The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 328: Joel Peterson - How To Build The Bonds That Make A Business Great

Episode Date: September 15, 2019

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk Full show notes can be found at www.LearningLeader.com Text LEARNERS to 44222 #328: Joel Peterson -- Joel Peterson is the Chairman of the Board at JetBlue Airways. He has served on more than three dozen boards over the past 45 years.  Joel is also the Founding Partner and Chairman of Peterson Partners, a Salt Lake City-based investment management firm with $1 billion under management. Peterson Partners has invested in over 200 companies through 13 funds in four primary asset classes: growth-oriented private equity, venture capital, real estate, and search funds.  Since 1992, Joel Peterson has taught courses in real estate, entrepreneurship, and leadership at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University.  Sustaining excellence = They are trusted, credible, and dependable -- They "build a high trust organization" It doesn't happen naturally.  You must be intentional about it Why is it so hard to build a trusting organization? "People are weary.  Trust is critical.  You must do what you say you are going to do." "Trust is not being gullible.  Trust is a hard edged concept." It's three parts: Character Competence Authority How to build a culture of trust? Listen -- Capture what your team is saying through 1 on 1 conversations.  Understand common values, goals, strategies Reframe the dashboard -- What does winning look like? Make sure it is clearly defined.  What's the current level of trust in the organization? How to run an effective meeting: Have a purpose, the right people in the room, and follow up assignments. Have pre-work.  It must be done.  Go through each individual member.  "Build trust by the process." How to run a town-hall: Listen carefully, repeat it.  FOLLOW UP and take action. How to handle broken trust? Fix breaches immediately. "Bad news doesn't get better with age." -- "Don't let grass grown under your feet." "Trust decreases transaction costs." -- Everything is faster when there is trust. "You can't do good business with bad people." Interview process: Understand the decision points Determine roles/responsibilities as a team Check references The most important decisions you will make is who you hire and who you fire There must be a vividly clear picture of what success is: Break down the details: Who is the champion? Time frame? Budget? -- Measure all of them to ensure all involved know what success is. Do a post-mortem: What went well? What didn't? Why? Keep your team informed: "Err on the side of over-communication." "Write a partner letter every two weeks.  Keep everyone updated." For JetBlue, there is a weekly meeting update -- a "State of the Union" for the 24,000 employees Create a learning organization -- Foster an environment where there is a love for learning. Strive for win-win negotiations Each is part of a series -- Think long term You must be fair in order to do many deals Art of the compromise -- Don't be zero sum.  You'll build a reputation and nobody will want to work with you. Embrace respectful conflict -- Create an environment where people can open disagree.  This helps people refine their ideas and make them better. Advice for husbands/dads: Be there as a cheerleader, not a policeman Be a listener, make sure you understand "Love is the most powerful force in the world." Use the "Get To Know You Document" Why joining The Learning Leader Circle is a good idea  

Building a high trust set of relationships really speeds things up, makes everything more durable. You can be more innovative, more creative, because you're working together transparently. This episode is brought to you by Seeing Around Corners, the new book by Rita McGrath, a global expert on strategy and innovation. It's your go-to guide for spotting and responding to strategic inflection points in business before they happen. After all, inflection points don't happen overnight. Someone in some business is capitalizing on the early warning signs. Learn how you too can see around corners and set your business up for success, featuring a special forward by best-selling author Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School.

Seeing Around Corners as this falls must-read business book. Welcome to The Learning Leaders Show presented by Brixie and Meyer. I am Ryan Hawk. Thanks so much for being here. Text learners to 4-4-2-2-2 in order to join tens of thousands of learning leaders from all over the world. Receive Mindful Monday updates what I'm reading, watching, writing, thinking about. Also have the opportunity to be part of my book launch team. Text learners to 4-4-2-2-2.

Now, on tonight's featured leader, this one was a real treat for me. It's the great Joel Peterson. Joel's the chairman of the board of JetBlue Airways. responsible for leading 24,000 people at JetBlue. In addition to that, he's taught at the vaunted Stanford Graduate School of Business since 1992. And author of an incredible book titled The Ten Laws of Trust, Building the Bonds that Make a Business Great. A few of the topics we discussed, the three key parts to trust and why it's not a soft and gullible concept. it's actually hard-edged.

And Joel explains more. And then we go inside his unique interview process to hire high-performing, high-trust leaders, and he explains with specific details how you can do this. And then how to be a better negotiator and create win-win long-term agreements in the marketplace. This one is so good. It's the great Joel Peterson. All right, here we go. Joel Peterson.

and great to have you here on the Learning Leaders Show. Welcome, man. Nice to be here, Ryan. I am fascinated about your background and what you've been able to accomplish in your career of leading and serving other people. To get us started, Joel, I'm curious. When you think about why you've sustained excellence over an extended period of time, as well as the commonalities of the leaders that you respect and you look up to in your life, what have you found to be the commonalities among the people?

those leaders who sustain excellence? So I think there's several things that leaders who stay in leadership positions do. I think the first one I would say is they become trusted. They're people that you can rely on. They keep their promises. And that's really one of the reasons I wrote this book on the 10 Laws of Trust. You know, what do you have to do to build a high trust brand? And I really observed that people can build high trust organizations too.

They can be intentional. about building a high trust organization. It doesn't happen naturally. It's not easy. It takes a lot of work. It happens a conversation at a time. But to me, that's the most powerful currency a leader has. So while we find leaders who are powerful and who rely on rewards and punishments and they lead through that,

to me that's not real leadership. Real leadership is to inspire people to become their best selves. I think that the thought of trust absolutely makes sense and everybody is listening right now in their car or they're working out and they're nodding their head saying, well, yeah, of course, Joel. Like we've got to have trust. Why is this so hard or why is it so hard to create an organization that is built upon trust? Well, people are human beings and they have become wary. They've been burned from time to time from trusting something that did. didn't happen. And it's hard to keep promises. Basically, trust is developed when you deliver

results that you've promised. And so sometimes people fail to do that because the weather intervened, because they didn't understand the assignment clearly. So there's certain kinds of betrayals of trust that are relatively innocent, but they're just derivative of being human beings. There are other kinds, though, where people are bad actors, where there's a betrayal. And those are ones that you have to excise. You have to figure out how to overcome. So I think it's a challenging thing. I think we all want to trust. We all believe we're trustworthy, but we've all failed to deliver from time to time, no matter how good we are. I mean, you were a quarterback. Sometimes you overthrew the ball, I'll bet. Yeah. No, no doubt. And threw it to the wrong team as well.

that does not create confidence and trust in your quarterback if you do that. No, it's a great point, Joel. I remember kind of espousing the virtues of trust when I was a mid-level manager. And I also vividly remember a few senior leaders, ones that weren't particularly my favorites, but they would come to me and say, just you wait, little boy, just you wait, young one. once you get more repetitions in the world with people, you won't sing that jolly song much longer. You'll realize that you can't lead with trust because you'll get burned. They'll chew you up and spit you out.

And I always felt, well, one, I hated hearing that. And two, I thought, does it have to be that way? Is that really the way it has to be? And I made the choice to say, I don't think so. seeing your work and what you've said over the course of your career, and we're going to get into your story here in a second, makes me feel so much better about that. Why, for that person listening that has that older person talking to them, just you wait, young one, what do you say to that person? I would say that they probably don't really understand what trust is. They think trust is this fuzzy, warm feeling that you're being gullible. So they say trust is being gullible. And I find that trust, if properly understood is a very hard-edged concept. It's something that isn't the warm and fuzzy feeling about something.

It is an assessment. And in the book, you'll see that I say it's derivative of three things. One is character, two is competence, and three is authority. So somebody may have high character. They may have the desire to do the right thing, but if they're not competent, there's no point in trusting them to do something they're incapable of doing. and if they don't have the authority to deliver on it, there's no point in trusting me. So they may be wonderful people.

They may be competent people, but if they can't really deliver on the promise, you shouldn't trust them. So that says it's really, you have to be fairly analytical and thoughtful. And then when you trust people, you trust them an assignment at a time. And you communicate a lot. So I think you give people a leash. They either perform or they don't. And if they do, then you give them another assignment. And trust is built kind of a molecule.

a time, a layer at a time, a conversation at a time, a conversation at a time, a delivery at a time. And that way, trust can be built in a durable way. And it's not just this fuzzy feel-good feeling that is kind of a polyana thing that you get people like that who will kind of make fun of it and say, just wait until you grow up and are burned. You're not someone who just studies this and writes about it. You've lived it. You're currently the chairman of JetBlue. So you are, you are, have been in our involvement. and actually running something successfully. I like to take this, Joel, from, we're zoomed out a little bit now, and now let's zoom in and get tactical for the person who is running a business like you've done.

How, let's say someone's getting ready for their Monday meeting. They're leading a team. They're getting ready for their Monday meeting. And they're saying, you know what? I don't know if I've focused enough on creating a culture of trust. what are some of the first few actions that manager who's getting ready to lead their meeting can take to start pointing towards this environment, this culture of building one of trust? One of the most important things that you learn to do is listen. You don't trust people who talk and are telling you things all the time.

If somebody listens and captures what it is you're saying, you'll find that your trust level in them goes up. And so I find that it's not the going into the meeting with 10 people where you can build trust. It's the one-on-one conversations you have with each of those managers. And you build trust with each of them. And you build it around common values, common goals. And if you really do share values and you share goals, you can build a strategy that you all want to follow. And you can take assignments, which are really the tactics for executing the strategy. And you all are on the same page.

And then ultimately, as the leader, what you do is you determine what the dashboard is. How are we going to measure success? So I always ask the question, what does winning look like? What would it be like to win? And then how do we measure that winning? And so get everybody on the same page. I don't think you can do it on a Monday morning going into a meeting, say, I'm going to now build a high trust organization. I think you have to say, I guess for me it starts out with saying, what is the current trust level, the organization?

Where are we? Where are we deficient? And actually in the second edition of the 10 laws of trust, we added a diagnostic where with 10 questions, you can kind of ask and get your team to respond to these 10 questions and determine whether you're a low, medium, or high trust organization as a starting point. And that's important to know. I'm curious. What was, and perhaps even now, I'm curious about it, your day-to-day interactions running a company like JetBlue. I know every day is different, especially when you're in a high up leadership role. But was it a series of one-on-one conversations with leaders throughout your business and building trust one person, one conversation at a time? What about when you'd have a town hall with the entire group there? Because I think people listening have all sorts of these types of actions going on, that they're working to prepare themselves for to be better in a one-on-one situation. when I have to share the vision of my team and why you should trust me, why we should trust each other. So could you expand a little bit on some of your day-to-day interactions and your thought process behind?

This is my approach to one-on-one. This is my approach to a town hall, that type of behavior. Well, I think you're wise to split it into these different things. I think the one-on-ones are to me, they're the foundational thing. But you do a bunch of other things as a leader. You do hold larger meetings. You run larger meetings. I think how you run a meeting really is an important element in building.

If you don't have a purpose for the meeting, if you don't have the right people there, if you don't have follow-up assignments, trust will go down. Meetings can destroy trust. So you have to make these meetings sort of high trust events, but they have to be built upon the pre-work. For example, in a board setting, we always have, we go through. our materials with individual board members before we get them all in the boardroom together. So we've already been through the process with people so they understand it.

People have a chance to ask questions. Not everybody wants to ask a question in front of 12 people. So you build trust by the process that you go through. In the large town hall meetings, I think one of the best things to do is ask, listen, repeat what people have said. say I sense what you're saying is, repeat it, make sure that you've captured what people are doing, and then follow up. If you say you're going to do something, well, I'll have to get back with you in a week on that. Get back with them in a week. You know, a lot of times people, they've learned

these devices for putting people off, and people know that. And so they say, well, he'll never get back to me. If you want to build trust, you get back to them. So I think in town all meetings, you shouldn't expect that you can answer everything. But if you say you're going to get back to somebody, do that. It's so critical. It seems obvious. I've sat in those town halls. I've seen, yeah, we'll get back to you. And it never happens. In each town hall, it gets worse and worse. And then you know what happens? People stop talking. There's no point in raising your hand anymore. What's the point? Because you know it doesn't matter. The person is going to nod and smile and say, yeah, we'll do that. And then nothing happens. That is when you know, if you're doing your assessment level of trust in the room, that there's something wrong if people aren't willing to talk. Yeah, and it's hard to rebuild it. Exactly. Go back to square one, have one-on-one conversations. I think listening is really one of the people who are really good, active listeners, you end up trusting.

Yeah. It's very hard to, you know, most people don't know how to capture, you know, to listen and capture what the other party's saying. Well, do you say as a jumping off point, Joel, I'll go a little bit backwards. Law number 10 in your book, which is a really useful book called The 10 Laws of Trust, Bill. the bonds that make a business great is fixed breaches immediately, how to restore trust. So this could be for people in a personal relationship, too. You know, we all have friends in our own lives as well where somebody makes a mistake and they betray your trust.

And sometimes it can be amazingly damaging when this happens. What are some of the ways to fix breaches immediately? Well, I think the first idea is to say, don't let any grass grow under your feet. You know, a lot of times you say, oh, I don't know, this is awkward. And so what happens is people let time go by. And as time goes by, it always gets worse. So I find the best thing to do is just open up the conversation and say, I was really disappointed in what this happened. I want to make sure that I've understood. And in many cases, what you'll find is somebody had a completely different reading of the situation, or they understood their assignment completely differently,

or they thought they were trying to achieve something as a priority that you thought was a low priority. And just communicating on that is a way to fix things. But you have to do it quickly. You can't let time go by. Is there an example when this happened, or can you share an example of when this happened in your life or perhaps someone close to you that you've studied? Well, the one I always think of I was given an assignment early on when I was just out of business school to run some numbers on a real estate project that my boss was going to make a deal based on the numbers that I gave him. And I ran the numbers, handed him the sheet of paper, and I went home at night and re-reviewed what I'd done and I'd made a mistake. And so I went back in the next day and said, gosh,

don't use those numbers. And he said, I've already made a deal. And so then I was faced with the dilemma, what do I do now? I'm a brand new hire. I want to impress everybody. I don't want to make mistakes. This deal has been cut based on bad numbers. And so what do you do in that case? And the fact that I addressed it immediately and was open with him allowed me then to say, rather than bury it and just let it move forward, maybe nobody will ever realize it. I called the guy with whom he had done the deal and said, and explained to him. I said, this is what's happened. I made a mistake. I would love to be able to revisit this transaction. And I'll be darned if he wasn't open to that. He was quite sympathetic with it. And we ended up doing over 100 real estate financings over the next 15 years with each other.

Wow. Our trust level was so high because we'd opened up the door and we hadn't buried anything and hadn't done any spin. So that was my experience with that. Yeah, I think it's when you make a mistake, just own it quickly. Own it quickly. Talk. I think the speed with which you do that is, really a part of it. Yeah. It's staying transparent. If you want to be as I trust, you can't, you can't fuss around for a month worrying about it.

You know, I, this reminds me, I had a, I was so fortunate to have a conversation with four-star general Stanley McChrystal. And Stan is, he, you guys, you kind of remind me of each other just of how smart and likable you are. Well, he's on my board at JetBlue. He is? Yeah, so I've known Stan for seven or eight years. Incredible.

Okay. We'll stand, so it's not surprising. Stan said to me, trust decreases transaction cost. And that quote has been emailed to me a lot from listeners of my show to say. That brief moment when you guys were talking left such an impression on me because it's so true in all areas of life and business that when you have a trusting relationship, everything's faster. I mean, the Coveys wrote The Speed of Trust. I know they're involved with writing the forward of your book as well. But explain to me in your experiences of how and why trust decreases transaction cost.

Well, because you don't have to double check everything. If you've ever been in a situation to deal with somebody that you don't really trust, you double check every comment they make. You run the numbers six times. You're mistrustful about the documents. You get lawyers involved in every thing, and they are combative. often, not always, but they're sometimes quite combative and it slows things down. The other thing that happens, I think, is you end up with more durable agreements because they're

flexible. You can come in and you can make change it. If you're in a high trust agreement with somebody and you say, gosh, this isn't working, you sit down with them and they say, well, let's figure out how to make it work. If you're in a low trust thing and you come to somebody and say, this isn't working, they say, well, wait a minute, what's in this for me? How am I going to, and it starts a whole negotiation slows things down, makes agreements less durable. So I think building a high trust set of relationships really speeds things up, makes everything more durable. You can be more innovative, more creative, because you're working together transparently. One of the potential pitfalls are dangers, though, here, Joel, is because there are people listening right now who think

we live in a Pollyanna world with our conversation through the first 17 minutes or so. But one of the potential issues is if there are people out there to take advantage of somebody like Joel Peterson because they know how you lead with trust, how trusting you are of other people. What is your mechanism in place to deal with those who potentially are looking to rip you off or potentially looking to take advantage of you because of your good natured approach to the world? Well, the simple answer and the one that you will be unsatisfying is don't deal with them. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of fish in the sea.

You don't have to do business with people who are. Trammell Crow used to say you can't do good business with bad people. Right. And that's a pretty insightful summary of things. Now, you don't always have the choice. Sometimes you have to do business with people you can't particularly trust. And I would say there you have to be where. You have to be smart.

You have to involve lawyers. And it gets back to this idea that I enunciated early on. give people trust in small increments. In other words, build it up. Trust is this extraordinarily powerful and durable thing if it's built on a solid foundation. If it's not, it is extremely fragile. So I think you have to have the right image for how trust is built. Yeah.

When you are making hiring decisions, and obviously this is a very important quality to the culture that you've built in our building, I love to go inside the interview room with you. And I don't know how often you do this or I'm sure there were moments where you've done it a lot. But so if you could take us back inside what it's like to interview with you and what specifically you're looking for in a leader to hire to be a part of your team. What does it sound like? What are you looking for? Like can you take us into that flow? Yeah.

I mean, I typically like longer interviews and I like to understand the decision point. You know, when people have taken a left turn, you know, why did they do it? How did it go? What did they do? I always like to also ask them, what will your boss say when I call them about this? Because either they'll be nervous and won't want you to call the boss or they'll give some answer that they don't really know. Or they'll have great insight. And that tells you a lot.

I think a lot of the question, you know, what are your weaknesses? You know, you get these canned answers. I don't think they do much. So I think a lot of the interview questions that people use really are not that effective. I think besides having a good in-depth interview where you're taking somebody through their whole life and the various decisions they made is the reference check. I think reference checking is really a skill that is quite important when you hear from other people. You know, how did they manage this Saturday?

How do they deal with disappointment? How did they deal with success? How did their team come together? You know, you get a lot of insight. So that's a combination of trying to understand their decision-making framework, why they've done what they've done. Probably some of their motivations in life will come out through the course of telling that story and you asking questions at various points of the story. And then doing a number of reference calls, talking to people that they've interacted with on a regular basis. For sure.

It's amazing that the reference checks part doesn't happen more frequently. And I always, I'm a reference. I feel like for a lot of people and every once in a while someone calls and, and we have a good conversation. We have good chat. But then other times someone who's asked me to be a reference, they'll follow them and say, hey, I got the job. It went great.

Thanks for helping me out. And I'll say, well, they never called me. And I'm saying, how did you get it? And they're like, well, I guess they skip that part. So it is interesting to me that people don't do that more frequently. I feel like that should be a natural. part of the process. Well, if you really think about building a high trust organization, the most important

thing you do is who you hire and who you fire. That says so much to the organization. And if you don't do that well, which includes great reference checking, you'll be unlikely to build a high trust organization over time. And the other mistake I think people make in reference checking is they delegate it. They have somebody from HR make the reference check. If you're hiring somebody who's working on your team, you by gosh, need to make that reference check yourself. Absolutely. Let's get into a few more of the rules. I want to get to,

let's go in more order now. How about let's go with number three, which is empowering others. And you tell a story in the book from Google's Thomas Williams. Can you, I mean, empowering others, again, some of these at a surface level, they sound obvious. But it's not necessarily about the obvious zoomed out version. I want to get into it and say, okay, what does it mean? How do you actually empower others and sharing examples is helpful way to to talk about that as well. Yeah. Well, I mean, empowering others is obviously giving them the tools they need, giving them the responsibility and its accountability too. I think a lot of people feel like, well, I've empowered them, therefore to make them accountable or to check up on them flies in the face of empowering.

My experience is just the opposite. If you've really empowered somebody, you'll say, I'm measuring you by the three following factors. I want you to know where you stand on that. You're really empowering them by giving them the feedback around those elements. And that leads to the next one, number four, which is measure what you want to achieve. And people must know what winning looks like. And the example is the Harry Truman, the sign he had up in his office. And he comes from the show me state, Missouri, about like we got to analyze and measure.

look at our results. So what is your process to make sure people have a vivid declaration of what success looks like? You know, I'm glad you asked that question. It's really one of the most important things that you do as a leader is know what peak are we climbing and define it? Because a lot of times people are vague about it. We want to be the best this or the best that or whatever. You really have to break it down and say, this means the following. We will increase sales with it. Our margins will look like this. We'll hire a team that gets these kinds of awards or whatever. But you have to, you have to sort of quantify and measure and set time frames. I always say that when you're running a project, you need to have a champion. Somebody needs to be responsible for it. You need to be on time on

budget. So what are the resources you're going to use? What are the deliverables? And what are the time frames. And if you're clear about those things, it may feel like you're micromanaging, but you're really not. You're really just giving people the tools they need to feel empowered to get the job done. Do you, did you have a regular post-mortem process in place to, for projects or for goals or for vision set to say, okay, let's take a look back. And I'm, I'm particularly interested in this when you've had a successful year because I love, obviously you have to review failures. And most people do do that well. We're like, like, what happened this year? We got crushed and you go have these deep dives and all these meetings.

But sometimes when you have a successful year, there are certain companies that just kind of keep going without stopping and reflecting and understanding why you were successful. So what's your post-mortem process like? Well, I think either way, you need a post-mortem process. Right. You need to understand what were the drivers. What went well? What didn't go well? What would we change? What will we continue doing? What will we stop doing? I think that's a, that's a drill that most quality managers know to go through. Whether or not they do it in a way that the entire team feels motivated by it is another question. Sometimes it can feel like beating people up, making it related to bonuses or whatever, and people lose track of really we're winning

together as a team. Business is a team sport. You win or lose as a team. And the team should not only self-analyze when things aren't going on, they've had a loss, but they should celebrate together and pass credit around. And both of those increased trust levels. Number six is keep everyone informed in that you should, a rule from Max DePree, he was CEO of Herman Miller, makes great chairs. I've had some of his office chairs, by the way. But he said you have to err on the side of overcommunication.

How did you err on the side as a, or how do you, as a leader of a business, tactically now, air on the side of overcommunication. So I think there's a couple of things. One is stick your nose in people's doors, you know, and ask him, what are you working on? How's it going? There's notion of the stand-up meeting is pretty powerful. Yeah. So I think just walking in and having the habit of three-minute, five-minute meetings with various

people and making them not scheduled, just stop in. I think that's one thing. I used to, when I was managing partner at a company called Tremel Crow Company, I wrote a partner letter every two weeks. And I updated everybody on everything. How were we doing with new starts? How are we doing with leasing? How was financing going? What challenges?

What's going on in the economy? What are our competitors doing? So every two weeks, every partner would get the same letter. At JetBlue, we have a weekly meeting from various members of the management team. Could be our head of flight, our tech ops person, our commercial officer, whatever. But they write something that is about what is the state of the union in their particular area. So everybody, and JetBlue, it's 24,000 people all get this email that says, here's where we are on this issue. And if there's something happens, if there's some bad press about JetBlue, we want them to hear it from us, not from reading the Wall Street Journal.

why again seems obvious why don't most people do this well i think a lot of people don't want to talk about bad news you know they say maybe if i don't talk about it it'll go away i mean you know that politicians have learned to issue bad news on a friday night particularly a friday night before a super bowl or something like that maybe it'll go away and so everybody's kind of wise to the drill and I think we've become wary as a society. We watch people spin information and we tend to discount that I think I mentioned in the book this Howard Schultz quote where he said, you know, in the 60s when I would release a new product, 90% of the people would believe in the benefits I cited. When I do it now, 10% believe it. We've just become wary, you know, about things because people

have learned to spin. They've learned to not tell the bad news, as clearly, as openly, as completely as they tell the good news. So people feel like they're being manipulated. People are smart. I think that's one of the things that you have to start out with is you have to believe that the folks that you're dealing with are really smart. They have a level of intelligence that may not show up on an IQ test, but they know where the bodies are buried.

They know what works and what doesn't work. Don't fool them. Don't try to. Does because of this now nature and humanity, Does it make your life and role easier or harder? It does both. It sort of says you're starting out behind the eight ball with people. On the other hand, if you are able to build a high trust, transparent organization,

you have a greater competitive advantage than you might ever have had before. If people like each other and trust each other and can rely on each other and give honest and direct and immediate feedback, and we say we're a learning organization. We love to learn. I remember a leader we had who after a leasing call would get the team together and say immediately after a leasing call would say, how did we do? What went well? What didn't go well? What mistakes?

And he would start out and say, here's the mistake I think I made. So it was okay to say mistake. But it was fun because we were all learning together. That's the kind of high trust organization that tends to. thrive over time. I think when I consider these long-term relationships that I try to build with just really all the people that I value in my life, I think having win-win arrangements or negotiations is key. So number nine, the rule number nine, to strive for win-win negotiations. You know, this can be something as little as a fantasy football trade. Don't try to get one over

on your buddy when you're making a trade. You want to do trade. You want to do trade. for life. You want to be with these guys for life. And that's something just tiny and insignificant. But also is telling, you know, are you the guy who always offers the lopsided, stupid trade? No, we try to do win-win agreements. Explain to me like how you've utilized this principle and this truth to build something that's sustainable. Well, so I see every trade, every transaction, every negotiation, as part of a series. I think a lot of people see them as an episode. episode. If I can win in this episode, then I've won. I basically say, I'm trying to build, I told you early on about this guy that I did 100 deals with. I basically said, if I'm not fair with this party, I'm not going to do 100 deals with them. I'll do one. It's one and done. And over time, he would correct me. I'd make a mistake in a, in a negotiation. And he would tell me, I don't think you're really meant to do that. Because it was a high trust relationship. We ended up making better and better deals. I think it's

rare to be able to build that kind of relationship with somebody. And if you do, you'll do a lot of business with them. Again, that goes back to the idea of the speed of trust. Things are a lot, smoother when you're doing repeat transactions with people. You don't have to do all of the front-end work. I think who you choose, how you deal with them, realizing it's a long-term relationship. You know, you know, you know that's with your spouse. You know, it's a long-term deal. You don't have to win every argument, every debate. It doesn't have to be your vacation. Each time, you know, you compromise. And I think the art of compromise is actually one of the reasons in our society that we've become mistrustful. People are sort of zero sum. We see it in politics all the time now.

People don't let the other side win. It's total destruction. It's zero sum. It's 100 to nothing victories and losses. And to me, the other party has to win. And so you have to figure out how can I craft something where the other party gets what they want at a price that I can afford? long term, it's better for both. One more I want to cover number seven is embrace respectful conflict. Steve Jobs is used as an example in your book. Big believer in this. Adam Grant uses the term called be a disagreeable giver, meaning that it is helpful to your organization to speak up with the thought in mind that I am trying to help us grow. And sometimes we need to have respectful conflict or we're not always going to be on the same page. We've got to get it out there. So how do

embrace respectful conflict? Well, I think one of the things you can do is assign somebody in your organization to make the opposite case. So if I'm saying we're moving towards, we want to build a 10,000 square foot retail center somewhere. Somebody to say, this is a really bad idea because of the following reasons and make the most persuasive case they can make about that and have everybody listen to it and ask questions. You, in a sense, you've manufactured the conflict in that manufacture people refine their ideas they sandpaper what it is and i think without that process with ever everybody's just saying yes and nodding you make a lot of mistakes that you wouldn't make if you know if you just said wait a minute nobody pushed back on that how many times

have you heard an organization say well everybody thought it was a good idea at the time nobody said anything and most things where you where you do the post-mortem and look back you say i kind of knew there was something wrong well have somebody make the case yeah newsrooms, and I learned this from watching Aaron Sorkin's TV show called the newsroom, they have what they call a red team. And the red team's job is to come in after the fact and punch or put holes in the story prior to them going with it. And usually this is only for really big stories. But I think that's a good concept. And all of businesses have a red team every once in a while to poke holes in the idea or the project or the new product, whatever may be so that it forces you to really think and go

deep and understand, okay, what's the best way to do that? I have to make an argument, essentially, and having that red team can help you do that. Joel, it's an absolute pleasure. I have to ask you one more question, though, because as someone who has lived a life of a successful marriage, I believe seven children, five of them being girls, is that correct? Yeah. Yeah. Grandchildren, you know, you've passed the football in the backyard with Steve Young because Like your son-in-law played with him for the 49ers from what you mentioned before we started recording. What advice do you give to someone like me who married with children trying to keep going? I'm very fortunate to have the greatest wife in the world as far as how she and I are.

I got lucky. What advice, though, to live a life of excellent marriage and being a dad? that's the most important thing in my life and for the listeners as well who have that title. What advice could you give to me? There's a couple of things. One thing that I've learned with dealing with children is be their cheerleader, not their policeman. For a while, I felt like they need discipline. They need a policeman.

And so I thought that was my role. And I really realized over time that I would have much more influence being their cheerleader. The second thing I learned was to be a listener. you know, to make sure that I understood. And I used to sit with my kids when they were little and just put them on my lap and say, tell me about you. Tell me about your week. And sometimes an hour or not an hour, a minute or two, it felt like an hour, would go by

and they wouldn't say anything. And then pretty soon they'd open up. So being a good listener really helps. And I think the final thing I would say is this notion that love is the most powerful force in the world. You know, we think of these other forces and they can be really powerful. You know, I can get you to do a lot of things if I have a 356 magnum, you know, I can force you to do a bunch of stuff. But over time, it doesn't, the minute I set it down, the minute I fall asleep, it's done.

Whereas love, if somebody feels loved and supported, it is so durable, it is so powerful. That's hard to do, and you have to be in control of yourself and your own emotions. But sometimes I often tell people that sometimes I have to remind myself that I love somebody that I don't. really like that much. What that means is that you are really their fiduciary. You are looking out for their best interests. And people sense that. They pick up on that. Again, people are smart. So I'd say those three things would be the ones I would say I've learned the hard way. Joel, I have to tell you, man, this has been a real joy for me. I feel just so lucky sometimes. I quite honestly, you know, when I get, publicists reach out quite frequently three to five times a day.

And so you never fully know what to expect. But every once in a while, you get to come across a guy like you and you leave an impactful imprint on my life. So I just want to acknowledge that. And thank you for that because you just don't know what you're going to get. Are you going to get somebody who just wants to pump their book out there? And sometimes you find the opposite, find someone who's just a genuine person who cares, tries to add value to other people's lives. And I just want to thank you for that, man.

That's awesome. Thank you, Ryan, for saying that means a lot. And I will say this about the book, since you mentioned the book, I'm donating all proceeds to charity because I really care about this notion getting out to people. I think we would be a better world. We would be better organizations, better families. If people knew how to really embrace this notion of trust and fix the betrayals in their lives and move on. So I've decided I don't care to make any money from.

I just want to have people consider these notions, these ideas. I urge you to buy this book, The Ten Laws of Trust, building the bonds that make a business great. And Joel, is there anywhere else you'd like my listeners to go to learn more about you online? I'm sure that there's it. I know we have a web page somewhere, but I don't know what it is. Sorry. I got you. It'll be all linked to the show notes at learningleader.com.

No worries at all, man. And I just want to tell you again, acknowledge I thoroughly enjoyed this. I appreciate the care and attention and your preparation you put into this. And I'd absolutely want to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man. Great. Thanks, Ryan. All right. Thanks, Joel.

Good day. All right. What a joy to have that conversation with Joel. I had to sneak that question in there at the end when you see somebody who's been married for over 45 years, seven children, 25 grandchildren. and I asked him, what was the key to that? He got this huge smile on his face I could see on video. I wish you could see it. And when he said, love is the most powerful force in the world, man, it was great stuff.

I loved that a few of the other topics that really stood out to me, the importance of embracing respectful conflict and how that's how we progress, perhaps create a red team at your business, keeping everyone informed, the fact that he would write a partner letter every two weeks. all should do something like this, a status update so that people know where we stand, what's happening, what's going well, and share the bad news. Don't be afraid to do that. And then going inside his interview process, I found to be really helpful. Do reference checks, have an understanding of what people have been like prior to meeting you. There's so much good

stuff from this one. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. If so, I would love it. if you would spread the message one person at a time. As you know, word of mouth marketing is as good as it gets and it's powerful. It means so much to me. I would really appreciate it if you did that. And it continues to give me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so much.

Talk with you next week. Can't wait. This episode is brought to you by seeing Around Corner. The new book by Rita McGrath, a global expert on strategy and innovation. It's your go-to guide for spotting and responding to strategic inflection points in business before they happen. After all, inflection points don't happen overnight. Someone in some business is capitalizing on the early warning signs. Learn how you too can see around corners and set your business up for success,

featuring a special forward by bestselling author Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School, seeing around corners as this falls must read business book. Okay. Thank you so much. I truly mean it, man. I never know what to expect. And sometimes I do just get the people kind of pushing their stuff. And I felt this genuine sense of care.

And it means a lot to me. And I really enjoyed this, man. I really do. You're nice to say that. And I really don't care about it. selling books. I care about having people talking and getting these ideas. That's evident. That's evident. Well, I really appreciate it. I'll be sure to send your team a note when we get this one, an intro and outro slapped on it and then we'll ship it out for everybody to hear.

Cool. Thanks so much. All right. Thanks, Joel. You too. Bye.