Joey Coleman's Guide to Navigating Leadership, Empathy, and Employee Experience

in a crude laboratory in the basement of his home hello everyone and welcome back to the show today we have an absolutely tremendous guest an all-timer here on the Ryan Hanley Show Joey Coleman and if you were at Elevate 2018 you would have seen Joey Coleman live he wrote a tremendous book never lose a customer again and Joey is back to talk about his latest book never lose an employee again and I think you're gonna absolutely love this conversation we dive into so many aspects of being a leader of managing people of hiring of firing the emotional toll that it takes on everyone involved uh you know obviously the employee who is being impacted but also uh the leaders the HR people the managers all everyone in between who has to deal with uh you know just the trials of of employee engagement employee management and uh it's a wonderful conversation Joey's a tremendous guy and just brilliant and always love having him on and never lose a customer again is one of my all-time favorite business books I keep it uh right next to my desk uh with a few other books that I've mentioned in the show before um that I I essentially use it as a uh like a guidebook like a textbook and I reference it all the time so uh you're gonna love this show you know love this conversation um guys before we get there if you are enjoying this podcast I am no longer taking advertisers on the show um I want to be able to share um exactly how I feel exactly how I think uh new messages need to be delivered new content new ideas I want to be able to share it in a way that I do not feel bottled in and certainly I don't want to ever say anything or do anything that offends or put any companies or sponsors in a in a particular uh position that makes them feel uncomfortable I also want to focus the content specifically on you guys and and where I see our society going our economy going our business life going where I see us as leaders as professionals as high performers as individuals seeking out peak performance which if you listen to this show I'm assuming that's at least some part of your mindset um there are topics that we need to dive into that uh are important and I want to be able to do that without any guide rails and um I also you know don't care to manage uh the day-to-day of having sponsors I appreciate everyone who sponsored the show and hopefully they feel that they got value out of their sponsorship but for the foreseeable future I'll not be taking on any sponsors so what that means is guys the the only fee for this show is you know is sharing the show is if you find value in the show share it um if you're not subscribed subscribed if you feeling super froggy leaving rating and review on apple itunes that you know when when my reach out to to new guests to guests specifically outside of the insurance industry uh they look at things like how many ratings and reviews you have what are those reviews look like what are people saying it means a lot to me and it means a lot 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and love for you to subscribe there as well with that guys uh appreciate the hell out of you love you for listening to this podcast let's get on to the all-powerful all-seeing all-knowing Joey Coleman the man the myth the legend Ryan Hanley I was gonna start with the exact same thing but your name I literally was waiting for you to come on the screen I was gonna say the exact same thing you beat me to it you son of a you're too kind you're too kind how have you been I feel like I have such fond memories of us being together live in person before the whole world melted down and disappeared for years yeah have you been uh good good um a lot of a lot of different twists and turns in the journey since then but um as I sit here today probably as good as I've ever been so um I was fired six days after you spoke um hopefully not because of my speech no no not not not specifically because you're no I'm kidding no um the feedback on your presentation Joey was such that they said I'm sorry uh we can never have you involved in this organization yes you did great but hiring that Joey Coleman guy gotta go was a problem uh so then I was the chief marketing officer of another company and then uh left there became the CEO of a fitness business there's a little twists and turns in there um did so well at that business I made it profitable and fun again for the founder so he fired me because I was his biggest expense and became the CEO again um at which point I decided that the universe was telling me to start my own insurance agency which I did seven days before the zombie apocalypse happened and um I fought through that was we uh built the business up through COVID uh we were wholly acquired in April of 2022 I stayed on the CEO founder and that's where I am today dude congratulations on being acquired by the way yeah that's awesome that's awesome and as you well know very rare that that happens yeah it uh I haven't talked too much about it um because I haven't known exactly how to do it um in a way that is useful to people um people know obviously I mean people listen to the show know and obviously it's a big part of my life but like the details how it worked how we got there the things we did um when when the time is right and I've kind of I want to the truth is our our buddy our our buddy Marcus Sheridan said this to me one day um I said you know we we did back-to-back speeches one time okay Marcus is obviously tremendous and amazing human love that guy yeah yeah he's the best and um and we've spoken back-to-back I think three times all three times um actually I shouldn't say that once I was ahead of him twice he was ahead of me following Marcus Sheridan is a trial for a speaker it's a trial so true so I've done that I've done joint events with Marcus yeah where we were back and forth over the course of days and yeah but he's he's the real deal brother he's the real deal but the good news is I believe that heat tempers steel I believe that pressure builds diamonds I believe that if you're gonna follow someone or open for someone Marcus is a good person because it is gonna call you to bring your a game in a way that 100 very few speakers would 100% and and what I learned from that is um uh he he you know so so being being buddies I would say to him hey look you know I feel like I bring a similar energy I feel like I can tell stories as good um as you know I can tell similar quality stories I can I love love stories I work the audience I'm doing a lot of the same things I said and while I get a lot of engagement you get standing ovations and I don't and I said not that I need that to feel justified in my work but it is uh in our business a testament to making an impact yeah it can be a metric worth tracking yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you know and and and I've you know one I'm I speak to a lot of insurance audiences who are often it's like literally ripping teeth out of their face to get them to engage with you totally yeah but um but you know I I'm like a test too that's a test too okay blah blah blah and I said well what you know if you had to pick one thing and he goes bro it's easy you don't have a million dollar slide and I said what what what do you mean by that and he said I have a slide that clearly defines that I know exactly what the fuck I'm talking about it's a slide you know and he's got this slide and it doesn't matter but he's like you don't have that thing he's like you have all the stories you have all the ability to work the audience he goes in some cases you know you can tell these stories in a way that other people can't you know you're not better or worse just you have a unique style and you have all these other pieces but you don't have that thing that everyone in that audience is going oh my god I want that thing so bad you know like you don't have that thing that is that because you have like these little little things that are good but they're not that thing that just makes you go I want that yeah yeah and he said you got to get that so I have purposefully and intentionally held off on telling the story around how I got to uh being acquired what that meant um because it was all it was highly tactical I mean it wasn't like I just walked into it of course of course there's always an area an element of serendipity of course but you you yeah yeah very few people sell a business without having strategically thought about selling a business yeah it happens but it's they're unicorns when that happens so so that's the deal so I basically have 18 a little less than 18 months to hit my targets and hopefully blow past them so I can say look now I can show I could stand in front of an audience and say here is a tactical framework or filter system that you could work through that maybe not in the same timetable maybe not the same whatever maybe bigger maybe you know but like here is an actual system that I put into place worked and got to this result which is you know I think would be lucrative for anybody so a million dollar slide that's my million I'm trying to get my million dollar slide my man dude I love every piece of this and you know what I particularly love and I just want to call it out there's a number of humans on the planet that if they worked really hard at something and then they got fired and then they worked to another place and worked really hard at something and left and then went to another place and worked really hard at something and got fired would say you know what I'm good enough of this shit like I've just like maybe I should be looking at other career options what I love about your resiliency and your energy is you are like I have what it takes to succeed in this industry and to be a player in this industry and make my mark on this industry and you doubled down on yourself and that's where you got your million dollar slide well dude how can you what is the hypocrisy if I were to pretend to tell people or share with people lessons that I've learned if I don't live those lessons myself it the hypocrisy would be what about in my experience north of 75 percent of speakers on stage do yeah yeah wow so that's it so that's it like and the fact that you don't cuts through the noise yeah what one of the reasons why Marcus is so amazing one of the reason I love calling him a close friend and a brother is because Marcus on stage and Marcus off stage exactly same person yeah same person the number of speakers that I know that are the same person on stage and off stage I can count right here I don't need any more than this I know I don't need any more than this and that I think is where the impact and the experience and the life worth living really comes from yeah you are on stage and who you are off stage same same same dude yeah I well one I appreciate that I can say I mean 100% for you too I enjoyed I enjoyed every part of one our an original podcast conversation that we had before we ever talked about you coming and speaking and elevate then all the time leading up our time together even though brief at elevate um I'm a huge fan of you not only as a person but uh but but your work obviously and and so happy to talk about your new book um I I could not agree with you more about uh so it's it's that kind of cliche but game smells game to a certain extent and I hear you I was recently at an event and uh a a new speaker uh new to speaking guy uh gave a presentation he was fucking brilliant um raw raw undervalued himself immensely especially when I heard what he charged to speak for that event I was like bro I'm gonna give you the best advice you've ever heard triple what you're charging like like you right right you know and uh you know and then I literally like bagged half of the rest of the event to spend with this guy to say like dude like because he was he was exactly the thing he was off stage and the thing he was on stage were so good he was a little raw I need a little more framing you know and whatever and just practice but like um but like I just was like these are the kind of people that we need to to continue to elevate because whether you 100% agree with what he's saying or not although his message was not controversial it was it was phenomenal it was about um selling selling to emotions instead of you know in a very positive way versus you know just you know I don't have to get into it but um but it was like this I just couldn't help myself I literally bagged like the second half of the conference and I just sat with this guy and like you know and was like dude think about this and how would you frame this up and you know I didn't have the answers I was trying to give him like thought experiments so that he could but it was like this we need more people like you on the circuit talking to people because it's not bullshit you know and that's a really important thing yeah dude totally agree totally agree I love it I love it so so okay so let me ask you this question as a speaker how did you survive COVID how did you how did you get through not being able to do your thing in person a converse converse uh combination of luck resiliency perseverance being willing to do whatever it took yeah and doubling down to what I knew to be true which is people are hurting right now and I had a series of speeches I did during COVID that were developed during COVID were only given during COVID and I don't give anymore yeah and the context of those speeches were uh the first one was all about the fact that we had been knocked to the bottom of the pyramid of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and how are we going to crawl our way back up and then in the latter half of COVID probably the last year what's next was the title of the speech where do we go from here how do we take what we've learned and restart and rekindle and do to do and luckily there were enough businesses that were struggling with those issues that I could come in and bring the content you know virtually to be able to do that I also did a lot of consulting during that time which I had kind of not been doing as much consulting but I just started you had talked about dialing that back and I had really done that yeah I had really dialed it down to almost nothing I was doing like maybe one consulting project a year and of course dialed it back up and there were a lot of folks that are like I mean I got a call from a guy one day and he said uh can we just talk for a while and I was like yeah man what what's going on and he's like I just had to fire 4 000 people and I just need a friend right now and I was like oh my god of course let's do it and then literally an hour later an hour later I'm on a call with another client and friend and he says can I be honest with you and I was like always you never have to ask permission for that he said we have 5x'd our business revenues yeah the last year in the last three months he did uh credit card payments yeah and he's like and I can't even tell my wife because I feel guilty about it because so many of my friends are firing people and shutting down their businesses and that juxtaposition for me personally to see people at their highest highs and their lowest lows and neither of them knew how to talk about it was like here here's here's some space for us to work dude I uh I had this conversation with a friend of mine I do these um I just a group of local business guys they're all 35 to 50 years old you know and and we just we get coffee and breakfast every other week and obviously when COVID happened we couldn't do it for a while but um you know politics aside as soon as maybe even illegally you know we could get together at somebody's house or whatever you know we did because you know I don't know it was important to connect and that conversation was happening with everybody in one of the shapes or forms right and and one of the things that I think is really interesting not to um I don't want to say uh better or worse but the emotional toil of often the emotional toil of being fired is what most people focus on the emotional toil of having to let people go is often brushed off as like ah you're just this authoritarian a-hole to like fire people totally that I have been at my lowest as a professional oftentimes in the moments prior to and directly following having to let someone go even if they deserved it yeah they 100 owned it totally is a horrible horrible thing horrible yeah horrible and that's where you know such a big premise of this book is designed to try to get the employer to understand the employee's perspective but equally I think when they do that it will help the employee to understand the employer's perspective yeah that's that's the trojan horse yeah the book see the trojan horse of the book is the person who's buying it it's going to be like wait a second this is all about getting showing the love to my people when did they get show the love to me have faith brother yes because when you show it to them they will feel a level of connection and reciprocity and bonding to you that you can't even begin to fathom the magnitude I'm I'm so excited to talk about this to you and just in full candidness um I'm going to use this as a personal consulting engagement as well since I have you captive happy to happy to we as always I trust you implicitly take the conversation wherever you like wherever you like I will follow um being my my own journey uh that I've had from an employee standpoint of both being m I'm going to forget exactly the number I got I'm going to get the first it was seven numbers and letters when I worked at American Express I was m18 and four more numeric symbols that I can't exactly remember but that's who I was right I wasn't Ryan Hanley I was this I was m18 my mail came so go you know experiencing what it means to be a nothing person and to be a number yeah to literally be a number yes yeah that's what you are I mean that's we we we know that humans don't like to be taught of as a number yeah and yet what does an organization like that do hey you're new on the job great here's your number yes and that's what you were that was the dales right so I've been that I've been family business I've been basically asked to leave a family business I've been fired multiple times uh even the job that I left kind of mutually it was not going well for different reasons that I won't get into because it just is not important it's not pertinent to this so I've had what I feel in general is a a broad broad stroke of experience in terms of employment um you know experiences yeah yeah and um so when I became a true employer I wanted to do it differently yes and um you know dude should we save some of this for the conversation because I'm happy to get into any of this this is the conversation are we in the conversation it's already started beautiful I love it we're in it already we're having already realize it's brilliant that's why I I hit record before you come on only in case this happens so that beautiful is that in case me like this brilliant conversation all of a sudden I'll be like we should add no so so yeah so so so my you know one of the things I think is so interesting is um when I started rogue it was just me I had no other employees obviously I wanted to grow it larger kind of fitting no offense if your brand is going to be rogue you better not start with eight people right yes yeah yeah yeah like live the brand I love which is which is funny because which it's so funny I still get asked today how do you feel about the name rogue and I'm like well it's a single syllable alliteration with one of the more memorable letters that has both a clearly defining differentiator and a word that clearly defines what industry you're in in it so frankly the fact that you ask that question means makes me question your intelligence you know that's my that's what's going on in my head what I actually say is I really like it I love it brilliant brilliant well I like it too I think it's awesome when I when I saw it come across I was like that is really fun yeah yeah but so so so the first thing I wrote down and this is where I'd love you know we're gonna get into the we're gonna talk all about the book and I want to talk a book and and um it's so excited and um and so okay so um the very first thing I wrote down when I was kind of sketching out this idea this is probably two days after I've been canned so we'll call it October 8th of 2019 um I am wholly committed to starting my own agency but I and I but most of the ideas are here not on paper so I'm starting to sketch those ideas out and literally the first thing I wrote before I wrote anything else and I wrote some core ideas which still exist today but the first thing I wrote was I wanted to create a no ceiling insurance career I wanted to create a career for insurance professionals in which they felt that as hard as they wanted to work as much expertise as they wanted to develop as willing as they were to buy into process they could go that far and that I because my last name is Hanley and your last name is Coleman that doesn't keep you from from ascending to all your wildest dreams come true world domination gold coins rain down from the sky and whatever else that you want out of life happens and um and that has been a very very interesting journey um and trying to implement that so what I would what I would love to get um uh before we get into that and use that as the construct is uh we talked you know I think we got a little bit of a feel for why I wrote the book but why why employees you know you're you're the you're the customer retention guy right you're the guy I literally have your book it's in my nightstand I still reference it to this day I'll pull it out for different ideas thoughts things I need to remember if for those listening I'll have uh um uh never lose customer again in the show notes you can go back and listen to the old podcast it's one of the best business books let alone customer retention that's specifically focusing on books I've ever read I still use it as a guidebook today just all candidness but so you're the customer retention guy now you're talking about employees now I think we can make a connection but where does that where does that jump come from why start focusing on this versus continuing saying to sales or customer you know whatever why where did this jump come from so before I answer that Ryan let me just say how flattered I am about the kind words about my first book which was never lose a customer again and all focused on the customer experience what you shared right there is actually a dream come true for me and I'll explain why when I wrote the book I didn't want it to be a once and done book you know there's some books in your life that you read once and you get what you need to get out of it and you're good to go yep I think the best books are the ones that you can come back to yeah you can read at a different point in your career when you're facing a different problem a different situation a different scenario you're in a different organization you've got a new product a new service whatever it may be so thank you for sharing that because that lights me up and I so appreciate that yeah yeah lots of people to your point are like so wait a second Joey for 20 years plus you've been the customer experience guy now you're going to be the employee experience guy why the switch yep friends it wasn't a switch it's the other side of the same coin let me explain what I mean by that we can't expect to create remarkable customer experiences if we don't have the employees to do it and an employee can't create a remarkable experience if they have no context for what a remarkable experience is and the fact of the matter is they're not going to be getting many of those experiences especially as an employee out with the brands they're interacting with their chance to get that experience is from you the employer and it can be the employer who's got their name on the door or it can be the direct manager who doesn't have their name on the door but is still responsible for the experience that's being delivered to that person every single day I had been into my customer experience career about all of let me see if I can remember yeah five minutes before I realized that employee experience was inextricably linked to customer experience so what I've always decided and if you it's ironic if you look at the two books you know same size same design if you're familiar with the first book same eight phases of the customer journey and same six tools we would use to create remarkable customer experiences have been turned internal on the employee journey and the employee experience so this is all the same story just with a different focal point if you want to improve your customer experience focus on improving your employee experience if your customers are thrilled with you your employees will be thrilled with you why because they'll like coming to work they'll like interacting with the people you serve if your customers can't stand you you're going to have huge employee issues huge employee morale issues because every day at work feels like a trouble some trot you know through muck and mire so there's an opportunity I think by focusing on one you're polishing one side of the coin and you get the benefit of lifting the value and polishing the other side of the coin as well yeah I agree I mean if you so our mantra at rogue is people process premium people are first for a fucking reason because you if you don't have good people who bind to what you're doing and you don't treat them well then it doesn't matter you can literally have nothing you could literally implement to a t perfect perfectly every phase of your first book and it would still not hit home if you don't have the people behind it so you know our our you know we don't we don't even focus on the customer until literally the third part of our mantra which is in our case premium being writing business for customers so like you know that that to me is is you know it makes complete sense and I think that so let me frame the question let me frame this question this way why is this so hard for people like like this to me is obvious like I don't maybe and maybe it's because I've been tossed to the curb so many times that I'm just like duh but like why is this so hard for people because I will tell you that one of the questions I get the most at rogue is about is about hiring and retaining people because we have a wait list to work here there's a literal wait list of people that want to work at rogue and like and I just you know we have to hit certain milestones of revenue before we can hire more people but like but like I don't get why this is a con as a concept isn't so natural to leaders managers etc uh couple thoughts on that and I love this and and before I get that kudos to you for having a wait list of people that want to work that's how you know you've created something special is when you have a wait list especially in this economy in this day and age where you have a wait list of people who want to come work for you brilliant I love every piece of that so here's why I think this happens I want to preface this by saying I come to this conversation from a place of both sympathy and empathy sympathy and that I understand it's hard empathy and that I've lived it too yep so I get it yeah most employers it has been a really long time since they were an employee you're kind of the exception to the rule Ryan I say this respectfully because rogue is earlier in its life cycle you remember the taste the feel the pain the joy of being an employee and you have brought that perspective full on to the design of your enterprise most employers it's been decades since they were an employee if ever so many entrepreneurs go straight from school or straight from you know out of their parents house to starting their own business they never pit stop in the place of employee and I say pit stop not to denigrate being an employee but meaning spend enough time in it to get the feels to understand what it's like to be an employee so that's problem number one problem number two many employers think that the definition of being a good employer is seeming to have all the answers being resilient ready to rock it never stumbling never falling and so they come to the conversation from this place of I'm going to have the answers I'm going to tell you I'm not going to show you vulnerability I'm not going to admit that I'm not sure and this creates a disconnect where the employees looking at the employer going I can't bring my concerns to them because they'll think I'm stupid or they think I'm not paying attention or they don't think I'm doing a good job and I might get fired and no one on the planet goes to work thinking gosh I hope today's the day I get fired yeah right this is not how it operates third and final reason and this comes back to that conversation of how does the customer experience guy become the employee experience guy in most organizations rogue risk being an exception right in most organizations customer experience happens over on the marketing team the sales team the ops team employee experience happens in a silo called HR if you have an HR department or whenever there's a problem we pay attention to it oh my gosh we gotta we gotta fill a role somebody just quit let's spin up HR capabilities if you're in a small organization or oh my gosh it's been two years since we've given our people any feedback I suppose we should do an annual review that's what they do right let me google questions to ask on an annual review and we'll have an annual review process right it's haphazard at best and that's again not a criticism of the leader this is just the challenge we all face and no one with all due respect to my HR friends in the world no one is sitting in a job right now going hey we're going to invite HR to this meeting and they're thinking oh this meeting just got better yeah yeah if you hear HR is coming to the meeting you think oh I'm going to be packing up a box and heading out at the end of the day escorted by security yeah that's why HR or I'm going to be put on a performance review plan or there's some type of punishment that's coming so the challenge I think we face as employers as leaders is to remember what it was like to be an employee and if we can't remember it to step into their shoes and feel it to think more strategically about the journey of the employee experience and how challenging that is and to break down the barrier between we're having a customer experience conversation or employee experience conversation to say we're having a human experience conversation and wherever we practice our human experience skills internally it sharpens and hones our abilities externally and vice versa what's up guys sorry to take you away from the episode but as you know we do not run ads on this show in an exchange for that I need your help if you're loving this episode if you enjoy this podcast whether you're watching on YouTube or you're listening on your favorite podcast platform I would love for you to subscribe share comment if you're on YouTube leave a rating review if you're on Spotify or Apple iTunes etc this helps the show grow it helps me bring more guests in we have a tremendous lineup of people coming in men and women who've done incredible things sharing their stories around peak performance leadership growth sales the things that are going to help you grow as a person and grow your business but they all check out comments ratings reviews they check out all this information before they come on so as I reach out to more and more people and want to bring them in and share their stories with you I need your help share the show subscribe if you're not subscribed and I'd love for you to leave a comment about the show because I read all the comments or if you're on Apple or Spotify leave a rating review of this show I love you for listening to this show and I hope you enjoy it listening as much as I do creating the show for you all right I'm out of here peace let's get back to the episode all right so there's there's lots of impact that was I completely I mean just I I couldn't agree with you more I think that's that's exactly it I mean that's that's I'm going to give you so you said uh I don't I want to uh be uh humble and candid and say that well I do think we have a great culture uh it's got plenty of cracks you know so so just be right if I may forgive me for interrupting yeah this is how I know you have a great culture so let me let me unpack this in the book never lose an employee again the new book I interviewed hundreds of companies 50 plus of them made the book case studies in the book from all seven continents I think I'm actually the first business book to have a business case from all seven continents including Antarctica okay super fun it was exciting for me you know fun little experience every single interview I did somewhere in the first five to 15 minutes the leader that I was interviewing said you know Joey I'm happy to do this interview and talk but you need to understand we haven't got all this stuff figured out we've got cracks in our experience we're not perfect that's how you know you're remarkable you're remarkable when you have the level of self awareness to understand that employee experience is never done it's not a destination it's a journey yeah and as the marketplace changes the type of people we're bringing in changes the type of clients and markets we're serving change our employee experience is going to evolve and the companies that think they've got it figured out friends I'm sorry I can pull out a stopwatch and track how much longer you're going to be in business because we are living in an exponential age we are living in an age where the change that is happening not only in terms of the technological change but the evolutionary change the physical change the emotional change the cognitive change is happening at a rate that is unprecedented in human history unprecedented we're we're on the hockey stick going up and we've got a brain that evolved over millennia yeah and we're being asked to completely renew everything we knew to be true not 50 years ago but even 10 years ago and in some cases five years ago and in some cases like ai six months ago what we knew to be true six months ago is not true today the same holds true for your employee experience and as the world is becoming more uncertain and more chaotic more employees are looking for grounding for certainty for confidence in their life and if as an employer you can provide that you can provide a space where they feel the ground beneath their feet where they feel that they're not on shifting sands every step they take you will be the employer of choice in the marketplace yeah i'll tell you um i want to go back to your having all the answers thing because this to me feels like one of the core especially for mid and small size businesses not not micro businesses but mid and small size businesses this feels like one of the main issues that leaders face when it comes to cultural issues is that they feel this burden um on their shoulders of having all the answers and i'll tell you in the moments so we had a moment we'll call it somewhere six months ago where i could just smell that our culture was off right i didn't have any maybe direct direct feedback but i could just little comments here little nips little but but but but back and forth and i could just like yeah something's off right and what i realized was the reason it was off is because i was carrying that burden right i tried to not do that i i tried to but for for that period of time for things to change that were going on it was like i everyone was looking to me for all the answers and i'm in my bed uh crying sipping bourbon because i don't have all the answers and i don't know what to do so i uh i i actually um i i made a couple life changes in terms of just like trying to focus a little and what came back to me was one of the original ideas of rogue which is being of service so what i say what i started saying to the team i i held an all hands meeting the following tuesday and i said look this is my fault i said it's my fault because i haven't been up my job here you guys think my job is to tell you what to do it's not frankly i couldn't do really any of your jobs anymore if i ever could i said my job is solely and squarely to be of service to you you need to come to me not with looking for answers but with with answers that i can then help you implement and and integrate into the business i am my job is to be of service so don't don't there are things that obviously i can help with or or know or have experienced before but stop coming to me you know and i didn't say it exactly this way this doesn't you know i said it a little with a little more grace but basically i said stop coming to me looking for answers you have the answers that's why i hired you that's why you're in that position that's why i trust you that's why i care about you is because you have the answers i don't have the answers my job is to be of service and when we change that that meeting it took a couple more meetings for them to believe it and and kind of fix the cracks that it created but today we are firing firing on as many cylinders as we are capable of firing on at this time and i think it in large part was due and then i had to push that down to my to my next level of managers right your job as the leader of insert division is not to just point fingers and tell people what to do it's that be of service to them and what hey you're struggling with this particular function let's talk about what what can i do to help make that functioning but and that concept and what's crazy about is i think we yearn for there must be some sort of physiological or psychological thing that i don't necessarily understand yet because whack people just picked that up and it just it was like it was it was crazy it's crazy to think of how quickly we came from what could have been probably a very bad direction and just it just changed the whole course of where we're headed and um it's been wild to watch ryan i love this so many thoughts so many thoughts on this so yes it is a yearning dan pink wrote about this in this fantastic book drive right what do employees want they want autonomy they want the option to make their own decisions they don't want to be told what to do they want to feel empowered to do what's right one of the interesting things about putting together a book with so many case studies is i had to make the rule early on that i would only tell one story from any one company even though there were 30 40 50 amazing things they were doing for employees i had to just pick one because the book cannot be 300 000 pages right it needs to be 300 pages so there's a company i talk about in the book run by some great friends of mine and the company's called pila and in the book i talk about something they do called pila university how they onboard and train their people over about two months as opposed to two days which is what most organizations think about onboarding their people but there's something they do that speaks directly to this and their chairman brad petterson his good friend of mine was telling me this he calls it the 131 so here's how this works when people come to brad they can come with one problem not 10 not 12 not 30 they have to boil it down to one because we can easily talk about all the challenges we're having and then the conversation in a meeting or in a discussion really never goes anywhere because there's too many different things and too many variables yeah yeah so they have to narrow it to one they can bring one problem they can say brad this is what i'm dealing with here's the challenge they then have to suggest three potential solutions not one not two three three ways that the problem could be dealt with or responded to then before brad will tell them what he thinks they have to tell him which one they think should be the one they move forward with one three one wow i love that brad said is a leader a significant percentage of the time he's like sounds great to me run with that one yeah that was my response i was like but that time they put so much thought into it they already know the answer correct they already know the answer and now imagine them leaving the meeting going wow i went to the chairman of the board with a problem i outlined three potential solutions and the chairman let me pick which one we ran with the feeling of pride the feeling of intentionality the feeling of ownership that comes from that absolutely incredible last thought on this yeah forgive me for getting a little religious you're good but there's a religious character globally in the hindu religion that i love called ganesh ganesha is known as the remover of obstacles that is his role in the hindu religion forgive me at least based on my understanding i am not hindu but i've spent some time in india i have some friends who are hindu this is how they've explained it to it and based on my own research and reading so if anybody listening we will forgive you forgive me any slight deviations but what i love about this is the title the remover of obstacles yeah to me that is your role as a leader my role is to serve my people by removing the obstacles to their greatness yes to their best version of their life if that obstacle to your point is feeling a ceiling on their growth remove it if their obstacle is feeling that they don't know how to proceed forward because it's muck and mire i need to bring shovels and flashlights to the game to help them see more clearly or to hold their hand or to prop them up or to lead them forward or to just give them a listening ear how often as humans are really what we're looking for is just the chance to be heard my wife and i have uh i've been happily happily married for uh 13 years now coming up on 13 here in a in a couple months and one of the great things we adopted early in our relationship that has served i like to think it served me incredibly well and she's very gracious to uh indulge me this is when she starts to present something she's dealing with either i will interrupt or sometimes she will say this before and say am i looking for solutions or am i looking for listening oh i like that a lot and if she's looking for listening i just zip it i close my mouth and i just listen and even if i have an idea and i'm like oh honey you should just do this no no no that's not what was asked what was asked was listening as a fellow speaker we were talking about this if somebody is doing a speech and they come off stage and they say well what'd you think joey i say what are you looking for are you looking for feedback are you looking for constructive criticism are you looking for me to tell you the things i loved the things i didn't love what kind of conversation do you want to have right now yeah now that catches a lot of humans off guard ryan because most humans don't stop before they give advice most humans don't stop before they share their perspective or their ideas to say what do you actually want right now your employees your team members are exactly the same way ask them what they need give them the opportunity we had this experience yesterday with my team we're on a hyper short deadline before a big thing we've been working on for a long time and i said to them there are two projects that we would love to have accomplished by this deadline but everything in my gut is telling me there's no way that can happen there's not enough hours in the day do you agree with my gut instinct and i say before i even ask that question the heads are nodding like we can feel the tension yeah i've got team of about three people on this call three people plus me so there's four of us said here's the deal i'd like to know from each of you which one we should focus on because we can't do both of them so we can only focus on one so which one do you think we should focus on and most importantly and they know this by now we've been working together long enough why tell me your why what's your reasoning what's your what's your belief what's your your perspective that makes you give this answer and then i sat back and was quiet and i watched as one person said well i think we should do this one and then another person said well i think we should do the other one and here's why and the first person said you know what i hadn't thought of that yet you're right i'm now with you we should go with option number two person number three said well joey i think there's a possibility that we could get both done i said i appreciate that enthusiasm and attitude god i love that about you but i'm telling you there's not enough hours in the day my job as the leader is to be the realist and say there's not enough hours in the day so coming back to it if you had to pick one she said yeah it's that same one as the other one i said fantastic i said by the way just so you all know i was thinking when we started this conversation that it should be the first one you all have convinced me it should be the second one and that's what we're going to do going forward my hope in that little story and in that little example is my team knew that their opinions are valued that their opinions are appreciated and that when presented with their reasoning and logic i'm willing to go in the direction they think is best even if i'm not sure or i may think a different direction is best now before this gets misunderstood ryan there are times when the leader has to make the call and has to make the call by themselves this is the nature of leadership this is the reason you find yourself in this position in your organization whether you are the founder the owner a manager doesn't matter there are times when the decision rises to the level that a choice just has to be made one of the regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum i heard an interview from president obama when he was president nearing the end of his term that i thought beautifully summed up the difficulty of being president of the united states and i had the opportunity to work in the white house in the office of council to the president so i had the opportunity to witness this personally it was amazing and to hear him reiterate it i was not working in his administration it was years later to hear it from someone else share this perspective and he said this by the time the question gets to my desk the obvious answers are gone the easiest answers the easy simple solutions those those were figured out before it got to me what i'm dealing with is two variations of a not good answer on either one but i gotta pick one because we have to move forward so i'm picking it knowing that there's a consequence knowing that i wish there was a better choice knowing that there's something else that might be a better solution but we haven't found it and no one's found it and we've got to move forward to me that's the definition of true leadership true leadership is being willing to say when the chips are down when we've tried all the options when we've explored the possibilities and there's no clear clean obvious answer to make a choice now that choice could be taking a course of action that choice could be stasis you know we're not going to do anything we're going to just be in a holding pattern for a while and see if more information presents itself or other things happen that figure it out but all too often i think leaders miss the opportunity to involve their team in the discussion and leaders miss the opportunity to when the chips are down say you know what friends i'm sorry a decision has to be made we need to move forward we can't spend any more time in this so i will take it on my shoulders to move forward with this path and if this goes awry blame me that's fine that's the role that i've signed on to play in this organization there's a lot there's like yes i think what you've described is um you know you need you need to have trust in humility right as a leader uh those are that's pretty common uh uh understanding where i think a lot of people go wrong is in one of two ways they either go hardcore hierarchy do as i say don't ask questions or they go the opposite they go flat everybody's got an opinion everyone's got a voice the answer is actually i mean it's a benevolent dictatorship is really the answer and i mean that maybe you don't like the word dictatorship i get it no no i have no problem with that you personally no i have no problem with the phrase dictatorship you know i have the problem i have with the phrase the only problem i have with the phrase dictatorship is most people completely misunderstand it yeah that's right i wasn't people misunderstand it you know i understand no i understand they they specifically misunderstand it what what i think i agree with you it's not an either or it's a yes and yes there are times where there needs to be hierarchy there are times when there needs to be plurality yes and the question is what are you creating in your organization and what are the topics where a process dictates a decision and what are the process the parts of the organization where a conversation dictates the decision yes and there need to be both if we do too much process we're a hot mess if we do too much conversation we never get anything done and so it's this interesting blend of what we do but what i know to be true is that we are at a time in human history that is unlike any other time and what we are being called to do is recognize that the command and control industrial revolution hierarchy structure is not serving the way it used to yes i would make an argument that it never served as well as people thought but let's just save that conversation for another episode yeah hopefully we can all agree that it's not working the way we want it to work now you can say oh it's because of these millennials or you can say oh it's because of social media or oh it's because our workers are remote they're not under the same roof listening to what i don't care what excuse or reason or rationale you want to bring to the table but i like to think we can all agree it's just not working as well as it could couldn't couldn't agree more with you i think i think it had a moment in time when there were things that had to get done at you know in the industrial revolution and i agree with you it probably was not even optimal for its time what you what you can say about that structure and i'm not advocating for it because it's certainly not how i run my company but i think if you're going to steal me on that side of the argument in a short period of time and for a short period of time you can get a massive amount done if the leader's bet is right right so correct if the leader's bet is right in a short period of time that type of structure can get a massive amount done however you burn people out you eventually fall apart because you have no culture and if the leader's bet is inaccurate because he in most cases it would be a he we're not taking anyone else's feedback then you also went off a cliff so there are we read the stories of this structure in the winners and we play winners bias or whatever it is for that confirmation bias yeah confirmation bias of hey look at look at how it worked for henry ford yeah yeah okay look at the interviews of anybody who worked for henry ford yeah yeah yeah they're like oh my gosh this was a nightmare could you produce this stuff absolutely here's the thing i've got two little boys yeah and one of the things i talk about with them all the time is everything everything in life is a choice and every choice has consequences and every choice has desired outcomes and undesired outcomes that occur so just recognize that we've got a choice and we want to do our best to choose wisely we're going to have to make choices based on limited information we might make a choice that we're going to sprint really hard for a time period i'm doing that right now this i mentioned big project big that we are sprinting harder than my team frankly has ever sprinted before and i know that i've pushed the boundaries and i also know that after this timeline i darn well better give some time for rest and recharge and recuperate right downshift and i've already started talking about the downshift okay by the way this this has a finite end this is not forever but we are going to sprint for this time period for a period and then we are going to take months not days not hours months to let the dust settle a little we're going to continue to work but we're not going to be working at this speed in this pace and we're going to see what happens and then we're going to adjust accordingly i i think there's just so much opportunity to recognize that as cervantes said it's the road not the in it's not the destination it's the journey to get to the destination you achieve your goals by paying attention to the journey not by paying attention to well what will it be like when we get there that's fine and dandy and that's important to vision cast initially but then you darn well there better be paying attention to the road and the journey because you're going to miss out on a lot of opportunities and beautiful things if you don't so you know how i frame this in my head i frame everything as an experiment or a practice everything it's an experiment or practice what are we doing here are we experimenting because experiments you some experiments blow up some experiments are amazing but you know what you do you learn you're right i say it all i say you got the opportunity to learn yeah i think most leaders don't actually learn from the experiments they justify why the experiment ended up the way it did without exploring why the experiment didn't go the way they thought it would yeah i i agree with that completely uh i tell the team i go look based on the on my uh assuming the fact that uh i have irish heritage and was born under the sign of aquarius um we are destined to make every mistake that exists our goal is to not make that mistake twice so let's work through do the things be aggressive work hard have questions push boundaries you know do things that are outside of what the norm in our industry is and if it doesn't work it's just an experiment you just won't do it again it's super simple and fail fast and have fun yeah and then the things that do work right the things that do work that we do want to implement and make part of our company we think of them as practices just as a practice that's all it is just a practice you show up for practice you practice sometimes practice goes great sometimes practice doesn't but it's a practice and what you do with practice is you just keep doing the practice you show up to practice it's a practice right and when you frame these things i think in people's minds and and some people will tell me that the way that i look at it is word games i've had people say that it's the word games that you know and i'm like words fucking matter words totally matter totally matter like it is literally the foundation of our ability to communicate in the modern era is words language it's a whole thing it hugely matters so when you say these things and and i love the way that you frame all these examples it's it's why i enjoy talking to you so much it's like it is so important not just that you've developed the idea or the concept but that you frame that concept in words that will have lasting meaning to your people and lasting meaning in the way that you want it to be there right so um you know i talk about humility a lot and i try to practice it i always take i take full responsibility for everything even if i had nothing to do with it not to get people off right but what what we'll talk to is hey look that thing you did that wasn't the best thing we didn't love that thing but what we're going to do is work with you to create a new practice gonna make sure that doesn't happen again right it's my fault we didn't have a practice for that i will work on my part of that of creating a practice for you your part is that you follow that practice and you don't let it happen again how does that does that sound good that sounds great okay and if they say no well then we just kick them to the curb you know no um no i uh i think that the way that you described your conversation with um with your team uh pushing for this goal is exactly the framework that i hope people try to develop that you have the trust and and and humility in yourself as a leader to ask your people for their opinion to listen to their opinion to take it seriously and then to be willing to change your mind if they make an argument that suits and i feel like if you give that to your as a gift it's a gift you're giving a gift to your team you're saying here i am willing to exchange my my authority as the leader because the buck stops with me i'm willing to exchange some of that with you in exchange for you doing some of the work of coming up with that ideas if you will afford me the privilege of because the buck stops with me when it is necessary i get to make this call and you trust that i'm doing it only in in situations and where it's necessary and if you can develop that relationship with your team um man the shit that happens that comes out of nowhere the things that get solved all of a sudden problems get solved like i'll show up and it'll be like problem solved problem so apartment i'll be like no one asked what who am i where yeah they're like yeah we didn't need you for any of that i'm like okay great ryan it's it's it's so true i think if there was one takeaway that i would ask listeners to consider is are you looking for automatons or free thinkers in your organization now as i've said before everything in life is a choice and choices have consequences in some circumstances you might be like joey if i could just get a ton of automatons who do what i ask them to do man my life would be easier sure it would in many ways but would also be worse hey joey i want free thinkers i want people that take responsibility that actually make choices they don't have to come with me for everything well guess what then they're not going to come to you with everything and some eggs are going to get broken and some mistakes are going to get made and things are going to be done in a way that you wouldn't have done them and that may be good or bad depending on the circumstance but get clear about the kind of person you want and then build that in to your job posting to your position advertisement build it into your interviewing process build it into your hiring process your onboarding process your retention process your offboarding process by the way how you offboard an employee when they go somewhere else or they're fired is just as important as how you onboard them and yet most businesses pay no attention to this what is the full journey and what are you hoping to accomplish keeping the eye on that prize i think it pays huge dividends in return where do they get the book where do they connect with you guys uh i've said this before on the show i'll say it again joey is just one of the best i mean i know i've i've stroked your ego quite a bit but it is due and um i hope they connect with you on wherever your places are and go get this book this the number one thing i'm getting asked to speak about i'm not even an expert on this topic is how do we hire people how do we hire more people who will be engaged and whatever like they see the culture that we have i'm not even expert i'm getting hired to speak on it this is the guy people this is the guy right here like you know i mean well pay me but then also pay joey i love it i love it yeah ryan i so appreciate the conversation so the book is called never lose an employee again and it's available in whatever format you like to consume books so if you like hard covers so you can write the margins and take notes and highlight what you want you've got it in that format if you're a kindle or a nook reader and you like to be able to kind of scroll through and read we've got that version and if you'd like the sound of my voice in our conversation today we've got an audiobook that i narrate so i will actually read the book to you it's available wherever you would get your books or your reading materials go out and check it out by the way i'll just put it in the side if you buy the book and you don't get value from the book you send me an email my emails all over the book you send me an email and you say joey i didn't get the value i don't see how it can apply to our organization and i'll refund the cost of the book that you pay that's how confident i am that you're going to be able to find at least a nugget or two and hopefully a lot more that are applicable to your workplace your environment what you're trying to do with your people the other place you can find me is on my website joey coleman.com that's j-o-e-y like a five-year-old or a baby kangaroo coleman c-o-l-e-m-a-n like the camping equipment but no relation joey coleman.com if you're on the socials i know ryan's on the socials i'm not on the socials as much find me over on linkedin that's the place to find me uh anywhere else you'll find accounts but they're for lurking not for posting so come over to uh to linkedin and i'll see you there and like i said i so appreciate your time ryan inviting me to the show but respectfully and more importantly i appreciate all the time to everybody who listened into our conversation i hope you had as much fun and learned as much as i learned from talking to ryan and getting the chance to chat with him you're the man thank you thanks buddy close twice as many deals by this time next week sound impossible it's not with the one call close system you'll stop chasing leads and start closing deals in one call this is the exact method we use to close 1200 clients under three years during the pandemic no fluff no endless follow-ups just results fast based in behavioral psychology and battle tested the one call close system eliminates excuses and gets the prospect saying yes more than you ever thought possible if you're ready to stop losing opportunities and start winning visit master the close.com that's master the close.com do it today