The Game with Alex Hormozi - The SIMPLE Managerial Framework That Changed My Business | Ep 422

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

Communicate the expectation. Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) talks about the reasons why your employees are not doing the tasks you’re asking them to, and the process of how to turn things around using the managerial framework he’s come up with. Once you hit all the peaks of the framework’s triangle, you’re on the right path!Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Timestamps:(1:10) - Alex's framework: What if someone doesn't do what you want?(2:38) - Reason #1: They're unaware of your expectations.(4:27) - Reason #2: Lack of training; show them how.(6:17) - Reason #3: Check motivation; incentives drive action.(9:16) - Understand internal, external motivations within your team or company.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

When you're trying to diagnose a situation, if you're asking an employee, and I'll give you some of the scripting around this at the end, it's like, hey, is it this? Like, I've noticed you're not doing this thing. Is it this, this, or this that's causing it? And then you're not attacking the person, you're attacking a process and it makes it much easier to talk about. Welcome to the game where we talk about how to sell more stuff to more people in more ways and build businesses worth owning. I'm trying to build a billion dollar thing with Acquisition.com. I always wished Bezos, Musk, and Buffett had documented their journey. So I'm doing it for the rest of us. Please share and enjoy. If you deal with human beings, you are going to inevitably

try to influence them at some point to do what you would like them to do. And this happens within the context that when you go to a restaurant, you ask waiter, you hope that they put the thing in for you. Right? You want the food to come out the way you want to come out. We have desires and demands that we make of the universe, and we want them to come back to us based on our preferences.

Now, that being said, when we run a company, right, we deal with employees and other people a lot in order to organize them in a single direction to get them to the outcome that we desire. All right? And so I have talked about this in the past, but I will give you Alex's simplest framework, which is a triangle framework. If you don't know why I am, my name is AlexerMorosy.

I'm probably companies that deserve $100 million a year to make these because I want you to make tons of money. And then hopefully partner with us in the future to get from $3 million to $10 million to $20 million and beyond. All right. Awesome. So let's rock and roll. So one of the easiest frameworks that I've actually been somebody who's struggled at the managerial side more than kind of like the strategy or the marketing things like that. Like I've struggled more on the managerial side. So for me, frameworks here in some ways actually provide me more value than other frameworks because some of this other frameworks came more nationally to me.

This one did not. And this one is something that I have stolen ruthlessly from Layla because she's like, one he really does more than managing than I do. But I'm sharing this for the entrepreneurs of the world because I hope that you do not struggle as I did. All right. So if you want somebody to do something and they do not do it, what do you do? All right? So there are three reasons that someone will not do something. And part of this, two of these, I snagged from Andy Grove, who was the founder and storied CEO of Intel. He wrote high output management, which is an excellent, excellent book. It's a little advanced, but it's really good. So recommend. That being said, he said there's only

two reasons that an employee does not do what you want them to do, which is either they do not know how or they are not motivated, right? And so he said, therefore, the job of the boss is to motivate and to train. He said, if you're not training and you're not motivating, you're not being a good boss. And I thought that was wonderful. That being said, I came up on a circumstance in my life where both of those situations were not actually the case. There was a third scenario, which came up, which is why I now have a triangle for why people don't do stuff. All right? Number one is they don't know that you want them to do it. And so I'll tell you a quick story. So I had a sales manager that I really wanted to succeed, right? And so we hired them and they were new and I was super excited. And, you know,

a few weeks in, I was like, hey, dude, had a conversation with some of the sales guys and you haven't done any call reviews. WTF, bro. And the guy was like, I was unaware that you wanted me to do call reviews. I was like, well, I just, I mean, I just figured that's what you would do as a sales director. Now, mind you, that is probably what they should be doing a sales director. But guess what I didn't do? I didn't tell him. I didn't tell him I wanted him to do. that. And so two things here with communicating expectations. Number one is you have to communicate them. Number two is you have to repeat the communication. Number three, you have to make sure it's documented, all right, which means it's in writing in ideally multiple places. And if you can, make sure that

it's part of daily or weekly checklist or things that they report on. The things that you ask them to give you are going to be the things that you subconsciously communicate are important to you. All right. So if you say, hey, I need you to report on these three metrics. Guess what they're going to think is important to you. The three metrics. So if you want something to be done, make sure they are reporting it to you on a weekly or daily basis. The faster the communication cadence that you have around the item or task or activity or metric, the more important they will deem it. So if you meet twice a day about a specific metric, they will think it's very important, right? If you meet once a quarter and it's one line item on a slide chart, they will probably think

it's less important. And if you don't report on it at all and never talk about it at all, they will definitely not think it's important and very, very, very high likelihood of not doing it. All right? So peak of the triangle here is communicate the expectation. It sounds silly. But when you think about this, and this is why I'm sharing this framework, is that when I have somebody who's not doing what I would like them to do or not adhering to the preferences

that I have, I think, which one of these three is it? And so it's very helpful. It's also really helpful when you're trying to diagnose a situation, if you're asking an employee, and I'll give you some of the scripting around this at the end, it's like, hey, is it this? Like, I've noticed you're not doing this thing. Is it this, this or this that's causing it? And then you're not attacking the person, you're attacking a process and it makes it much easier to talk about. All right, that was number one. Number two is training, which is, do you not know how to do this thing? Do you not know how to do a call review? Well, let me tell you what a call review looks like. Let's do two of them together. And we'll record the thing so that in the future you can go back

to it, right? This is what we're looking for. This is the transitions. This is how we take the notes. And this is how I want you to communicate it to the sales team. Aha. Right. And so not only did we communicate what we wanted, we said, hey, this is how you do it. And this is how I would like it to be done. Right. And then finally, this is how I want you to report on it to me so that I know it was done. Very, very simple. But you know what? People don't do it. And being advanced is simply never not doing the basics. And I do have a double negative there because that makes it makes you think a little harder. But what it means is that being advanced is always doing the basics. Like that is what being advanced is, is doing the basics even while you have tremendous volume, right? If you think about this

for a second, when people start small businesses, they tend to grow because they have lots of personal interaction. They provide lots of service. They service with a smile. And what happens? They hire some teammates. The service goes down. There's less smiles, less skill. And so what they did was they stopped doing the basics at scale. It's all it is. And that's why businesses plight up. And so it's thinking about what are the things that made you successful in the beginning. And then how can I duplicate those at scale? It's always doing the basics. That's what it is. All right. So number one, communicating the expectations, doing so ideally, frequently and making sure. it's measured. And in writing, and if we do that, we have hit the peak of the pyramid. Number two

is that we have the training side is that we show them how to do it and how we want them to do it and how we want them to report on those things. All right, that's number two. Real quick, guys, you guys already know that I don't run any ads on this and I don't sell anything. And so the only ask that I can ever have of you guys is that you help me spread the words so we can out more entrepreneurs, make more money, feed their families, make better products and have better experiences for their employees and customers. And the only way we do that is if you can rate and review and share this podcast. So the single thing that I ask you do is you can just leave a review. But take you 10 seconds or one type of the thumb. It would mean the absolute world to me.

And more importantly, it may change the world for someone else. Number three, the drum roll please is incentive. It's motivation. Is do they want to do the thing? Because think about it, if I said, hey, dude, I need you to do X, Y, and Z, right? And you know how to do X, Y, and Z and you're not doing it, the reason might be that they are unmotivated. Now, I'll give you the caveat here is that if someone says, I've been too busy, right? Now, you can look at that because that's usually what will happen. Like, let's, let's, let's, let's, you know, go real world for a second, right? Theory sounds great, but what's real world? They'll say I was busy, because they're not, no one's going to be like, I was not motivated, right? So part of that could be

motivation, right? Because if I said, hey, if I give you $10,000 to get this done by tomorrow, will you do it? It probably would. So I think with enough motivation, they can do it. But that being said, they might also not have the training know how to manage their schedule in a way to prioritize these activities. So you might have to train them on other components to make sure that it's easier for them. Right. Now, that being said, when you introduce that, this three frameworks, I just love it from a conversational perspective and how to assess certain problems. So if you have a teammate. So this is for you right now, real world. If you have a teammate or a director or manager or an individual contributor who's in the company and they are not doing things to the extent

that you want them to, to the quality you want them to, at the speed that you want them to, or they're just not doing it at all. Think about using this three prong framework, which is like, hey, Johnny, you're underperforming right now and it's really unlike you, right? And the reason we say that is because it also embeds a compliment, which is like, it's not like you to suck, right? And so automatically we're actually protecting the ego of the person while still attacking the behavior. All right? It's really nuanced. I learned that one from just being real, but it works really, really well. She said, hey, it's not like you to be late for stuff.

So what's going on, right? It's not like you to not get your end-a-week reports in. Like, what's going on? Right? And this is where when you say that what's going on, it's you look through the three lenses. Like, what's going on? Is it you didn't know that I wanted you to do it? Did I not communicate it well?

Is it that you don't know how to do it either in general or given your workload? Or is it that you're not motivated to do it, right? Are there other priorities that are more motivating for you to do? Right. And so when you ask those questions, it gives them very clear boxes to direct their replies. And then you can isolate the issue. and then you can solve it. And the thing is, if you have the three boxes

and you can isolate the issue and then you take the actions to solve it. And if the activity still doesn't happen, then you say, hey, we talked about these three boxes. We solved the problem. Like, and I can't say we haven't communicated. So is it just a motivation issue? Right.

And so at that point, then you can get into a little bit more real conversation. It's like, you know what, I actually hate this job. And you're like, you know, like, we hate having you. I'm kidding. You don't, you wouldn't say,

oh my gosh, that sucks. Let's see. And if you like, and if you like, well, maybe there's another role in the company that would fit you. I would say nine times at 10, that's what you want to do. It's usually not the right call. Because usually if you were to hire somebody for this other position that you might have open the company, you should probably just hire the person that you would normally hire there. Because if you look at that person and this person, and a track record of

failure does not make a high likelihood candidate. All right. So big picture for everyone, use the triangle of figuring out why people do not do the things that you want them to do, which is one, did I communicate the expectation to you? Am I doing it with adequate importance to tell you how important this is to me, which is frequency and detail of communication and making sure that it's recorded down, right? The training, oops, that's this side of the triangle. The training is that I actually show them how to do it and then how to manage the other things in general that they are doing so they can get all this stuff done. Yes, check that box. And then finally, are they motivated or incentivized in order to get this done? And so I talked about their

internal motivation, but there's also external motivation, which is like, do I need to do? Do I need to rely on how they're getting compensated? Because if, for example, I asked them to do this thing and they're getting compensated for four other things and they don't get compensated for this extra thing, well, then guess what they're probably not going to be motivated to do. The extra thing. So we have to make sure that they are properly, motivated, you know, internally as a human being in terms of they're aligned with the company. They see why this thing actually makes a difference. All right. And this is a, this is my last little tidbit on this is that people a lot of times just want to know why. Just why. Why am I doing this?

And if you if someone understands why they're doing, because otherwise activity without purpose is, is what they do at prison camps, right? It's pointless labor, right? And so that's the thing. It's like, you have to give it a point. You have to give it a purpose, right? Which is like, when you update the CRM with the notes from your calls, it helps finance. It helps duty. finance actually have good conversations with these people, which helps us collect more money and helps us get more people staying on track, right? It helps Cindy in customer success on the onboarding give them a much more personalized experience. So we want to sell something great, right?

Don't you want to sell something great? Well, if you don't put notes in, you're actually selling something that's worse because we're going to provide a worse experience for them, right? And so they're going to get on the onboarding call and we're going to be able to have no personal, we're not going to be able to know what their issues are. We're not going to know what their pains are. We're not going to know what they're struggling with. And then we can't even help them more.

So you're going to try and sell them this amazing solution. And then you're not giving us the ammo to actually do the things that you have just promised them. Oh, right? And the other reason we do this is because for us to not waste your time. So now I just did two benefits to the global benefit, which, let's be real. A lot of people might care about if they're good people, but a lot of people do not. But for you specifically, when you leave the notes, it helps us screen out candidates on the front end so that we can use that data to make your call likelihood of close higher so that a higher percentage of your time is spent closing people

and talking to people who have the money, who have the problems that we actually fix, rather than wasting time with tire kickers and people who are probably not going to buy. Does that make sense? Right. So when you do this, we help you sell more and make more money. Fair enough? Great. And so you can appeal to the larger picture of like, why do we need this as an organization?

But then also, if you can, ideally, tie it back to a personal benefit to why it benefits them. A lot of people just don't know. And so just explaining that process, you hit all three of the triangle boxes and you are far more likely to get somebody who does the things that you're asking them to do so that your company can grow the way that you want it to so you can make all the money in the world and then wonder why you did it to begin with. All right, Mosey Nation keep being awesome.

Bye.