📖 To access Travis' complete book list, visit his storehere
Speaker 1:
This is Unleashing Leadership and I'm your host, travis Moss. We're in season five, we've got co-host Dave Nurchi with us, we've got the book the Hard Thing About Hard Things and that's a book by Ben Horowitz and we have a mouthful today. Dave says this is an 80% Travis, 20% Ben Horowitz quote. But CEOs take things too personally. They either have too much pressure or not. They don't take things personal enough. They ignore addressing issues. I'm pretty certain that that's Ben's stuff. You might just be looking at me like Travis, come on, you got to work on this. I'm pretty certain that that's Ben's stuff. You might just be looking at me like Travis, come on, you got to work on this. I'm pretty sure this came from Big Ben. Here, ceo needs to be urgent without being insane. I know that came from him. Move aggressive and decisive without being emotional. Okay, all right, you can go first Ask me anything you want.
Speaker 2:
You got to do the intro first. The sponsor.
Speaker 1:
Oh, we got a sponsor for this one. Yeah, we do. Yeah, it's Ditch the Suits, ditch the Suits podcast. Get more out of your money and life. Check them out at ditchthesuitscom. Anywhere else podcasts are, you can go to YouTube, nqr Media If you like what you hear, subscribe, join our 30 some odd thousand subscribers, um. Give us a review, leave some comments. Uh, it is just fun fact it has been voted podcast of the year um last year. I don't think they've done the awards this year yet, but last year we got podcast of the year, which was pretty cool. Um of all, podcasts by quill, which looks at, I think, a lot of podcasts, but there's some pretty. You know there's some big time podcasts in there. We got a pretty cool award on that. Um. All right. So, dave, now you get to ask whatever you want.
Speaker 2:
All right, so we'll. We'll tackle this one dissect.
Speaker 1:
Dissect this question here.
Speaker 2:
I mean, when I look at this, I all I know what's sticking out to me is balance. Right, the whole, the whole thing here is there's gotta be balance. Um, so first part is taking things to to personally or not personal enough. So how do you? Is this a sliding scale or is this like, hey, there's this one way to kind of handle this? Uh, you, gotta.
Speaker 1:
I think he's talking about personalities. I think that either I'll just pretend I'm in this situation, either I take everything personal, every single thing that goes wrong, or every slight or everything bad thing. Somebody, somebody says I take it personal, I'm going to, I'm going to fight everybody, right? Or I'm just going to, like, huddle up in a little shell and cry myself to sleep all the time, right, so everything is just level five. You know, hurricane, the world's coming to an end, can't barely function, or what's the big effing deal? You know what I mean? It's the business is business.
Speaker 1:
I don't take it personal at all, right, um, and, and I, and I think that the the point is is that you've got to be somewhere in the middle. You do have to take it personal, because it is your baby. You are in charge. At the same time, I think how you take it personal is important. Do you take it personal in a way that's debilitating, or do you take it personal in a way that's motivating? Do you take it personal in a way that's constructive or do you take it in a way that is destructive? Right, and so I think that that's what he's getting at, more so than you know. You should be one way or another.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, that makes sense. So it's really. It's really the. The way that you do handle the personal part of it or or not, the balance is key, but it's it's how the reaction actually is Okay, yep. So then the next actually is okay, yep, so then the. The next part is so how do you what? How do you create urgency without wreaking havoc on everything right, without making people kind of go ballistic over things, but also keep the urgency there when you need it?
Speaker 1:
yeah, and I think I think that that goes with, like, if we're I think we look at this a couple different ways. One way is if we take it off of just taking things too personal or not personal enough. So, okay, this is something that's important, it needs to be addressed urgently. And this is a learned skill, like a lot of times people go you know they're, they just start yelling at everybody. You know what I mean, and it's everything else has to stop and this has to be the center of the the universe. And I think that that comes with skill development, where you learn how do I influence my organization in a way so that, when something is important, I can push a button and, without being destructive, people go okay, that's important, I know what I need to be, I know I need to jump over and work on that.
Speaker 2:
Right. Um fire drill. Mentality right Everything you walk in and everything's a fire drill. This came up or that we got to yeah, Okay.
Speaker 1:
So so I I think that this is skill development and organizational development. The CEO has to, and you don't trust me, you don't get this in the handbook. When you become a leader, right? Nobody teaches you what to do in an emergency. When you're a leader, or nobody teaches you what to do when it feels like every single person is pointing a finger at you, right, like every single person is pointing a finger at you right. After you've had those situations and you've digested them and you go okay, I don't want to do that again. That sucked.
Speaker 1:
How do I build into my organization and how do I build into the way I approach things, processes or structures, so that when something comes in the door or something happens that is really significant, how do we react?
Speaker 1:
It's kind of like, if you're investing and you have a portfolio, yeah, you should have a plan for what you're going to do if the market crashes 50%. You don't wait for it to crash 50% Now. You're an emotional mess and you make a stupid decision that ends up haunting you forever. You have the contingency plan before it happens and then you stick to the plan, right. So there's a discipline component of this that has to come in too, but you build it when you're not going insane, to keep you from going insane, basically, or at least to keep your insanity in check or in a you know, in a confined area. Yep, so I think it's skill development also, how you, you know, establish communication and response times and things like that within your organization. Like if something comes up now, the way that I would deal with a lot of things is pass it to the right management channel with a methodology of communication that says hey, this is, this is like we, we have an old shit button right.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
So we do our scrums and we have ASAP, we have need detention, we have important, we have just issue right and then we have oh shit.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
And oh shit means it doesn't mean the world's falling in, but it means this is the priority this week. We all need to be focused on it. It needs to get done. Nobody has to go bonkers about it because you come in on monday morning you see there's no shit there yep, yeah.
Speaker 2:
So I mean the best. So the best way to approach that is is having the plan, having the structure in place, right, so people are aware that, yep, this status could come up, the oh shit status could come up, but it doesn't mean everything else goes to shit, it just means this one thing needs to be the priority and we need to work through it.
Speaker 1:
Right. Right, and that's from an organization standpoint. That's the hard part is properly managing resources and also not freaking everybody out. So there can be something that's really significant. You need to be able to bring that to the team and say team, we got to handle this without freaking the team out. Right, and that's why you got to have these processes in place where they're used periodically. And it's not a oh my gosh, you know this is this is we're on the cliff. It's a okay, I understand this is a no shit moment. I know what I'm supposed to do in a no shit moment. You know anybody who's pulled into the team. We're going to get assigned stuff. There's going to be a project site that's put up. We're going to have to file the project and we got to make it a priority. So anything that's not priority it's got to get rescheduled.
Speaker 2:
Yep.
Speaker 1:
You know and we're going to be expected to be accountable. We're going to be expected, if we get assigned something we a serious insanity moment where somebody you know is going to be held accountable.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, let's do everything we can possible to avoid getting in those situations by planning up front?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and I think that that gets to the last part is the move aggressive and decisive without being emotional? This is something that's been very hard for me to learn is it's not all about me, you know, and and so, and this is where you balance yourself between taking everything personal and business being business right. Like I make the decision, so that part's about me, um, people reacting certain ways. That's not about me, that's about them Right. Or I make a decision, you know I have to cut off my hand to save my body, type of thing. That type of decision, how I deliver that, all that kind of stuff that's on me. But after that decision, that's the business part. Now it's business right. And so and I think that's part of just going through these things when you have emotion in those types of critical decisions and in the delivery of the decisions, I don't think it ever comes out right.
Speaker 2:
Right.
Speaker 1:
So you make a decision, um and that can be a component of taking things personal and and understanding business as business. But then, once it's time to to to move right, this is my decision, now we're going to move. That's where it's got to. That, when we're talking about aggressive, when we're talking about um, decisive, we you know, last episode we were talking about confidence Once you make that decision, it's just okay, this is it, this is the business's business part of it. It's got to happen.
Speaker 2:
We're not going to sit here and all cry and hold hands about it.
Speaker 2:
We've got to move forward. Yeah, I think the previous point is what helps keep the emotion out of it. Is that the planning up front, or the you know the structure and moves that take place when something is is the OSHA or the super important right, the priority, the more that's planned out and the more that the team understands okay, this is how we handle this, here's everybody's role. You don't need emotion involved. You kind of take that out up front as much as possible yeah, and I have an ugly baby rule.
Speaker 1:
Um, in our ownership group for productivity hacks, it's the one that the last slides that I show on our fourth class. It's called the ugly baby rule and this is this idea that there is nothing that's a sacred cow within the business. Um, the business sometimes has to be franken, be Frankenstein a little bit for the betterment of the business, as far as what you thought it was. And I think where leaders get in trouble is they so attach identity to projects or programs or services or certain issues within their business that when that issue breaks, when there's a problem with that, they can't pivot and then it becomes very emotional. It becomes very, very stressful.
Speaker 1:
Versus, if you're like look, sometimes the baby's just ugly. You know what I mean. It's, it's I. The business is designed to change over time. It's designed to be adaptable. If I'm running a business that's that is designed to change and be adaptable and I fight change and adaptability because I take everything too personal, because it's somehow a reflection of me as a human being then you know I'm going to get myself in trouble all the time and you do this with any. You know people who work on projects or people who lead teams and stuff. Stop being in love with what you think it's going to be and allow it to be what it is.
