High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 337: “Do You Care to Lead?” with Michael G. Rogers, Author & Keynote Speaker

Episode Date: May 15, 2020

Michael is the founder of Teamwork and Leadership, a speaking and training company with a mission of building extraordinary teams and helping leaders love their jobs more. He is a former Director of Learning, Performance and Quality at a Fortune 50 company. He is the author of the best-selling book – You Are the Team—6 Simple Ways Teammates Can Go from Good to Great and his new book "Do You Care to Lead" just hit bookshelves in February. His blog Teamwork and Leadership regularly ranks in the top 10 of leadership blogs and has a monthly following of over 30,000. He is an Inc. Top 100 Leadership Speaker. Michael received both his Bachelors of Science and Masters of Science degrees from Utah State University. Michael resides in Southern Utah with his wife, Terri. They have been married 30 years and have six sons.   In this podcast, Cindra and Michael discuss:   · His #1 Leadership Strategy · The 5 leadership stars · How SONIC can help you · His work with the Southern Utah Football team · How the best leaders and coaches develop a strong culture   HIGH PERFORMANCE MINDSET SHOWNOTES FOR THIS EPISODE: www.cindrakamphoff.com/MichaelG FB COMMUNITY FOR LIVE PODCAST INTERVIEWS: https://www.facebook.com/drcindrakamphoff/ FOLLOW CINDRA ON INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/cindrakamphoff/ FOLLOW CINDRA ON TWITTER: https://twitter.com/mentally_strong   Love the show? Rate and review the show for Cindra to mention you on the next episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/high-performance-mindset-learn-from-world-class-leaders/id1034819901   You can find Michael at: https://michaelgrogers.com/ and on social at: Instragram: https://www.instagram.com/michaelgrogers/ Linked in: https://www.linkedin.com/in/secondg/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/rogersgmichael

Hey, my name is Cindra Campoff and I'm a small-town Minnesota gal, Minnesota nice as we like to say it, who followed her big dreams. I spent the last four years working as a mental coach for the Minnesota Vikings, working one-on-one with the players. I wrote a best-selling book about the mindset of the world's best and I'm a keynote speaker and national leader in the field of sport and performance psychology. And I am obsessed with showing you exactly how to develop the mindset of the world's best so you can accomplish all your goals and dreams. So I'm over here following my big dreams and I'm here to inspire you and practically show you how to do the same. And you know, when I'm not working, you'll find me playing Ms. Pac-Man.

Yes, the 1980s game Ms. Pac-Man. So take your notepad out, buckle up, and let's go. This is the high performance mindset. Failure without learning is just simply failure. But if you learn, it becomes an experience that you can grow and get better from. Yeah. And I think all failures like that. Welcome to episode 337 with Michael G. Rogers. This is your host, Dr. Cinder Kampoff. And I'm grateful that you're here. If you know that mindset is essential to your success, then you are in the right place. Because we talk about everything here related to mindset. And I'm hoping you're doing well and staying safe. We're staying safe at home here in Minnesota.

And our shelter at home was just moved to safe at home, which means more things are going to open up on Monday. And we're looking forward to that. This is an interesting time to navigate. This is a parent. I have two boys, Carter and Blake, ages 10 and now 13, and they haven't played with their friends for over eight weeks now. So we're really looking forward to Monday, and it's going to be interesting navigating how can they play with their friends six feet apart. Today's guest I am pumped about. Michael G. Rogers and I are in the same speaker mastermind with Jane Atkinson. I love her work. You should check out her podcast, The Wealthy Speaker Podcast. And I have read Michael's books.

And in this episode, we talk about leadership and culture. And I wanted to have him on for a few reasons. To teach us really how to be better leaders, to talk about culture in the workplace, culture at home, and culture in sports, and how can we build it to be the best leaders that we can be. And I knew he would bring it today on the podcast, and he brought great strategies and tools and tips for us today. So Michael is the founder of Teamwork and Leadership, a speaking and training company with a mission of helping extraordinary teams and helping leaders love their jobs more. He is a former director of learning performance and quality at a fortune 50

company. He is the author of a best-selling book, You Are the Team, Six Simple Ways Teammates Go From Good to Great, and his new book, Do You Care, just hit bookshelves in February. And that's the book that we talk a lot about in this podcast. His blog, Teamwork and Leadership, regularly ranks in the top 10 of leadership blogs and has a monthly following over 30,000. He is also an Inc. Top 100 Leadership Speaker. He received his Bachelor's of Science and Master's of Science from Utah State University and resides in Southern Utah with his wife, Terry. They've been married 30 years and have six sons. So Michael and I today in this podcast talk about his number one leadership strategy five leadership stars and how they can help you understand the

people that you lead what sonic stands for and how that can help you how the best leaders and coaches develop a strong culture and i wanted to really ask him a lot about his work with the Southern Utah football team. I work with football teams. So I was like, I'm going to pick his brain about this. And I really enjoyed learning about specifically like how he goes about developing a culture with a football team. If you enjoyed today's episode, wherever you're listening, head over and subscribe and give us a five-star rating and review this just helps us reach more and more people each week when you leave a five-star rating and review i'm going to read your review next week just like this one this one is from gary hollywood from new zealand

and when i read it it gave me goosebumps he said i'm an olympic world champion medal winning swim coach with over 30 years of experience. Needless to say, I've experienced my fair share of adversity along the way. Although I've persevered, never swayed from my path at times it's been challenging. Today's short podcast talking about adversity optimized my life's result in a nutshell, verbalizing it in a way that defined it better than I could have. Thank you, Dr. Cinder Kampoff, for adding yourself to my list of supporters as I enter an exciting new chapter of self-discovery.

Thank you for coming and joining us on the podcast, Gary. I'm so grateful that you're here and grateful for your rating and review. So I'd love to read yours next week. And if you are listening to today's episode with Michael G. Rogers and you enjoyed it, share it with a friend anytime that anything resonates with you. Send a message to a friend or you can copy and paste the link on Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Spotify, wherever you're listening

to this and text a friend. Tell them what you're thinking about them. You can also share it on your Instagram stories and tag me at cindracampoff. Without further ado, let's bring on Michael. Welcome to the show, Michael Rogers. Thank you so much for being here today on this beautiful sunny day. So thanks so much for being here. Yeah, thank you, Cinda. It's beautiful and sunny here as well. I know.

I'm trying to see the good in the small things I can be grateful for at this point. So Mike, tell us a little bit about your passion and what you do to get us started. Sure. So my passion is team work, team development, and leadership. I love speaking and writing on those topics. And that's really what I consumes a lot of my day right now is, is those two passions. Yeah, that's awesome. So you're a speaker, you're a writer, you'll, you're, you teach classes, you're going to be a professor full time next, next year, right in the fall. So you have a lot of hats that you're juggling here. Yeah, still while doing all the other things, speaking and writing and all the other good stuff. Yeah, exactly.

So tell us a little bit about just how you got to where you are now. Yeah, so probably about three years ago, my company that I was working with, which was a Fortune 50 company at the time, was offering an early retirement package to all employees. And I was in a higher level leadership position at the time. And I was grateful for that because it allowed me to do something different. That's what I thought I would do. I thought maybe I'll go into a different industry. I was in health insurance at the time. Just do something different. Well, I started writing a book about three months before I took early retirement. And by the way, I'm far from retirement. It just happened that I had just enough years of experience to take it. But I started writing a book about three months before

that. And about six months after I'd taken early retirement, I'd published it. It had done pretty well. I started getting some speaking engagements and I'd had my hand in speaking on and off the last 12 years before that, working with teams and doing team development. And I'd been writing a blog for about 10 years up to that point. So I dabbled in this space, but this book allowed me to do it full time. And so that's how I got involved. That's wonderful. Michael, I'm going to ask you a big whammy question to start off, right? It's the third question of the interview. But I want to ask you this question because I think when people hear a speaker, author, professor, you know, they think, well, Michael's just probably perfect, but I want to start with this to show

some vulnerability, and what I'd love for you to tell us about is like a time that you failed. What does failure mean to you, and tell us about a time that you failed and what you learned from it. So I love the topic of failure. And it's something I actually speak on. So and I share one experience that I had that I think is a great lesson in failure. And it's not something maybe you would traditionally think like where I failed with the business or something like that. It was failing as a husband. My wife and I were having a pretty heavy disagreement like couples do. And I asked her at one point, I just said, give me a list, honey, just give me a list of six things I can do differently. And I thought, well, that's going to take her a day or two and maybe she'll even forget about it. Right. But she was back in two minutes

with that list. And I thought, okay, well, I've committed to this. And so I started taking that list everywhere I went and trying to get better. Because obviously I was failing her as a husband in these six things. Now, most of these things on the list I did not know about. They were blind spots to me. And sometimes with failure, that's how we find out where we're failing. Because we start asking people where we're failing or where we're struggling or where we can get better or where we can improve. And I took this list with me on a consulting trip. And as I was unpacking my bags in the hotel on that trip, I noticed the list was at the top of the bag.

And I thought, well, that's interesting because I had packed it on the bottom of the bag, not the top. And I looked at it and she had added four more things to the bag. And I thought, well, that's interesting, because I had packed it on the bottom of the bag, not the top. And I looked at it, and she had added four more things to the list. So now I had 10 things that I could improve on and get better at. And really, the reason I tell you that story is because to me, failure without learning is just simply failure. But if you learn, it becomes an experience that you can grow and get better from. Yeah, I think all failures like that. Yeah, so to me, that was, that was a big failure. I've had a lot of failures, I think, as you know, as most of us do in life, both of my relationships, as well as a lot of other things. But that's just a simple story. So I didn't love that story because it does show your vulnerability. Yeah.

It makes you real. And what I heard you say is like failure is when you don't learn from something, right? Could you, could you, especially since you speak on this, can you define it a little bit more on like what you see failure is? I think it's really interesting. People see it very differently. And so I'd love to learn more about it from you. Sure. Yeah. So I, I feel like I always like to say the only mistakes we make are the ones we failed to learn from. And I realized I was actually speaking at a, um, uh, cancer research facility, one of the largest in the world. And

they said, well, hold on a second. There's some mistakes that we make that are pretty big and they are truly mistakes. And I agree, there are some life and death types of mistakes we can make, but most of the mistakes we make, we can learn from. And they're really not a mistake. They're just an opportunity to learn. And I like to, you know, I think from a leadership perspective or a husband or a parent perspective, wife perspective, girlfriend, boyfriend, the way that we treat failure makes a big difference in everybody's lives, including ours as well. But if you think about like when we learn how to walk, because everything we learn in life has had to do with some type of failure

for the most part, if you're coupling experience with that. And so i look at for example a little uh what is it one and a half two year old that learns to walk a one year old you know and they take that first step and what do they do they fall on yeah they fall on their little huggies or pampers or whatever it might be and what do the parents start doing at that point or others around baby well they encourage that baby to try again, to keep trying, keep trying. Could you imagine for a minute if parents instead said, that was horrible. Don't ever try to take a step again.

You'll never learn how to walk. The way that you embrace failure, the way you look at failure, the way that you look at failure with others has a lot to do with whether you'll be successful and others will be successful. So to me, again, the only mistakes we really make are the ones we fail to learn from. And, and you know, my wife, for example, if I didn't ask her for those things and those things I failed at, even though it was really difficult to get those things, like I said, I was hoping she just wouldn't remember the list, but she did.

And I appreciated that you were vulnerable she just wouldn't remember the list, but she did. And I appreciated that you were vulnerable and you even asked her the different ways that you could improve. A lot of people wouldn't even ask for that feedback. Well, and I have to admit, I'll be vulnerable again. My intention was just to get her more off my back at that time. But since then, since then, I have asked her from time to time, what can I do to improve? And I've got longer lists and I keep trying to improve and get better. And that's, you know, how we strengthen our relationship. But I think even as a leader, you know, that's something I did regularly. I asked my people, what can I do?

What am I failing at? And if they didn't have any suggestions, I'd give them some, uh, or I'd give them some ideas, things that I knew I was failing at, which would get them more comfortable. Once they saw that I started working on those things to get better at them. See, so it's not just the way that we embrace it, but it's what we do with that. And then it's, and then when we get the feedback, talking about feedback and failure, it's what we do when we go back to that person to say, look, am I still, am I succeeding yet at this very thing? Those are just, it's what we do when we go back to that person and say, look, am I still, am I succeeding yet at this very thing? Those are just, there's so much on failure we could talk about, right? Yeah, it is. And I think how, what I see in sport, you know,

is that when someone fails, they can be punished really quickly for, for a mistake that they made in the field. And since we're talking about teams and caring, I think that will probably come out in our conversation as we keep going. But I'd love to learn, like, what made you decide to write your new book? Do you care to lead? So the book, I really found there was a gap in leadership. And I love authentic leadership, servant leadership, those types of philosophies of leadership. And there was a definite gap. There was a survey poll done by Gallup at the Gallup group where they asked people, employees, they asked, do you strongly agree with the following statement that somebody,

anybody at work, including your leader, your supervisor cares about you. And only four out of 10 agreed with that statement. That meant that six out of 10 people don't feel cared about at work, which is astounding to me. That's, that's just crazy. And I'm sure if we asked them, does your supervisor care about you that it might've been only one out of 10. But if you ask a leader, leader that people know you care about them. But it's also about helping you to care more. You just naturally do that by following the formula that I have in the book. Yeah.

Awesome. I can't wait to dive in. I'm thinking about what people that I lead, what they would say. And probably some would say, oh, yeah, Cinder really cares for me and some might not. So yeah, being vulnerable right here. So I'm going to learn from you as well today, Mike. Let's kind of dive into this. And what I really loved from the book was this idea of sonic. So I think that's maybe where we should start. Tell us about what sonic means and what it relates to or how it relates to do you

care to lead and just this idea of caring and leading. Yeah, so it's a five-part formula that I really believe creates more loyalty and results-focused organizations, teams, people. Because when you really care about people, they tend to be more loyal and they tend to be more focused on results. And so if you want those things in your organization, then you follow this formula that I've outlined. So the formula, like you said, is called SONIC. And it's not an acronym that I forced in any way. It's just actually natural, like it was meant to be. It came about, the S stands for service, which is serving those you lead. We can talk more about that a little bit later, but it's absolutely the fastest way to unlock your leadership as that first part of

the formula. And then open up, which is vulnerability. Big, big part of it, creating psychological safety on your team. The N is for nurture, which is about really spending a lot of time focused on helping your people improve and get better. I always use the example, if you're to take an avocado tree from California and plant it in the mountains of Utah where I live, it would never thrive. And if you took an apple tree where I live in Utah and where we have an abundance of them and plant it in the desert of California, it wouldn't thrive. That's because all people are different. People are much more complex than teams, but they need the right care. They need the right water, the right soil, the right nurturing. And people do too. We can't cookie cutter manage. So that nurturing is about spending time knowing your

people's needs, understanding them individually and personally administering to them, nurturing to them. The second part is, or the fourth part of it is I, which is inspire, which is knowing your team needs to know where you're taking them. They need to know why you're taking them there, and they need to know the how. That's the inspire part if you can get them to understand all three and and have what i call these success lines where they literally can see the impact that they're having to the organizations of the team to themselves and the organization and the team can see the impact others are having on on them those are success lines then you've got a lot of the battle to win in terms of inspiring people to be more intrinsically motivated than extrinsically motivated, which is a real key,

right, in leadership. And then the fifth piece is to commit. It's about your commitment to the leadership process. There's a story told of a chicken and pig that are walking down Main Street. And some of your listeners may have heard this story, but they see a restaurant that's open for breakfast. And the chicken looks at the pig and says, we ought to open up a restaurant that only serves breakfast. And the pig says, well, what are we going to serve? And the chicken says, ham and eggs, of course.

And the pig says, well, whoa, wait a second. You're just making a mere contribution. I'm making a full commitment. And I think leaders have to be that ham and the ham of eggs. They have to be willing to sacrifice and commit to their leadership and their people, really care about their people. And this is stuff that has to be top of mind for you as a leader, as you lead. So that's the song. Love it. Awesome. Fits perfectly. So I could see why you chose it. I love all of the components that make sense in terms of caring and leading and what you're talking about today. I have a few follow-ups on that for sure. So let's talk about service first and this idea of being a servant leader.

Tell us what that means to you and maybe like a top tip on, I don't know if it's a tip, but you know, cause it's more of an approach, but for people who want to become more servant leaders or just want to understand it, what would you tell them? Like, what is it and how do you do that although that's a really big question yeah well and you use the term servant leader which i love that term i love that philosophy i'm definitely about servant leadership but service is a component of that and service like i said earlier there's no way no quicker way to unlock your leadership than through service there's no quicker way to unlock your leadership than through service. There's no quicker way to unlock any leadership or any relationship that you have than through service.

Service is doing more than just your job. You know, I'm having regular one-on-ones with my employees, you know, or I'm being kind. I mean, those are all great things, but service is something like, and this is just a real simple example, and we could come up with thousands more, but let's say, for example, that you have a team and it's snowing outside, and instead of sending your team that day into this blizzard because it's snowing really hard, you choose instead to order lunch in for them. That sends a clear message that you care about them. It's a simple thing. I get it. And service, the concept of service is a simple thing. But putting it to action requires that we're thinking about it often. We're thinking about others more than we're thinking about ourselves. And we're looking for creative ways to do this. I have a friend of mine, for example, I wrote about this in the book. He said he would just go around. He noticed as he was talking to people around the cubicles in his office, he was talking to his employees, he noticed that there was some dust on top of each of the cubicles.

And so he just got a can of Lysol and a rag and he just started wiping down the cubicles. And he does that on a regular basis. That shows it sends a message that I'm a servant, that I care. And he says, it's so simple, but my people really like it. Like it's meaningful to them. Just little things, that I care. And he says, it's so simple, but my people really like it. Like it's meaningful to them. Just little things like that. Awesome. What about opportunity and showing kind of your vulnerability

and tell us a bit about why that's important, particularly as leaders. Yeah. So some people have asked me before, what was your favorite chapter to write? Yeah. the, was your favorite chapter to write? Yeah. And this, this was my favorite chapter to write by far. It was probably the one that I was not looking forward to writing the most. When I got into it, I was like, this is cool. I had a lot of ideas on this that I put it out there and I thought it was going to be difficult to write.

It just flowed. And so opening up and vulnerability is about creating psychological safety on your team. And it starts with you. It starts with your own openness. And let me talk about what psychological safety is. And I don't know if you've talked about that on your show in the past or not. A long time ago, maybe like a year ago. And we talked about it related to like um leadership and teams and creating a culture of like that failure is okay you know so yeah i would love to learn more about

how you're seeing it and particularly i think a lot of people who listen are business owners or leaders but also there's a lot of coaches you know people in athletics and in business so we'd love to get your opinion on on how we might create more psychologically safe environments. Yeah. So the base, great. The basis of psychological safety is trust. And there was a researcher, her name was Amy Edmondson. She was a graduate student at Harvard University at the time. And she wanted to find out what made some teams more effective and other teams not so effective. So she studied medical teams. And if you think about medical teams, probably the way that you would naturally go about it is which are the teams that are making the fewest errors.

Those are the most effective teams. But what she found was the opposite. She found the teams that were making more errors were actually the teams that were most effective. And here's the thing, I'm going to put it, it's going to sound a little bit of a contradiction, but it's not. It's not that they were making more errors. It's just that they were admitting their errors more. They were talking about their errors. So they had just as many or maybe even fewer errors than the other teams, but they were open about admitting those errors. And she coined, she was the one who coined the term psychological safety, which is being used a lot more these days. You want to get your teams to a point where they feel like they can open up, they can fail, that it's okay, that they can take risks, that they can say, hey, I made a mistake,

or you know what, I need help here, or you're better at this than I am. When you can get that, you create what I call efficiencies on teams. You create efficiencies in meetings, you create efficiencies in your relationships, in your communication. I mean, those efficiencies trickle down considerably. Sarah Blakely, one of my favorite entrepreneurs. Yes. Female entrepreneur. Huh? Yeah. Billion dollar company. She's been super successful. One of the most successful female entrepreneurs there are. And she tells a story of growing up and how her father at the dinner table would always ask the family what failures they had that day. Okay, going back to failures, right? What failures did you have today? And she said, if we couldn't come up with something,

he would almost seem disappointed that we didn't have something that we failed at. He had created psychological safety within his family. And leaders have that opportunity. She actually created what she calls at Spanx, oops moments, where she talks about some of the mistakes made in the history of Spanx. She talks about mistakes she's making today and she encourages others to talk openly and freely about their mistakes

and to create again, this psychological safety. So when leaders can create this on their teams, it creates absolute magic. And in the book, I have ways that you can do that. But the first one is it starts with you. You have to be vulnerable. You have to be the first to say, you know what? I'm not so good at this.

I need somebody to help me with this. Or oops, I really messed up on this one. You know, whatever it might be. Or just share some personal things about you. I've seen, and I can share later with you, a story that just blew my mind in terms of a leader who opened up and what it did for that team. There's lots of those kinds of stories. Wow. Well, and what about the people who are listening who are thinking, oh man, that's really scary to be vulnerable with my team. And how do I still maintain boundaries?

Do you know what I mean? Like, I'm just thinking there's maybe some people who are listening that are thinking about that. What are your thoughts on the difference between vulnerability and still having boundaries? And yeah, just share your thoughts on that. You have to do what feels right for you. And if it doesn't feel right, not necessarily comfortable. Those are two very

different things because you have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable when it comes to vulnerability. But, but is it the right thing for you and for your team? And I've consulted with literally hundreds of teams. So I've, we've, we've gone through a lot of these types of exercises. I'm going to share that story with you. Yeah, tell us because I was going to ask you anyway. Because this was like the extreme, but it felt so right for this team. So I was asked to come in and consult.

It was a senior leadership team and they were struggling with a number of things. And so we always start by working on building trust, you know, and getting to the point where we can start being more vulnerable with each other. And so we have this exercise and a lot of the stuff that I, I do comes from Patrick Lencioni, the book, the five dysfunctions of the team, great book, by the way. And what we do is what's called a personal history exercise where you talk

about something in your past and your childhood that scared you. Okay. And this leader, the CEO of this company, got up and talked about his alcoholic father. Now that's not uncommon. I've had leaders stand up and talk about their alcoholic father, but this leader, everybody knew his father in this organization. Now, I'm pretty sure he'd gotten permission to share the story. But they knew this person very well. And he got up and he talked about it. He started crying. He started sobbing. And it just it was it was I was just sitting there like, Whoa, I hope I hope this goes where it needs to go. But then I noticed around the room, other people started crying as well.

Now, you want to talk. I know this is soft stuff, but I'm a big believer in soft stuff because emotions are at the heart of what teams do. Teams are about relationships at their very core. And so the better we can get those relationships, the better, you know, ultimately we can create that connection on teams. And this team was connecting. And I will tell you after that, it was this team completely changed night and day. I've got another story and I won't share it now, but in the book, I talk about a story at Google of a leader who had actually stood up and shared that he had stage four cancer. Amazing story. Something nobody saw coming completely changed this team. Now, again, it has to be what's right for you. And

maybe you start kind of simple, but you know, people do want to know a little bit about you, believe it or not. Yeah. You know, they really do. And so maybe simple ways to start is this is how I spent my morning or during the, this is what we're doing at my house during the coronavirus time, right? This is what my boys are doing or sharing about your family. What are some easy ways that you think people can start? Those are some ways I'm thinking I might start. Yeah, I think those are all great. I think you can start, well, you can bring a consultant i will tell you that that's a great way to do it who could facilitate some of these activities because

um they can just bring it in a way that if you said hey let's all sit around and be vulnerable it's not going to work work as well there's there's some other things that have to come before that like trust but if someone's giving you permission to do that and creating a space where they feel safe from a psychological perspective that's easy to do yeah right it is but as a leader right now to do i should say not easy yeah right but as a leader right now you can you can start just by you know sharing some of those things that you talked about, Cindra, just being a little more open and vulnerable, like with your mistakes. Yeah. You know, I screwed up this morning. I, I had, I thought I, you know, I'm just going to talk about my schedule today and some of the ways that I messed up my, you know, I don't know what it is. It could just be something that you messed up at home. If you want to go to that level,

that's getting a little more serious. But again, it's just starting to get more comfortable doing that because if you're comfortable doing that, people are going to be more comfortable doing that because in a sense, you've given them permission to do those very things. And that's really the key. And that vulnerability could start just on your one-on-ones with employees, you know, talking about, you know, they're struggling with something. And maybe you struggled with that very thing when you were at their level, you know, of employment. And it was something that you learned. And so you share about your struggle and your failure, but also what you learned from it.

That does a lot in terms of creating trust with those that you leave. And, you know, there's other things you can do, like create norms. I go more detail of that in the book, but create team norms where everybody agrees on levels of conflict, for example, or whatever it might be. You're giving, again, people permission to do things. Everybody's giving each other permission to do things, and that's a real key. I like the question of like how you failed today. And I'm thinking about Sarah Blakely and how she was conditioned that failure is okay. And likely, I could imagine she would say that's one of the reasons why she is one of the most successful female billionaires, you know, self-made because she embraced failure. And so I like the idea of just

asking that question at the dinner table, or maybe at the top of a team meeting, tell us about a time that you failed today, just to kind of create that idea that we can all learn and grow from failure. So have your oops moments, right? Have your own oops moments with your teams. Okay. I'm writing that down. So Michael, one of the other things I wanted to really talk with you today about is your work with sports teams. You're very similar in terms of your work and my work is similar in that it's like sport and business and I do work in both and I love football and I know you've worked with like Southern Utah football to help them really develop their culture. So I'd love to hear how you've done that. And then how some of the, the, the, maybe the Sonic or some of the other

ideas from your book, do you care to lead how you've used those with sports teams? Yeah, you bet. So yeah, Southern Utah University is a football team. I was contracted to do some work with them to help them with the culture. About three years ago, they had a real winning culture. They'd actually gone further than they ever had in the playoffs. They won their division one football team. They'd won a conference championship and things were going all really well. But the last couple of years, they kind of lost, lost, you know, their footing in terms of culture. And so the coach, he's a wonderful coach coach, very caring coach, he brought me in to kind of help him with that. So I started off by working with the coaches themselves, working on some of the things that we just talked about with

vulnerability, creating goals. And then for this team, and every team's a little bit different in terms of how you do this, but we actually created a scoreboard for this team, something that would drive their culture, something each meeting they bring up and becomes a basis of their meeting. You know, where is their score and what do they need to do specifically right then to improve it? And it's a time-based score. In other words, they're looking at being done with this, I think it was like four months after we started all of this and then moving on to another one and creating another scoreboard. But, you know, a lot of their focus is on that.

Now, of course, with this virus and everything that's happening around that, they've lost some of the things they were able to do before. They were, I think, two days into spring practice, canceled. No more spring football practice. And of course, everybody knows who likes football like us that not having spring practice at a college level is a big, big, huge issue. Yeah, it's going to be difficult. But credit to this coach and his focus on this scoreboard driving his culture. You know, we talked about it and agreed that while some of these things might change, the scoreboard still needs to be a central focus of what they do. And it's not just the coaches that are aware of it, the players are aware of it, they talk about it regularly, communicate it regularly. And you know, culture is about keeping things top of the mind. And so around do you care to lead, I'm actually,

we haven't gotten to that phase yet. But I will be working with the coaches in terms of leadership. I'm going to be working with their captains in terms of leadership and teaching a lot of these basic principles. I mean, you know, football's a man's man sport, right? A lot of these coaches, they're, they're men's men. I mean, they're tough, tough, tough guys. And you help them show vulnerability given that environment but you'd be surprised we um i've done this with with coaches football coaches and others where we've had these almost in every case where coaches are crying and sharing i again i'm not saying crying's like you know when we think about crying we think this emotion is soft stuff but this genuine stuff. Like they feel so much trust that they can open up and be vulnerable and get to that point. But these guys are emotional too. And I think a lot of it's because our culture as a society is changing

a little bit. We're realizing that it's okay to be open and vulnerable. In fact, it's a strength in terms of your leadership to do so. And I think these coaches realize that as well. Give us a sense of a few examples on your scoreboard. So I'm just thinking about if I did something like this with the team, how like just what are what's on that scoreboard and how do they use it to communicate it throughout their week or their day? Yeah, so one item. And so there's, they've got, they have five items and I won't go into detail around the whole five items

because obviously if you have any. Or bring confidentiality. Big sky football teams watching. We don't want that. But one of their areas is discipline. Okay. You know, and one of the ways they score themselves on that is making sure that the kids are where they need to be and doing what they're doing and that they're um they're not

getting in trouble and so they have little scores around all those things which lead to the bigger score which leads to the even bigger score which is is, you know, their football team versus what they're going, their opponent, whoever that opponent might be. And so that's one academic discipline, you know, is, is another area, making sure kids are in class that they're going to study hall, just some simple examples. But, and those are, those are things that, you know, literally maybe as you look at it, they may not completely define their culture, but it's a part of what their culture needs to become. You know, ultimately, I asked them last time I met with the coaches, I said, how much of this do you feel will be attributed to your success as a team?

Culture, in other words. How much of all the stuff we're talking about, trying to create, will attribute to the success as a team culture. In other words, how much of all the stuff we're talking about trying to create will attribute to the success of your team. And without hesitation, I'm thinking, I said, I said 30, 35%. They said, no, 75%. And several others said, yes, seven, they all agree. 75% of what we do in terms of winning has to do with our culture. And I think it's that way with any team. Culture is a hot topic right now, but it needs to be because we don't do it as well as we should do

it. I think it also makes you realize that it's just more than X's and O's. And I think is there's more and more awareness that you have to train other parts of your body and your spirit, your mind, besides just your knowledge of the game I think culture is a big component of that Michael one of the things I wanted to ask you about your book do you care to lead you talk about these five stars in the book and I thought those were really interesting tell us what those five stars are and how that relates to culture and maybe you know with an example of athletics or business like we're talking about now. Sure. Yeah.

So I talked a little bit about the chapter under nurturing and I shared the apple tree being planted in California, desert of California, avocado tree plant in the mountains of Utah and that we can't cookie cutter management. Well, this goes along in that chapter. This is part of that chapter is these five categorizations i feel like 90 plus of our time as a leader should be spent on at least thinking about if not proactively developing and helping our people become better growing them up i always say that you have four choices as a leader you can can move people up, you can move them over, you can move them off, or you can do nothing.

And to do nothing is never a choice. But unfortunately, it's what a lot of leaders do because they don't have the courage to do the hard things. And so they just kind of let it go. And when I say 90% plus, I mean, I'm talking about thinking about these things, classifying people, thinking about moving these people, having conversations with them. It's all those things. So moving up is where you should be spending the majority of your time.

Moving over, which just means moving them to a different team, a different seat on the bus, a different bus entirely. But again, don't move your problems to somebody else. That's not fair to the person you're moving over there. Because again, we care as people, we care as leaders, we don't want to do injustice to those we lead, we never do. Even if we're moving them off, we do it the right way for the right reason. Whether that's and that's for everyone, that's the person being moved off the team, the organization, you as a leader, it's everybody. That's the things you have to think about.

But moving up, so I have these five classifications. I have rock stars. I have rising stars. I have middle stars, steady stars, falling stars, and deceiving stars. So your rock stars, everybody knows who the rock stars are right they're the people they get there early they leave late you don't never you never worry about them you feel that you wish you had a whole team of rock stars they're just great and then your rising stars are rock stars but they haven't they don't have the experience yet to

become total rock stars then you have your steady stars your middle stars these are the folks that you know nine to five they're going to meet expectations but not necessarily exceed expectations but they're there and you've got to do something with them because you don't you don't shouldn't be accepting just that level of performance right and then you have your falling stars which we wish we had no falling stars on our teams, right? And then we have our deceiving stars. Now, this is an interesting category. It's my favorite one to talk about.

Deceiving stars are falling stars and rock star clothing. And what I, yeah. So what I mean by that is that these are the folks that you believe are doing your team and organization well, because they're your top performer, but to your team, they're dragging the morale of the team down because secretly, at least hiding it from you they're hoarders they're people who who fail to collaborate they're people who take credit for things or partial credit for things that they are they take full credit for things they should have only got partial credit for your team sees the issue but you don't because they're top producers so you just tend to ignore the problem and i'll give you a great story i was last last year speaking to a company and the CEO of that company came up to me and said, I got to share experience with you.

I had a deceiving star in my organization. And most, by the way, most teams and organizations do. You just have to look and ask and you'll find out more. You got to discover. And you may even know who they are. You're just choosing to ignore them. But he said, I had a deceiving star on my team and she was a top producer and we would regularly coordinate her in front of everybody we'd put her up on a pedestal we say this is who you need to become like she's the rock star that we all

want to be like and the people in the organization are like no we don't not want to be like her she's negative she's she's a hoarder. She doesn't give credit. She doesn't collaborate. It's all about her. And he said he didn't know this. And it was literally, it was dragging the morale of the company, the people down. And when, of course, you drag morale down, you drag results down as well. He said, I had to make the difficult decision and let her go once I found out all of this and I couldn't help improve her and move her up. He said, I had to let it go. And he said, as soon as I did that, production went up. One person. So Michael, when you think about, I love the idea of these five stars and it helps us really think about how we might, you know, put people that we

lead and how we maybe categorize them. How does this relate to nurturing? And what do you think about how do you nurture each of these different stars? Tell me about that. Well, I have a grid. So the first step, and I do this as part of my workshop, but the first step is to get these people out on a grid. Find out where all your people fall. You have to know,

you have to identify where they are and be honest, be truthful. I actually, you can get a free, free grid at do you care to lead.com. It's under the tool section. So do you care to lead.com. And then you have to start making choices in terms of actions. So if you have a falling star, what's the one thing that's keeping them back from becoming a middle star? Or if you have a middle star, what's the one thing keeping them from becoming a rock star? And so what action are you going to take? And that's

part of that grid, part of the activity I do. It's funny. I asked leaders, I said, what's your minimal level of performance that you accept? And they'll say rock star, of course. I'll say, well, look at your grid. You have a number of people in that falling star, middle star categories. That must be your minimal level of acceptance in terms of performance. You know, it's not rock star. You got to like proactively do something with these people. You got to move them up over or off. To do nothing is never a choice. And so these people were not proactively doing something with these folks. And most of the time, 90% plus of the time, you're going to be moving these people up. Yeah. Excellent. Excellent.

So good, Michael, if I could summarize what we've talked about so far, really good. I liked what you said about the Sonic. I thought that's a great structure to help us think about continuing to care for the people that we lead so service open up nurture inspire and commit there we go I think I got that right super interesting that only four out of ten people say that people care about them at work so that's's anyone, right? Anyone. Just their leader, like anyone. So that really just shows you the importance of coming from this caring approach. And then I loved our conversation about vulnerability that we had so far. And just this idea of the oops mentality,

Sarah Blakely, asking your team how they failed to create this kind of psychological safety. And your star stuff, I really like that. Hel helping us think about how could we categorize the people that we lead and move them up? What kind of other tools or strategies would you have to help us develop our culture? And then we'll close up. Yeah. You talk specifically about culture. I think there's a couple of things. One is in order for culture to be, this is like a tip. And I think most people know this, but they do a poor job of practicing it. Is in order for culture to be successful, you have to keep it top of mind. So a lot of times we roll out great programs, but we fail to put it in front of people on a regular basis. It has to be something that is easy to remember, something that's relatable, something that they can connect

the dots with, and something that has a vision behind it, something that is absolutely the thing that gets them out of bed every morning. It has the why, you know, it has all those good things. So keeping it top of top of mind is is critical. And I think part of creating that culture as a leader, it starts with you. It starts with you thinking about yourself less and thinking about others more. And that's really the principle behind putting caring in the front seat of your leadership. That's the principle behind becoming a care to lead leader is putting others

before yourself. Love it. So you can, I know, head over to Amazon. I know that's one place you can get both of these books that we talked about today. You are the team. And then do you care to lead? Michael, how might people reach out to you if they're interested in connecting with you and maybe on social or your website? Give us a sense of how we might do that. Yeah, so I'm at all the major social media platforms.

You can find me there. My website is michaelgrogers.com. Michael G, G as in Glenn, Gary, whatever. michaelgrogers.com. And you can contact me from there. Michael at michaelgrogers.com is my email. So feel free to reach out to me there. And I'm pretty active on social media for the most part.

Got some big followings on a couple of platforms. So I'd love for you to join me. And yeah, that's where you can find me. I've got other products and stuff as well. And both very good books. So check them out. If you liked what we talked about today, we'd love to hear from you. You can reach out to Michael and I anywhere on social. I'm at mentally underscore strong on Twitter and then cindracampoff on all the other ones. So thank you, Michael, so much for your time and your energy and to help us think about how can we lead with caring and to help us to develop this culture that will help people be more or feel more psychologically safe. So any final comments or advice you have for us?

Nope. I think I've gotten it all in, but I have to tell you, this has been a fun experience and you're a great host. It's super fun. And people need to listen to your podcast. I've listened to a couple other episodes. You do a great job. Thank you. Thank you. Well, appreciate your time and your energy and your vulnerability today. You bet. Way to go for finishing another episode of the High Performance Mindset. I'm giving you a virtual fist pump. Holy cow, did that go by way too fast for anyone else? If you want more, remember to subscribe and you can head over to Dr. Sindra for show notes and to join my exclusive community for high performers

where you get access to videos about mindset each week. So again, you can head over to Dr. Sindra. That's D-R-I-C-I-N-D-R-A.com. See you next week.