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Speaker 1:
This is Unleashing Leadership, and I'm your host, travis Moss, and we are on season five. We've got our special guest, dave Nurchi, with us. We're getting after the lessons learned from the book the Hard Thing About Hard Things, and our big point today make it an honor to teach in the organization. That's brought to you by the One Big Thing podcast, because you are not alone. Learn how to reframe your challenges and overcome the things that are holding you back, and that's what Steve Campbell, as your host on that show. He's also co-host with me on Digital Suits. You can find more about that show at nqrmediacom. You can go to our YouTube page at NQR Media where you can just type in one big thing on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast and you'll get to hear more on his interview style podcast. So, dave, making an honor teaching the organization. What's your thoughts about this?
Speaker 2:
I think it's so important to do this for a few reasons. I think if you don't do this, if you don't teach at every level and as you advance in an organization, you kind of lose touch of what's happening. Right, you might get in your own silo. You might just kind of have your head down doing work and you lose sight of the new people who may be onboarding and training or just other employees as they advance on their career path, right. So if you make teaching a priority and stress the importance of it, you get engagement at all levels, at all times, really right, if that's one of the goals as you reach the top or towards the top of your career path. Now it's time to give back.
Speaker 2:
That's how I kind of look at it. Right, you are in that seat where you join and you're trying to absorb information, You're trying to advance, make a good impression, whatever it is, as a new employee. It's time for you to now give back and make sure your new people, or your people who are coming up, have that same experience. So I think it's hugely important and it builds a camaraderie. Right, you have relationships building through that because you're involved and you're present in the teaching and training. Well, whose job?
Speaker 1:
is it to actually teach? So when you think about the organization and you have managers and people in charge of things, whose job is it to actually teach the employees their job or how to be a good employee, or you know the nuances of the company and how the culture works, Whose job is it to actually teach?
Speaker 2:
I think it's the manager's job. They're a direct person who either went through that job right and has advanced through it, so they have that perspective, um, because that's going to be probably the best person to ask questions to um and give them the right insight of what it actually is like to be in that role. I think then, if you get more into the company culture, different things like that, the environment maybe, just like the norms of the company that could come from different. I think that should come from different people. That could come from leaders in the organization. I think that should happen. I think it should come from managers, people in different departments, right, because you're going to have different perspectives and different divisions or departments. That I think are valuable for any role in an organization to experience.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I think that you got. When you're talking about Ben Horowitz and his writing, what he's talking about is it is the top guy or gal's job, like it starts at the very top. The very top person is in charge of teaching, and it's not just the top person's job though. So the top person teaches, and one of the things that they teach is that everybody's here to teach and it should go on down through the organization. And if you have a good culture, probably the people at the very bottom of the organization you know your newest entry level people they're probably teaching up, and then the people at the top, they're trying to teach down.
Speaker 1:
But you can't have it where there's a scenario where people say that's not my job, it's not my job to teach people, right, like you know, if, if you're here for yourself, you're right, it's not your job to teach people because, um, in your mind, everybody's there to serve you, which is also kind of self-defeating, because if you were to teach people, people could actually serve you better. But if that's your feeling, you're just selfish anyway. So you know, don't waste any time with that. But people in an organization can, like the organization will go so much further. How much time is wasted because people quote don't know what they're doing, they don't know their job. Well then, teach them right, slow it down and teach them, or help them figure out a better way to show them. And you know, one of the interesting things about teaching is that when you have to break because we do a lot of this, we do a lot of training and when a training program doesn't work, what happens at our company? The managers step in. Whoever the next manager up is, they're stepping in and pulling the problem apart and rebuilding the training for it and even leading the training on some of the very basic entry things and some of the most complicated things, because we're all responsible for making it better.
Speaker 1:
But everybody in the organization has got to be a teacher.
Speaker 1:
But when you are the teacher and you have to dissect the problem, figure out how to actually teach it I'm not saying like I've seen a lot of people who think teaching is I'm just going to take the information, throw it at you, get you to repeat it and then say, see, I taught you.
Speaker 1:
I mean like actually helping somebody learn how to do something with competency. Competency means that they probably understand more about the broader context of the thing that they're learning, but I'm going to actually teach somebody how to do it. That means I've got to be really good and I'm probably going to be talking about standards that need to be met. And that's going to be a status check for myself or benchmarking for myself, to look at my own work and say how well am I doing. And that's why being a teacher is so important, because the best, like everybody wants a mentor and all this other stuff right, be your own mentor by teaching. If you actually, if you're really good at something and you're trying to figure out how to make your team members understand it better, figure out how to teach it and you will actually even get better at what you're doing. You'll refine what you're doing Exactly.
Speaker 2:
When you're teaching, you're also learning right.
Speaker 2:
You're kind of relearning and you're now teaching something that you had learned at one point with a different perspective, teaching something that you had learned at one point with a different perspective. So there's a good chance you're going to maybe find some holes in it or find a better way to do it and work through things like that. So you're also learning. It does that. The other thing it does is it keeps a consistent message and approach across the board. Right, because you're sitting there teaching someone how to do something. You're actually doing that as well. Right, because you're sitting there teaching someone how to do something, you're actually doing that as well. Right, like you're teaching the way you do it. It's a consistent communication in that sense as well.
Speaker 1:
I think it gets back to like the ideal team players. No jackass policy too. Look, if you're going to come into work and you're going to complain about the culture or about people not knowing what they're doing or why you got to do all the work but you don't teach anybody how to do something better, that you're kind of in that jackass realm there. You can be really good at what you do but you're not contributing at all. You're not actually like. When you really think about what's going to make this business like, like, thrive and be around long term, it starts. It starts with the subconscious of the business, that intellectual capacity that the overall business has, from the broad staff having good skills and good skill development. And you can be the absolute, but you can be running circles.
Speaker 1:
People do this, I think, because they're afraid sometimes. Well, if I I teach them, then they can take my job, like you can't be afraid to teach people because you're going to lose your job. I mean, like the, the number, the best thing that you can possibly do that you should be proud of is you know, I taught that guy and that guy's a superstar now, because if you're in a place with good culture, they're gonna see and say who say where'd that guy come from? Oh, he came from that manager over there. Or maybe you're not even a manager, maybe you're just a producer. Every person who worked with that guy over there has achieved X, y, z. It's that person that is actually the gear of the business, because they're willing to teach, they're willing to share, they're willing to develop people, and probably that's also why that person's consistently producing and improving themselves. Right.
Speaker 2:
And the key there is be part of a company that does promote that type of environment right. Yeah, because there are companies that there will be someone who's taught and they probably do take the job of someone else. So I think that's important to point out is that you want to make sure you're in an environment like that where teaching is promoted, rewarded in that sense, right Of like, of that recognition of wow, all these great people are coming through this person. That's something we want to recognize.
Speaker 1:
That's a good point, because you and I've done a lot of interviewing and we've done a lot of hiring and um, all the time, people, most people, are looking for money, you know, as their big driver money or title and you know this is where there's going to be people who are like, well, I can't teach the things I know in my company because people use it against me, then you're at the wrong place. And if you're at that place just because of money or title but you're miserable, like you don't have to, like there has to be a balance to this, right, yeah, when we find people that we get really excited about, yes, everybody wants money, but it's the people who are really excited about the learning opportunities that come with a job and how they're going to be able to interact with their peers and the type of open environment that is about, you know, everybody getting better and growing and those types of things. That's the type of organization that you want to look for and I think more people need to put more emphasis on that. You know like, yes, okay, again, you still got to get a paycheck, but you know, let's say that you're going for a job interview. One job pays you 80 and one job pays you 85,000 or even 90,000, you know, so that five $10,000 difference and you think about what you can do with that right and after taxes, what you might be able to do with that. So maybe you have an extra, you know, $600 a month or something like that, six $700 a month. You got to really think about what that's worth.
Speaker 1:
If your career is going to stagnate, you know, yeah, because you might to put yourself in the right environment, maybe you take the lower paying job, but the runway is long, you know what I mean. Like you can be growing in that organization a long time and stepping up, and stepping up, and stepping up, and the organization, because of how it's being built, is going to be around a long time and stepping up, and stepping up and stepping up, and the organization, because of how it's going to be built, is going to be around a long time, versus the organization that's going to essentially pit you against your peers all the time. And it's like, you know, dog eat dog. And I'm just going to tell you, you know, when you're young it doesn't sound like a big deal, but as you get older you get burned out from that kind of stuff. I mean there's plenty of people leave industries because they started at an organization that pitted them against their peers.
Speaker 2:
Yep, yeah, and you? I mean. What happens with that? If you're not bringing the right energy every day or your energy is getting sucked out of you, you are going to hit that point where you don't advance anymore and in the long run it's going to burn you Gotcha.
Speaker 1:
So everybody listening ought to go into their organization and say, hey, go to your manager. Or, if you're in charge, start thinking about what can I teach? What value can I bring to everybody around me? That's, I think, our message for the day.