The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Manage Your Gaps: Reclaiming the Awesomeness of Management by Matthew D. Ley

Episode Date: June 1, 2025

Manage Your Gaps: Reclaiming the Awesomeness of Management by Matthew D. Ley Amazon.com Ipnadvisors.com Manageyourgaps.com Management gets a bad rap. You don’t normally find social media posts of people professing “everyone can be a manager” and lauding their virtues. We save that stuff for the real heroes: the leaders and the doers. But what if we’ve gotten it wrong? What if we forgot something crucial? What if we’ve lost the ability to understand that management is awesome? In Manage Your Gaps: Reclaiming the Awesomeness of Management, author Matt Ley explores the three places most organizations get management wrong and describes how to bridge the gaps. In these pages you’ll learn: Management is not the junior varsity squad of leadership It is not a gold star for tenured or outstanding contributors The power of managers is their ability to be zero value add, non-leaders The answer to the question “If teamwork makes the dream work, what makes the team work?” The power of the EP!C Management™ model And many more examples of how managers and management bring sustainable value. Get ready to improve your profits and unleash the power of your people. Get ready to reclaim the awesomeness of management.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries and motivators. Get ready, get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Cause you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain.

Now here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi folks, it's Voss here from the Chris Voss Show. Dot com. Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, that makes it official. I'm able to hit those high notes at the beginning of the show cause I used the same rubber bands that Michael Jackson did. Oh, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen,

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ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and has probably reached a level of cranium capacity that is unknown to any prior primates of humanity before. Did I say primates twice? I don't know. I'm just making up people. Give me a break. Anyway, but you want other people to be as smart as you so that when you go to those Christmas dinners and Thanksgiving dinners, you don't have to talk to Uncle John and Uncle John, of course, never checks Snopes. So that's the problem there. Go to Goodreads.com, Forchess, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Forchess, Chris for Chess Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com for Chess Chris Foss, Chris Foss Wine and the Tik Tokity, and all those crazy places. And of

course, you're testing their ability to figure out how to work the internet. That's always good too. Opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host or the Chris Foss show. Some guests to the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it is not an endorsement or review of any kind. Anyway, we have an amazing young man on the show. We're going to be talking to him as hot new book off the presses and some of his deets and how you can do stuff better, especially in management leadership. Who thunk it?

Anyway, he is the author of the latest book to come out called manage your gaps, reclaiming the awesomeness of management by Matthew D. Layout, July 17th, 2024. I'm having a brain seizure evidently. Matt is a management expert and co-founder at Inflection Point Nexus Advisors. He has over two decades of experience. He helps organizations bridge critical gaps in management, teamwork, and leadership. He advised that my company should fire me, but my name's on it. So it didn't work anyway.

I need all the help I can get people, especially his. He is guided by two key philosophies, fulfillment ROI and fulfillment formula, enabling individuals and organizations to maximize impact with less effort. His diverse career spans roles as a software engineer, pastor, disaster response coordinator, ultimate Frisbee coach. That's the pinnacle right there. Supply chain, project manager and dedicated volunteer. He's driven by curiosity, community building, and lifelong learning. Matt has a MDIV, an MBA, and multiple professional credentials. And I went to college, I didn't go to college.

I started my first company team. So I have no idea what any of that means. Welcome to the show, Matthew. How are you? Oh man. That was worth the price of admission. Thank you for that. Uh, my PayPal's over here.

Anyway, guys, give us a.com. Where can people find you on the interwebs? If you want to find out about the company, ipnadvisors.com, you want to find out about the book, it's manageyourgaps.com. You can find me at either of those places or I'm most active on LinkedIn. No, you lead off with the book, management gets a bad rap on Amazon here. What's going on there and how does your book help get that bad rap fixed? Yeah. So where this came from is I, you know, as I've been doing consulting and working

with organizations and frankly being in the midst of organizations as a manager and as a leader, everyone talks about everyone can be a leader. Everyone should be leadership. Let's have it at all levels. Nobody gets out there and says, everyone could be a manager, really struggled to be a good manager. And we sort of denigrate it. I was seeing sort of two narratives going on.

Either management was the gold star for standout contribution or tenure. So it's like you've been here long enough. You did a great job on that project. We're going to make you the manager. Or it was the JV League for future leaders to say, let's just try it out for a bit. You know, this doesn't really count, but when you're ready, we'll move you into leadership.

And I say, that ain't it. This is, this is actually detrimental. Organizations ability to be not only sustainable, but to successfully grow. We need to reclaim that management itself is actually awesome. We've just given it a bad rap and we're using it incorrectly. Yeah. And people leave companies, it's interesting to me.

I believe, don't quote me, but I'm pretty sure I know this unless I've gone insane, which is also true. I believe the number one reason people leave a company is poor leadership and management. That's the reason they leave my company because I suck. No, I'm just kidding. I wrote a book on it. Anyway, I'm probably, I'm always working on it, though. I don't ever think I'm great. Keep that in mind. Don't be a Dunning-Kruger person. So one thing you mentioned, we were talking in the green room beforehand that one of the things you in the green room beforehand that one of the things you, you helped do is managers that maybe, or leaders who were, you know, maybe doing really well with what they're doing and managing people well.

And maybe something, you know, something's not working in the car parts. You got to get under the hood there and maybe change the oil or fix something mentally. Tell us about that a little bit. Yeah, we can, we kind of joke about it internally at IPN. That's like, we're always on the outlook for miserable man, miserable leaders. And what we mean by that is someone who's like, this used to be fun. I used to love this job. I used to something happened in the last six to 12 months where I just lost my mojo.

The crud is built up, just something's going on. And we're like, person, you have hit an inflection point, which means you here isn't going to get there. And a lot of the time, a big portion of that formula is how does management show up in your space? managers are like you said, people leave bad managers bad leaders, because they're your culture champions, they're the most influence on the people's day to day experience of the organization. And if that's a struggle,

that shows up as misery for leaders because they have to do way too much. Or they're like, I told everyone to do and no one's figured it out. And so we helped them untangle what we call uncovering the matrix to answer the question of what do you need to do a little bit differently? And a lot of times it's not really big shifts. It's just a different perspective. Different perspective. And that's really really big shifts. It's just a different perspective. A different perspective. And that's really, you know, an important thing. I mean, sometimes we get stuck in our own scotomas and our own blind spots or, you know, belief systems that

are self-limiting. You know, I remember years ago, I, you know, I loved hiring employees and the management stuff. And then one day I was very disgruntled. Then I realized that the problem was I was hiring employees. No, I'm just kidding. We just do the jokes here. Boys are wonderful people. Sometimes they're better than me. In fact, a lot of my employees have been better than me. And that's been awesome. That's the goal. That's the goal. You don't want to hire people that are smaller than you.

You don't want to be the ceiling of your organization. You want to be the foundation you want to build up. Oh, we spend time hiring people, do multiple interviews. That's the key. That's one of the keys. There's many keys. I'm sure you consult a lot on that. Now you talk about the gap in your book in the title.

What is the, what is the gap and how to manage them? Can you tease us out a little bit on, on what this gap thing is? Yeah. So actually it's, it's three gaps, gaps, the strategic, the tactical and the operational. And basically the strategic is does your organization value the manager role as part of organizational design? And so we need to bridge that gap where we recognize that managers as a role have something to offer. The tactical gap is do managers know what the heck they're supposed to be doing? So if managers aren't leaders, what is it that managers actually do, which is the act of

management most of the time? So we help them understand that. And then the operational one is answering the question of teamwork makes the dream work, what makes the teamwork? And that is, I think it's one of two things. It's either leaders who are good at engaging in management, or it's managers who are good at engaging in leadership. So we have to help you understand what is management versus leadership, who's a manager versus a leader. And once we kind of have clarity on the concepts, it's just mixing it all together. And that's what leads to the teamwork actually making an impact. You know, you mentioned something too earlier, I think it was about you use the word culture or

something that affects. Culture champions? Yeah, yeah. Then the leaders being culture champions. You know, I learned this a long time ago. I think I got it from Peter Senge's book, The Fifth Discipline and creating a learning organization. I remember thinking the first time I want to build a big organization, I want it to

be a learning organization. And so a lot of leaders, when I talk to them, I'll ask them two things that they seem to, most of the times, maybe I don't talk to the right people, you've talked to probably more than I have over 20 years, but I'll ask managers, what is your management style? And they have no clue. And they, and so they don't have it defined in their own head, let alone, you know, their people are like, what is the hell going on? And then culture, managing the culture, the community, the health of the community, making

sure that you're a good, fair judge as a leader. One of the things I try and always do with my leadership is be transparent and to signal to people through my beacon of leadership that I'm a fair judge, that I'm going to give them a fair shake, that if there's an issue, I'm going to try to be a good judge, especially if it's a conflict between two different employees or, or management or, you know, some sort of conflict, I'm going to try and be a good judge. I'm going to make a decisions because, you know, people see people get fired out the door and they think, Oh, Chris on a tear is, you know, he woke up on the wrong side of the bed, you know, stuff like that.

Sometimes there's popularity, contest cultures that are kind of very high schoolish, where if you don't kiss the boss' ass enough, you know, it doesn't matter how much work you do, but if you don't kiss the boss' ass enough, you know, you, you know, you've got that culture where the high school courts are where they're like, if you don't, you know, you don't do any work and just kiss the boss' ass and you get a promotion. So, you know, trying to make sure that there's that, that sequential sort of culture. I don't know if you want to talk about that, but I find most people I talked about, they have no intention awareness or

design. And for me, that sort of design is paramount. Oh man. You're dropping, I'll say dropping gems there. There was so much in there we could pick into. I'll start with the culture piece. Two of the things I talk about with clients is culture and process. You got both all the time, whether you know it or not. The thing is, there's sort of a four box that they fit into. It's visibility. Is it explicit or is it implicit? And it's the intentionality. Is it ad hoc or intentional? Most cultures, most processes fall into the ad hoc implicit. So nobody talks about them.

Everyone just knows them. It's tribal knowledge. And you just kind of make them up as you go. The goal is to take your culture and your processes and move them into the intentional and explicit. So they're named, they're documented, people understand what it actually means so that when you're not in the room as the leader, particularly, people are still on know what the boundaries are of what's acceptable and what we're looking to do in this space. Because the minute you leave the room, if you, people don't know what to do next, then you are the culture. And that's a culture of one. And that is a very, and that's a lot of where miserable leaders come from. They grow to

the scalability where the culture of one no longer works. And that's a huge inflection point. Yeah. I mean, I'm just kind of shocked. Maybe it's cause I've just been so focused on it. And then, you know, some people they're just, they've adopted the culture you come into and sometimes that can't be good, especially if you're doing a rebuild or a reset, you know, or a company has had some toxic leadership, you know, you've got to come in and, and you've got to sell people that you're going to change the culture to something healthy, that you're a healthy leader, you know, and sometimes that can be more work than just

creating your own company. But, you know, any company I create or group or community that I create, I have a lot of gaming groups online, dating groups and different things, any sort of thing that I create the moment I launch that thing, there's a focus on what are my rules? What are the communities rules? What, what, what is my intent on the culture and safety that I want to build in that community? What does my leadership look like? And unfortunately, I can do a lot of that in my sleep. But even then, you know, you kind of have to ask yourself, you know, you have to do what I like to call the old, oh, it's from hunt for red October, where you check your six, you turn the boat around and make sure that you're not being hunted by another submarine.

I forget what it's called, but it's, you flip, you flip, you check your six and you go, am I really holding up what I think I'm holding up? Does this really stand up? Are my actions falling through my words? Yeah, I mean, that reminds me of a, so one of the concepts I share with people, I love like giving people frameworks and ways of understanding.

I call it the four C's. If you're struggling in any spot, check your four C's. It's do people know that they're cared for? Are you getting clarity? Are you being consistent? And are you communicating? You can do those four things well. You will weather pretty much any storm that

you're going to come across. It's usually one of those four that's missing. And ideally it would actually be over communicate. I just didn't fit with the alliteration. So would you say communicate six times? And that's real important. It's like the legs of a stool. Yeah.

Yeah. You miss one, things collapse. You've got to, Being a leader is hard. And I remember, I'm sure that people are going to scream in the audience because they're like, he said it for the 5,000th time. But I used to keep a picture on my desk, it's still my storage that says, basically the implication was just because you're given a title doesn't mean you're good at leadership or something in that effect.

And you need to earn that title every day with your people. And so that could be grounded. I mean, it's really easy being a CEO of the company you own to lord around your 100 employees and be like, I know everything, which I do as Napoleon. I dress up as Napoleon too, and I put my hand in the chest. And then I lord around with the sword and knight people and stuff. Sometimes they chop off heads, but yeah, the judge, the judge is working on it. I get one of my six ankle bracelets off next week. So I'm pretty happy about that. I mean, all the

greatest hits, the callbacks on the Chris Voss show today. It's early days. What, what maybe is in your book that, uh, you want people to maybe teased out to know about, to help them pick it up? Maybe we haven't touched on, you know, there's, there's power of Epic management here and in the Epic spelled funky, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. So I'll pick a couple of things. One, just because you mentioned it earlier about managers, not

knowing their management style. Articulation is extremely important. Because it's very hard to feel successful in something you can't define. So if you don't know what management is for your organization or for yourself, it's really, really hard to feel successful in it. So you need to be able to articulate what that is. A concept that I love to share a lot is knowing the difference between rock stars and rising stars. Like everyone wants to shine. Everyone wants to be a star, but there's two very different ways along the pole that people tend to show up within that. The rising star is the person who wants to use this role to prepare them for the next role. And the rock star is the person who wants to take this role and go deep into it and become

the expert on this particular role. As particularly new managers, they tend to treat everyone like a rising star because they are usually themselves a rising star. If you've moved into management, most likely you've been promoted into that role and possibly you're looking to be promoted into another role. So when someone stands out on your team, you're like, I got to support them. I got to make them into a rising star. I get them ready for the next thing, the next thing. They might just be a rock star.

And so letting people know that you're, you're aware where they're at and asking them, are you a rising star or rock star, which also can shift, you know, becoming a new parent. I wanted to be a rock star. I didn't want to go into a new job. I just wanted to get real good at the one I was doing so that I could be present for my kids as I were becoming people in the world. Other times in my career, I want to be a rising star. So having that be like a check in, just be, are you a rising star? Are you a rock star? That's a good distinction to help people figure out where they're at. Yeah. I mean, how do you have that conversation with, so I'll give you an example on how to handle that or not how to handle that. I'll give you an example of what happened to me as a kid. So I was like a stupid 20 year old kid. Things haven't changed much clearly clearly except for the age. And I worked in a dealership and I, I, I was a business guy back then.

I, there was a leasing company I worked from. I, I fell out of business. I had no other skills. And since it was kind of in the car leasing business, I, I did dealership sales for a year. And so one of those things where you find your way and it was, it was actually the greatest sales opportunity for me in the world that changed my life, but I would always wear a suit because I wanted to be, I grew up poor.

I wanted to be that professional guy. I was going to school for being a stockbroker. I always wore a suit and tie and look nice. I, you know, cheap seer suit, nothing special, but I wore a suit. And so I kind of stood out from a lot of the other dudes and I'd been studying how to become business. I spent most of my 18 to 22 years, 22 age reading Harvard Business Review, trying to get prepared for being a CEO someday.

And the management one day came to me and they go, hey, you hey, we really think you're a future management person and we're going to start seeing if we can't develop you. The GM made a comment, he goes, look at some of these lackeys around here, see, it's kind of rough. They had to use car division. Those guys are pretty salty and good men. But they can be a little, basically all the salesmen would disappear anytime a cop brought the lock because they're worried about child support, alimony, or I don't know, whatever warrants they had from the weekend.

But so he was like, you know, there's people are pretty salty around here. You know, we want to invest in you. Me and my stupid mouth, like a couple days later, went up to the assistant manager and basically made the same, made the inference. And I was like, yeah, you know, you're right. And I, you know, looking around here, I probably should be good. There are, you know, Dave's right. There are lackeys around here and the assistant manager looked at me and you

can see I, he was like, what? And, and that was the end of that. I, I think after that, I was sick for three days when I came back. They're like, yeah, we're not doing this with you. Fuck off. They fired me. I didn't call them sick. That helped too.

But yeah, telling that to the system manager and passing that along was not one of my brighter ideas. So I think I bring up that story. So how do you be careful not to overinflate someone's ego, especially when they're a stupid young kid like me or old kid like me. How do you handle that so that you're not creating a monster head-wise? Because I've done that with salespeople and they just get worse sometimes if they're already bad. They already do enough cocaine and hookers on the side and they're just like, I'm the best salesman you have. Thanks for telling me. I'm going to do more.

Yeah, no, I guess two things within that is one of my favorite talks that I do is called managers or zero value add non-leaders, which is a part about the clarity piece. And one of the big pieces with that is that managers and leaders are contingent roles in every organization. The only people who actually add value to an organization are the contributors. You fire all the contributors, your managers and leaders are going to sit around to another thumbs or else they're going to have to actually do the real work that people are doing at the contribution level. What is the point of a manager or

leader? Leaders are to set where's the future vision of the organization? Where are we going to find more value to mine in the future? And the manager's role is to multiply that value, which means you have to know your people, you are contingent to their success. And if you're doing it all yourself, you are one not doing management, you're just a high paid individual contributor that's probably screwing everyone else around you. And they're not creating more value. So you're a negative multiplier to your organization, or at the very least a fractional. So helping them understand like, look, if you want to step into this role, what

success looks like is going to be different. It's not how well you do, it's how well the team does. And if the team struggled in, you got to own that because that's what you're here to do now. Yeah. It's so important. So talk to us about the stuff you do at IPN, Inflection Point, Nexus Advisors, some of the different, how you help people, how they can approach, on board with you, et cetera.

Yeah. So, I mean, we've got a bunch of different on-ramps because we know people are coming to different levels of, we have online courses, we do a lot of facilitation work. Our big thing is programs, helping people institute new things into their overall organization and then being strategic partners. Like we have a role of uncover the matrix where we'll be on site for seven weeks to help you say, okay, what is actually going on here? All the way up to being like a fractional chief strategy officer

to help design the future. And what that's all boiling down to is people a lot of times confuse progress with activity. And don't recognize that progress is actually a three-step process. One, you have to be oriented. Where are you trying to get to? What's your why? Is everyone aligned to that? Then it's activation, which is what do we actually have to do to get there?

And then it's sustained momentum. How do we make sure that we're doing this in a way that the fire keeps burning and the engine keeps running. Yeah. How do we, how do we keep the fires burning as they say, culture transformation, strategic facilitation, organizational health. We talked about culture, leadership development. This is what a lot of people do. I'll cue you up on this on the pitch. You know, one of the things that happened, we talked this about in the show is a lot of, you know, somebody would be, you know, being a good employee and they're kicking ass, taking names, maybe they're top salespeople, maybe they're top person that's on that team.

And they're really good at being the worker bee sort of person. And you know, maybe they lead the team a little bit, but then they go, you know, the company goes, Hey man, we're promoting you. We're giving you the title and the money and have fun with that. And a lot of times they're not developed as leaders. They don't, they need a whole, maybe you correct me. They need a whole new skillset or maybe a deeper skillset of what leadership is if they've never had it before.

A hundred percent. And I mean, that is a, one of the oldest tales we talk about all the time. Don't, don't take your best, like, salesperson and make them your worst manager. And the reason we do that is, I think it's part of the Pareto principle, the 80-20 rule applies here, that when you move into management, I don't call them soft or hard skills anymore, I call them transferable and contextual. So you are really, really good at the contextual skillset

that leads to success on your team as a contributor. So we now put you in management. That success skillset is only 20% of what makes you good at management. The other 80% are all the transferable skills. Can you help people have clarity on what their role is? Do they have good job descriptions? Do you have good organizational design

for the right number of people? Do you have clarity on what success is? Do you have metrics? Do you have goals? How are people right number of people? Do you have clarity on one's successes? Do you have metrics? Do you have goals? How are people trending as they move through the organization? Are you helping them be better tomorrow than they were yesterday? All of those pieces are transferable because they will help you be successful in any organization. I don't care if you have no idea what the people on your team do.

If you can bring that skill set in, you will at least be 80%, which is a passing grade. It's not something you write home about. You still have to figure out what your people are doing if you want to be a great manager and an exceptional manager. But that skill set is the important piece. But when people get moved into that role for the first time, they start to get afraid. It's the theory and practice are very different. All of a sudden, you're second guessing yourself some of that posture syndrome might set in. you double down on the skillset you know, which is the actual piece. And if you're already getting 100% on that 20%, it's not going to increase your grade. You have to be able to do the other piece and helping people articulate the difference between

the two and how to develop that skillset. That's a huge part of what the book and the Epic Management Model is about. You made a coffee cup comment, I like to call them, that said something, I have bad ADHD, but it says something about how you need to be improving your people every day. Some of that effect, there was a line that you had there, do you remember? Michael Slauson People will be better tomorrow than they were yesterday. Pete Slauson Yeah, I need to mount that on my wall, or a coffee cup, or maybe, you know, a knuckle crusher. My math teacher had one of those in high school, big paddleboard.

He broke someone's hand and that was in his career, but don't do that folks. I'm just, they're just jokes. Don't write me. We're professionals here. Don't try to call me. Yeah. Don't do this at home or your office, but no, I need to put that on a coffee cup because it's really important.

You know, I, I've talked about how one of the things I always do is move around my office and try and touch the hearts and minds of people, check in with them. How's things at home? How's things going in your life? How are you holding up? Can you give me your social security card and loan me your Amex? You know, that sort of thing. You know, letting people know I gave a shit about them.

You know, I've watched the CEO of HP move throughout his day and how he, and it's a bad word to use with HR, touching people, hearts and minds, but it is in essence, I don't know, I just haven't found a better word, but it's connecting, maybe connecting people and letting them know that you give a shit. Yeah. That, you know, you're just not like, Hey, did you, you have your TPS reports? Okay, fuck off. See you by, you know, that sort of shit from office space.

And, and, you know, a lot of times, you know, checking in on people, you know, I've had employees that have struggled and you're like, man, we're probably going to fire Bob because Bob's fucking shit up right now and turns out they're in the midst of a divorce, you know, and Bob was a great employee for five years. And suddenly Bob's off the mark. You know, I've, I I'm gonna be a psychologist as CEO I'm sure you've seen this movie a million times But you know, sometimes I have to do brain surgery

Psychology level and I have to get in there and you know I have a salesman come to me and be like I've been selling all sorts of shit and suddenly I can't sell anymore I don't know what's going on and you're like great. It's like I need a more work No, but you know, you've got to get in there and find out. And sometimes maybe it's a home situation or something's not going their life. You know, one of the big blobs I usually have with salespeople is they start making a lot of money, becoming more successful than they've ever been. And so they kind of feel a little fat and they don't have that driver of

starvation anymore. And, you know, then, then you got to deal with that. I don't know. You're some of your thoughts on some of that. Yeah, no, that's, that's it. I mean, that's definitely the care piece of the care, clarity, consistency, and communication that shows up in that piece. Um, I think management, probably the biggest reason managers exist is one-on-ones like one-on-ones are the touch point of the organization.

That's what makes it flow and move forward smoothly, consistently, and helping people grow. And two, I think of the one is knowing that the one-on-one is not the manager's time, it's the employee's time. And what the manager is asking is basically, how am I helping you move forward in this? And two questions I love to ask are, what's something exceptional you did since our last meeting?

And what's something like outstanding you're looking forward to? A couple of reasons. One, people don't like to toot their own horns most of the time. Maybe in the sales world, my experience of it is a little bit different. You got to have a little bit of that hubris to be in that space a lot of the time.

But at this, people struggle to name their gifts. And so asking them to do so on a regular basis helps them open up. And also, if I go two or three one on ones, where they can't name something exceptional they did or something outstanding or they're excited about, that's basically like a stay interview. I'm like, what's going on? You're just not, you're not feeling it right now.

I'm not getting it. Let's take this meeting to talk about that. Like, is there something going on in this space that we need to address, bring to the surface? And that can be that human side of things that you're not overseeing a role, you're overseeing a person. And yes, they have accountabilities,

but they are all the other things outside of those boundaries. And if you're not accepting that into the mix, those pressures from the outside are gonna start to crush those accountabilities real quick. So you have to figure out how to bring it in to the conversation and create that as a safe space. And one-on-ones. That's the touch point for managers. Yeah. Yeah. You see, you use the touching again. HR is going to call both of us now.

It's a license above the belt. I mean, most of them think above the belt. It's hearts and minds. It's all above the belt. I don't touch anybody anymore since the nineties. I saw that Michael Douglas movie in the nineties. That's when we had to start doing the sexual arrest on people. And I don't touch anybody anymore since the nineties. I saw that Michael Douglas movie in the nineties. That's when we had to start doing the sexual arrest on people. And I, I don't touch anybody. I, in fact, I, I have one of those bubbles. I roll around my office and from John Travolta pulling seventies reference right now. Or like the devilish man high five where everyone does the high five. Yeah. But yeah, yeah. From over there, six feet, six feet distance. COVID was my

cure. I mean, cause now I have an excuse feet, six feet distance. COVID was my cure. I mean, cause now I have an excuse to stay six feet away from me. I do that with my family and relatives too at Christmas. Yeah. They don't want to be near me either. Cause I only bathe five once every month or something. Just be economical and environmental. Yeah.

It helps if you do that bathe once a month thing too, cause people just stay the fuck away from you and have some peace. Yeah. Doesn't work well with the wife, but that's not a problem. Anyway, enough jokes aside. As we go out, any final thoughts or teasers you want to do and all that good stuff. Maybe we missed. I think just shout out to you for doing this. I love the program. This has been a great interview and yeah, it's not a once or twice. Yeah. If yeah, if you're in a miserable leader space and you're like, I don't know why, look me up, give me a phone call.

30 minutes we can talk. If that's all it takes to get you unstuck, happy to do it. All my employees are dialing phones right now. I don't know what's going on, but I can hear yours ringing in the background. That's weird. So give people a final pitch on how can they onboard with you the dot coms, et cetera, et cetera. I get to know you've been on the internet.

Yeah. IPNadvisors.com or manager gaps.com. Is that that's the company or the book, or you can find me on LinkedIn. There you go. So thank you very much for coming to the show. It's been very insightful. You've got some fun. Who knew management business talk could be fun and chatty. Matt, thank you very much for coming on the show.

It's been a while to have you on. Thanks, Chris. Appreciate it. And no touching, right? No touching. Just want to make that clear. Don't touch people. I'll get a call tomorrow from somebody who said, Chris said I could touch the hearts

and minds at work. So I went around the office today. Yeah, don't do that. That's going to get you with HR. That's why I don't have an HR department for myself is because- It gets in the way. Yeah. I touch too many people, evidently.

Anyway, you know, it's kind of like Nick Cannon in that sort of sense of a way. He's an Elon Musk. They've got 50 kids or something each, I think, at this point. I think they're, I think you're basically preparing a basketball team to play each other. So there's a joke. Anyway, guys, so thanks to my audience for tuning in. Order the book wherever fine books are sold. It is entitled manage your gaps. Reclaiming the awesomeness of management by Matthew D. Lay out in July 17th, 2024. Thanks so much for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, fortresschrisfoss, linkedin.com, fortresschrisfoss, chrisfoss1 on the tick tock and e and chris or facebook.com, fortresschrisfoss. Be good to each other. Stay safe or else i'll see you next time there we go that's it