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Without a doubt, the number one driver of profit growth is people growth.
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People think I've got a business problem.
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You don't have a business problem, you have a people problem.
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So, as leaders, we need to make people growth our number one priority.
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And the problem is, especially as things get difficult, people growth becomes our last priority as we're just trying to tread water in 15 other areas.
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Hey, uncommon Leaders, welcome back.
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This is the Uncommon Leader Podcast.
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I'm your host, john Gallagher.
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Look, I'm excited about the guest today and I know I say that almost every time I'm excited, I'm thrilled, I'm all those different things.
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But what I appreciate about the guest today and I know I say that almost every time I'm excited, I'm thrilled, I'm all those different things but what I appreciate about the gentleman I'm getting ready to talk to, mike Goldman, who's an author, he's a speaker and he's an all-around great guy.
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But I think it's one of those things like you feel this brother from another mother kind of thing in terms of the passion that we share for developing leaders and developing leadership teams and the way we go about that.
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Mike Goldman is the bestselling author of Breakthrough Leadership Teams and also the author of Performance Breakthrough, and he's got a new book coming out later on this year that he's going to talk about as well.
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He's the host of the Better Leadership Team Show.
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I hope that I did okay yesterday when I chatted with him, that I'll end up on that show and again, it's someone that I know I'm going to learn from into the future.
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So he's on a mission to help CEOs not just grow their business, but to truly create engaging and fulfilling environments for their teams.
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So if you ever wonder how to build a team, look, this conversation today is for you.
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It's not just about businesses.
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It might be a team in your church that you help to lead volunteers.
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It might be, frankly, your team at home in terms of who you're leading, but I know we're going to learn a lot from him today.
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Mike Goldman, welcome to the Uncommon Leader Podcast.
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How are you?
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I'm good Thanks for having me, and you did a great job on my show, so I hope I could equal that.
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We'll see All right?
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Well, let's see how we can repeat this and run it back today as we go forward.
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Mike, I'm going to start you with the first question.
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I start every first time guest on the Uncommon Leader podcast, and that's to ask you to tell me a story from your childhood, if you would, that still impacts who you are today, as a person or as a leader.
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I love this question so much and I'll try to take a longer story and shorten it a little bit, but you'll tell me if you want me to go into more detail.
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But when I was a kid, my grandfather his name was Archie.
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We called him Papa Archie.
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My grandfather was the best man I ever knew.
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He was just strong, and I don't mean muscle strong, although he was a pretty tough, tough guy, but, you know, strong in mind, incredibly proud of his family, not monetarily successful, blue collar guy.
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And when he was about 84 years old he was still driving, he was still working.
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He was driving a cab.
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He had no business driving the cab anymore.
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He couldn't see very well and we got into a number of accidents and one day he got fired from the cab company and he was too proud to tell us, but my grandmother told us he had gotten fired and I always remember that day because I felt like that day was was the last day I ever saw my grandfather and and he actually lived another two years after that, but he wasn't pop anymore.
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He was a guy that always had, you know, kind of a gleam in his eye and fire in his belly and the gleam was gone and the fire was gone and we grew up in the Bronx in New York so we lived on the sixth floor of our apartment building.
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My grandparents lived on the fifth floor.
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We had dinner together together every night and then we'd watch the Yankee game on TV or whatever we were doing and and pop would just sit and I knew we couldn't hear very well.
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I'd say, pop, is the TV loud enough, could you hear it?
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And he said, uh, no, but that's okay, it's like he was just waiting around to die.
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And what I learned from all of that and seeing, seeing that over a couple of years the impact it had on me was once he stopped working, was forced to stop working, he felt like he wasn't of use anymore and he was just waiting to die.
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So I could have taken so many different messages from that, but the message I took from that is that in my mind, retirement became a dirty word.
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Oh, four letter word.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, Retirement's in my now.
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I don't I don't fault anyone who has a goal of retiring or has retired I mean nothing wrong with that but in my head it imprinted retirement is this four-letter word I'm going to love what I do, I'm going to help others feel fulfilled and love what they do.
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And thank God, I'm lucky enough and I've frankly worked hard enough, that I love what I do every single day.
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And I just turned 60 not too long ago.
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And you know, I hope when I'm 75, I'm saying yeah, but you should see what my business is going to look like when I turn 80.
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Like it just imprinted that in me where where, thankfully, I love what I do.
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And, man, I don't ever see retiring.
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I might slow down, but I'm not sure retiring is in my cards until the universe retires me.
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I hear that and, mike, I appreciate that so much.
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Thanks for sharing that story, and I can hear that I'm going to bet we're going to get back to Grandpa Archie as we go through this conversation.
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But one of the things that I often think about myself not to show the word retirement, but ultimately, I believe I've been presented with a set of gifts that I'm supposed to use and I want to exhaust every ounce of what I've been given so that I don't have anything left.
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Don't have anything left to give, whatever that means.
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And your point about retirement as long as we're continuously bearing fruit in the lives of ourselves and the lives of others, I think we've got to get going.
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We've still got purpose, we've still got a reason to carry on.
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So I appreciate you sharing it and I appreciate the decision or approach you made to be that excited about it.
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I can see I hope to be going when I'm 75 as well.
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We shall see how that goes.
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Hey, let's jump right into this.
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Breakthrough leadership teams.
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For those who may be a little bit new to your work, what does a breakthrough leadership team look like in general?
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When you're working with others right now, what are some of the benefits that can result from a breakthrough leadership team.
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Let's just start there from a vision.
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Yeah, and just providing the foundation.
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You know what I have seen.
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I've been coaching and consulting for over 35 years now and what I have seen is, as the leadership team goes, so goes the rest of the organization.
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So it's got to start there.
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And when you say, you know what?
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What does a breakthrough leadership team look like?
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Uh, the goal of a company.
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If, if, if you're listening to this podcast and you've got an organization, you probably didn't start your organization with the goal of having a great leadership team, and that's not the goal.
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Great leadership is a means to an end.
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So I want to talk about what that end is, the way I think, of what that end goal is.
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I think it's about creating a great company, and there are three characteristics, I think, of creating a great company.
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And number one it's about growth.
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And growth is about the dollars and cents.
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When I say growth in this capacity, I mean consistent and significant top and bottom line growth.
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So if you don't have consistent, significant top and bottom line growth, I don't think you have a great team.
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You probably don't have a breakthrough leadership team.
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So growth is number one.
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Number two is fulfillment.
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I don't care how fast you're growing, if you wake up every day and your team members wake up every day and you dread starting work.
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I don't think you have a great company and I don't think you're on a great team.
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So the first one is growth, second is fulfillment and the third is impact.
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If you are not adding value to the world every day, I don't think you have a great company.
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And when I say adding value to the world, some people think peace in the Middle East, climate change.
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But adding value to the world could be you fix leaky pipes that your customers have, but you've got to be adding value.
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So I think a breakthrough leadership team and there are six pillars of creating that team and we can go through those at whatever level.
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You want or not.
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I'll leave that, john, up to you.
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So there are six pillars of building that team, but the end result of that team is growth, fulfillment and impact.
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Love that.
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Love those three criteria, if you will.
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I'm just taking notes on that to make sure we get back to those and to your six pillars.
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I was reading your book and in the introduction that's when I got hooked as you started to tell this story, and I just want to read this section and I want to let you comment on it because it hit me really hard.
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It says leaders with a good business idea think they can white knuckle it and make things happen.
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You touched on this with regards to they didn't start their business thinking they had to build a leadership team.
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That's how many business leaders become successful in the first place.
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They launch a successful company through unglamorous, difficult work, but as that company grows, long hours and personal commitment aren't enough to keep the company moving forward.
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The leader needs help and in desperation, they hire quickly and wind up with a mediocre team that is unable to scale with the company.
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So you talked about that vision, that growth, fulfillment and impact, but you also talk about that from a challenge standpoint in terms of what those leaders run into.
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What are some of the other things you see in those leaders who are trying to build those companies that are getting in their way.
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What are some of those barriers?
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Yeah, the first one is what you just mentioned.
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It is the team kind of evolves over time.
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It starts off with three people around a kitchen table along with the founder, and then it's five people and then it's 10 people and the founder says I, you know, I, I can't have 10 P, the all these 10 people reporting to me.
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You know, joe, could you take two of these?
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And Susan, could you take these other two?
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And then all of a sudden you got 50, 75, a hundred people and you've got this structure of your team.
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That doesn't make sense but it evolved.
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And you've got people that are stretched too thin, you've got people that aren't clear on what they're accountable for.
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You got the wrong people in the wrong seats.
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So I think it's structure of the team gets in the way because we're not proactive about it.
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And I'll tell you that the biggest thing and there are so many, but I'm just going to, I'm just going to grab two of them the biggest thing is not prioritizing people growth.
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That, I think, is the number one thing that gets in the way.
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It's not just a matter of having the right team around you.
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That team has got to be learning and growing.
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You've got to be assessing the performance of your people.
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You've got to be developing and coaching your people, challenging your people, re-recruiting them, coaching people out of the organization that aren't a fit.
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And you know most people when they think about creating a great company, when they think about growth, they do have the right vision.
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Do I have the right strategy?
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Do I have the right processes and systems?
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And, of course, all those things are important and, john, you and I work with our clients on all those things.
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But I have found, without a doubt, the number one driver of profit growth is people growth.
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People think I've got a business problem.
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Is people growth?
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People think I've got a business problem.
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You don't have a business problem, you have a people problem.
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So we need to make, as leaders, we need to make people growth our number one priority.
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And the problem is, especially as things get difficult, people growth becomes our last priority as we're just trying to tread water in 15 other areas.
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Yes, Great stuff.
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Those are barriers to that.
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That are things that folks have to overcome.
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I'm going to come back to a couple of them in our conversation, but as I move through your book, look, I was so excited when I saw chapter one self-leadership that that leader who's running that organization that may have bootstrapped this organization for 20 years, doesn't think that they have to be the ones that have to drive.
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And you touch on a few things that are important for leaders from their self-development, including managing their emotional state and developing an internal locus of control.
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So touch on one or two of those in terms of what are the action plans for those leaders and how you get them started on the journey.
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Because I know you also say you don't just work with the team, you insist on working with the top leader as well.
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Absolutely, Absolutely.
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And maybe you mentioned the locus of control and you mentioned emotional state, so maybe I'll cover a concept that hits both of those.
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And I actually have a TEDx that I did, a TED talk I did back in Gainesville, Florida, about two and a half years ago that touches on this.
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It's called the Antidote to Anger.
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But one of the key things I learned and frankly I say I learned it.
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I need to relearn it every single day and I learned it from my son.
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I have a son he's 30 now but he's got Asperger's syndrome and from the time he was probably two to the time he was in his mid-teens, I am not proud of the father I was and there's a whole deep story behind that, but I'll keep it high level not proud of the father I was, and a big reason for that was and I wouldn't have looked at it this way at the time is I was looking at all the challenges my son had and in my mind he was pushing my buttons on purpose.
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He knew how to piss me off and, man, he was doing it every day and we had good weeks and a whole lot of weeks from hell.
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And one of the things I learned over time that I now coach my leaders on is this idea that no one wakes up in the morning and says what could I screw up today?
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I don't care if it's your, your bitterest enemy, I don't care if it's left or right on the political spectrum, I don't care if it's your most difficult team member or peer.
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No one wakes up in the morning saying, what could I screw up today?
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You know, everybody is just trying to do the best they can with the resources they have.
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I call that the law of positive intent, and it doesn't mean everybody's doing the right thing.
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But when someone's doing something that frustrates you or makes you angry or you don't understand it, as opposed to lashing out because you believe they're doing something wrong on purpose and we see that in our polarized society all the time.
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Now, if you believe they're just trying to do the best they can with the resources they have, it causes you to get curious.
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Not angry, but curious.
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You want to know what do they know that I don't know?
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What do I know that they don't know what resources do I have?
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That they may not have Causes you to ask questions.
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And that is not the only lesson in self-leadership that's in the book or that I teach my clients, but this idea, the law of positive intent, is such a foundational lesson for people to learn to manage their own emotional state and take control of their lives, versus thinking the problems out there with all these other pain in the neck people.
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No, no, no, it's got to start with you.
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Love that, your locus control.
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As I read that in the story, I remember there was a CEO that I was coaching and he loved to look at his team and say I want you guys to tell me what part of the problem am I?
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It was such a humble question that he would ask those others to point to him to understand what he wasn't seeing about himself inside of that locus control that needed to be improved upon.
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And I just I love as you go through it, as you go through that with those individual leaders.
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What are some of the disciplines you encourage those leaders to have to be successful at developing their teams?
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Well there, when it comes to discipline, I really think of three major disciplines.
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Now I'm not talking about self-leadership anymore, although it's impacted, but when it comes to the team, there are, I think, three high-priority kind of disciplines of execution, and the number one discipline is aligning around a small number of priorities.
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I talk to CEOs all the time and I say, all right, tell me what are your top priorities for 2025?
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And they list out 12 things.
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It's like, well, if everything's a priority, nothing's a priority.
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So those aren't.
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Now they list out two or three.
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I know maybe they've got it.
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So the first thing is aligning around a small number of priorities, whether that's annual priorities or quarterly priorities, and I call those rocks the quarterly priorities.
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So that's number one.
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Number two is measuring what matters, and by measuring what matters, I mean you may call them key performance indicators or productivity measures.
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Think of marketing.
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If I say you're accountable for marketing, that tells me almost nothing about what my expectations are of you.
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Does it mean our website went live on time?
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Our new logo has a lot of pretty colors.
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A bunch of people are clicking on our email marketing campaign, or does it mean you've brought in at least 10 marketing qualified email marketing campaign, or does it mean you've brought in at least 10 marketing qualified leads each week?
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What does it mean?
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Well, I don't know unless we specify that.
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So it's not only around aligning around a small number of priorities, it's measuring those things that matter so we can keep score and people know whether they're winning or losing.
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And then, third is having a consistent planning and communication rhythm.
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And what I mean by planning and communication rhythm are things like annual planning retreats, and in my world those are typically two-day retreats that I coach and facilitate my clients through.
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But you don't need a coach, you can do it yourself.
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But there's annual planning retreats, there's quarterly planning.
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In my mind, quarterly planning is the most important type of planning.
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Back when I was in my twenties and thirties and worked for big management consulting firms, we would do three and five year plans and they would be beautiful.
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Millions of dollars spent plans and they would be beautiful.
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Millions of dollars spent beautiful PowerPoints sitting in binders on a shelf gathering dust, because five months after they created it, the world changed.
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They stopped holding each other accountable.
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So quarterly planning is critical.
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So it's annual retreat, quarterly planning, monthly check-ins, weekly accountability meetings, quarterly planning, monthly check-ins, weekly accountability meetings, daily huddles, that whole planning and communication rhythm is so important.
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Including one of the most important things is having at best weekly, at worst bi-weekly, one-on-one meetings with all of your direct reports.
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That is critical.
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Hey listeners, I want to take a quick moment to share something special with you.
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Many of the topics and discussions we have on this podcast are areas where I provide coaching and consulting services for individuals and organizations.
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Okay, let's get back to the show.
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I love that governance model as you walk through Annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly and even daily to a certain extent in terms of what's happening, that are very important.
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That rhythm that happens and then having the discipline to actually carry that out.
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Again, just like the binder, it doesn't mean a hill of beans if you wrote it down, if you're not going to execute on it.
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And then I love the start out, the prioritizing things.
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You can do anything you want.
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You just can't do everything you want and if you got too many priorities, you got no priorities.
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You know that and I appreciate it.
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Again, we get so aligned, mike, it's unbelievable.
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The other side of that you touched on in the book with the teams was a lot of times these leaders who started out on their own, they're bootstrapping, they're working really hard.
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They don't necessarily have the structures and processes in place and when they look to scale, they hire on kind of the first people, they hire fast and they hire friends or others to help them out, and then there comes a time, ultimately, that those individuals are not going to take them where they need to go.
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And I know you touch on it.
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The difficult decision of letting a leader go is never easy.
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How do you coach them to the realization that I either need to change this leader or I need to change this leader?
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How do you coach them there?
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Yeah, and, by the way, this question is so important to me.
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It was part of my book Breakthrough Leadership Team that you're talking about.
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It's kind of the sixth pillar of building a great leadership team is assessing talent, coaching and developing talent.
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But it's so important that I've got a book another book coming out in October called the Strength of Talent how to Grow your People to Grow your Profit where the whole book dives about a thousand miles deeper on that concept.
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So this is so near and dear to me and you know the way I coach leaders on.
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It is, you know, number one there's got to be a rhythm, like I just talked about the planning and communication rhythm.
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I have my leadership teams meet every quarter it's part of our quarterly planning process where they do something I call the quarterly talent assessment meeting, where every quarter doesn't mean they're going back and doing quarterly performance reviews with their people, where every quarter doesn't mean they're going back and doing quarterly performance reviews with their people.
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I happen to think annual and quarterly performance reviews are the worst inventions ever created in business.
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But I'm talking about leaders working as peers to talk about debate, hold each other accountable for building strength of talent within their organization.
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What are we doing?
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To challenge our best people, to re-recruit our best people, to promote our best people, to reward our best people, to leverage, coach and mentor them.
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You know what are we doing?
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To take our mediocre folks and coach them up and then, for the low performing folks which are they're low performing either because they're they're, they're low in productivity and or they're not living our core values.
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They've got more more behavioral.
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And, by the way, I don't care if they're your best salesperson, I don't care how productive they are, they're not living your core values.
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They're toxic to your organization.
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So that is something that that I hold my leadership teams accountable for all the time, especially in these quarterly meetings.
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But throughout and you know too many I see too many leadership teams, too many leaders go three, six, 12 months, two years, letting low performers stick around.
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And one of my philosophies is fire fast, hire slow.
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We cannot afford to let these low performers be toxic to our organization.
