it and hang out. Now, bigger company events will typically buy their stuff. But, you know, if you're a small business owner out there, it doesn't have to be expensive. It's, hey, let's all go meet up in the park and bring our own lunches. You know, you don't have to have a space. You can find a space or,

you know, be creative with it. You don't need to drop 10 grand a month just to build trust through food. Right. Back in the day, I had this reputation on our team, on the live events team, for every time our VP went out of town, I would buy ice cream. So they were kind of happy when he left and made me look really good. So it's a leadership lesson as well as, and it was just fun. How much of that cost to get the ice cream? Oh, it's like 30 bucks and you're 20 people. Like, It's not much. Or if we splurged, if I really went big, hey, we're going to happy hour at Sonic, and we're doing half-priced drinks with cherry limeades for everybody, making it rain.

It was great. That's amazing. So you mentioned small business owners. You know, we're at over 1,000 people. It looks different at scale. I mean, the amount of money we spent on food per year now versus 20 years ago is very different. So how do you do this with a team of, let's say, two to five people or 10 people? Yeah, one of the things we do, I mentioned earlier, people asking people to bring lunch or, hey,

we're all going to, you know, the other day, we actually gathered together as a leadership team to watch some of the videos from Summit. And so we all were like, hey, just bring your own lunch. We're going to meet at this time. Another thing that we do is our leadership team has a quarterly offsite where we spend a whole day planning out what's coming in our business, working through big problems. That's something we teach in on your leadership for another time. But one thing we always do is the night before we get together and just go out to dinner together. And so I cover it. We go out to a local restaurant and just grab dinner. We'll may even get an appetizer or two, maybe a dessert.

Liven it up, special. But really, the point of that is just to spend quality time together and to look each other in the eyes and to laugh and to tell stories and to just have a deeper understanding of each other. And that really builds trust. And trust is the foundation of everything on a team. And so we like to do that right before our offsite because we know it's going to be a fun yet intense and sometimes frustrating day where we're going to be having help. conflict. And so I want to spend time, you know, set in the foundation of trust before we do something like that. Yeah. I heard a story about a company. They would do like, you know, pizza Tuesdays. And they were looking at, you know, cutting some things out of the budget. And that

was one of the things they cut. And people revolted. There is a weird power in taking away food from people. And it's a basic human need. But there is an amazing that happens when we gather together, we eat together, and we're not in a meeting. Because usually your interactions are emails and meetings or you're passing someone in the hallway. But when you're you're you make it a point to sit down together and not talk about work and just go, hey, Daniel, how's your son doing? How's your, hey, Joe, you love to grill. What do you grill lately that you absolutely love?

It changes the relationship for the better when you show that you care. So often, I think we believe that we have to have some highly produced lunch. Again, this can be really easy. It can be as simple as bring your own food, like Daniel said. It can be a chili cook-off. We have a lot of teams that do that. The other thing, I was just in an advisory group with some of the. senior leaders yesterday. This is a group that's been together for two years, some simple apps,

just hanging out. And then we did these questions for humans cards that we have, Office Edition. From Dr. John Deloney. Yeah, absolutely. It's great. And we learned so much from each other. Like, honestly, I think yesterday, our trust in that group was probably a solid seven, eight. And I think we went up a notch or two just based on an hour together, a few tortillas and guacamole. That's all you need. And those questions. And it was great. And it really comes down to connecting and not being so in the meeting. What are we doing? Take the notes. Accomplish, accomplish.

Instead, it's connecting on a human level. That's what this is all about. That's what builds trust. Well, I love the way both of you lead your teams, Joe, with the Live Events team, and Daniel with Entree Leadership, of course. You guys, I'm crushed it and honored to know you guys. Thanks for being on. Thank you.

Thanks, George. Hope you enjoyed that leadership roundtable, and we want to know what you think about it. Did you like it or not? Call and leave us a voicemail at 844-944. 14-40-1070. And if you'd rather email us, we've got that email address for you in the show notes. All right, coming up next, how high-performing teams achieve a high level of trust. It's coming up right after this.

All right, welcome back. Coming up, I'll be joined by one of my favorite thinkers in the world today. He is Simon Sinek, best-selling author. You've read his book, Start with Why. You've seen his TED Talk, which is one of the most viewed of all time. And above all, he is an optimist who continues to inspire folks through his podcast, a bit of optimism. Enjoy this conversation with our friend, Simon Sinek. Simon, thank you so much for being with us today. How are you?

I'm very well. Thanks. How are you? Doing great. Can you tease any new projects you've been working on lately? What have I been working on? Well, one of the big things that's happened over the past couple years, I found an organization called the Curve Initiative, which is a collection of some of the most forward-thinking modern police chiefs and sheriffs from across the country, Republican and Democrat, come together to evolve policing from the inside out. Wow. That's been an education, I'll tell you. It's been fascinating.

Well, you're always working on something new, exciting, inspiring, and wild, and we love to hear about it. Oh, thanks very much. And today we're talking about trust, which is seemingly a bigger and bigger issue as we see teams that are struggling, people leaving their jobs, leaving poor leadership, leaving toxic companies. And so it's more important than ever to talk about how high-performing teams achieve those high levels of trust. Agreed. Well, there's a lot of things we have to consider in some of it's historic. Our nation, over index, on rugged individualism. You know, over the past 20, 30, 40 years in business, you see sort of incentive structures are almost entirely, in our companies, almost every single incentive is based on an

individual performance. There's no such thing as team performance or group performance. We're literally not incentivized to help each other. We're incentivized to hoard information and keep it from each other. And so it really requires fantastic leadership to keep a team together. And that's the other thing that's been lagging, which is in, too many companies, we don't see leadership taught. Our companies generally do a pretty good job of teaching us the skills we need to do to do our jobs. And most companies do a pretty poor job

of teaching us the skills we need to do, to trust, to lead, to take care of each other. So I think there's a lot of opportunity here in almost every single company, of almost every single size in almost every single category. Yeah. Well, we say around here, business moves at the speed trust. And if your team lacks that trust, it can erode not only the success of your team, but your business itself. So how have you seen that play out with companies you've either watched or worked with? Well, I mean, yes, yes, and yes. I mean, it's kind of silly that we're having this conversation, isn't it? It's like everybody knows you can't have a relationship. You can't have a romantic relationship without trust. So why are we having a conversation that you can't

have a successful business without trust? It's human beings interacting with human beings. You know, it's, again, you can't have friends without trust. So I think it's hilarious that we're talking about this, it's a big idea. I will point out one very sort of what I find ironic realization, which is, you know, I stand on the stage, I write books, I talk about trusting teams, I talk about high performing teams, you know, I'll use various examples, including seal teams, which are considered some of the highest performing teams on the planet. And I talk about how they value trust over performance. If you consider, you know, once asked the head of training for the seals, you know, how do you choose who moves up through the ranks kind of thing?

He drew a graph on the vertical axis was performance and on the horizontal axis was trust. Clearly, nobody wants the low performer of low trust, right? And performance is defined by how good are you at your job. Trust is defined as what kind of person are you, right? Clearly, nobody wants the low performer of low trust. Clearly, everybody wants the high performer of high trust, clearly. What they learn is that the high performer of low trust is a toxic team member. and they would rather have a medium performer of high trust, sometimes even a low performer of high trust, it's a relative scale, over a high performer of low trust.

Wow. And if you think about it, if you put a high performer of low trust in a job and the company only rewards performance, then eventually that high performer of low trust, who's a toxic team member, becomes a toxic leader. And again, we have a million metrics to measure performance, but we have minimal to no metrics to measure performance. trust. And so we have a lot of toxic geniuses on our teams, these high performers of low trust, and very often leadership knows about it. And when somebody says, you know, that person is really doing a lot of damage to your culture and they go, I know, but their performance is so good, you know? They love the revenue. They love the revenue. So the accountability actually lies with the leader. They're willing to look past some of these very human indiscretions,

these things that destroy trust, selfishness, hoarding information, overbearingness, bullying, whatever it is because somebody's performance is good. And it'll always bite you in the ass because that high performer of low trust doesn't care about you. They care about themselves. And if they get a better job offer, if they have an opportunity, they'll bail ship in two minutes and you're left holding the bag. It's really easy to find these people. Just go to any team and ask them who the asshole is. And they'll all point to the same person.

They'll tell you. They'll all tell you. And that doesn't mean that they should be fired, by the way. This means that they should be coached. I believe someone should be asked to leave the team and join another company if they prove themselves to be uncoachable. Just because somebody is a high performer of low trust, they still may have blind spots. If we bring these things to them in a constructive way, they go, oh, my goodness, I had no idea. It's possible.

How coachable are they? Same with our low performers. You know, they have to be coachable. By the way, it's also easy to find those high trust members just go to the same team and say, hey, who do you trust more than anybody else, especially when the chips are down? They'll also all point to the same person. That's the most gifted natural leader you have and may not be your highest individual performer. But they are capable of raising the performance of everybody else because they're such high-trice members.

Not to beat this horse to death, but one of the things that I find so interesting is I talk about these things. I talk about these high-performing teams. And what I've seen in companies is that they hear what I say and then they try to take that stuff, and attribute it to a person. I'm talking about high-performing teams, and you're trying to make high-performing individuals out of the information that I'm talking and writing about, right? Almost everything that I write about is about teams,

and yet we aren't trying to build teams. We're trying to build great individuals. So I think we need to get back to teamwork. Is it because that's harder to do? I mean, performance is an easy thing to measure, right? You said it. I love that revenue, right? Whether it's revenue or profit or whatever it is,

we measure numbers because they're easy to measure. It's a little harder to measure trust. It doesn't mean it's not there. It just means it's a little harder. The irony is all the traditional metrics will benefit from high-performing teams over time. Trust will see the benefit over time. It seems like lazy leadership at that point.

It is lazy leadership. Because we've all heard the quote, what gets measured, gets managed. And what's easy to manage things that show up in the Excel spreadsheet, and you can see the numbers are down or the numbers are up. But it's harder to have to,

be in constant connectivity with your team to really have your finger on the pulse. Yes. And that's part of good leadership, which is, A, staying connected to the team. And if it's a larger organization, you need spies. You know, all the great leaders have ever met, they have spies, which is people who they have close relationships with, they've known their whole careers, maybe they grew up together. People don't really know that they are close friends. And they can pick up the phone and say, so tell me what's actually going on. Tell me what people are saying. I just talked to everybody. How did it land? You know? You have to know what's going on inside your organizations. Pulse surveys are fine, but they're not consistent. They're not done the same way. Different companies have different ways of doing it. They're fine. You know, if somebody got in trouble the day before, they're going to say, I hate it here. If somebody got a bonus the day before, they're going to say, I love it here. You know, there are a moment in time. They're a snapshot. But it's something, at least. At least it's something. It's some sort of data point. But yes, you have to be connected to your people. And it's constant. You know, like your children. You can't just check in with your kids once and everything's fine.

There's a comedian who said once, my wife keeps bugging me whether I love her or not. And I told her, I said yes on our wedding day. I told her I do, and I'll let you know if it changes. You know, and that's kind of how some people run their companies, which is they check in once and everything seems to be fine. I'm like, all right, well, you know, let me know if anything changes. And like a marriage, you know, you have to keep saying, I love you. You have to keep saying, I care about you. You have to keep telling your kids you're amazing and I love you. You have to keep checking in and asking how things are. Good leadership is as much a human listening enterprise as anything else. Yeah. And beyond even the words, you know, the actions have to be there too. And so you can say you care,

but are you actually in those one-on-ones really asking them how they're doing and leaning in instead of sitting there on your computer while they're, you know, venting about a problem. And so there's definitely a lack of true leadership in that arena. And I think there's also this level of, I don't want to be friends with the people I work with. I'm here for the paycheck. I do the bare minimum. We're seeing all this quiet quitting talk. It seems like we want to disassociate our work and our lives. What is the right relationship we should have with that? So quiet quitting is not a new experience, just a new word.

We used to call it disengagement. It's the same thing. But by the way, rebranding it is a good thing. Like the term innovation, it's so overused. It doesn't mean anything anymore. Talking about engagement, you know, it's like it got so overused. It didn't mean anything anymore. So we have a new term that makes everybody perk up and listen.

and pay attention to the problem, which is a good thing. Quiet quitting comes from multiple reasons. People have re-evaluated their lives during COVID. They're saying to themselves, maybe work is not that important to me. You know, I just want a paycheck. And other people, it's because of the leadership environment, which is they don't feel seen, they don't feel heard. So they'll do what's basically the amount that I won't get fired,

but, you know, I'm not going to go above and beyond. The problem is it's demoralizing for the person who's doing it. In other words, at some point, they stopped taking pride in their own work. at some point they stopped caring about themselves. And so I would rather people, you know, if they're disengaged for a reason that, you know, they like the company, they're just not into it, then raise their hand and go to their boss and say, can I have a difficult conversation with you? Like, I'm really kind of struggling and trying to figure what things are.

You're at least a colleague, at least a coworker, you know, because anybody who's actively quiet quitting, who's made the decision to do less, you know, that takes a toll. The other thing which I think is interesting, it's happening at the high levels as well. A lot of us have gone through the trauma of COVID, and the dust has not settled. And we don't exactly know what the future of work looks like. Everybody's got an opinion. But we don't know if we're all going to be going back to the office or if we're all going to be remote or what a hybrid looks like. Lots of people are talking about hybrid, but nobody really knows what it looks like.

Companies are struggling to implement hybrid systems. It's still a mess. And we don't exactly know what the future work looks like. And so that uncertainty contributes to all of this. And I think the best way to deal with it is to have these conversations out loud. I think it's good for leadership to say, look, we know we're going to end up in some sort of flexible workforce. We don't exactly know. Here are the things that we're thinking.

Here are the things we're struggling with. Tell us what you think. Everybody's kind of acting independently. And there isn't a conversation. I'll tell you one true story. There's a CEO of a big company Atlanta I talked to. He was talking to one of his senior executives. and just offhanded, one of his executives said,

it's so great, you know, we love it. We've moved our family down to St. Petersburg. And the CEO is like, what? He's like, yeah, yeah, we love it down here in St. Petersburg. And the CEO is considering bringing everybody back to work. And now one of his senior executive doesn't even live in the state. So what does he do? Does he force him to move his family back to Atlanta?

Does he tell him he has to commute to Atlanta? Does he tell him he can work 100% remotely when he's trying to get everybody else to come to work? But the guy never even said, we're thinking of moving our family to St. Petersburg. Everybody's kind of just doing their own thing. And yes, we have the freedom to do what we want, but we seem to have forgotten that we still work in groups.

We still work in, there's that word again, teams. And it's good to have freedom, but isn't it better to exercise responsible freedom? And all responsible freedom means is, yes, I want to do the things I want to do, but I recognize that my actions and decisions have ripples on the team that I work with and care about. And it doesn't mean I have to compromise or deny myself, but it means I have to communicate. Like, hey, boss, I really want to move my family to St. Petersburg. My parents-in-law live there, you know, my kids love it there. But I love this company and don't want to leave. Can we talk about what works? And then it's a conversation. And then it's a negotiation. And then everyone feels heard,

and then all the opportunities are on the table. But when we act unilaterally, sometimes it makes it complicated, and this goes both ways, for the company acting unilaterally without a conversation, as much as the people on a team acting unilaterally without conversation. But I think communication is the thing that's been woefully lacking in all of this. Yeah, well, this all ties back to this idea of unity and trust. And we've made an intentional decision here at Entree leadership, which is part of a bigger team at Ramsey with over 1,100 team members, to all be together in physical proximity every day. And that's a very controversial take in today's society. but we found that you do create more trust more quickly when we can be around each other versus screens.

Have you seen any data or anecdotal evidence of that? Well, I mean, we know that. That's true. I mean, it is much easier to build trust in person that it is online. And if you choose to have a distributed workforce, it actually requires more work to build trust. Trust is very organic when you're working together because you walk past each other in the hallway. You say, hi. You know, you grab a coffee together. You want to grab lunch.

you're struggling with something, and you knock on the door and say, hey, do you have a minute? You know, all of these little things build trust. Isaac Stern, the famous violinist, said, music is what happens between the notes. Well, trust is what happens between the meetings, whereas in a virtual workforce, the only thing we have are the meetings. You turn on the Zoom, you have the meeting, you turn off the Zoom. Done. There is no between.

And that's a problem. And so, you know, if you're in a distributed workforce, you actually have to do more. You have to have huddles every Monday morning where everybody gets to check in. nothing to do about work, just chat, say hi, you know, social. Leaders have to do more work to pick up the phone, not schedule Zoom calls, but pick up the phone and say, hey, how you doing? Just wanted to check and see what's going on. Like, it's actually more effort.

It's not impossible to build trust virtually, but it is more difficult. Yeah. And the other problems are that in a virtual workforce, if there's misinformation or gossip, it can swirl like crazy and get much more insidious, much quicker. So, yeah, of course there's huge advantage. of going back to work. And like I said, I definitely think the future of work is something more flexible. The question is, how do we get there? As you said, some companies are going full force and say, everybody has to come back. And if you don't like it, then, you know,

kick rock and pound sound. It's a strategy. And it'll please some and piss off others. But the other extreme is everybody can do whatever they want and live wherever they want. You know, it'll please them and piss off others. I mean, that's kind of, you're not going to please everyone. But I'm really curious where it nights out. The one thing I'm comfortable, predicting is that flexibility is here to stay, where in the past, somebody would have to say, hey, next Friday, I need to be home for my kids, can I work from home? And now Friday morning, you wake up, you send an email saying, hey, I need to stay home today. I'll be working from home remotely. And everybody shrug their shoulders and say, all right, you know, I think we can safely

say that's here to stay. On top of building trusts, which we know, we talked about the difficulty of that, it's even more difficult to repair trust that's been broken. I mean, you think about a marriage that's very true. It takes a long time to build and it's very quickly broken. How can leaders repair trust or team members to team members repair trust that's been broken? Accountability is the thing. Saying you're sorry doesn't mean you're wrong. People are very often afraid to take accountability for fear that they're, you know, here's the analogy. You're at the airport with your roller bag and you accidentally run over someone's foot. Okay. You turn around and you go, oh, I'm so sorry. And they go, worry about it. Now, clearly, you didn't do it on purpose. You didn't mean to do it, but you still took

accountability because it's your roller bag. It's your suitcase, right? Now, imagine rolling over their foot, and you say nothing. And they go, what's up? And you turn around and be like, I didn't mean to do it. It wasn't my intention. And they go, you hurt my foot. They're like, I didn't do it on purpose. And you have a whole fight because you simply refuse to take accountability because it wasn't intentional. Saying you're sorry doesn't mean you're wrong. Saying you're sorry doesn't mean you did intentionally, it just means you take accountability for your words or your actions. That's all it means. And so I think one of the things we need to do is if we say or do things, maybe we're a little bit short-tempered in a meeting and somebody brings it to our attention. It's important that we pick up

the phone or go to someone's office and say, hey, really sorry how I showed up in today's meeting, not my proudest moment. I just wanted you to know I'm aware of it and I own it, right? And somebody will say, thank you. Thanks for saying that. In the minute you add a butt after an apology, it negates the apology. You know, I'm really sorry I showed up battling that meeting, but I'm really tired. Okay, so you're not taking accountability. You're blaming fatigue, right? So what we're talking about are human skills. And it goes right back to where we started this conversation, which is our companies teach us hard skills, but they don't teach us human skills. I hate the term soft skills. Hard and soft are opposites. And to be effective good members of a team, we need the hard skills,

the skills we need to do our jobs, and we need the human skills, the skills we need to be better humans. Things like active listening, things like confrontation, things like how to give and receive feedback, things like how to have difficult conversations. These are all skills that can be taught that we don't teach. And I think listening is the big one. You know, there's a big difference between listening and waiting for your turn to speak. And I think most of us are pretty bad listeners. Men in particular are pretty bad. You know, we want to fix everything. We hear a problem. We want to fix the problem versus sometimes somebody just wants to feel heard. That's all they want.

And we have to learn to hold space for someone to feel heard. So it goes a long way to building trust. Sometimes you don't have to say anything to build trust. Sometimes you don't have to do anything to build trust. You just have to have the skill set for someone to talk to you in person or over the phone and you know how to hold that space and then they can get everything out they need to get out. And you can affirm it. You know, one thing we did with our team, which was hugely valuable,

which is we had a listing session. We want to know all the gripes. We want to know all the complaints. And we sort of started, say, what do you want to tell us? Where have we fallen? What can we do better? Like, tell us. We want to know.

And, you know, some of it's absolutely valid. And some of it's just whining. And you can tell the difference. It's fine. But you can still validate both. That's interesting. Go on. Tell me more.

What else? Go on. Tell me more. What else? And Leadership Gate offered no excuses, no pushback. No correcting the facts. We just listened and wanted more and let people empty their buckets. And everybody felt this.

catharsis. Then the next day, and it was very important to separate it, the next day we said, okay, yesterday we talked about all the things that were wrong. We want to talk about what we can do, the things that we can improve. I want to hear your ideas that you think that we can implement, or you want to take responsibility to advance the cause. And it was an ideation, an idea session, it was wonderful. And we have to remember that the first session was emotional, the second session was rational, and you can't mix the two. Because when somebody's in an emotional state, when they're telling you all the things that they don't like, you can't five minutes later go, okay, now, let's talk about all the good stuff and what we're going to do, right?

Got to separate the two. And so I think this is all part of making people feel like they're in a trusting team that we can even distinguish between an emotional conversation and a rational conversation. You know, in our company, we have a rule, which is if it's above a five, it's about something else. So someone comes in hot and heavy because about whatever issue at work. And if their tone of voice is above a five, it's not about the thing they're talking about. It's something else. So our responsibility as leaders is two things. One, let it out, but then to find out and say,

okay, what else is going on here? You know, we need to get to the root of this. And just like folks in our companies can spin up and get all gossipy and create false narratives, so too can leadership. You know, if we take somebody who's above a five at face value, leadership starts creating a narrative of this person is this and this person is that. And then all of a sudden that person is labeled, and that's how we're going to treat that person, that's also just as insidious and just as dangerous inside a company. So, yeah, so I'm a huge fan

that we should be teaching, listening in our companies, and it will do tremendous benefit to the quality of trust inside our companies. That's such a great exercise that any leader can go do this week with their team and go, hey, I'm open to all this feedback. And it starts with the leader creating an environment where the team even feels comfortable

being that honest. And a lot of places and companies and leaders, they go, I'm not going to really tell him what I think. No way. And so that just is another mirror back to the leader to go, have you created an environment where people feel safe? And by the way, if the leader's unsure, then part of accountability is to simply say that, which is I'm not sure that I've done a good job of creating a safe space for people to be totally honest in this company before. I realize that people may not have been totally honest with how they feel about coming here.

And I'm determined to change that because I believe it's important that we build a culture of trust and that we can be open with each other. it starts with me and I'm going to model the behavior. And so I'm still learning the skill. I'm probably going to bumble it a little bit. But, you know, work with me here, but I really want to know. And if I start giving excuses, if I start being defensive or I start correcting the facts, please just point it out so I can recognize that behavior because like I said, I'm working on this, but I really want to hear from you. And really listening is trying to understand the meaning of what's being said. Don't take it personally. Don't correct the facts. That's superficial. And really the three phrases you need to have

in your arsenal or go on what else tell me more and it doesn't matter if it's slightly wrong because very often as I said before it's emotional we're holding space for emotion right and if something is egregious and if there is it doesn't even have to be egregious but if something requires accountability then the leader can say oh my god we totally did that you're 100% right I'm so sorry you know just like that roller bag wasn't intentional necessarily but it still happened so yeah that's got to be a personal story. That must have happened to you many times in airports. I mean, you just, I see it happening. I've seen it happen. I've seen everybody's been bumped or knocked and, you know, whether you're on a crowded bus or subway. I mean, everybody's been bumped or knocked. And I've

seen fights ensue just because somebody refuses to apologize. What? I didn't do it on purpose. It's like, I didn't accuse you of doing it on purpose. I'm just accused you of running your bag over my foot. It's a simple version of that accountability for sure. Yeah, yeah. And it's a good skill. It's a good skill. So as we wrap here, Simon, building trust can feel squishy, which is why a lot of leaders don't lean into it. It's easier to look at the Excel spreadsheet, like we mentioned. What's a tactical step every leader can take this week to gauge trust and build trust on their team? I think learning to have the difficult conversation is the best one.

They're hard to do, but they're easy to. The skill is easy, but mustering up the courage to do it as hard, right? Here's how you have a difficult conversation. We need to have a difficult conversation. I've been afraid to have this conversation because I'm afraid I'm going to do it say something wrong or accidentally trigger someone. But it's very important that we have this conversation and it's more important than any fears that I have. So work with me as we get through this. And then you can pretty much attack any subject you need to. But knowing how to set it up and then

knowing how to convert to being that listener is really important. I think the skill, if anything, is the courage to have the conversations. It's the courage to admit that I need to do better and that you're on a journey. And then you actually have to go on that journey. You have to actually go read books, watch TED Talks, listen to interviews that help you build these skills. One of my favorite books that does it is how to talk to kids so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk. Yes, it's a parenting book. Turns out listening is the same skill for adults. It's a great simple to understand book that teaches you the basics of effective active listening.

So you actually have to go on the journey. You actually have to become a student of this stuff because it's hard. It's hard being human. Well, that's powerful. Well, Simon, as always, thank you so much for your optimism. and wisdom, always love having you on the Entry Leadership Podcast. Thanks for having me back. Hope you're well. Keep well, rather. Take care of yourself and take care of each other. Thank you. What did I tell you? That guy is brilliant. Thank you so much, Simon,

for joining us on today's episode. If you want to build the team that trusts each other, it all starts and ends with leading people well. And that's something that a lot of business owners struggle with. As we like to say, business is easy until people get involved. So you've got to stay connected with your team consistently. And we have a really great way for you to do that. It's called Entre Leadership Elite Weekly Reports. This is our system to help you track your team's morale, their workload, and stress every week at a glance.

And you can try it for free for 30 days right now. Go to ontreleadership.com slash elite to start your free trial or click the link in the show notes to learn more. If you enjoyed today's episode of the show, follow or subscribe and give us a five-star review. You can also share this episode with your team, with your friends, or on social media. And while you're over there, go ahead and give us a follow at Entree Leadership. This episode was produced by Tim Hull, edited by Jacob Harrison, and mixed and mastered by Will Rutter.

I'm your host, George Campbell, and on behalf of the entire Entree Leadership team, thanks for listening. Until next time, keep learning and keep leading.