What Your Team Wants From You

While analyzing data from his Total Business Reset surveys, David has noticed five significant trends which principals should be aware of to run their firms more effectively, as well as one thing your team wishes you’d stop doing.

Transcript

Blair Enns: David, there are various reasons we do this podcast. If you think back to 2015 when we first started recording them, they didn't air until the beginning of 2017, but we said, hey, we don't get to speak to each other much these days. Why don't we do this podcast? We'll just talk once a week and we'll record it. Maybe it'll be a podcast.

David C. Baker: We need to revisit that reason.

[laughter]

Blair: Now we're recording twice a week to get ahead of it.

David: Talking a little too much, yes.

Blair: Yes, we're getting a little sick of each other. You keep trying to shorten the podcast to five or six minutes, and I keep trying to drag them out. Anyway, another reason we do this podcast is because I get free consulting. I have to confess, when you sent me this topic the other day, and the topic is What Your Team Wants From You, I looked at it. We nominally run the topics by each other, even though you get to choose your topics and I get to choose mine. I could say, "It kind of feels like one we did before, but whatever. I'll let David do his mediocre topic." [laughter]

Then I went back to what I was doing. What I was doing was preparing for this Leadership Circle Profile, which is where an outside consultant is interviewing my team members about my leadership style-

David: Oh, you're so screwed. [chuckles]

Blair: -and some other people, including you, so you're on the list. You're going to be invited to give frank feedback on me as a leader. I go back to this LCP 360 Leadership Circle Profile, and I realize, "Oh, wait a minute. Let me look at David's document again." I skim through it again, and I went, "Oh my God, this is me. This is everything I need to do more of," and the one thing you identify that my team wishes I would stop doing. This is podcast disguised as therapy. Thank you for choosing the topic. It could not be more timely.

David: [chuckles] I sent a quick text to Shannon and apologized for not taking her name out of this before I sent it to you.

[laughter]

Blair: Yes, oh my God. I'm going to try a little bit to not make this all about me, but this is all about me.

David: Well, you know what's so weird about this to me is-- so we have this really well-validated survey tool. Then we hire-- we have this third-party contractor that we've used for years. She's really, really good. She goes through and she synthesizes it as scientifically as possible, and doggone it, every one of these syntheses looks the same. It's almost like we wouldn't even have to survey anybody, and we could accurately predict what people think about the principals at these firms. It's just so uncanny. That's what made me think we ought to just do this. We ought to talk about it.

Blair: You're talking about your core consulting offering, which is called the Total Business Reset. You go in and look at basically everything in the business, and as part of that, you have a survey for principals, the owners of the business. Then you have a separate survey, is that correct, for all the team members?

David: All the team members, right. Yes, and they cannot be anonymous, so we have to know the name, but we anonymize the results. Then everybody also participates in a personality profile. It's just a shortcut. It just really gets us up to speed really quickly about how to solve the issues that are unique to a particular firm. It's just so fascinating to me how they just-- and I think if I were running a firm again like I did for years, I think this would describe me too. I look back over my leadership style, it just described me too.

This isn't hang-your-head sort of stuff. We're not trying to beat anybody up. It's just interesting to see how you're maybe not all that unique, and what employees want of you is reasonable. It's just reasonable. Having said that, I haven't worked outside of this industry all that much, but I think that the leadership style of these firms is generally very good. You have to look really hard to find an asshole running a firm. As principals, your intentions are good and you pull it off really well, but there are some blind spots and that's what we're here to talk about.

Blair: Yes. These five points, your key message here is they are almost universal. When I read them, I thought this really could be about me. This is what I expect to see in this survey, this profile that we're about to undertake for me and other leaders in the team. I think I might as well just save the money and not do the survey because you've just done it.

David: [chuckles] Right.

Blair: All right, so let's hit me- I mean, us, the listener, with what number one is on the list of things that your team wants you to do more of.

David: Yes. Pay more attention to new business. This is logical to me too. Some of the things that people want principals to do don't seem all that fair, but this one seems fair to me. Because if we look at this from the other side, you and I have said this in so many different ways, one of the things you have to be responsible for is new business. You can get help from other people, you could even hire a full-time person to do this, you could work with an outside firm, but if new business isn't happening, it is you, regardless of what your personal role is in that.

It's not just about bringing clients in who will respect the team and who listen to the advice and who pay fair things. There's a subtle message in this too. People haven't really told me this, but I've read between the lines, in that if you're working at a firm where the principal really believes that new business is a part of their responsibilities, it conveys this pride in the firm, so they want you. It's like kids want parents to be proud of them; employees want principals to be proud of what this firm can do. One of the ways that that's manifested is when they go out there and the principal proudly finds clients that they can have an impact on. It's not just about new business purely. There's some emotional component in this as well.

Blair: That is a profound insight, has never occurred to me that directly before, but I think you're absolutely right. I'm just starting to see patterns of that everywhere in my own business as well that makes sense. Then I immediately conjure up some of these firms that have been pretty successful, maybe not at the top tier of success, however you would define it, but they were decent businesses, where the owner just seemed uninterested in new business. [mimics] "Well, you guys take it, whatever."

Not only is there lack of pride, but there's a lack of direction. Because every new client that the firm takes on represents a step towards or away from a strategic vision-

David: Oh, yes.

Blair: -so when the person in charge of that strategic vision is not taking a big interest and having a strong hand on who those clients are, then it's effectively abdicating the visioning or the strategic direction of the firm.

David: Yes, so you just layered something on top of what I said that I hadn't thought about. With each new business win, you're saying I'm charting the direction of this firm. This client that I just handed to you is a perfect example of where our firm can really kick ass in the marketplace. Yes, so we could do a whole episode just on this notion.

Blair: Well, I think we did. We could go deeper into it, but we did an episode, I forget the title, but basically reinventing your firm through new business-

David: Oh, right, right.

Blair: -but that's the idea. If you take the last client that comes in, and you see the principal owner as responsible for that client, if your sample size is just this N of 1, the last client, and you look at this client and you say, as employees, as team members, "Oh, I guess this is where we're going. These are the types of clients we're working with. This is the type of work we're doing. This is how strategic or tactical the work is. This is how profitable or unprofitable it is," then it gives you pause when you consider, "We'll just take this one for the money. It doesn't quite fit what we do. It's not the ideal client. It's not the best commercial terms," et cetera. What's the message you're saying to the team about the future direction of the firm?

David: Yes. It's like we do a big yearly family vacation and I'm responsible for planning it. "Okay, family, here's our vacation this year. We're going to go to a state park and then we're going to go to a drive-in." It's like compare that with something where you put a lot of effort into it, you took into account what people like to do and so on. It seems every new business win is a statement about what you think about the firm, how capable they are, what their skills are.

If this isn't happening, then the team notices. Whether they talk about it among themselves or not, this is always at the front of the line. It's like, "Hey, only you can fix this. Just go do it, go do it, and we'll help you. We just want direction. We would love to help you with this, but we need you to step in front of this." That's the first thing that keeps coming up.

Blair: I think tied to this, and it'll come up a little bit later, is we've got the current business. We've got this. You go get the next one. Okay, so that's the first thing your team wants you to do more of is pay more attention to new business. The second one is tied to this in some ways. It's developing more proprietary thought leadership.

David: Yes, it definitely is tied because the more you develop this IP that sets you apart, that same IP helps you do better work after you land the client too. You have principals everywhere at firms that are dying to be more differentiated. It's not like they're trying to stomp their friends who work at other firms down into the ground. It's not that way at all. They just want an easier life. They want to know how we think differently about something. We want to have some sort of a process so that when a client asks us how we do something, then we can easily answer that. We'll get more into that a little bit later.

You notice this is the second thing, and it's also the thing that the principal is most suited to do. Because they grew up as a firm, started from just one or two people into a bigger entity. They were doing the work back then. They know what it means to do that work. They're also on the front lines of all of these conversations with new business prospects. They're in a position to have their pulse on what's happening in that marketplace, and how we can further differentiate ourselves not just by where we focus, but in terms of how we think. They want to know how they think.

If you imagine going to a memorial service for a family member or somebody that you really respected, one of the things that you're going to hear from the people that stand up and talk about it is, I'll never forget how he or she would say this frequently. What comes up in your remembrance of somebody is how they thought differently, how they had different perspectives. The people on your team want that too. They don't want to blend in with the whole industry. They want to be attached to it, but they want to be different. They think that you not only have the time, but you probably have the mind to do that, and they want more of that from you.

It's not like a greedy, "Hey, do your job." It's not that. It's more like a longing, like, "Oh, man, we need more from you." It's not negative. It's positive. It's like, "We know what you can do. We wish you could do this. It would really help all of us." That's the spirit of it.

Blair: I'm going to read the sentence you actually wrote here for the second thing that your team wants you to do more of. I skipped over the first part, rising above the client work. Rising above the client work, and we touched on that just briefly in the previous point, and developing more proprietary thought leadership or even IP. There's three components there.

First of all, just get out of the day-to-day, and this is going to be a recurring theme. Then this idea of proprietary thought leadership, so not just thought leadership, proprietary. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you're implying with that word proprietary is a novel point of view or perspective.

David: Right.

Blair: This is thought leadership that is not being generated by ChatGPT or other large language models where it's like, what is the conventional wisdom or even best practices on a topic? It's, no, I've thought about this topic, this narrow topic, and I'm looking at it through a specific lens of a belief or a perspective. Here's my point of view on it that is not going to be uncovered by a large language model. It is a point of view that in that point of view, you can see the uniqueness of this firm.

David: Right, so picture that employee who's thinking exactly what you just articulated, and they change jobs. They go to another agency, another creative firm at some point. Those are the things that they're going to take with them. They're going to influence that next firm they work with and say, "Hey, this is how we learned how to think about it," and everybody around the conference table will look at them and it's like, [muses over] "That's interesting. That's good," and they'll nod and they'll look at each other. It's those kinds of observations that maybe they're not earth-shattering, but they're a little bit unique. They're a new way to look at things.

Blair: Yes, I hadn't thought about it that way before. That's interesting. It's a novel point of view on a topic that maybe even the client thought they knew the topic well. They just hadn't looked at it from that angle before.

David: Yes.

Blair: We've touched on this in a few previous episodes, but the third component here is even developing IP. The idea that proprietary thought leadership and IP are very often related, the latter falls out of the former. If you have a novel point of view on what you do or how it should be done, that almost always eventually evolves into a novel way of working. That can get really novel and it can start to include proprietary data that you gather about your novel point of view. Then you wake up one day and you think, "This is actually some meaningful proprietary intellectual property."

David: Yes, it might end up in a book, or maybe less publicly, it's the kind of stuff that one of your key employees talks about in the first few days of a new-employee orientation. It's the kind of stuff that just helps you see your place.

Blair: A diagnostic tool-

David: Yes, right.

Blair: -where you're quantifying your client's baseline state, et cetera.

Blair: We're talking about what your team wants you to do more of. The first one on the list, as you say, it's always the first one, pay more attention to new business. Second one is rising above the client work and developing more proprietary thought leadership or even IP. The third one, we've alluded to this already, these topics seem to be related to each other: a stronger vision for the future.

David: Yes, and I guess to correct myself a little bit. Maybe there is a strong vision for the future, maybe it just isn't articulated, whatever, but if it's not articulated to the team, it doesn't count. Here I'm talking about; in five years, how do you envision this firm, like what size, and what will we be doing? Will we be more of an advisory firm at that point? What size will we be? Will we be international? Will we still be in these vertical industries? Then you work backwards and say, "Well, the first step would be in three months, we think we need to hire another strategist. Then maybe in a year, we're probably going to go fully remote," or whatever that looks like.

The point is not whether they agree or not with that future. I mean, at some point, it is important that they do to some degree. It's not about objecting to the specific picture of the future that you're painting. It's, is there a picture? Because these folks, even the least ambitious of them, want to see where they fit in this picture. There's a bunch of puzzle pieces together. They want to know, should I hitch my wagon to this? What's going to happen with this employee? Or even down and dirty, you're not going to announce this in a company-wide meeting, but what's going to happen with that department over there that's become sort of untethered to the whole, they seem to be doing their own thing? Are you aware of that? Are you going to fix that? Is this what you intend? What about rising leadership? Okay, there's a husband-and-wife team running this thing, and I'm not sure if I have room to move up, or whatever.

It's just all of those kinds of questions that people think about, particularly if the culture isn't all that strong. If there's any crack in what they see as your leadership, then they start to fill those vacuums with really weird ideas. It's even more important for you to articulate-- well, first, to develop and then to articulate your vision of the future. They have a right to know. People don't just go to work, get their paycheck and go home now. Where they work and what they do at that enterprise is a statement about who they are. That's just the way it is, and so you have a responsibility to lead this thing.

Blair: Yes. You used the word lead and leadership there in that description. I think this point of a stronger vision for the future, this is the definition of leadership. Leadership is, essentially, we're going in this direction and inspiring people to want to follow. Everything else on here, you could characterize as management issues.

David: Right.

Blair: There's a saying in sales, I quote it often, I don't know who the original author is, but, "No vision, no decision." We talk about that when we're working with our clients and helping to inspire their prospective clients to move forward. If they don't have a vision-- if a client is considering hiring you, and they don't have a vision of where this engagement is going to lead them, this beautiful world, the beautiful outcome, if they can't see it and get inspired by it, then they're not likely to make a decision to hire you.

If there is no shared vision for the future among your team members, what's getting them excited in the morning? Doing the same thing they did yesterday, last week, last month, last year? Making inferences about where the business is going based on the last client that just came in, "Oh, I guess we're going in this direction."

David: Maybe you're a writer and you read all about AI, and your principal hasn't said anything about it. Well, you're going to sit there and you're going to think about it. You're going to think about, what are the implications of this, and you're going to feel you need to spend some of your brain cells not on the client work that you're getting paid to do, but worrying about the future, instead of saying, "You know what? I've got some pretty deep confidence in this leader because of how he or she has led over the years. I'm not going to worry about it too much because I know that he or she is thinking about this stuff." That would be one example of how you'd think about the future.

Blair: Yes. Okay, and the fourth point is making tough decisions. I'll read the statement here that most everyone knows you should make, including you. Most of those tough decisions are in what domain?

David: About people. They're almost always about people. Think about it from the employee's perspective. It's like, "This employee, I just don't like him. He's not very good. Let's just get rid of him." Well, that's not how you can think about it as a leader. You are thinking about the whole, but you're also thinking about this person, what's fair to this person. You may be aware of all kinds of other things going on that complicate the decision, and so sometimes you just overthink it and wear yourself out.

What you don't want to be doing is making all these big decisions about three months after everybody else pretty much knew what should be decided. You can't be too far behind the unspoken consensus. This is very, very common. I don't think you're going to catch as much flack for making bad decisions as you will catch flack for not making them soon enough. People can forgive bad decisions. They cannot forgive inactivity. It's just a glaring hole in your leadership when you can't make tough decisions.

Blair: That same principle, you said, this is really the tough decisions around people and you've been talking about team members, but the same principle applies to clients too, doesn't it?

David: Oh, yes, absolutely, and that's even more obvious sometimes. Because even with team members that are a little bit tough, you're still in this battle together with them, but whether it's right or not, I'm not sure it is right, but employees feel like clients are largely interchangeable. Their tolerance level for a client that just is always late, or doesn't pay on time, or doesn't respect the staff or is just rude, they have virtually no tolerance for that. The only time they have more tolerance for it is when everybody knows that this client is so big on our roster that we have to do what they want. Even then, that just drags people down and they feel they're chained to this and they're not in charge of their own destiny because they're backed into a corner because of this big client.

The tough decisions are always preceded by the tough conversations. That's where you could start. What tough conversations am I avoiding at the moment? I need to have those. Once I have those, the decisions come a lot easier after you've had the tough conversations.

Blair: I think of the four points you've talked about so far under the banner of what your team wants you to do more of, there's one more to come. If we go back to this EOS model of the two primary roles in the firm being the visionary and the integrator. The visionary is just what the word implies, in charge of the future. The integrator is the person who makes the trains run on time. I'm a classic visionary. I think you have strong components of both, and I've seen that in other successful entrepreneurs, but I'm skewed one way. My wife is my business partner. She's skewed the other way. She's the integrator.

These first four fall to me in my business. I wonder if it's a classic entrepreneur where it's like, yes, okay, I can pay more attention to new business. I can develop proprietary thought leadership and IP. I can bring a strong vision for the future. I can make tough decisions. I actually think all four of those things are strengths of mine. This fifth one, I'm not sure it's me. I'm using myself as a surrogate for a classic visionary entrepreneur. Putting better processes in place. It's absolutely my life and business partner. That's her strength. Then you say-- so your team wants more from you is putting better processes in place. Then you say, "Oh, and enforcing them." [chuckles] It's one thing to have a process, right?

David: The reason that that little tension point comes up frequently is because the visionary- using your language just a minute ago, the visionary is actually pretty good at putting processes in place, but they're usually the worst of the whole group at following them. Conversely, the integrators often struggle at putting the right processes in place, but they're very good at following them and they resent people that don't follow them.

Blair: And holding other people to them.

David: Yes. That's where there's just a real mismatch because if the people putting the processes in place are the ones who are least likely to follow it-- timekeeping is a great example. Neither of us think timekeeping ought to be as big a part of this field as it is. If you want to use that as an example, you have somebody looking at profitability, the principal, and they decide, rightly or wrongly, that, okay, this is tied to timekeeping. "Okay, team, we're all going to do this," but then the only person who doesn't do the timekeeping is the principal. It just falls flat, right?

Blair: Yes, there's no Magna Carta equivalent, where the king must follow his own rules in an agency.

David: Right, yes. If you want to be super concrete about this, where this comes up most frequently is in onboarding new team members. If you believe like I do-- you listening, if you believe like I do that finding great employees is actually a little more difficult than finding great clients, then you would probably follow through with that and smooth their entrance into the team more than you do.

Because usually what happens is you finally wait to hire somebody until you just can't wait any longer. You finally just jump ahead and hire somebody. At that point, there's all this work that's piled up ready for the new person to do, and they're just thrown into the deep end of the pool, which is exactly not the plan to do. If you wanted to see where this is most glaringly absent, it's in how new employees are integrated into the team.

I think that that's something that, yes, a principal probably shouldn't be primarily responsible for that, but they should have a hand on that. As an organization, you as the principal should have a perspective on how important it is to ease somebody into the team and to at least make sure that that path is smooth. That's a process thing. Same is true for onboarding clients and so on.

This is the least important of these five things, and it surprises me that it comes up so often. One thing we have to keep in mind that I think clarifies this is that principals, the people who have a pretty high tolerance for risk, exist without processes. They can jump from place to place without a net underneath them. That doesn't bother them all that much. The people that are working for you on your team, they don't have the same aptitude for risk, and they find processes and predictability comforting.

Sometimes you are withholding process from them out of respect, in your mind. It's like, "No, I don't need to treat them this way. They're big people," but actually they're not like you. They want more process. It's just more getting inside their heads and doing what's good for them and not what you think is good for them. Putting better processes in place does come up frequently on these lists of what employees wish principals would do more of.

Blair: This being the last point of five points, putting better processes in place, I think it's tied to the last point you want to make, which is the one point under the banner of what your team wishes you'd stop doing. These two things strike me as being related. Do you want to tell us what all the team members, all the employees want you, the owner, to quit doing?

David: Yes, and here's where-- I'll just use a word that rhymes.

Blair: Bad word coming, kids.

David: Quit mucking around in our work. [laughter] We did an episode on this, which I thought was really fun to do. I think we titled it something like, how to drive your employees batshit crazy. That's acting like you don't have the time to be involved in the work and then swooping in at the last minute, throwing everything off the table and saying, "Not good enough, team," but you didn't have enough respect for the process to be involved from the very beginning.

Like you said early on under one of the points, I remember specifically you saying it, the team thinks, "Hey, we've got this, boss. This is what we're good at. Don't worry about it. We don't need you here. In fact, we don't want you here. We're really good. Just let us be good at something. You go off and do your job." It seems even odder to the team when you're mucking around in their stuff at the expense of doing what only you can do. Quit mucking around in our work.

Blair: I'll tie one of the earlier points to this too. Quite a while ago, Shannon said to me-- we were talking about me focusing on the high-value activities and my inability to do so. I said, "Give me an example of what I should be doing." She said to me, "I don't understand why you are not writing every day," and that's the highest value activity that I do is write. I say, "Well, I've got all these other things to do," and I listed all these things, and all of these things, you could categorize as mucking around in the team's work.

I want to go back to the last point of, it's your responsibility as the principal to put better processes in place. This is how you ensure- and this is Blair speaking to Blair here, this is how you stay involved without being involved. This is how you ensure that the right things get done without you having to muck around. Because there's a direct correlation between you mucking around in the work and a lack of processes in place.

David: Yes, exactly right. Do people understand what rhymes with mucking? I think they do.

[laughter]

Blair: Hey, before I forget, I'll say this so that we remember it, but when you were talking about one of the key better processes that should be in place is this idea of onboarding new employees, and you said that comes up a lot. It struck me that we may have touched on this topic only briefly, but it probably merits a deeper dive. If that's something you're willing to do-

David: Oh, yes.

Blair: -talk about putting together a system for onboarding new employees. I think that would be universally valuable.

David: Consider it done. I'll put that process in place.

Blair: Okay. Yes, well done. We're talking about What Your Team Wants From You, Blair, in brackets. [laughter] Number one, pay attention to more new business. Number two, rise above the client work and develop more proprietary thought leadership or even IP. Number three, a strong vision for the future. Number four, make tough decisions. Number five, put better processes in place, and the one thing your team wishes you'd stop doing is quit mucking around in our work and do your own job.

This has been really therapeutic for me, David. Hopefully, our listeners got something out of it too, but I don't really care. [laughter] Thank you for this.

David: Thanks, Blair.