The Future of Leadership

 Leadership has a credibility problem. There's more content, more frameworks, and more advice than ever and yet engagement is down, managers are struggling, and most organizations aren't ready for what's coming. In this episode, George Adair sits down with Tony Dilorio to get direct about where leaders are failing today, what great management actually looks like in practice, how to hire better, and what AI is already doing to your organization whether you're ready or not. No theory. Just honest, practical leadership for the people building teams right now. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:19

Back to the Keystone Technology Podcast, where strategy meets execution. Bud's words have to earn their keep, and shiny new tech still has to survive contact with reality. I'm your host, George Adair. I've got my trusty resident guest, Tony Diorio, back in the studios, and he's ready to deliver some heat to our audiences today, giving us a firsthand account into what it means to lead into the future. Tony has spent his career in leadership, building teams, developing people, and watching organizations succeed or fall apart based on one thing more than any other. How well leaders actually lead.

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Tony, welcome to the show. Thank you, George. It's great to be here. I'm excited about this segment.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

Great. Okay. So we are going to be direct today. We want to reach the audience in a very different way because we believe that all leaders are better equipped when they can cut through this noise that's happening out there and address these issues head on. You see, leadership development has a credibility problem today. There's more content, there's more frameworks, there's more thought leaders, all these buzzwords than ever before. And yet the data on employee engagement, management effectiveness, organizational trust keeps pointing to the wrong direction. So today we're asking the hard questions: where are leaders falling? What do they need to do differently? And what are some headwinds to look out for? While some of it's fueled by AI, some a strained economy, but both are causing this organizational for better, better out of IT leaders and sales teams alike. Would you agree, Tony? 100%.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

I think the the corporate mentality today is on the wrong side of where it should be. And I and I truly believe the younger generations are smarter than they were before. And they're starting to see that. And they're seeing it in their parents' careers, they're seeing it in the stress, they're seeing it in the home life. And they're not going to do that to themselves. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

Yeah. You know, I I think it it goes into just about everything that we do. I like what you said there. Uh it's not just uh the office, and leaders need to recognize that they're leaders everywhere, everywhere they go. Right. Uh at home, at the office, um, community, whatever you're doing, you're a leader. Uh I like to say though that uh you know, the the quote and phrase I'm I'm gonna use today is this isn't your grandpa's house anymore. So we have to recognize that and we have to see how we are consuming that old order of leadership from our past, or maybe from our childhood. Maybe it was something we were taught from our fathers, maybe we were we just watched it from leaders that are now leaving.

SPEAKER_00 3:16

I I think you and I grew up and watched how loyal our parents were and what they got in return for that.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

Yeah. Yeah, very, very different. Loyalty, you know, generation two, three generations back, the silent generation or the greatest generation. Um, either one of those was very, very different, right?

SPEAKER_00 3:37

Right? There was an investment back into you as much as the time you invested into them to a degree. To a degree. I only know of a couple professions today that are outside of the government that offer any pension at all. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

Yeah. Yeah, those don't exist anymore. And quite frankly, employee loyalty is starting to dwindle again. It's going back to, well, we don't necessarily need you. You're replaceable, you're expendable. We'll just go out and get another one because there's plenty of them.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

Yeah, and the em the po and the employees, and the inverse, the employees are saying, Well, you're only gonna pay me 10% more to take on 40% more stress. Why would I do that? I don't need to do that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:18

All right. Real quick, before we get started, I just want to give a brief on the format, how these shows operate, and what to expect. So we're gonna go over um a few questions, and and really they're just gonna be topics. We're gonna touch on these topics. I'm gonna ask Tony some questions, a few of them, and then we're gonna drop into what we call rapid fire. And rapid fire is just gonna be a section where Tony can give us uh some short, brief answers. There'll be a lot more fun, definitely tied to the topic, but be quick and and um impactful. And then we're gonna close. So simple format, but I'm hoping today is very impactful for all the listeners to gain something on how to be good leaders, where leaders might be failing today, and uh how to improve your leadership style and capability so you can be effective in your organization. Okay, let's get started. So, topic number one, are you giving people purposeful work that plays to their strengths? And I asked this question this way because you know it's something that we think about probably 10% of the time, if not zero. Strength-based leadership is an important factor to how leaders should be leading today. And I think we often forget that people are unique, they have various different strengths, and if we're able to pull on those strengths, uh we can build strong individual contributors. So, Tony, when you look at organizations that are generally struggling with retention, they got moral issues, uh, you know, maybe that's not on the surface, but it's definitely happening. And underneath all that, how often do you think it comes back to leaders who are not understanding what their people are actually built for? And what does it look like when you find a team where the leader has figured it all out?

SPEAKER_00 6:12

So, excuse me. I would say certainly the lion share to question number one, right? Do do people are or are the leaders actually built for it or the teams built, the leaders recognize that? Certainly the lion share, if not close to 90%. And I'll get I'll get to the why here in just a second. What does that look like when a leader's figured it out success, right? So though I think those are just the easy answers that go into that. But to dig a little bit deeper on the leaders not understanding their teams, I think the biggest thing in the world is that we've gotten away from the culture piece that bring people together. So it's uh people will throw around the term team. What does a team actually represent, right? You've got each other's back, you move forward together methodically, everybody's moving under the same guidelines, the same objective, right? And we've lost that. Somehow it is now almost everybody's out for themselves, or the sales managers, the VP is out for their goal, right? And they're going to obtain that goal regardless of the 12, 20, 30 people beneath them and what their individual goals are. One thing that I did, I still do, um, and I don't ever give this up for anybody in the future, is every year I pull my sales guys out of the field and we sit down and we go over personal goals and we go over professional goals, right? Because the one thing that nobody, at least in my 20 plus years, nobody's ever been able to show me is that personal and professional aren't connected. They absolutely are.

unknown 7:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:45

Right. And we always talk about work-life balance, but part of that balance is this. So they're absolutely connected. So we'll sit down and we go through their personal goals, we go through their professional goals, and then we kind of intertwine what that success looks like. And I manage them to that. So in six months, when we're having a performance issue, when we're having a slowdown, when we're having something that comes up, I go back to their goal sheets, right? It's a reminder of this is what you wanted. I'm not the boss trying to push you down a road you didn't want to go. I'm enabling you, empowering you, supporting you to accomplish what you communicated to me was where you wanted to be, what your objective for your life was. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:25

Let me kind of go into that because I think when we when we considered how we drive our staff, how we steward our staff based upon work that's purposeful, that's that that ties to their strengths. Is there an opportunity or have you seen an opportunity in your past where you maybe set out some goals, but as you went along, you found your your team members weren't necessarily accomplishing those goals, and maybe they weren't fit for achieving them to begin with. So was there a reset that you could do, or maybe an experience where you could share with us where you had to pause at a certain point and say, we're gonna readdress this and go back to what your your greatest strengths are, because this might not have been it.

SPEAKER_00 9:12

Yes. I mean, the the the overarching point of what you're making has certainly come up in my career. Um I've never had to play catch-up, meaning I didn't have to go beyond the point and then realize, oh, they're not cut out for this job. I was always able to be in front of that because not only did you have that meeting, we'll just call it January of fiscals, right? So you have that meeting in January to understand those goals. But every quarter, right? I use, I I hold a QBR, which is a quarterly business review. And within that quarterly business review, we go over those goals, right? Where they are to those goals, the metrics that we set out to measure those goals, right? And we go through those. So typically, I'm seeing it before it becomes a problem. We're having a conversation about that going into whatever that next quarter is, right? And we're putting more metrics, maybe more things in place for us to get ahead of it or to start seeing maybe we're starting to sway a little bit away. So we put more metrics, more KPIs in place that put us back towards that goal, right? And get them back in line. Or the question comes up, and this has come up, uh did you were those the right goals for you? Yeah. Right. And then that's a bigger discussion. And when you find out that maybe they were over the tips of their skis, because I've had that before, right? When they were a little bit more confident in themselves than what their skill set was. And I have had to have the conversation with a couple of people to pull them out of the field and say, look, we need to reset, right? I took a salesperson and we moved him from a salesperson, excuse me, a salesperson, field, a field seller back to an insight BDR type seller, right? To learn these skills that they thought they knew, but really didn't. But again, we weren't ever really behind the eight ball. We started to notice those things because of the QBR, and then it was just an executive decision when you know to make that move from.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

Yeah. So I like what you said with hey, we're gonna consistently um conduct our check-ins to make sure that we're getting to our goals. I think those are critical elements that are probably underappreciated by uh from leaders. It's sort of just uh expected that you're meeting with people doing your one-on-ones. But you're not necessarily, nobody knows. Are you meeting for the right reasons? Are you talking about your goals, or are you sitting there just kind of shooting the crap and talking about things that maybe don't align with that and you just wasted most of your time. And so I think it's important to have those quarterly business reviews come in as a leader and really make sure that you're aligned to what you're trying to accomplish. To me, that helps to get people to their strengths. But I do think there's something additional here that maybe we could um, you know, entertain a little bit, which is how do we make sure that our staff is positioned to do work that is purposeful for them? And I know this goes, again, this isn't your grandfather's, this isn't your grandpa's house anymore. Because your grandpa's house would say, Well, I gave you a set of tasks, or you gave yourself a set of tasks, and we're supposed to meet them by the quarter. And that didn't happen. Now, did we ask the question in that set of tasks was, is this person the right person to go and create a marketing campaign? Did I stop as a leader and say, look, I don't think they have that strength? And either, A, I'm gonna either press them into some training and get them what they need to be able to get there, or B, I'm not gonna give that work to you. I got to give that over to Lisa over here, who's much better at it, uh, because look, that's important. I don't think you're gonna enjoy it. I need to make sure you come every day with that extra vigor and that excitement because I know that excitement is going to turn into outcomes. Um, so talk to me about that. Um, and and and I like what you said about the QBR. Make sure you're doing that. But is there a point where they're not getting to it? Yeah, you can't just let them go. You can't just say, no, you get to not do that anymore. I'm gonna go give it over to Lisa. Um, but uh is there an opportunity as a leader to shift quick and say, look, I made a mistake by by by signing off on this and saying you're gonna get this done, but let's go shift and move it on to somebody and then I'm gonna give you this other job that I think you're really good at.

SPEAKER_00 13:31

Well, I I think the majority of the time it is a quick choice by the leaders because we've given up on some of those things that I just outlined in the first question. Because those aren't part of our normal day, what I see is you don't have an actual culture, a true culture at a lot of these companies, and there's no team environment. So I I know I keep bringing these up, but to go back to your question, a leader who has those discussions, knows their teams and empowers their teams, are often not gonna pick somebody who's completely in the left field to take that task on. They're gonna know that that person has at least some of the foundational skills. Can they do it? I don't know, right? Maybe they have seven out of 10. And we're just gonna go test them. And yes, as a leader, you've got to push them in there to see if that's something they just didn't know they could do, right? But it's, you know, maybe something that just comes a little bit natural to them. So yeah, sometimes we have to push them into it. But I mean, in in my opinion, if you're doing your job as a good leader, building a solid culture, building a true team environment and empowering those people, then I don't think you're so far in left field that you're making a major shift or a major pivot. It's a small pivot, small shift, and then you still end up on top of your objective like that.

SPEAKER_01 14:42

Okay, let's close out that one. Um, just some some quick notes on that. Keep up with your teams, make sure they're accomplishing their goals, conduct your quarterly business reviews daily, probably, check-ins, whatever it is you do as a leader, don't forget to stay on top of that and stay focused on your employees. Mind, be mindful of the their strengths and align that to the work that they're doing. Very challenging task for leaders these days, but that's the world we're in. And we need to start turning that that um that dial. Okay, topic number two, what should leaders and managers actually be doing? You know, when I when I thought about this question, I knew it was going to be a can of worms because every employee below the leaders has probably a rap sheet of things that they're, oh, my manager should be doing this, that's do anything. What does he do? What does she do? You know, what are they doing up there? You know, uh kind of that Will Farrell, you know, what's she doing back there? You know, me love ma. I never know what she's doing back there. Yeah. So that's that let's let's go there. All right. So the question, Tony, is you know, if you could take a mid-level manager who's technically solid, but struggling to lead their people, and you had 90 days with them, what are the two or three things you'd do you'd build into them first?

SPEAKER_00 16:08

I would make and that and I already know the answer to this because I've had to deal with it. Yep. So let's just say for this hypothetical question that we've got a small team, right? Two or three sellers, right? And then I've hired a mid-level director, manager, whatever to lead those sellers. And we had 90 days, right? So I'm gonna say a team of three, and we have 90 days. So what I would do is I would make that manager uh spend it essentially immersion. I would have them on calls, you know, four-legged sales calls for four days out of every three weeks, right? Because you got to leave a little time for him to do his job. But for four days, uh three weeks in a row, I would have him with each one of those reps. There's your 90 days. The easiest way for somebody to try to to to enable somebody to understand, right, is to have compassion and empathy. And if you've never walked a mile in their shoes, you have no idea where that compassion and empathy needs to go. So I would have a full immersion system where I would make them go on these four-legged sales calls, they'd have to see how the meeting was set up, what work went into that meeting to set that up, right? The campaign that was then designed after that to go and uh generate the demand. The resource coordination that then goes into the finding the right person, both personality and technical aptitude that match with that customer, and then enable that relationship and then manage as the quarterback the negotiation, well, the SOW, the whatever, right, whatever deliverables, then the negotiation, then the close, and it doesn't stop there. Then it's the fulfillment, right? And it's the enablement to use it. Because if they're not going to use the tools, you're not gonna sell them anymore. Yeah. Right. So you got to get the adoption piece of it too. So for any manager that wants to come in that thinks they, you know, that they know, right, has the experience to walk a mile or two, even five miles in that person's shoes, they really understand where that compassion, where the empathy, where the understanding needs to be.

SPEAKER_01 18:12

Yeah, you you bring up a such a good point. You remind me of a manager that I had who was outstanding at getting things done, giving me reports, you know, sending me over data, and this, and he would talk with his teams. But there was a huge gap in his understanding of what his teams were doing, actually doing. And there was times where there would just be a big whiff of what actually happened in a situation to what I heard from, let's say, our business line leaders. Business line leaders would tell me one thing. He would tell me something different, and then the actual person who did the work, you know, would also be a whole different story. I got three different stories. And so that's because uh of what you just mentioned, which the manager didn't have a full understanding of what his teams were actually doing, how they were accomplishing it, uh, but more importantly, what they needed to do. And so I love what you what you said there, which is as leaders, especially managers, they should be engulfed in what their teams are doing by actually doing it. And then and maybe that's on a, I don't know, quarterly option or maybe monthly, I don't know all the time. And the position, how you design the position.

SPEAKER_00 19:22

I mean, I I'm assuming based on my experience with sales managers that I've hired, but you know, your business might look differently. And you said 90 days, so it could only be that they spend one week with them. It's not often that you get the luxury of spending three weeks, four days a week going on calls. But in this scenario, to immerse yourself in what they're doing, absolutely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:43

Well, let me ask before we move on from this topic, how can a manager, you know, a lot of managers want to satisfy their staff. They want to be uh good, loving managers, people that, you know, are liked by their team, and they struggle having those hard conversations, right? Maybe providing critical feedback, not always positive feedback. I've seen a lot of managers today that are Can I just say this? Soft?

SPEAKER_00 20:11

Okay. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 20:11

Yeah, I'm just gonna say soft. Um, and and that's what it is. I've seen a lot of it. They don't want to harm their team. They don't want their team upset with them. They're worried about negative feedback up, you know, above, whatever it is. How can these managers um, you know, work on that feedback part that is both constructive and their teams actually change what they were doing because there's probably some things they need to be doing differently.

SPEAKER_00 20:37

That's why they're getting the feedback. I don't I don't think you're gonna like my answer. Maybe the audience doesn't much like my answer, but in this later couple of generations, we've gotten soft because people are shying away from confrontation. All right. We we've gotten away from debate clubs in school, we've gotten away from a lot of things that we used to do that just promoted healthy conversation. And now that healthy conversation is seen as an argument. It's something negative. It's not a debate, it's something negative. It becomes an argument. And then we have this whole other paradigm where, well, if we're gonna argue, we can't be friends, right? So you have that, all that stuff is creating a culture now where, in your words, they're soft. In my words, they're shying away from confrontation. If you can't have just strike, look, if your neighbor's dog was pooping on your lawn every morning, you're just gonna get up and go and just go clean it up yourself, and then you know, cuss them out in your head as you walk back to the trash can every day. No, you have to learn how to deal with confrontation. You have to learn how to deal with those things. So, my advice as your question is posed, go find a confrontation. Get yourself into it. You don't have to go to blows. Not every confrontation has to be a fight, but go get into one and then get yourself out of it at the same time.

SPEAKER_01 21:54

I was listening to another uh great podcast, um, the Maxwell Leadership. Has all these tentacles and arms of different people. Greg Gart Greschel is one that I really love. And he deals with it head on. The way he is is very direct. But one thing that he mentioned, which I think this is a good way for us to think about things, is if we want to grow, if we want to improve, if we want our organizations to improve, we actually have to seek out difficult conversations. We have to actually seek them out and do it in such a way that we've practiced our delivery so that not only do we both leave the table in a positive way, but we're we're both moving in a direction. It doesn't have to be the direction one person likes or the other. But we're compromising, we're moving forward, we're helping the organization, but we're seeking these things so that we can get better at the way we present and the way we act during those situations. So it's an active way of saying if I want to be better, I've got to go seek those situations. So maybe I'm asking my boss, I'm going from the other direction right now, but maybe I'm asking my boss to give me some feedback. But my boss needs to be good at providing feedback because uh an employee is never gonna go to that person and say, Hey, I'd love some feedback from you if they've never done it.

SPEAKER_00 23:12

Well, we have a we had a whole bunch of years, so I'm just gonna say that, but we had a whole bunch of years that were very good economically, and a lot of people were promoted for their work ethic and not for their leadership abilities. So we have a lot of people in these leadership positions still, because that, you know, we're retiring at a later age. And so we have these people in these leadership positions that really were never cut out for leadership positions. It was just like, you sold the biggest deal in the Western man, you are a VP now. Yeah. And then that poor George has to go figure out how to be a VP. And frankly, not everybody's cut out for this stuff.

SPEAKER_01 23:51

Yeah. I love what you said. That was another thing I heard on that same podcast is we have always been promoting people who have performed from a KPI standpoint or a project standpoint, or they delivered something amazing. And so we thought that's all that it meant to promote somebody. You got all this stuff done, you're just a go-getter, you work really hard. It seems like you're churning a lot and you're doing stuff. But I forgot there's these intangibles, or they should be tangible now. We used to call them intangibles of how do we move the organization? How are we promoting the business values? Communication.

SPEAKER_00 24:29

Communication.

SPEAKER_01 24:30

How are we communicating? Yeah. Is why is that not a factor in your promotion? And then how are we bringing the team together? These are just things that we used to call intangibles. Now they're tangible. They have to be added to your performance goals and metrics.

SPEAKER_00 24:45

And I don't think it was ever anything malicious. I don't think anybody just decided to go away from it. I I truly believe the executives at the time were saying, hey, this is how we're going to invest back in them. Right? They did something amazing for our company. They delivered, in your words, right? So we're going to do something amazing for them, and we're we're going to make them a VP and give them all the benefits that come with being a vice president. But they didn't realize the trickle effect from that, right? And what was downstream from that decision. So I do believe it was probably done with the greatest intentions. Yeah. And it just turned out those intangibles were really tangible. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:23

Yeah. I think uh we're going to move on from this topic, but I think managers should be spending time. Uh oh, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 25:29

I want to just say one more thing on this topic before we before we uh head out and it it's fundamental from a parenting aspect. So when my nine and seven-year-old get into a big sibling ride, big sibling fight, right? And they're scratching each other because that's what we still do. Scratching and pushing and kicking. Um, I don't get involved. Right. So this is another fundamental parent thing, right? That you probably take a whole nother show on. But I don't get involved. I stop the fighting, sit them down next to each other and make them work it out. Right. You guys talk. If they raise their voices, they get grounded. I only mitigate, I only regulate the the tone and the temperature of the conversation and let the two kids actually work out their differences. So again, I think let them let each other don't you know be complete jerks with their tone. Um, I don't let them be little. Um, we don't use name calling. So there's only a few rules that we have. Otherwise, I let them work it out. And this is only going to make them better at just dealing with conflict in the future. Yeah. So I I'm a big promoter of that. But now I I know you want to move on.

SPEAKER_01 26:33

Well, that's okay. No, no, that's good. I think what should managers be working on is important. Make sure you're focused on your teams, not just their outcomes, not just their performance outcomes for, you know, executing projects or completing a certain amount of sales, or, you know, those things are very important. That should be a good portion of your indicators, but there's also the intangibles and seeing how they deal with conflict. I think that's important. It is.

SPEAKER_00 27:00

More so than I think people understand.

SPEAKER_01 27:01

Great. All right. Topic number three. What is AI doing to organizations right now? And what do leaders need to get ahead of that is going to be game-changing for them? So, Tony, we're hearing a lot of leaders either panic, adopting AI tools without a real strategy or sticking their heads in the sand and hoping it doesn't get to them, right? So, what's the leadership posture you'd recommend now? What does it look like to actually lead an organization through this without losing the trust of your people?

SPEAKER_00 27:37

Those are good ones. Um, when it when it comes to question number one on the posture, um, in order to be an effective leader, not only to lead the team, but an effective leader for the business, I think you always have to be open, new tools, new ways of doing things, right? Because at the end of the day, if you can increase productivity or efficiencies by 10%, that usually means seven figures. Maybe more, it depends on the size of your business. But regardless, you have a huge return that can just be done right there. So for a sales guy, one of the hardest things that we have is acquisition of customers, right? So instead of acquiring 10 new customers and I can just increase efficiency by 3% and deliver that same result to the bottom line, I'd rather go for the, you know, the the simple thing that I can control because customer acquisition is something that's uncontrollable. So at the end of the day, I think you got to look at that posture. You always got to be looking out into the future. But one of the biggest things leaders have to do when something like AI comes in is reassure their people. Communicate effectively with your people, but you've got to reassure them that, guys, this is a supercharger. And anybody that's listened to a to our previous uh podcast, you know, they've they've heard us uh talk about AI on that subject, and it's a supercharger for humanity, it's not a replacement for humanity, right? So as we get better at governing it and as we get better at using the tools, AI is just going to be a supercharger that makes Georgia Dare look like Georgia Dare plus 1020 cloak.

SPEAKER_01 29:06

Yeah. Yeah, I wonder um, have we reached the precipice of saying if you're not at this level, then my assumption is you probably aren't using AI and AI tools. And therefore I might actually look at you in a very different light and maybe even not consider you for promotions, not consider you for this position or or project because I can't tell that you've actually supercharged yourself, as you say. And so ask that question or answer me on that is do we look at our teams differently because they're not using it?

SPEAKER_00 29:40

I think we I think we have maybe not now. I think the the the piece of your question, the now part is the operative, because I I don't think now, but we're on the precipice of it. So if we don't start now, right, you've got to start somewhere and you gotta start, but you're already behind the eight ball if you're just starting now. So I think it is something that is yes, is the direct answer to your question, but almost starting now is almost a little late when it comes to AI because it's moving too fast. Yeah. We've already been here, it's been on our doorstep for let's call it just over a year in real production. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:13

We'd say two. Okay, we got it. Uh but you're right, the first year was a little bit more. It was all chat GPT. It was a little first year. All just chat GPT mostly, and it was clunky.

SPEAKER_00 30:20

Yeah. Yeah. And that's, you know, we could go down that discussion point, but generative tools are a lot easier to build, right? So being a chat GPT, um, being a generative tool, makes sense that it was first to market. Yeah. It doesn't require all the compute and everything that the the agentic tools are going to use. So now that we're really truly in an awesome time with AgenTic, if you're not in it now, you're already behind. So you're you're gonna have to step on the gas pedal and do double time. Yeah. I and then I didn't answer your second question there. You know, the what does it look like when you're losing people in an organization? This one is I I really love this question, and I I I hope people are paying attention because the last position I was at, I went through seven years of ups and downs. And just sorry, just to clarify, losing the trust of trust of the people, yes. But but it could be losing people too. I think it goes hand in hand. If you've lost the trust, they're gonna start looking for jobs, right? So it kind of goes hand in hand. But yes, agreed. Um, so I was with a company that lost their way, lost their culture. And so the funny thing was is they had dubbed me the culture creator at this last job. It's kind of funny. We joked about it, we had a good time with it, but it was but it was a reality that I realized in that when you left the western United States, it was a completely different feel. Nobody had each other's backs. People were complaining about this guy doesn't do this, but when I work with this guy, he does this. And everything was just tense. But as soon as you shifted across Missouri, it was a team environment. And so that's they ended up dubbing me the culture creator uh for those reasons. But you have to, and it just goes back to the earlier questions. When you're losing people or the company has lost trust of the people, you have to somehow create a bubble. Yeah. Otherwise, you should probably start looking for your own new job. Yeah. Because it's all going to crumble around you. But if you have any control at all and you can create a bubble, create the bubble, make sure your team is empowered, reinforced, and you're communicating effectively. Love it, love it.

SPEAKER_01 32:19

So communication is important. So if your teams are afraid to ask what AI means for their job, that's not an AI problem, right? That's a communication and trust problem. So again, it just goes back to being human towards people. Be honest, be frank, let them know where the company is going and be clear as to, you know, the direction. Okay, let's go to the last topic. So topic four, hiring better, yeah, building a philosophy that finds the right people. So this is a big topic today. Uh the market is readjusting at how it conducts interviews, how it looks at hiring processes, models, philosophies, all of that. And it they are finally coming to the point of saying, well, we've got to hire the right people. Probably something, you know, Jeff Bezos and and Elon Musk have been doing for decades very well. The rest of the organ the rest of the organizations in America are finally getting to that point. Now it's a lot because of the economic factors, but where do you see hiring going wrong most often? And what's the most underused signal that leaders and hiring managers keep walking past that would actually tell them a lot more about a candidate than any other?

SPEAKER_00 33:36

So I'm going to uh on the last, I think the thing that they walk past the most is we've overthought every metric of hiring. We've overthought every process of hiring, and we brought it down to this black and white, and that's how you kill a culture right there. Yeah. Right? So everything's just a black and white. It doesn't come down to who that person is, their aptitude to learn, their ability to work with a team, their ability to communicate, all of that's just gone. Because when you're Jeff Bezos and your Elon Musk, everything is built into a template. And you answer maybe it's 500 questions, right? I I am shocked when I go to Home Depot and I see the little hiring cubicles and I see these 16-year-olds in there answering 200 question surveys to figure out if they're a fit. You're retailing light bulbs and Clorox bleach. Yeah. Right? Nobody's coming to this young 16-year-old to ask him how to freaking design a house. Yeah. Right? They're coming to to find where the light bulb is. And it's a 60-watt or a 40-watt, right? Right. So we've overlooked almost everything about the hiring process, trying to remove it and make it as simply automated as possible, but you've lost the culture. You've lost where people live. And when you lose that, or you never had it in the first place, then you can't build a culture where everybody feels included and part of something.

SPEAKER_01 34:52

Yeah, I've often heard that Amazon is not a culture place. No, you don't go there because you want great culture. You go there because you want the experience. You want resume builder. Resume builder. You want to be known for working there. Money. Money. Right? Yeah, but it's definitely not a culture. And I do think that's a big miss because while you can drive people into the ground as hard and fast as you want to get profits and to, you know, increase stakeholder, you know, excitement about your organization to value yourself great, but you're not building something that's sustainable. Right. And so there's a big miss there. So I think it's important.

SPEAKER_00 35:29

What I do, if I could tell you what I do, so I'll take him to the driving range, I'll take them for nine holes on the golf course. It's two hours. But golf is one of those sports where it's you, it's all on you. Yeah. So I get to see if you get frustrated, how you deal with that. Yeah. If you're out there throwing clubs, right, you don't know how to deal with your emotions. If you just don't give a shit, yeah. Right. You just kind of sit back and you hit the ball 300 yards, 90 degrees to the right, and you're just like, yeah, whatever. Then that's how you're approaching your daily life. Yeah. So I can see every bit of you in two hours on the golf course way more than I can in four 45-minute interviews. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:07

I think that's a wonderful point. You're getting the in the intangibles, which is, hey, I'm putting an effort out there. I may not be the greatest golf hitter, but I'm putting an effort out there. I've got a good attitude. I'm enjoying the time I get to spend with you here. You can see these things that are happening. Now, I think that's also possible during the interview process. And I think what you're seeing is organizations are saying, I need to see culture fit in a different way than you writing something down on a piece of paper and or performing for me in front of you know this deal. Sure. And so I think that's important from a philosophy standpoint is how are you looking at those other intangibles that you're probably not grading against?

SPEAKER_00 36:49

Yeah, and I mean I'm not that smart. So if you can figure out a way during the interview process to get those intangibles, then my I go do that more power to you. I'm I'm I'm an ex-athlete, I'm pretty stupid. So at the end of the day, if I just get you out there for two hours, I can make my decision pretty, pretty simply. But but yeah, there's much smarter people out there than me, so I'm sure there's a better way to do it. But that has always worked for me. I've I've only made two bad hires in my entire career. And I mean bad hires. My odds look pretty good.

SPEAKER_01 37:18

All right, so we're gonna move on from that. But the the summation of it is look at different metrics than you probably did before. Ask different questions to see the excitement and joy that they have coming to your organization, see if they're going to translate in the real world. So you need to start asking different questions and looking for different behavioral cues. Rapid fire time. Are you ready, Tony? Let's do it. All right, short answers, first instinct. Here we go. One thing that every manager should stop doing immediately. Holding their employees' hands. All right, next question. Best leadership book that actually changed how you operate, not just one you recommend.

SPEAKER_00 37:56

So it's not a leadership book. And this is gonna sound a little cliche, but I'll I'll try and pull you back to why it's my answer. You could even say it's to some degree my sales Bible, but the challenger sale, again, not a leadership book. But when you use some of those tactics that it explains within the book, that I think there's 12 of them that are stand out that I've used over over and over in my career. But if you use those in a leadership capacity, you're gonna get amazing outcomes as well. Yeah. So it's funny because the the book's not written that way, but if if you conceptualize it and you use it in a leadership format, the book actually does deliver very well.

SPEAKER_01 38:32

There's a lot of great books that can translate like that.

SPEAKER_00 38:34

So I love that you pointed that out. Um performance reviews still useful or time to kill them? I think it's a modification, uh, kind of as we discussed earlier. I think it has to be something that so performance reviews in it in its uh historical format are all company-based. Yeah. What did you do for the company? Right. When we see this next generation, and we alluded to it earlier on in the podcast, but when we see this next generation, they've watched their parents, they have no loyalty to these corporations. So when you come in and it's me, me, me, you're never gonna get the outcome you want. So it has to be me, you, me, you, me, you, right? Give a little, get a lot more. All right. So you have to understand their goals and what you're gonna do to invest into their goals. And their goals could be something as simple as within the next five to seven years, I would like to be looked at or have a be in a position to look at a leadership role, right? It's not hard to do. Yeah. But you gotta make that little investment for them, and then they'll give you 110% productivity because they know you're invested in them.

SPEAKER_01 39:36

Yeah. Fantastic. Biggest red flag you've seen in a candidate that most people miss. Can I say blue hair?

SPEAKER_00 39:42

Well, you know, unless they're working for the uh I don't think people miss that one though. Yeah. Yeah. No, it and uh look, I we might be jet, we might be joking about it, but there's there's nothing more unprofessional than than showing up looking like a fluorescent sign. No, but in in all actuality, a red flag that most people miss, I would say is is how you put yourself together. It's not your dress because your value isn't the threads that you wear or how expensive your outfit is, but it's how you carry yourself. And when you carry yourself in a certain way, people take immediate notice. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:20

Yeah, you got it. Yeah, that's very, very important. Uh last one, the one leadership trait you can't teach someone either either has it or they don't.

SPEAKER_00 40:30

Investment. And and I say that it's very vague, but investment. And I mean you have to care about the people. So you are investing. If you care, you're investing. Yeah. So I would say, you know, the investment in your team and your people, it goes miles in return. I can't even put in numbers what the ROI is that you get on. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:48

Yeah. And I think it's all the things we talked about, giving good quality feedback, being there for them, meeting with them on their regular basis, looking at the intangibles, not just the performance metrics. Right. So it's when you say investment, I think of it that way.

SPEAKER_00 41:03

Would you agree? 100%, but I think it even goes beyond that. I had a I had an employee who was a great employee, wasn't the top guy in the company, but he you could count on him every year, numbers just could count on the guy. And he developed lung cancer and never smoked a day in his life, developed lung cancer. And so that took him out of the field. His workload, how can you put that on somebody else when his commissions are made? So guess what? A lot of my management responsibilities took a back seat, right? I had to tell my boss's reports were going to be late. I had to work late nights, right? But somebody had to get in there and deal with his customers. I don't say deal with it like it's a negative. Somebody had to pick up the ball where he left it so that he could go and focus on getting better. Unfortunately, uh he passed from the the cancer. Um, but those are the things you're never too far above anybody. You always have their backs, things like that. I was at the hospital every day for five days when one of my employees fell off of a mountain rock climbing. Right? I did my job from the hospital. I did my job and his job from the hospital for five days in a row.

SPEAKER_01 42:05

Building that relationship of just being human and being more than just, you know, using them for a means to an end. Frankly, lean on your faith. I that you know, if you want to be a good leader, be faithful. Yeah. Yeah, I think we should have a uh topic on that as well is how you how you bridge those two gaps because that's where morals come from. That's where your foundation comes from. And guess what? You're probably putting more of that into your work than you know. And you know what? Uh celebrate it, understand it, and continue to drive into it because that's what's gonna build your team. Yeah, back to the basics, morality basics. I like that. Yeah, morality basics. Love it. All right, that might be a topic. Or that might be an episode. Okay, Tony. Appreciate you bringing it real today. This is exactly the conversation I was hoping uh we would have. In this episode, if this episode meant something to you, please share it. Forward it to the manager who needs to hear it. Send it to the leader who's trying to figure it out for their next move. That's how these conversations get farther along. Until next time, keep building with purpose, keep leading with clarity, and keep pushing past the buzzwords toward what actually works.