Ep 61 - "A Leader's Focus"

0:07 Welcome back to the Head, Heart, and Boots podcast. I'm Chris. And I'm Brennan. Join us as we wrestle with what it takes to transform ourselves and the businesses we lead. I don't know. What'd you think? I don't know. It was kind of serious. Should we laugh? Christopher. How are you, my man? I'm good. There's so many great things in life. It offsets the not so rad. You know, I'm for those that follow us on, on the YouTubes, on the YouTubes, the interwebs, I've noticed that our table, like I think we're going to have to upgrade eventually to maybe like an actual six foot table so that we can have enough room for all the crap that we try to put on this two foot space.

0:53 Are you starting to feel that? I feel like that's actually like in all reality, that's a little bit of a passive aggressive thing that you're, Well, you're telling me you don't like all the gadgets and things that I bring to our podcasting table. You'd like it more neat and tidy. Do you know, you know, when they say the saying, if the shoe fits, I made no direct comment, passive or otherwise. Well, and actually, in all honesty, I mean, half the crap on the table is mine. Speaking of gadgets, I ordered that Apple Watch. You did? I just need to say it all out because I'm a little bit embarrassed. Do we need to walk through the chat that we had regarding accountability and gadgets? I think it would probably be uninteresting to most folks. It's a different episode.

1:33 So maybe that's a separate one, yeah. All right. Okay. Okay, man. Let's get into this topic. So, okay. A while ago, I mean, I kind of lose track of when these episodes will get released versus when they're recorded, but we did an episode number 55. Yeah. Yeah. was changing project manager mindset, changing our project manager mindset. And dude, that episode got some serious plays. And we got a lot of feedback. Really fortunate, we have a bit of a friendship with CNR and we do some contributing to that. And of course, there was an article there too about it. Anyways, point being, It struck a chord. We got a ton of feedback on the relevance of that and how it was applicable. And we got a lot of people saying how they were going to share that down into their ranks, really almost as a training.

2:20 And that's exciting for us. Obviously, when we do something, we hit something that obviously there's value. So I wanted to do a similar kind of episode. And I wanted to focus really on this transitioning that happens when, as we're moving people in our ranks from field roles or more technically competent roles, and then we're asking them to slide into division manager spots. We're asking them potentially to fill operations manager roles, maybe take over the lead seat of a branch or one of our revenue generating locations. There's just this shift in mindset. And so I just, I wanted to do a show on that.

3:00 We're going to, you know, we're going to try to keep it tight. We're going to try to stay kind of at that 10,000 feet. We're not going to necessarily get down into the weeds. This is a little bit of a window into our consulting process because this is, I think this conversation is going to touch on, you know, a lot of the stuff that when we do like an onsite with our clients, we spend a healthy amount of time with leadership teams walking through this stuff. And I think in some ways, it's always fun when you have an article or a show that just takes off. But we kind of knew it was going to strike a chord because this issue of project management and leadership development, every single client that we work with, there's an opportunity to grow in that.

3:43 Yeah. And I just think, again, for all of us, that's those special places that when you get improvement, they have exponential impact on the team. It can always be improved. It's one of those areas of the business you can always be investing and you'll get a return on it. Yeah, for sure. Okay. All right. So kind of the groundwork for this, I want to preface this kind of with this. Let's put it this way. You and I really have kind of subscribed to this idea of the four disciplines of execution. Of course, that's a Sean Covey piece. We didn't come up with that. Sean Covey, that whole Covey group, prolific business and leadership writers, obviously, major folks leading that charge. Anyways, they talk about the four disciplines of execution.

4:24 The reason I like to start there is because in a lot of ways, I feel like if we commit to that pillar strategy, it then shapes a lot of how we think and what we end up doing as leaders down to how we execute on a day-to-day basis. So I want to start there. It's like 30,000 feet, and we'll work our way into what you and I feel are the primary focuses that our key leaders need to be navigating and spending their energy on. Okay, so the four disciplines of execution. The first is we focus on the wildly important. We're going to kind of unpack a little bit later what that means. So for us as a leader, depending on where you're at in the organization, that wildly important could shift slightly.

5:08 But what we've identified over time is it's really just what shifts is how you impact that. But your focus is pretty much the same, whether you're a department head or you're a GM, right? They're pretty similar. So focusing on the wildly important, basically what we're going to do is identify what is the wildly important for us, depending on our role, and then how we affect that. Act on lead measures. I can't remember the first time that we heard this, but I do distinctly remember in one of the firms that you and I worked for. this really kind of took us like a wave. Like when we started to identify that there's leading activities that you can influence. And when you do that, it gives you the highest chance of reaping the reward or getting those lagging measures that you want.

5:55 So like we talk about this in sales, there's leading activities that we can hyper-focus on and measure and pay attention to that will likely give us the revenue generation that we want to see, right? Right. Yeah. I mean, the fact of the matter is, and I think some of the philosophy behind this whole 4DX model, it's acknowledging that we don't ultimately have control over people and the decisions that people make. And this is true in sales. So 4DX is really great in a sales environment. My first exposure was actually in a state farm office. I was working for a mentor agent. who now is actually one of the top agents in the country. And he's been working on 4DX for 10 plus years now.

6:35 It's been highly successful because it doesn't matter how good of a salesperson you have. We can't control... what other people choose to do, but we can control the behaviors that lead up to that decision, right? To create a higher propensity for success, right? And I think that's an important distinction because sometimes we get so focused on the result and yet we don't ultimately have control over other people. Yeah. you know, to control that result. No, I agree. We can only control our inputs, right? That's right. That's right. And we're going to probably bounce on these a couple times, but I really do feel like there's something so important about these things. So again, guys, Sean Covey, Four Disciplines of Execution.

7:15 Read the book. Go put some time in really understanding how these impact us and what we can do with them. But that acting on lead measures is such a critical shift in the way that we're leading people. And primarily because I think one of the struggles that we have, like when, for instance, we do our monthly review of the financials is it's kind of happened, right? There's not, we feel almost helpless and frustrated by the fact that something went down and now we're looking at it postscript. There's nothing more I can affect that month. Now, moving forward, it obviously gives us insights to modify behavior, blah, blah, blah. But this leading measure thing is so critical. And the idea that as a key leader, whether a department head, even project managers, GMs, OMs, if we can look at our team and go, what are the things that I can measure and draw people's attention to that gives me the ability to have live impact all the way up until we start measuring those lagging indicators?

8:12 That's really vital. Okay. Keep a compelling scoreboard. This one's interesting. Okay. I think for a lot of us, because we tend to be somewhat shy of conflict, we think that public scoreboards are creating conflict potentially. Right. And I think one of the things that we've learned over time is when you have the right people in the bus, a public scoreboard, it creates healthy competition. It aligns people's performance and if they're winning or not winning with the leadership team. So there's no secrets. There's no hidden gotchas.

8:54 There's no misunderstanding of how someone is doing. And so the positive impact of a more transparent or public scoreboard is actually far more healthy for organizations than any downside. is that those that don't want to be on a public scoreboard tend to be the ones that probably aren't performing well anyways. Right? And now, the interesting thing about this keeping a public scoreboard, it also helps us problem solve. So we're not saying this from the level of accountability and then you ditch when somebody doesn't perform. But if we can see it on a consistent basis... Again, we can influence it.

9:35 We can jump in before it's too late. You know, if a, if a team player is starting to slide into that B to C seat, well, we have an opportunity because it's public. We can see it and we can hopefully get that propped back up and provide whatever insight or training to get them back into that, that A seat. I mean, there's lots of implications for this. So keeping a compelling scoreboard. And then this last one, four, right, is create a cadence of accountability. You and I are super fans of Clint Pulver, right? And just his kind of focus on creating a better relationship between employees and employers. And he talks about this balance that, gosh, we've talked about this so much of...

10:19 accountability and connection, right? And the idea is, is that we, we have to have equal parts of both. The employees are engaged with companies where they're heard and seen, where they're valued. And we do that through connection, right? Really understand these are people and we're connected to those people. And we marry that with a cadence of accountability, right? And accountability is hard. It's difficult for us as leaders to maintain. We get tired. Some of us are kind of optimists by nature. So we feel like I've said it once, right? That everybody will do it now. And then we get greatly disappointed when our team members don't follow through.

11:02 We take it personal a lot of times, right? All the different things. Yeah, I think where we tend to fall down as leaders is in the cadence. Yeah. It's like, I think most of us as leaders know we have the responsibility, but where we tend to fall off is we allow little things to go unchecked. And those little things start to stack up and become patterns. Yeah. And then those patterns extend from one person on our team to other people start seeing, oh, that behavior is actually acceptable. It's not ideal, but it's acceptable. Yeah. And then they start to develop that same pattern, right, of exception, you know, to our standards.

11:44 And then they pass it from somebody else. And so then all of a sudden your team, the standard is slipped big time. Yeah. Yeah. But the cadence seems to be the hardest part because most people don't last in leadership very long if they can't make difficult decisions and hold people accountable, fire when necessary, that sort of thing. But it's this regular cadence that's so hard to maintain. And we see this a lot, particularly in our smaller restoration companies where they don't yet have a strict... adherence to say a production meeting every week. Yeah. Right. Or for the larger teams, a leadership meeting, it's not happening every week. Instead it becomes an as needed kind of thing.

12:24 Yeah. Or we fit it in when we can. Yeah. And that's what we've seen is when the cadence goes away, we start to have these little compromises, these little allowances, things start happening and small behaviors start to slip. Yeah. The mitigation process outline, little bullets start to get left out. And then all of a sudden over a quarter or months or over the course of the year, we're in a totally different place than where we started because slowly these exceptions have started to creep across our entire process and team. Yeah, spot on. You know? Yeah, totally. You're right on. And I think that's the challenge too, when we, as we're moving people into these leadership seats, we haven't given them this updated focus of it's, it's not necessarily about you getting this work done any longer.

13:16 It's more about you now play a key role in helping us establish accountability with our process. Like you were one of the individuals that did it so well and you were so consistent. Yeah. that because of that, we are now asking you to move into a position where you're overseeing that rhythm. Are we doing it consistently? And when not, what do we do about that? So anyways, I think that that's just part of that challenge. But you're spot on. It really is this cadence of accountability. And a lot of that is designed in our battle rhythms. A lot of it is in our production meeting schedules, that stand to process. Like... How many opportunities do we give like consistently and at a fixed place in our day-to-day operations where we can review and check things out, inspect what we expect so that we can keep our teams accountable for their behavior?

14:08 Because in most cases, what we've identified is it's less about malicious intent and it's far more that we've created a path of least resistance and our person has taken that. Yeah. Right. Just like any of us would. Yeah. Because the cadence, as you call it, is not in alignment with... There's too many opportunities for that course of action to look differently than what we expect. Yeah. I mean, back to this old Henry Cloud statement that we've just really latched onto, and that is leaders will always get what they create and what they allow. Right. And the cadence and the battle rhythms is the platform for checking both of those.

14:49 What are we creating? What are we allowing? Right. And not letting that get out of control, right? There's, I think General McChrystal or one of these other famous generals too talks about, hey, you walk past, you walk past a non-compliant behavior without saying something. You just endorse that behavior. Absolutely. You just said it was okay. Yep. And how often do we do that as leaders? Oh my gosh. Yeah. So often, right? All the time. So let's go into, let's talk about this primary focus of leaders because we've identified kind of six key areas of focus. And I think, excuse me, eight. And I think sometimes we can lose track of these because we get caught up in the nuts and bolts.

15:32 Yeah. We get caught up in... project management, production flow. We get caught up in the production schedule and we can lose sight of some of these other really important things. Yeah. I think one of the ways to look at this before we move into this is, this is the critical shift mentally that our leadership has to make. And I think the challenge can be is... A lot of the times as business owners ourselves, we're not 100%. Like we haven't really done a good job of articulating what my leadership team's focus should be. And because of that, we've allowed one of our team members to essentially fill in the blanks.

16:15 And the challenge in that is that they're going to use their existing database, their existing experiences to fill in those blanks. And really often, and this isn't always the case by any stretch of the imagination, but most often we've moved somebody into a leadership role because they've done the tactical part well. And so when we move them into this leadership role and we don't talk to them specifically about, hey, this is part of the mental shift that you need to have. Like, this is where you're going to begin to focus. This is what I want to see from you. This is how you win now. Yeah. Yeah. They fill in the blanks. And well, how do they fill in the blank? Well, they do, right? They go back to what they know. And what they know is doing the work, right?

16:58 And so an example of this is, and we'll obviously get into them when we get down into the pieces is, If someone sees that they need something to get done, a doer's knee-jerk response is go do that thing. I know how to do it. I already know how. I've got the experience. I've got the knowledge. It's faster for me to do it than try to tell somebody else. And when that goes on and on and on, we create a culture now where we're just in this cycle of fighting fires. Because we're no longer proactively leading our teams. We're just jumping in and fixing problems ourselves over and over and over again. Because we haven't spent any time proactively solving the issue for the long term.

17:40 And what we see when we talk to leadership teams about this is almost a sigh of relief that someone recognizes that these leaders are just doing the best they can with the limited tool set that they have to their use. And when someone says, you know what, the reason you feel frustrated is because you're spending your energy in the wrong lane. light bulb goes off and they're like, oh, oh my gosh. Yeah. That is my frustrated. I didn't even know how to say that, but that's what I'm anyways. That's good. That's what I'm feeling. Okay. So let's get into these, the primary areas of focus. And I mean, to a certain extent, this is our opinion. This opinion comes from experience. Oh no, dude. It's, it's fact, dude. This is law.

18:20 It's fact. It's the loss is laws of the universe. This is laws of the business universe, I think. Okay. Okay. So the first one is our primary focus has to be on our cash and collection activity. Okay. Cash and collection activity. Again, if we're a doer, we win when we get the work done. However, as a leader... Our job is to ensure that we get the work done in such a way that we're able to collect and get paid for our services. So what does this look like as a primary area of focus for a key leader? And when I say a key leader for this topic, I'm talking about division manager up, team lead and up, let's call it, right?

19:05 Depending on your size and scope of your company. So cash and collection focus can look different based on the role in the team. But an example would be at the team level. It's about monitoring the way that we're closing a project and invoicing. So let's say I'm a mitigation team manager. We go out and execute on a job automatically. The area that I'm going to dig into and monitor and look at is in order to support this cash collection focus is, are we getting the information from the field in a timely manner? And is it accurate enough for me to quickly and time efficiently write a sheet, get an invoice submitted, and get that approval process started? Yeah.

19:46 Right. That's mission critical. Yeah. What is the quality of my document packages that we are creating, which includes the photos, includes the moisture logs, includes all the things. Right. And if you're a mitigation manager and you're listening to this right now, I want you to walk through a scenario with me. How often do you find yourself filling in the air gaps on shitty paperwork? Because you know it. You've done it. You know what the team missed because it's applicable to almost every single water loss that we do. And so you just continue to fill in the blanks. You continue to audit horrible data coming from the field and you fix it in quotes because you know how to fix it. Yeah. And it has to be done. It has to be done. I got to get these invoices out.

20:27 So your solution... is to get in and do. You make up, you fix it, right? Now, there's a challenge in that because it's a band-aid. Are we equipping our team then to follow process and be owning that process? No. Now, you're stuck ensuring that you're the one reviewing documentation and writing our scopes of services because you're the only one smart enough to fill in the gaps, right? Which means you're also not using that time to be in the field, to do quality control, to be mentoring, to be training appropriately, to be engaging with customers. Right. Right. All the things that come further down in this list.

21:09 Right. Right. Yeah. Right. And, you know, I think it's just important for us to give some of those examples where people go, oh, yeah, that is me. Yeah. Yeah. And that's so common. And I'm not putting anybody down for being in that position, but that's part of the frustration that we're creating for ourselves is we're doing instead of creating change in the process for a long-term result. So again, we don't want to get too bogged down in the weeds, but that cash collection activity, what that ultimately means is that if we're in any kind of position where we're leading a team or higher, right? Our focus, we cannot give up the kinds of day-to-day activity that drive our ability to collect and protect the cash flow for our company.

21:50 Mm-hmm. for anything else. So if we're doing something else outside of that, we need to find a way to delegate and or train into our team to be accountable enough that we're not the fix. That we're not down in the weeds, right? That's really how we stay focused on that area and keep it moving. That's good. Hey friends, hey listeners. We're doing something a little bit different with our ads. So you've been accustomed to hearing some ads with our favorite partners and companies in the industry. Now we actually have a product page, our partners page on our website. So floodlightgrp.com forward slash partners. We want to give you a quick rundown though of the people that we're partnering with and we believe in as really go-to resources in the industry.

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25:19 Thanks, guys. profitability and consistency of service delivery. You know, it's interesting. Even as I looked at that, I was at a community fundraiser event and I ran into one of my construction buddies this morning and we were actually talking about this. And what we were talking about is just this interesting observation that... your most profitable jobs tend to also be your happiest customers. Oh, yeah. Your loser jobs, the jobs that go sideways, tend to be with unhappy customers. Now, of course, sometimes it's just because of a crazy customer. We always have those one percenters that are just impossible to work with. The customer throws a monkey wrench into the system, etc.

26:01 But more often than not, when we have a failed project, it's because of what we did or didn't do. Yeah. Nine times out of 10. Yeah. Right? That's a whole other podcast is why do things go wrong? And we can talk about those key things. But it is interesting that as a leader, there is a correlation between profitability on jobs and execution on the customer experience timeline. Right. Right. That when we're minding our process, when we're doing the pre-construction budgeting, right, when we're having that restoration checklist meeting with a new buildback client and we're walking them through the process, setting appropriate expectations, explaining the process and all that kind of stuff, we tend to get better outcomes.

26:42 Yeah. In terms of our profit, it's when we don't communicate well and we... you know, end up getting a bunch of change orders and all this kind of stuff that our costs go up and that profit shrinks. Right. And if we go back to kind of that starting example, if we're bogged down in the office or behind a desk or behind a screen making up for a failure to execute in the field, then we've lost all of our ability to proactively manage the consistency and the execution in the field. I can't do consistent quality control checks. I can't be talking with my clients and finding out how their experience is going. I can't pop in on a job and do some ad hoc training and updating for our team because they're really close.

27:26 But we're just missing the mark enough. I can't do things like let our team know that they're doing a great job following these XYZ processes in the field because I can't get out to interact with my team. I'm struggling behind the laptop. Or I'm at one of these jobs. I'm at one single project all day doing... instead of equipping a team to do. Yeah. So you can see how, and I think these apply, like even all the way to the GM level, if you're a small enough team, it's completely reasonable to have GMs and operations managers that are filling in the blanks and they're going out and they're executing on a project. They're slipping into a project manager role.

28:08 They're filling estimator tasking because we just got to get the work done. And we slide out of that lane. We're now no longer proactively leading the profitability and consistency of our service delivery. So here's something to kind of keep in mind, I think, as we walk through this. I really want to encourage leaders as they listen to this is the key switch here is the stop doing piece. Like, and this is kind of hard, the doing. What I mean is stop being one of the tools... that's used to complete the project and be more motivated by ensuring that the tools are available and sharpened so that your team can execute in the field.

28:49 And so the challenge I see on this is that our teams may be mentally on board on saying, yes, cash and collections is important. Profitability and consistency of service is important. But the way they fix the problem is jumping out into the field and doing themselves and start creating a team that can actually execute consistently. And that's that mental shift that we're talking about. It's vital that business owners and key leaders begin to slide in this proactive management of the resources instead of constantly dropping down a couple runs jumping out into the field onto that project to be one of the tools that's being deployed. That's the shift, right? That's the shift.

29:30 Okay. Number three, creating new opportunities, right? This is our operational selling. Every single one of us on the team, especially as key needs to be considering, what is our team doing? What am I doing? How am I behaving in such a way that will give our company another shot, another job, a new relationship, a new opportunity, right? And some of the ways that we talk about this, like on the sales side is we talk about, especially in the commercial environment, how vital it is for operational leaders to be aligned with their Salesforce to the point where Salesforce could be setting up meetings and intentionally drawing our operational leaders out to engage that prospect or that new account to create depth and trust that the service delivery will happen.

30:19 Right. Yeah, this thing, this is one of those areas where we certainly haven't always been fantastic, but I think you and I did achieve some success in the teams that we've worked in where breaking down those walls between production and sales and also really getting... getting our salespeople connected up to our operational leaders routinely. Yeah. You know, to where there's a regular open conversation happening about new clients that have come in, what's being sold in the field, what are we hearing out in the field? Yeah. Relaying feedback, you know, from sales, that interaction with the primary, you know, customer back to our production team so that they have that intel to work off of.

31:01 It's important. Yeah. or operational leaders to always be connected to what's happening out in the field on the selling side, right? What is the promise that we agreed to deliver on? That's right. And that's a huge disconnect for so many teams. Commonly, yeah. We get so focused on the scope of work, the nuts and bolts of the execution, our GP. we forget to really engage all of our resources. And probably the most important resource is, how did we get this work? Because folks that listen to our stuff, there's this really important tie-in with the commercial sales and this pain solution selling model is that these customers, in particular commercial ones, are coming to us for a reason.

31:41 There's some kind of pain point, unmet need unmet preferences that other companies haven't been able to cater to, whatever the case is. But there's a reason why that customer is coming to us instead of going to XYZ restoration. And if our operations leaders aren't connecting with our salespeople, we can end up delivering on the wrong promise. Totally. We've talked about this before. We have our cadence that we established in operations. One of the cadences we had earlier in our careers was that all PMs had a weekly face-to-face meeting with recon clients, which is a really strong process. It's great. Keeps everybody on the same page. Problems don't fester for too long, blah, blah, blah.

32:24 But here's what's interesting. That salesperson... talks with that customer about prior damage events that they've had and customers like, oh God, communication, it's just so terrible. We never know what the hell is going on. That salesperson thinks, oh, this is great because we have our weekly meetings. They're going to love this. Then when the sales rep follows up and explains our weekly face-to-face meeting process, and the customer's like, oh, the last company did that, and that was nowhere near enough. We were kind of hoping that we'd get daily updates on what's going on. But if that kind of intel doesn't make it back to the department leadership, and they can't articulate that down to their production teams, we end up thinking we're delivering on this standard that we've established, whereas the customer has this whole other expectation that's going to lead to us disappointing them.

33:12 This happens all the time. Yeah. I think what you're highlighting is it's less about our operational leaders thinking that they have this other thing they can do from time to time when they're available. And it's a shift to, no, one of your primary responsibilities as a key leader in this organization is to ensure that you are finding and aligned with things in our process that give us another opportunity. Yeah. So for a key leader to make time to ensure that they go and participate in that relationship in that way is not a sometimes do it when you can. Yeah. It's a primary responsibility. It's how you create a return on the company's investment in you and your role.

33:54 Right. And we're going to, this is going to be common with everything. This might need to be a two-parter. I know. I know. Yeah. Okay. Number four is customer satisfaction. Yeah. And I think what we're saying here is, is it because we just talked about consistency and service delivery. Ultimately, that will create customer satisfaction. What we're talking about here is the inspecting of and digging into and ensuring that we are creating satisfied customers. So an example would be if your team gets surveys sometimes or gets reviews sometimes, you as key leaders are allowing something very, very vital to slip through the cracks. You're treating customer satisfaction and inspections of that as something else you could do if you have time versus a primary responsibility in your role.

34:42 And so, you know, of course, our friend at Liftify. Yeah. Okay. The reason we explain to people this is a great resource to adopt into your business is that it's a very easy business. thing to commit to. It's completely cost-effective. It's silly not to use it. The results are high. But the point is, it's you as key leaders understanding you have a commitment to understanding your customer satisfaction as part of your roles and responsibilities. And this is a resource that will help your team execute on that more consistently. And at the same time, it's not like a silver bullet of having a system like Liftify or getting Google reviews and stuff on it. Part of the customer satisfaction thing is digging beyond those things too.

35:25 And I think as leaders, that is part of the responsibility we're taking on is to really understand. So we talk about departmental leaders, GMs, owners routinely engaging, closed, collected customers saying, Hey, Mrs. Jones... Listen, I was following up. First of all, thank you so much for that Google review. I mean, that really, you know, pumps the team up when we see that feedback. And, you know, I appreciate the internal, you know, survey you guys returned to us. Great information. Do you mind if I take a few more minutes with you? I'd love to dig into some of your feedback. Exactly. We're always trying to get better. And then, listen, we talk about this process as leaders. It's so critical. It's so critical. listening to what the customers say verbatim. What are the words they use to describe their experience?

36:07 Do they reference specific team members about their experience? What did they like about our people and our process is just one of my favorite go-to questions. Hey, could you tell me two or three specific things about our people or our process that just made this experience a little bit better for you guys? And then verbatim capturing the those words and descriptions. And then the bigger thing is taking it back to our team and say, guys, this is how we win. I love that. This is how we win. I heard it straight from the customer's mouth. And it doesn't matter if that's Johnny, the plant manager or the VPO of this or that, or if it's Mrs. Jones that has a three-bedroom ranch that we just finished a water damage repair on.

36:51 That piece. So we're collecting Google reviews. That's awesome. Five-star review means something great happened, but it doesn't tell our team that. how we're winning. Agreed. You know what I mean? Totally. And so let's think about this. Let's, you know, using examples of what we tend to see people do to help this area in the business versus what they should be doing as a key leader is, okay, they understand that customer satisfaction is very important. That's not the hard sell, right? It's like, okay, I believe that. So then it's like, okay, how many of us as operational leaders have accounts that you will go out into the field and service because you don't trust your team to give them the level of satisfaction they should get from doing business with your company.

37:37 Oh, it's painful. Some people are cringing. Okay. Like, because we've all failed. You know, we've all... Not failed. We've all done that. Okay. Like I can, I know right now, I know of current conversations where people are doing this. So again, our point of walking through these primary areas of focus is it's not necessarily to remind you they're important because I think most people know they are. It's just how are you affecting them in your role is what we're talking about. What are the leadership behaviors that feed these areas of focus? Exactly. So on that customer satisfaction component, this goes back to us properly equipping our team members to go out and provide a consistent process that then will give them a great customer experience.

38:21 We build it into our process. So you as a key leader, it's less about you going out and taking care of that client and And it's more about you then looking at your team's processes, procedures, looking at your team's training platforms and consistency. It's the quality control. It's the what am I doing to affirm that my team is getting the tools they need to go out and create a happy client. Right. It's you spending your energy there. is what we're trying to get folks to shift out of. Because it's not just that we want you to understand that's important. It's we want you to stop going out and being the only resource that can make it happen and start equipping a team to do it as part of your role as a leader.

39:02 Okay. Number five, employee engagement. This is an interesting one for me because you and I are pretty hyper-relational by default. Yeah. So there's some natural instincts in you and I that just, we want there to be a party. We want everybody to be on board. We want everybody to come with us. We love team environments. Yeah. There's a lot of operators and key leaders that are so gifted and so skilled and so technically competent that, But by default, they're just not, they don't necessarily need to be surrounded by a bunch of people to have a warm and fuzzy. Yeah. That being said, when you take on a leadership role, you no longer have a choice of whether or not this is a team sport.

39:44 You've made a commitment by accepting the movement into a team lead role or an operations manager role that you will begin investing in your ability to connect with people and keep them engaged in the mission that you're leading. It's not a choice. It's got to happen in order for you to be successful. Yeah. in a leadership role. And that means that you may very well have to spend time and energy and get training and support on how to be better at the way you communicate to your team, the way that you establish relationship and connection with your team, the way you coach and monitor their performance. These are non-negotiables. As a key leader, your primary responsibility, one of those primary responsibilities is to ensure that you are building a team of people that know they are valued and they're committed to to the mission in front of them.

40:32 And you cannot do that through dictatorship or lording over people. Yeah. And I think such a big part of that is modeling. For sure. Right. It's like part of our role as leaders is we're there to create the container that everybody's working in. Right. And part of creating a really healthy container is consistency and reliability, right? Like you as the leader are setting that tone to where there's this safe place when people show up to work every day, like there's an experience they can rely upon. Like the standards don't change every day, the requirements, the expectations aren't constantly shifting.

41:15 There's a role that they can show up to and they know there's going to be some amount of stability that they're entering into when they show up to work. Like that's a big part is us creating the standards, the expectations, and then holding to them in a consistent way where people can rely on showing up to work and having a certain kind of experience. Yep. Right? Yeah, totally. Which is hard. It is. It's really hard. It's hard. And I think it comes back to what you and I've talked about many times is when we step into that leadership role, we first have to take stock of the way we're leading ourselves. Because I think if we bring our insecurities into that position, we bring our own lack of discipline into that position.

42:02 it is going to spill over. It's going to model the wrong thing. It's going to model the wrong thing. Because again, the modeling thing and team employee engagement, I think is we can't be engaged with our entire team all the time. And so what we're modeling day to day starts to show our team members how they should be conducting themselves. And it kind of spreads. So it's like... it's mentoring, I guess. It completely is. It's mentoring. It's saying, hey, I'm holding to these standards and values. This is how we're successful as a company and just consistently modeling that. It's like, I'm showing up to meetings on time. I'm not canceling meetings last minute. I'm not making excuses for my undone work.

42:45 I'm like, so employee engagement, I think is maybe even a not even a big enough term, right? It's like we are, we're building the environment, right? And we're setting the standard by how we act and conduct and treat others and the way that we hold to the disciplines and standards personally. And that is tough. Like I've had, I've had these come to Jesus moments several times in my career where I realized that I've shown up to my meeting five or 10 minutes late the last three weeks in a row. And then I find myself irritated because I have this one sales rep or this one employee that is showing up 15 minutes late. And I'm like, what am I doing here?

43:25 As a leader, I'm not even holding the standard. And then I find myself irritated because someone else is. And of course, it's all ego because then I think, well, I'm more important. It's okay for me to be late because I have really important stuff. Right? Yeah. But that's part of it. I think, yeah, I mean, probably the easiest way to supplement this or give you guys some more resource to check out is check out the coaching culture episode. I can't remember the number off the top of my head. It's recent though. Yeah, it's fairly recent. Creating a coaching culture. That's basically kind of a deep dive in part of this engagement, like our role as leaders and how we create and play engagement. I guess the short-term point for this is that it's not something else you can do when you get time.

44:07 Yeah. It's no, I, I've hired department managers to split the workload. Yeah. Right. Like I'm asking you to shoulder some level of responsibility in your role to help me continue to grow a platform in a company that has a bright future. And part of you doing that is in every single leadership role, we need to understand that a critical element and responsibility is for us to learn how. and then to proactively engage our employees to where they want to be at that company. Yeah. Like it's our job. Okay. All right. Team recruitment. This one is always hard because I feel like most of us start looking for people when we've already maxed out our production level.

44:48 And I think what we're saying here is that as a key leader, if you're out doing all the time, it's impossible for you to proactively manage the prospect pipeline for new talent, for new employees. And it's not the GM's job or the owner's job or the HR department's job. It's your job as a key leader to ensure that you're bringing in enough people to adequately handle the current and growing workload. Which means you can't think about this when you're tearing your hair out because you keep going out into the field and doing. You need to not go out and do and you need to focus on solving the problem by hiring good employees. Yeah, it's that E-Myth thing, right?

45:29 It's working on the business instead of in it, right? Yeah, yeah. You know, there's two aspects of this that come to mind when you're talking about team recruitment is there's a succession piece that we always have to be engaged in. Who are my risers? Who are my climbers in my department? Who is potentially holds the capacity to take my job? Right. So there's this piece of who's coming up through the ranks? Who am I developing for future responsibility and expanded scale? And then what holes is that going to leave in the team? Right. Right. You know, and so who am I going to, when I move this person up into this, then I've got this open seat. I need to start thinking about who's going to fill that spot.

46:09 And it could be somebody down the chain or it could be, I got to go external. I got to be finding new blood, right? To fill up my bench. So when I promote this person and I'm moving up into this more scaled role... And we all have some version of this. Again, if we just kind of keep using this department head as an example, right? Like there's operations managers role. Maybe there's the opportunity to take the lead seat in a new branch or a new satellite location. Well, who's going to fill that air gap for you, right? So we kind of look at these as two different things. So there's this recruitment and succession planning. I skipped a big cheater. But it's, no, you're spot on though is those are two different things, but they're critical. It's, I got to have enough seats filled on the bench to adequately produce.

46:54 Yeah. Right. And I need to be looking for that right hand. I need to be looking for the individuals that are showing promise and begin to feed them new levels of responsibility. Give them a vision. for where their career path can go as part of this institution. And what's interesting about all of these, because I know when I think about them, I'm like, gosh, there's like these minor layers of overlap. That's because they're synergistic. Yeah, they are. They don't really happen in complete silo from one another. They all support each other. So if you're in the right state of mind and you're focusing on the right things, these kind of perpetuate success, right? Because they feed into one another.

47:34 I think the big, you know, to kind of put a wrap on that, the keyword is proactive. Always. Because so often we wait until we're desperate. Yeah. And we've talked many times about desperation brain where then we're plugging holes. Yeah. Versus looking ahead and saying, hey, at our current production rate, If the sales team continues producing and bringing new meat onto the table, what am I going to need in four weeks? What am I going to need in three months, given our current growth track? Thinking proactively, bringing that information to the production and leadership team environments and letting people know. people know so that HR is prepared for that influx.

48:14 And we're getting those ads out on Indeed three, four, five, six, eight weeks before the actual need is there because we all know how challenging it is to find talent. But if we don't do that, we end up plugging holes. We end up taking people that don't meet our standard. Because they have the technical. And then it just perpetuates the problem. All these other categories, right? All the other categories. So bad. Yeah. Okay. The last one here is training. And again, I know you guys are listening to this. There's overlap. That's intentional. These are synergistic, right? So training. Stop doing. Start equipping. Please. Every time you go in to fill in the hole.

48:57 Yeah. with yourself, you've now robbed your entire team of getting better. Hmm. Like every time we pull you out of this proactive state of mind, and honestly, for business owners and leaders, you need to be paying attention to this as well. Because the expectation that you put on your people, the not supporting them, not giving them the resources they need as a key leader, and you're allowing them or forcing them to be in a position where the only way to fix the problem is by going out and doing it themselves. You too are creating the problem. Yeah, you have to model this. You have to model this. If you're running around with your hair on fire thinking you have to have your hands in every part of the business, you are modeling for all your people to have their hair on fire.

49:42 And we see this a lot. We see business owners that start companies because they're tactical, they're doers. They get in and they grind their face off and more power to them. The challenge is, though, is that if you never mature out of that state in the way that you lead your business, you will end up hiring and teaching people to operate in that space. And guess what? It perpetuates the problem to where now you never can get out of that space. Because you just hired a bunch of leaders that aren't doing anything proactively to lead their teams. Now they're just fighting fires right alongside of you. And they're perpetuating the problem within their ranks, which then obviously perpetuate the problem across the institution. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Okay, guys, let's just kind of wrap this up.

50:23 Again, this is 30,000 feet. We didn't get down into the real nitty gritty. If some of you are interested in doing more work with us around this topic, let us know. We do a two day training conferences on this. Conference is the wrong word. Training events, live workshops, live workshops, where we get into the nitty gritty of this and really teach teams what this means and how we execute in the field. to remain in these categories. So talk to us, send us an email, connect with us in a chat somewhere, or even on YouTube, you can just leave a comment. We'll talk to you more about it. But okay. So high level, four disciplines of execution. We want to focus on the wildly important. We want to act on lead measures. We want to keep a compelling scoreboard and a public scoreboard.

51:07 And we want to create a cadence of accountability. And again, that's Sean Covey. We didn't come up with that stuff. He's brilliant. Yeah. And then, okay, just recounting these primary areas of focus as key leaders. Where should you be spending your energy? Not when you have time, but because it's a key performance space for you as a key leader. Cash and collections. Profitability and consistency of service delivery. Creating new opportunities. Operational selling. Operational selling. Okay. Customer satisfaction. Employee engagement. team recruitment, training, and succession planning.

51:49 You know, what's interesting about that list, right, is I think when people log in to, you know, listen to a podcast about leadership focus, that means different things to everybody. But I think what's interesting about this list to me is, while there are lots of tactical things underneath these things, it's the vantage point that's important. It's like, we have to adopt this new perspective of our roles and, as really sitting above all the tactical do's and don'ts. It's thinking at this higher level of... It's this proactive position. Whereas we often were coming out of, how do I make this day work? How do I make this week successful with my team?

52:29 And then as we go into this higher level leadership role, it becomes all about how we're thinking about the business, how we're setting the team up for success, how we're equipping and mentoring. And it's all in this more long range. Absolutely. I'm going to see the benefits of my behavior three months, six months, nine months, 12 months out and being committed to that. And not getting sucked back into the glamorous, I was a hero today. I solved a problem. I collected an invoice. I set equipment. It's instead building the team for next year, the year after, et cetera.

53:11 That's it. That's the shift. Right? That's the shift. Okay. Okay, gang. This was good. Share it. If this taught you something and you appreciate it, the best way that you can thank us at Floodlight is to share it out with your friends and colleagues. Share it out to your team. Use it as a resource, right? This could be a good first conversation. Have your team, have your department leaders listen to this episode. Start to get their brain wrapped around this mind shift. And reach out to us at floodlightgrp.com if you're looking for some kind of consulting or advising partner, we would love to chat. Yeah, right on. All right, guys, see you next time. All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for joining us for another episode of Head, Heart & Boots. And if you're enjoying the show, but you love this episode, please hit follow, formerly known as subscribe, write us a review, or share this episode with a friend.

53:59 Share it on LinkedIn, share it via text, whatever. It all helps. Thanks for listening.