Ep. 20: CEO Retreat - Quality Comes from “Within”!
What are you willing to throw your life away on? With Andrew Reed and The Liberation. It's a serious question, one worth pondering. Am I living the life I want, an intelligent life, or something else? How can I have a better experience of life?
Speaker 1:These are some of the questions explored in this series of messages without the brag and the advertisement. Getting beyond even human institutions and society into the wilderness, nature, the reality of how life actually operates on this planet. These messages range from intimate recordings from the awakened forest to concerts, national conferences, and broadcasts on a wide array of philosophical topics.
Speaker 2:Hello, everybody. This message is from a CEO retreat at the J House or the Japanese House that we recently had. And this is where CEOs from all across the country fly in and we go through some of the various MBI or multi view methodologies and are really conventions that we've developed or evolved over the years that help organizations work. And I think this is useful information really for anybody because if you want to accomplish something in life, for example to start an organization or a company, or if you're going to advance into a leadership position, or if you just simply want a better quality of life as an individual, there's a lot of ideas that are shared in this message that I think would be quite helpful. And a major thrust of it has to do with quality.
Speaker 2:So you might say this is a quality message. And with that said, comes from where? It comes from within a person. And I think that's as important point as anything in this message. So without further ado, here is the CEO retreat day one.
Speaker 3:Welcome to the J House or the Japan House. It survived the fire. The Black Cove fires have wiped out so many of my neighbors, 13 of my buildings. Of course that's after being cut off for six months as you all crossed the bridge to get here. Anyway, we've been through something.
Speaker 3:But the thing about tough hits and things like that, what do they do? They harden us to a certain extent. We get some backbone about what life's about and all that. We also are softened at the same time. You know, if we allow it to do its work.
Speaker 3:And the energy in the room is probably I probably absorbed that. We had, again, the Special Forces Green Berets did the last trainings here over multiple days. Of course, and why are they here? Well, they saw, of all the places they went to help out in the disaster relief, this was the most organized. They had never seen a civilian population organize and become as efficient.
Speaker 3:And they said, Who's behind this? And obviously there's a couple of us that did. This was actually made into a store. I made it into a store because people can't go in the store. I mean, all our stuff's coming in by helicopter and a pulley system.
Speaker 3:And we cut LZs and stuff, a couple of them, just depending on the direction of the wind. But you know we were just our own people, all 78 people up here. And so that's how they got here. And of course I'll be going down to Bragg to teach down there because they need System seven too. They brought a bunch of their generals and colonels up here.
Speaker 3:So it's got the Green Beret energy and I probably assimilated some of that. But I thank you all for being here and we've got a great Iowa contingency. In some mysterious form, a lot of us, I'm from, you know, like Corn County, Iowa, and we've got a lot of us here, and but we're from all over the country, large companies, mid sized, as well as some small. So a great range. But again, we're still in this marvelous movement, which, and I do look at it still as a movement even though we've become very corporatized.
Speaker 3:And that's actually one of the things you want to defeat in a culture is the corporateness because let's face it, for most clinicians that's a turnoff. And how do you do that elegantly to operate in this highly standardized way without neutering out the feel of what everything is about? So the CEO retreat, and this feels very retreat like. It actually feels more retreat like than the burnt down multi million dollar studio. Because but it's a different experience because it's a different energy in all this.
Speaker 3:And I had some music stuff over in Japan and came back and I was so inspired that I thought, wow, we gotta have a Japan house. Because these are people of discipline and honor and meticulousness. And that explains so much of their success. When you think of a country that's devoid of almost all natural resources, but yet they have usually the second, third or fourth top economy in the world. Where does it come from?
Speaker 3:It comes from the people and the quality of the people. And the one thing I did want to make or talk about is this idea of quality because people talk a good game about quality, they give lip service to quality but yet they don't do quality. And we know that from again measuring again nine eighty nine data elements with nine twenty two cross calculations from a thousand hospices every single month. They don't know what quality is. Not really.
Speaker 3:And when I'm talking about quality, I'm talking about world class quality. Well where does quality come from? It comes from within here. It comes from within each of us. I'll say a vision of quality since being a CO has so much to do with where we're going and the ideas, the unseen things in our heads of where we want to go.
Speaker 3:But it comes from the quality of the human being first. And thus quality flows out of us because our lives don't so much happen to us as much as they flow out of us. All our results in life At least 50% of it is dictated by our human will. Our desires and the other is the dance we play with the external world that burns down things and kills bridges and that are outside of our control. But 50% is a huge amount.
Speaker 3:So the challenge here is to cultivate this quality which can be language as meticulousness, obsession. You catch an employee saying, Good enough? And it should prick you. Or that's that makes sense kind of or that's a good deal. Rather than the person of brilliance that is working at something and says, that's it.
Speaker 3:With paying no attention to the clock. But it has to start with that leader. I mean, and I think all the guys I had working over the last days or so in preparation from this, and again I'll rip people's lungs out if it's not being done to a certain standard. I mean,
Speaker 2:but it has it has to do with that attention to just little things. Again, meticulousness is such a great word.
Speaker 3:And it also translates obviously into customer service, or as we would language it in the world class world of customer delight. Because even in our end of life care, we're talking about repeat business where we endear ourselves to referral sources. Right? And we have to be meticulous in our consideration of their experience. I know that I can win over, for example, a nursing home with almost a single phone call or leaving a single voice message where you so jar them that this is different.
Speaker 3:And when these people start to hear that you go how many thousands of visits that you go without a single screw up, a single complaint The record right now is 5,553 beating the former record of 4222. Whereas a lot of hospices they have screw ups every day, complaints every day and think it's normal. I would fire off, you have to be almost have the attitude that you'll fire everybody in the organization and do the whole damn thing yourself. That's the I think the attitude of the CEO that gets quality. And of course phenomenal quality translates into phenomenal economics, because you have both.
Speaker 3:Because when we know one thing about this world, it refuses to let things be mismanaged for long. All relationships need maintenance, every building physical object, protoplasm, that's the human being is, all need maintenance. Care, whatever, however you want to say it. And so that's an element of this idea of quality. So yes, I'm obsessed about quality and probably will be for the rest of my life.
Speaker 3:I know that in the formation of Multi View, David and I you know knew that customer service was a big thing and the soul applies to our hospices. And I don't know where it comes from. For myself, probably some insecurity laden deep within me. But this this idea of being helpful, you know. I mean, the Iowa kids that go mow elderly people's lawns and shovel snow and it's just, you know, Boy Scouts do a good turn daily.
Speaker 3:Helpfulness. And and then and in this world see that's well you have to realize we say well, yeah this is the big challenge but this is what makes success easy or easier than we think. Yeah, you have to put in the hours because if you're going be meticulous again you're never going to be able to do it in forty hours a week. It's going to take the eighty, hundred sometimes. Hell, I don't even count.
Speaker 3:All I know is that I can come in after a week and I've already put my forty, you know, thirty four or forty hours starting the week depending on what I'm obsessed with at the time which is what? Focus. Quality. Quality? Yeah.
Speaker 3:So the language is so many different ways but again the quality of the most successful people in this world is the quality of focus which can be language of self discipline, again focus, self regulation, but even love. Because normally you need to love what you're going to do to have enough energy to sustain that amount of effort. So quality that comes from within a person refusing to allow almost anything else. And I'll just say this, talk about self control and normally I'm pretty I've got a Well I've got a lot of self control. It's evident from all this.
Speaker 3:But yesterday morning, I came in and we had about five, sixer guys and I lost it. Did I not, folks? You heard me talking like the Alaskan fisherman that I
Speaker 2:am. I
Speaker 3:mean, just because I was pissed. Because I had worked, you know, I mean almost non stop for a week before coming in and then all weekend completing, you know, book things and all that and cleaning and and and you know, obviously just doing all the things that a CEO would do. And there's a point where you just break. And I got this loss book because I've had so many pretty catastrophic hits in my life And I just written about how a person breaks and with that said, there's a time and place for it. There's a natural element.
Speaker 3:You forgive yourself. You try to get some forgiveness from others. But comes out of caring. And so I think with most things it's just there's a deeper element of intention of what are you trying to accomplish in life. And so for doing this ministry of hospice, I mean that's like one of the most holy grounds we are.
Speaker 3:And probably most of us have been working in hospice for some time. At some point you've been touched on some sufficient level that what we're doing is worth throwing our life away on. Right? That we're in it forever or until the next vision hits us. Yeah, but it's certainly contributory.
Speaker 3:Yes, we'll go through this. Okay. We have our modest manual. It's only, you know, 700 and 50 pages. Yeah, 41 pages, you know, I mean, you know.
Speaker 3:So we thin this thing down for us. And why is it this? And of course there's 20 of these. Because MBI is meticulous about, Well, we're six Sigma, you know. And you're a joke if you don't document the things.
Speaker 3:And I asked hospices, let me see your operations manual. Oh, we don't need Well, let's, you know, let's What's your training system look like? What's your testing? Let me see your labs. And they wonder why they suck.
Speaker 3:Why they're 50 percentile. But this is a large one because the CEO has to know a lot. We almost have to know every function that's going on in the organization on some level, so that we can intelligently supervise. But if we're really going to get enlightened, we're going to find that we're going to create conditions for success of self regulation where people need very little supervision, because that went out twenty years ago. And most of our work is being done autonomously anyway, so they have to learn how to self regulate.
Speaker 3:So developing a workforce that requires very little supervision. But the system does it for us. And of course that's going to come to our comp systems going be included with that. People the thing that people run from. And we are experts of experts on compensation.
Speaker 3:And your people development or training systems or whatever you want to say. Okay. So we have our modest manual here and it's got a great index so you can find things and it's got a great table of contents and all that. So lots in there. But we'll really hit the main points.
Speaker 3:But I'm talking fairly forcefully. I don't know where it comes from. Right after Helene and stuff, I was pretty beat down. I mean, I'm just saying that I actually got some juice Because, you know, my lungs had got burned up in the fire because I was working right, you know, knowing me, I'm gonna be right there with the forest fires. And I was working with them side by side at that very moment.
Speaker 3:We had the I was running the hose and he says, we gotta get out of it, we're gonna die. And my barn just goes up because all the houses before had been incinerated. And it's like, God, can I get a couple things out of the house? And we grab a couple things. And then and then I come around with the truck to the conference center.
Speaker 3:That's where the, you know, it's gated. And I thought, I need to unlock and at least you know maybe it hasn't burned yet. And so I parked on and I thought I better not drive in because if something happens I won't make it out. And I wouldn't have, would have died if I would have made that mistake. But I'm pretty cool under pressure for the most part, you know, and okay, park it here so at least they know approximately where my body is if something goes bad here.
Speaker 3:So then I went around the mountain and I just I there was the studio. It's a long it's a long drive. And there there's the studio up on the hill like engulfed in smoke. You could just barely see the outline Buildings on fire and and I I was gonna try to make it to get, you know, hard drives or you know, maybe a good Voyager was on my mind. It's a vintage instrument.
Speaker 3:And I'm going up and and even though it's I thought, wow, this is hot. Wow, this is smoky. And I would have kept going except for I couldn't see anymore. And once I lost vision, it's like okay, this is not gonna work out. And then I then but then the fire had encircled me.
Speaker 3:And so it was like raging and I thought, well this is gonna be really an interesting way to die. And I had that happen in Alaska when I was 15. I got knocked overboard by a wave. I was putting away a Braille system when you're on a seiner. And I remember I and it was taking me down to the bottom.
Speaker 3:I thought, Oh, it's not so bad to die. Miraculous, got out of that jam. But anyway, so I I ran, I just put my head down and I ran down the road, fire all over, even on top of the road because everything was going up. It ran out my lungs and I didn't know it. And so I'm in better place now and and with that.
Speaker 3:But you just don't know, again you're playing a game with the external world. And some of you, some people may say, well, you know, you're just stupid.
Speaker 2:No, I was ready to die for this thing.
Speaker 3:I mean, what the hell? You know, you only lived seven or eight times, you got to make the most, the most of each incarnation. So yeah, you're not gonna squander an incarnation. So yeah, I'm speaking fairly forcefully. It's just the vibe, but you know, sometimes I think we need rough electric shocks to bring us to our senses about running an organization.
Speaker 3:Because in healthcare it's so constipated, it's so bureaucracy. Someone's got to be the laxative and just knock the crap out of it, and loosen it up and say we're not doing meetings like this. We're not going to have meeting hell anymore. We're going to have two meetings a week, maybe one, you'll, when we get quality at a certain point you can cancel all your quality meetings because there'll be nothing to talk about because there's been no complaints. But it's just it's rich and again there's a lot of opportunity.
Speaker 3:And what's it so about? Yes, it's about quality, but I think the big thing that a CEO has to be about is success. That's the job. Lead us to success. Whatever that means.
Speaker 3:And you know that's not always so easy, right? We live in a competitive world. All kinds of things going on. But success is the job. Whatever that result is, obviously in terms of growth, economics, quality, mission fulfillment.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and that's I think that's the hard being a a person that that has developed themselves where they can actually make stuff happen here in C1 consciousness and we find ourselves. This world. A lot of people bitch about this world. This world of dense manner that we have great resistance and obstacle. But that's the whole point.
Speaker 3:Life is struggle. And so the CO being a well armored person for this world, wise. Being able to recognize who you're doing deals with. Are they a high low consciousness person? Are they the reptilian brain that I'm gonna sign a contract with and then gonna have no intention of honoring it?
Speaker 3:And so they'll you know take millions of dollars out of the deal or whatever depending on your scale that you're working at. Yeah. So success and in hospice again we're a profound person leading profound people doing profound work and that's so part of it. Right? And there's something about success that unites people.
Speaker 3:Nothing unites people like success. Whereas repeated failures tend to discourage people. Let's try this folks. And with that said, you know, we go in a lot of initiatives and they don't all work out. You know, I'm always and I think that's part of the reasons why a real leader can't do it in forty hours a week because you're thinking about the success of the organization, what is going to get us to the next place or whatever we need to go because we live in a world of movement, And how are we going to do this?
Speaker 3:And then you hit plateaus, or you have you know, you get your teeth kicked in. But that dogged persistence, and that again, then that's natural. You know we're getting ready to have a new a brand new breakout on an epic level but you know man it's coming through a few natural disasters overcome and and kind of a general weirdness even coming into the hospice world. And I and it's hard to explain there, you know, all I know is that there's there's been a It's lost Hospice has lost some of its shine. Just because we've got more lower consciousnesses come into it.
Speaker 3:And I say that, but I just know that again, these billionaire buddies will bring me in for these meetings because we know more about hospice ops than anybody. I mean I'm not trying to be whatever who else measures at that level? And has like you know three decades of watching this and that's one thing I'll never what I'm going talk to you about from academic standpoint. I've hired three academics that ran business departments at universities and such thinking that they would probably know how to run something. But they all failed because there's one thing about theorizing, oh this is how you would run the modern organization, third wave management, and you know, there's
Speaker 2:a big deal about theorizing and actually spilling blood.
Speaker 3:When that nurse that's been with you for twenty six years has to go because she's not producing the ROI, or you wipe out a whole divisions because it's decimating your focus on your main thing you're trying to do. Because if you've got or trying to do a lot of programs, I can tell you right now you'd probably don't have very high quality. Because every business segment that you have dissipates quality, focus, attention. Better to run something with fewer elements than more. And more I mean more is overrated and also it just demonstrates lack of self control or self regulation.
Speaker 3:Since quality is what we're talking about, focus. Well yeah, duh. I got 50 businesses. Of course they're all going to be probably you might have your cancer wing okay. Maybe your hospice is going pretty well, your home health.
Speaker 3:The rest of it is probably going to suck. So, success. Nothing unites a group of people like winning. And we live in a world of what? In incentives and disincentives.
Speaker 3:And this is one thing, again if if Moldavie comes in and takes a look at your comp systems, how many of you have negative incentives? That is where you take people's pay back. There is the acid test of whether you understand compensation or not. Anyone can throw a carrot out there and say you can make more and live in this goofy half world, but you're missing out on half the value. Because that preserving the negative like a master teacher would know, your pay system is your number one teaching system.
Speaker 3:I shouldn't say number one, it's among the top, but perhaps is number one. And you want a system where you don't have to have annual reviews or anything like that anymore. You want people to get their paycheck every cycle and say, oh, that's working out. Think I'll do more of that. Oh, that's not working, think I'll do less of that.
Speaker 3:Thus they're being taught by every paycheck. There's a report card of how well they're actually doing. But the negative incentive, are they doing the standards, the vows of the organization? Are they doing the quality? And if you have no mechanism to take it back, well you're gonna just you're gonna get a 50 percentile result.
Speaker 3:Because why could you expect to get a full result when we're only doing half of the comp system? An intelligent comp system I should say. And then of course I talk about comp a lot. Why? Because I did 38 compensation systems or should say yeah 38 for 38 companies before I ever got into Hot Spice.
Speaker 3:You know software, textile mills, country clubs, retail and it produced and the first COB system I put in was at Winston Salem, my first hospice gig where I was the accounting manager and they said, well, maybe he's got some promises making him controller, CFO. And we had a 100% increase in quality and a 100% increase in productivity within just a few weeks after I put in the new comp system. And that got me on the national stage, 2,000 people or so in the audience back at the height of NHO. That's before it was NHBCO. And so there's something to that in the comp system.
Speaker 3:So early on I'm kind of hitting some of the really big things to keep in mind so that we can be percolating on these big concepts. As the executives we are and we can have dialogue with each other as we go through, right? We have this proximity. But the natural world that we sit in and I purposely have this up on this mountain like this because we see it's a meritocracy, it's a world of merit. Mama bird doesn't go out and get the worm.
Speaker 3:Baby birds just don't get fed. And so there's the negative, you know, being preserved there. But incentives and disincentives and that we need both. And reconciling that. Again, the frustrated people are the people that want all good, all light, all sweet, all the time.
Speaker 3:This world is nothing like that. You I got burnt trees every place that tell me it's not like that. Monuments of destruction and ashes. No. There is day, there is night.
Speaker 3:And no matter how much we want to resist and say that's not right that there's night, it exists for some reason. May it's beyond our mechanism mechanisms or machinery to understand. But somehow we got to play the game or the dance with this external world. And that singular explanations of almost anything are insufficient at best. Why do I say that?
Speaker 3:Because we live in a multi world, the multi view. We don't realize what's happening with every action we have. And that's humbling. Because every topic, every individual is infinite. We're centers of consciousness living in a multi centered world.
Speaker 3:All of us are centers being represented there. In a universe without a center. There is no center folks. We're in a floating planet. Woah, just lost everybody there but You know, I mean I'm just saying the obvious, you know.
Speaker 3:Even the ideas of God, God no one has ever seen God. I I I'm building this church down here. This big hungry church or a church dedicated to the reconciliation of this bothness I'm talking about. And this has to do with your our thinking is what I'm really getting at about bothness thinking. We have two hemispheres of the brain.
Speaker 3:We have the right and left, one spatial, one concrete. And sometimes we have predispositions towards one if we really study brain chemistry and biology. This is a physical manifestation or recognition or even reverence of the bothness of life. That half the church will be dark, rock, half of it will be light. Male female, Republican Democrat, white blood cells, red blood cells, all the politics on every level of life.
Speaker 3:And just recognizing that, I said cool. The game house is also representative of opposites. In that, if we have an idea of life a little more playful, well, hell, that makes gives you kind of a coolness, a little unfazedness. So people I got a chessboard and I won't tell you all the games I play on it, sometimes I'll if I'm doing a business deal and usually I've got four or five going on, I'll plan out almost every move my opponent's gonna make. Not that I look at them in a way, but you know, success is what it's about.
Speaker 3:And so much of it comes down to your planning, your intelligence, to observe the patterns of life. Where is the guy gonna move his thing? What if he does this? What if he does the you know, voracious, you know, attack? Or what if Well, if you've already thought those through, you're not really surprised.
Speaker 3:You go, Oh, he did this play. Okay? Well, this is the logical move. Next. So anyway.
Speaker 3:Again, this understanding helps one remain calm relatively unfazed when trouble comes and trouble always comes. Trouble always comes and sometimes it's a meteor out of nowhere where one moment it's this and the next your world is in a tailspin. Like when my son drowned or my daughter got killed in the car wreck, tailspins. Or a hurricane wipes out everything you have or the scandal that takes down your business because of some low consciousness individual's moves. Okay.
Speaker 3:I'm gonna keep going here. So as we're CEOs here, motivation or should I say leadership is the job. Success, our ability to inspire people. Again, we going do it via force? Via fear?
Speaker 3:Sometimes you need almost a combination. And I don't tend to do the fear thing so much. You want people to respect you so much that they don't want to disappoint you. I think that's probably where you want to get to. Rather than so many people rely on what I'll say position power.
Speaker 3:Yes, I have this title therefore I can lord over you and tell you what to do. I think that a true leader goes to a place of beingness. Where they've elevated their own personal power to certain points. I am going to reference, we'll see how much time we have about the idea of even a school. I mean you want to really just forget about this quote nursing shortage?
Speaker 3:Folks, any hospice I really have anything to do with, we don't have any problem finding clinicians. Why? Why why do you why why can you get 50 nurses to apply like almost overnight? Because they hate their jobs. Their lives suck.
Speaker 3:All we have to do is provide them an employment option that's superior to what they already have now. Oh, payoff. Where their lives get better, they learn Yeah, they've got opportunities to make more money than they had before because if we manage well we can pay more. But then they have empowerment programs actually make their experience of life better because we introduce new ideas of how to live. All structural moves.
Speaker 3:For the most part. Like the art comes into this this ability to inspire. We talk about what best known success patterns. People again we avoid best practices as a lot of people like to say. It's arrogant.
Speaker 3:That's where I always question people don't consider their language or words. So you hear anybody say best practice they're either stupid or arrogant. Because nobody has the whole enchilada. I know I've been working in hospice again over I hate to say it's like only like thirty some years, some. I know I've just scratched the surface of how deep we can go.
Speaker 3:And especially the exploration of human potential. But we get these which can also be languages, habits, default thinking. We end up with competitive advantage, success, better life, and all this. Okay. Assessing leadership.
Speaker 3:This is one thing we have to do. We have to assess it in ourselves. Just like my slip up yesterday. I'll paddle my own posture pretty hard on that one. And please forgive me.
Speaker 3:But we have to assess people because we know that we can't do it by ourselves and no organization can grow beyond the leadership that we have in the organization. Okay, the first thing you're looking at somebody to promote them because you need great lieutenants and all organizations are normally short of great leaders. When we are growing the only Baldridge winning hospice, Norman and I, we formed it in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn and just said, hey if we just take everything that in the NBI world and what Norman, know, put it together, What can we do? Well, we build a hospice that in about six years we're a thousand something patients. There's two of the the worldwide awards of quality the Deming Award and the Ballot Qualities and we're the only hospice to ever do that.
Speaker 3:We beat out Federal Express and stuff as quality. In the first year. Because but it's a it's a grueling process and I learned so much and that was Norman's idea. I would never have pushed us to have to take our quality to such elevated heights. And I thought, when I got into it, here's your manuals, Andrew, that you need to study.
Speaker 3:You know, and it's just like, God, There's a lot, you know. Now MBI was actually doing a lot of it. But that explains all our success. We're all doing patterns of success. That explains wherever we are right now.
Speaker 3:Because you're we're in senior we've had success. Otherwise, we wouldn't be here. We've got a I know everybody here already has a higher level of consciousness. Otherwise, you wouldn't be here. I mean, I know that when we have breaks you're not going to go out and trash the bathrooms, you know.
Speaker 3:You bring in sometimes clinicians, you don't know what you're going to get. Not to demean them. But, you know, but that's an example of a vision setting extreme standards which demand rigor. And a dissatisfaction with everything that's mediocre. But that explains why that grew, why we were able to do the things.
Speaker 3:And it is the highest valued hospice in the world at at that time given on the ADC basis. Fitas is bigger than us. Obviously. And But it came down to this vision of quality or success. And that's what inspires people.
Speaker 3:But what I was getting to here is we stopped growing after 13 sites because we ran out of leaders. And so we developed something called the pipeline. And I've used it at Hope West, Nancy and I saw where again we videotape all employees. You have at least two videos structural thing where they teach we video them teaching some topic they know for just a few minutes, and then teaching about accountability. And I can go through a thousand employees in just a few hours and I can pick.
Speaker 3:Okay, we need to keep our eye on this guy or this gal. Let's put them on the leadership track. We're not gonna pay him anymore but let's start cultivating so that we have at least two leaders at every slot so we have redundancy in the system that we can grow and we'll never be hamstrung by limitation in our management leadership ranks against structural moves. So much about the system solution. So we're assessing those people that are going to be leaders.
Speaker 3:The first thing are they intelligent? Do they have the horsepower, the capability? Because it's very hard for a workforce to get behind a leader that they perceive as being as dumb as a rock. Yeah, I mean it's like the, yeah okay we just have the green berets here. If the guy just says we're going to take that hill, charge!
Speaker 3:You know, we all know that half of us are going to get killed. You know, mean I need a guy that's going to go, why don't you guys go and create a diversion in the back, and then we'll just sneak up around this way. Well, it's much easier to rally behind that kind of intelligence. Okay? And to me, two ways that you can, or a couple ways here that you can find or discover your talented people.
Speaker 3:Because most of the time you do not have to go outside your organization to find leaders. If you're doing that, we're not being very smart. Most of the time I found unless you need a change agent, that's kind of a different deal. Is but I found that normally you already have your talent within the organization. It's just what we haven't had the brilliance to discover them.
Speaker 3:Just like another CNA story. This is in Oregon. The gal came out of this really bad divorce. They made her a receptionist. Well she's great at being a receptionist.
Speaker 3:Then they said, well maybe she can be the office manager. Well, we made her office manager brilliant. Then let's let her run a clinical team even though she doesn't have a clinical background just like I've run clinical teams. Killer. Then the board said, hey let's just make her CEO.
Speaker 3:Bam! We doubled the census like that. Capability and she's a smart cookie. Okay, and how do you find these people? I look at their, talent of communication in writing as well as public speaking.
Speaker 3:Are they articulate? And you can cultivate that by having empowerment programs in your organization to teach public speaking in these things. That because that'll free people because people can only rise to the level of their ability to communicate effectively. And the next thing is their talent of organization and prioritization. Do they have lists?
Speaker 3:I won't even hire a person that doesn't do a list. Because they're not smart enough. They haven't figured out that they can't keep everything in their minds. A daily list. And then the skill of prioritization, the moving being able to distinguish between lower value things from higher value things and moving the higher value things to the top unless they're quick kills.
Speaker 3:That is things that give us a sense of momentum that we can easily accomplish rather than getting bogged down on something or constipated on something that just takes too much time or energy. But there those are giveaways though. Again, if they're not taking notes, don't hire them. Things will be missed because they've not formed that habit yet. And I think that's the other thing.
Speaker 3:So much of being a CO is the creation of habits. Default thinking in the workforce. Next, they have a great attitude, can do. You know, because attitude has so much the only thing we can control, we certainly can't control our thoughts, all this disillusioned thinking about thought control. We can't.
Speaker 3:We don't even know where our thoughts come in. We don't even know where our decisions come from half the time. But what I can control is my attitude towards the world. I can have a hostile view of it and think it's out to get me, eat me up, the reptilian brain, or I can say, oh everything is designed perhaps for my benefit. And this is another thing you cultivate because in a workforce you can have a single distorted personality on a team and it'll drive your top people out of the company and certainly lessen the pleasure of working.
Speaker 3:Best to get rid of that poison. Why not pay people to have a good attitude? Have happiness pay. Well, we've designed that. And in an elegant way of getting rid of people with bad attitudes.
Speaker 3:Next, assessing that this person's level of energy, ambition, drive. I mean a lot of times physically, you know, or they kind of like El Tanya has the can do rev up, and that's contagious. Yes. Because people don't want to get behind low energy people. Not much going on there.
Speaker 3:Human beings can size up people in seconds. We are very perceptive creatures, very perceptive species. Four, decisiveness. Courage. Nobody wants to be around the pansy.
Speaker 3:Oh, we're still gathering information all the time. Well hell, you're never gonna have enough information to make the decision. There's a time where you just have to have the balls, or however you want to language. I don't mean to offend people here. Even if it's a bad decision.
Speaker 3:Now with that said, we don't want to be stupid in our decision making just to be decisive. But people have to know you're going somewhere, that you've got a vision, you know where we're going, and then here we go. Rather than, yeah, I don't know, you know, I need to sleep on it for a few months. I think that's called hibernation. People are so afraid of failing or making a mistake that they fall into this analysis paralysis.
Speaker 3:Yes. We see it all over of life. Again that's a fiftieth percentile is like that. Now with that said, you say charge, let's go in this direction. Okay.
Speaker 3:It's a crap shoot. It's disaster. What do you say? Retreat. And people get behind that too.
Speaker 3:This was a bad idea. And it's just like, okay, I blew my top at the guys yesterday. Bernie went to give me a high fist thing and I about punched him out. He's the nicest guy there is. Anyway but but you own it.
Speaker 3:You know, you own that defect. And people will get behind that too. Because hell. People are more forgiving than you think a lot of times. Now with that said, if I did that all the time, we got issues.
Speaker 3:So, decisiveness. Fifth, a profound understanding of accountability. Okay. Accountability is really probably the ingredient of why things get done or don't get done. It's a high spiritual place knowing that all spiritual paths that are meaningful go through the valley of accountability or the valley of pain if the job or whatever is not being done.
Speaker 3:If we understand this, we don't need very many meanings basically because things just get done. We discuss it, we implement, feedback loop, done. Move on. So how to do and the skill of accountability of how to do the pain without losing talented people. That's a skill.
Speaker 3:And so then I say to you as an organization, what is your system of training your leaders to do accountability, do pain without wounding them so bad that you lose them? Where do they practice this? Do you practice this on real people? So, oh yeah, we only lost five people trained on that guy or that girl up to be a manager or can they do it in a safe place similar to the perfect visit or perfect phone interactions? Six, an interest in standardization.
Speaker 3:This is normally not a topic that we're formally taught. I really came more in line with it when, again, going through the Baldrige process. But I can ask most people, and if, you know, what what are the, you know, what
Speaker 2:are what are the steps of standardization?
Speaker 3:What are the requirements for standardization? What is the position state of self control? These are basics. And most CEOs and leaders cannot just say, oh yeah, well it starts out with this, define the standards, documentation, intensive training. Well how in the hell are going to do standardization if they don't get this?
Speaker 3:And so every manager and really every person in the organization learns the steps of standardization, the requirements of standardization, the position state of self control, self regulation. All those things are essential for world class. And then the seventh thing is when we're assessing for leadership, confidence. And how do I find confident people? Well you can have all these loony HR people that go off to their little programs of assessing folks.
Speaker 3:Well hell, I can cut through it in about three, maybe one or two minutes I can find out whether someone has compensation. Say here's your meager salary, not even enough to live on, And the rest of your pay is based on your performance. And if you see you can just see it in their eyes. Or the shakiness of their their hand or whatever. And it's like, well wait a minute, I got mortgage.
Speaker 3:I got Yeah, you can do all those things. But I'm asking you, ma'am or sir, are you willing to bet on yourself, your own ability to get results, and are you willing to bet on this organization too? And right there you smoke out your whiners, your wieners, your fakers. There it is. Because something deep within us, our species, yet, oh I need to have so many nuts.
Speaker 3:What if I don't do that? And with this system they won't even recognize because they want Pampers basically. They want a life of Pampers and diapers. Where I'm getting guaranteed amount, you know, and whether I do a crappy job because of low accountability or do a great job. And I just think that you have to have to think of an organization as a just like this natural world.
Speaker 3:That it's a living organism of all kinds of constituent parts, cells, like cells in the body, all having to perform their specific junction at a certain standard. If one part of it goes down or is hurt, the whole body system is hurt. So it has to be thought of as really this integrated coherent whole. Where there's zero silos. And your comp system again, I'll go back to that which is tied to accountability is the glue that holds it all together.
Speaker 3:Where people are penalized for non performance, not doing their job. Whatever the standards are is not allowed because the whole thing falls apart if we don't have that. Okay. No organization can grow beyond the capabilities of the leader. So that has that speaks to our lid.
Speaker 3:If Andrew's here, Malteveau can only go here. I can bring all kinds of hot shots and hot rods and hot dogs in. They only go here. Andrew goes within himself, isolates in the woods, dwells in the church, whatever, hangs out with special forces or whatever learns a few other things and I go to a different place well then organization goes to a different place and that's just the way it is so an organization can grow beyond the capabilities of the leader themselves and no leader can build anything of any scale without the help of others. So you can't do it alone.
Speaker 3:With that said, let's go ahead and take a quick break. I can just feel it.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening. If you need anything further, just go to mbi.life.