Our conversation navigates the subtleties of peer pressure and cultural fit as tools for organic quality control. You'll learn why the most effective leaders are those who lead by example, setting an implicit benchmark for their teams, and how proactive communication and recognition play into crafting an environment where accountability isn't just a buzzword, but a cultural cornerstone. Join us to discover how to cultivate a team that not only embodies excellence but also thrives on it.
Our conversation navigates the subtleties of peer pressure and cultural fit as tools for organic quality control. You'll learn why the most effective leaders are those who lead by example, setting an implicit benchmark for their teams, and how proactive communication and recognition play into crafting an environment where accountability isn't just a buzzword, but a cultural cornerstone. Join us to discover how to cultivate a team that not only embodies excellence but also thrives on it.
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Speaker 1:
This is Unleashing Leadership, and I'm your host, travis Moss, and I'm here with our season five special guest, dave Nurchi, and we're getting after lessons learned from the book the Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz and our message, our lesson for the day, set the tone. Sloppiness will not be tolerated. And today's message is brought to us by Cutthroat College Podcast, helping people avoid going broke because of the cost of college. So if you're worried about paying for college or whether or not somebody in your family even should be going to college, check out that podcast. You can find them any place really that plays podcasts. Or go to our website, nqrmediacom and click on the links that'll take you to the show so you can watch. Whether you're into spotify, apple, youtube, wherever you want to see your um, wherever you want to see your podcast, you'll be able to. All right, dave, I'm gonna bring that back up. We are setting the tone. Sloppiness will not be tolerated. We were talking before the show. I was trying to remember the exact point of um. This in the book and I think it's an execution point. And I think so, whether or not this is the point from the book. This in the book and I think it's an execution point, and I think so, whether or not this is the point from the book. This is what's sticking in my head.
Speaker 1:
I'm thinking about this from a standpoint of, from a leadership standpoint, from the top down. You have to keep people from getting into status quo like people from kind of just settling in where you know what's it matter if it's not the best? What's it matter if it's not world-class? I think Ben uses the term world-class a lot. I know we're going to have a whole, probably, episode of world-class, but you know it doesn't really matter. You know we're going through the motions. Does it always have to be great? And I think his point is is that it's got to be good and it's got to be good all the time. You have to be striving for excellence. You can't be taking the days off and you have to set that precedent.
Speaker 1:
And when people are deviating from that, the leader's job is to pull people back in line. And if they don't want to get back in line, get people who will get in line with quality right, because sloppiness is the opposite of quality. And when you're competing for your life or competing for your company, sometimes people who aren't at the top, they don't realize how important it is to be accurate and be on top of things and be on time and be good communicators. And if you let little things slide, then it's really hard to get people back in line. It's really hard to. You know, if you're using a hand, like a little cup, to the the the boat's taking out water and you're using a little cup to throw the water out, eventually there's too much water in the boat and it's just going to sink. You can't you know you can't get enough water out of it fast enough. But that's what I'm thinking about, that I don't know if you had a different perspective, where that came from in the book.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, that's right and I think I take it to this leading by example, like overall right. So you're, whatever you're doing on a daily basis, we talk about this right. When we talk about a seed like Good Karma and these different projects and things that we have going on, we need to lead by the example as leaders to let that trickle down right and that's setting the tone to me. So if we're doing it now, we have the ability to go to the management team and anybody else and say why aren't you doing it? If we're not doing it, that's a hard conversation to have because they could turn right around and say, well, you're not.
Speaker 1:
Right, right, no, I get what you're saying there, so we'll share a little bit of the backstory. So we get the program called Good Karma, which is basically it's about communication and it's about proactively recognizing, you know, recognizing people for doing good things or recognizing if people are going through a hard time hey, we're here for you. That type of stuff it's the little things that people forget to do because my life's busy. So, you know, remembering that you got a big day tomorrow is, you know, sometimes not top of mind. So we want to bring that top of mind so that the people that were around they know that we're actually thinking about them. So the Good Karma Project is this idea that you ought to be proactively making an effort to do things, probably on a daily basis, to let people around you know that you're paying attention, that you see them and that they're important. And we believe that.
Speaker 1:
And it's really hard to go to the ground floor employee, go all the way to the newest employee at the most entry level job and you say, look, you need to be doing this, and then they look back up at you and they go, but you're not doing it Right, and then you have every level in between. So maybe their manager ought to be doing it to set the example for them. But if their chief executive officer isn't doing it, why should they do it Right? And so when you want excellence, when you have standards, it starts at the top, like there's nobody who is so important or so busy that they cannot exude the principles that they're trying to hold other people to Right. Like if I think people ought to get back to people within 24 hours, I better get back to people within 24 hours. If I think people ought to recognize people around them, I better be recognizing people around them.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and that shows the importance of it. It's the accountability factor, and if you don't do that, I think you really create the do as I say, not do as I do, type of environment. Right, you're just barking orders out and telling people to do things, and it's a good way to either lose respect or buy in from people if you're just saying do all this stuff and I'm just going to watch you. So that's really the set, the tone piece, and I think the sloppiness will not be tolerated. Another takeaway from that one was really it's okay to to call people out and it's necessary, right in a productive way, to let them know that either you know that that quality wasn't good enough or you know they missed the mark on that, because that will take the unjustified comfortableness out of something. Right, if someone's just kind of mailing it in or doing things, you got to let them know. So that's one interpretation of sloppiness. Right, it's just not cutting it. Let them know, you know, do it in a productive way and move forward from it.
Speaker 1:
Yeah Well, it's like resiliency. You know you're building resiliency when you're creating a culture where there's a tone setter. Right, it's. It's hey, you know what you could call it the don't act like an asshole line. Right On this. If you're on this side of the line, you're acting like an ass. And if you're on this side of the line, you're acting like an ass. And if you're on this side of the line, you know you're exuding the principles that we want.
Speaker 1:
Basically, and it needs to be that clear cut, because if it's like you know it's, it's think about people who I don't really speed, I stay within 10 miles of the speed limit. Right, it's like well, you, you are speedy. So, whether or not you, you know you have an ethical issue because you're not speeding enough to get a ticket. You're lying if you're saying you're not speeding. And so the same thing comes with sloppiness and setting the tone. It's like look, it is sloppy. It's either sloppy or it's not sloppy, and you have to be able to set a tone Like I think about our management team. Every now and then, you got to be able to set a tone Like I think about our management team. Every now and then you got to be able to get on each other and say, yo, you're being sloppy on this right, or you're ignoring whatever term you want to call it. You know you're being irresponsible with it, you're not being accountable for it, you know you're skipping on your responsibilities. But every now and then you got to be the management team itself has all as self accountable accountable and say, wow, we're being sloppy, we need to clean this up, and you know and you, but it needs to be that blunt.
Speaker 1:
What I've learned through the last 20 years now is that if you're trying to be soft and nice so you don't hurt anybody's feelings, and they're really sloppy and they're just not getting it, that look, what's, what's the big deal? I'm just, I'm coloring outside the lines a little bit. If you're not like here's the ass line, like if you're on that side of the line, you're, you know, I mean you're being an ass. And if you're on this side of the line, you're, you're in the you know where you should be. If it's not that clear, clear cut, if it, if it doesn't have the potential to call somebody out and make them feel like, okay, I am doing a really bad job, then for some reason it just, it's like you know I, I'm taking it with you know, not serious, right? And it's so easy to take you because you know you're at work and things are being thrown at you all over the place, or you're at home and things are being thrown at you. It's like I'll just let that go. What's the big deal?
Speaker 2:
Yep, yeah, and I think one thing you said there, where you know, in our example, our management team, we were comfortable doing that right, Call each other out, kind of lay it down and that that brought to mind a quote that I think fits in here too, that and I'm going to paraphrase I don't know, I don't remember the whole thing, but it's something like good teams, the coaches hold you accountable. Great teams, the players hold each other accountable, and I think that's part of this. Right Is setting the tone, is that's the environment you want to create, where everybody is holding everybody accountable. It doesn't have to come from the CEO or somebody with a title to keep you in line.
Speaker 1:
Well, you want to create that culture that if somebody doesn't belong to the culture, the culture spits them out. They don't have to be fired. Exactly, Basically, there's so much peer pressure to have a certain standard that if they can't meet that standard, they don't want to be there. Um, and that also I mean. My last point on this would be that the eyes are always watching you might.
Speaker 1:
You might think that you're sneak, especially as a leader, right, you can hide a little bit when you're a junior employee or an entry level employee or something like that, but the more eyes that are looking up to you because of your position whether you want them to look up to you or not the higher up in an organization you are, the more eyes are looking at you. They're watching you and they're watching what you do and they're going to mimic what you do, or, or at least they may not always mimic the best things that you do, but they will definitely mimic the worst things you do. And that's that's just kind of how it goes, because the worst things that, as a leader, whatever the worst things you do are probably you're probably doing them because you're lazy about that area, Right, Right, so it's, it's like you know, I'm just not getting to it because I got this other stuff that's more important. So it's okay if I cut the corners. Over there they're watching you cut corners and they're like I'll cut corners too.
Speaker 1:
On the hard stuff, though, that you're doing, that you're really putting the effort in and trying to do perfect and you're saying, like you know, there's no, there's no, there's no exception to excellence here. They're looking at that, going that's a lot of hard work. He's the only one capable of doing that. So I'm not worried about that. You know, and that's a tendency. I mean like, yes, people will try to skill up and keep up, but it's a lot harder to keep up with the stuff that you're doing at the high standard than it is to keep up with the sloppiness and say, well, they cut that corner, so I can cut that corner too.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, when the eyes are on you, how you do anything is how you do everything.