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Speaker 1:
This is Unleashing Leadership. I'm your host, travis Moss, and we're on season five. We've got our co-host, dave Nurchi, with us. We've got the book the Hard Thing About Hard Things with Ben Horowitz. We are digging in. We didn't even look at what this episode was about before we just kicked it off. We're just like let's get it done.
Speaker 1:
And well, I guess we're going to talk about CEOs. Have nobody to blame. Every problem belongs to the CEO, and it's the current CEO. And this is brought to us by Seed Planning Group fee-only fiduciaries. This means that there are no commissions, there's no kickbacks, there's no incentives to sell people anything. They just get paid for giving advice. Check them out. Seed PG, as in planning group, seedpgcom. All right, dave, nobody to blame, but the guy at the top. Let's twist this a little bit. Okay, so I can blame stuff on you. All right, you are the top of your mountain, right, and a manager underneath you is the top of their mountain. So this is not just advice for CEOs. This is advice for anybody who is in charge of something and who considers themselves an accountable person. I think that this is advice for anybody in that category. Yep, so you can be the CEO of your own mountain.
Speaker 2:
Right? Well, yeah, I think once you start blaming, once you're playing the blame game, right, it's you automatically start losing accountability, or you just lose it, right, and everything that goes with it, because it's hard to be accountable to something if you're blaming others when you are part of that work or you assign that work. However you want to look at it, you're part of that and it comes down to you. I think the original part with the CEO and how we're broadening that you're at the top of this mountain, whatever the mountain is. So whatever happens on that mountain, you're at the top and you are the one who is ultimately accountable yeah.
Speaker 1:
Does anybody like politicians at this point? What do politicians do the politicians get? You get elected because they say it was his fault and I'll fix it for you and then, when they get elected and things go wrong, they say it was the guy before me.
Speaker 1:
Yep, and every single one of them blames on the guy before them. Not a single politician ever accepts blame for stuff. It says you know, I didn't understand the issue and I voted wrong. I effed up, right? I, I'm learning from this. Now I'm doing this. In fact, they won't even say that, they'll just say no, I never said that. It's like. Here's a video of you saying that no, that's not me, this is you. You were saying that yeah, that's not what I was talking about. It's like no, I listened to the whole thing. You said that what's your problem, man? You know what I mean. It's like, like, like we just can't. We can't accept blame for anything. I mean, this is part of the problem that we have with with policies that don't work. Well, we can't change them because in order to change them, you got to accept blame, and if you accept blame, that people running against you are going to bury you. You know like, look what they did. They even admitted they did it wrong. So you're better off, don't admit anything.
Speaker 2:
That's a bad thing, right yeah, instead of a good, exactly.
Speaker 1:
And blame is excuses, right. I mean, if you're a leader, if you're at the top of your mountain and you blame stuff on everybody else, what are you doing? You're making excuses? Mm hmm Right, there's reasons and there's excuses, right. A reason is I didn't hire the right people and put the right people in the right positions. An excuse is my people don't know what they're doing. Yep, big difference there. One has me and what I didn't do and one has what other people didn't do. Mm-hmm Right, because when you're the leader, if your people aren't trained, it's your damn fault that your people aren't trained, right, right. When the coach of a football team, when the football team, that's how it works.
Speaker 1:
And I think that, from a CEO perspective, or the king of your own mountain or queen of your own mountain, your job, first and foremost. Yes, we want to set up for the future, right. But first and foremost, you have to deal with what the heck is going on today. You can not forsake today for tomorrow. You do have to take care of today. So, as much as we talk about investing for tomorrow, you still have to survive to get to tomorrow, right? So your job is to deal with all the shit that happens today, whether it was your fault or not, nobody cares. You're in charge now. This is why you get paid a lot, right?
Speaker 1:
If you're in charge, you get the bigger reward. If you own in charge, you get the bigger reward. If you own the company and the company goes, goes big, you became, become a gazillionaire, right, and you get all the recognition, all that kind of stuff. Or maybe you're getting the bigger salary or whatever. Or if you're the manager, this comes with a hat that says I'm the manager, I'm the boss. Everybody's got to listen to me, right? Um, you are there to deal with the current problems. Nobody cares if it's your problem or somebody else's problem. All they care about is that you deal with the problem. Yep, the second you go. Well, that's not my fault, because so-and-so did it.
Speaker 2:
Um, you lose a lot of credibility right once you start doing that. Nobody's gonna follow you or trust you at that point well, do you want the next guy in line?
Speaker 1:
whenever something breaks in the future, just say you know, if dave only did a better job, this one had broken. No, that's not fair, you know, yeah, so so maybe. So think about it like this Maybe you take over an organization and they haven't invested in the future, and so they hire you because the last guy didn't invest in the future and therefore the present sucks. It's a shitty situation. So I say, dave, it's a shitty situation. I'm going to hire you to come in and start investing for the future and fix it. So if you come in and all you do is complain about what the other guy did, how does that help you fix the situation? You were hired to fix it.
Speaker 2:
It was already acknowledged up front.
Speaker 1:
Right, there's no reason for you to to to, to make excuses anymore. Everybody already knows it's not your fault. But every time you say, well, somebody else does something and therefore we're in this situation, you're losing credibility with everybody else Cause you're not problem solving. You're not solving the problem right, you're not dealing with the problem.
Speaker 2:
Right, so the that, that's a lot of that. The current part right, you got like that's the current CEO. Hey, this is it's, it's it's your problem now, because you're the current CEO, so every problem belongs to the CEO. Is that kind of the same concept as, like the mountain, you're at the top of the mountain because there's obviously a lot of different problems and challenges that could happen in an organization, right? So how do you? What's your thought?
Speaker 1:
And I think that this goes into our last episode, when we were talking about taking things too personal or not personal enough. You have to take it personal, you have to take your role as the head person personal enough that it does matter to me if there's problems, right? Yep, it matters to me deeply if there's problems. And you have to not be so emotional, though, that, every time a problem comes up up, you overstep and undercut somebody and, you know, throw your big boss title around, right, right. So, so, you, you, I think you have to be possessive of the fact that, if there's a problem, and it's because there's something that I need to be aware of and it could be a weak process, or poor training, or a manager that's not developed as much as they need to be, or, you know, some technology issue, and the reason is I'm at the top with all the information, right, right.
Speaker 1:
So if the technology is not working, ultimately I'm the one who can say hey, you have to change this because it's impacting those people down there, right? So Every problem has to belong to you, and, really, if you care about your organization, you should say every problem does belong to me. It doesn't mean, though, though, that you fix every problem. So I think that that's where this can go overboard.
Speaker 1:
The other way it's like you don't fix every problem, but you're going to own every problem, gotcha, which means you look at root cause and what are the things that I'm doing as a leader that's contributing to that problem? If my managers aren't trained, that's because of me. If my manager are three levels down that I wouldn't be training as in trained, it's because I didn't train my managers at this level to make sure that their managers were trained, to make sure that their managers were training their managers right, or whatever your hierarchy is. So it all still comes back to me and saying these are the standards of the organization. If the technology doesn't work, why aren't I going to the people who are in charge of the technology and saying you got to fix the technology.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so that's important Owning the problem, being accountable for it, doesn't mean you have to fix it. But that root cause will always be traced back to the CEO.
Speaker 1:
And the CEO needs to show up. When you got people struggling, you need to show up to them, as frustrated as you might be, and you need to help them get through the situation. And if it's a people problem, if you really got the wrong people, you got to fix that problem. That's your problem. If it's not a people problem, if you really got the wrong people, you got to fix that problem. That's your problem. If it's not a people problem, whatever they're struggling with, they didn't get the education or the processes aren't proper. You show up and say look, I understand, I put you in this situation, or we as a company put you in this situation. Now we're going to fix that together.
Speaker 2:
Right.
Speaker 1:
And you fix it. I tend to say we, just because I don't. It's about the company, it's about everybody, even though I'm going to own it. Like if we have a project and we're working on it, I'll show up and I'll say we, even if I've done the work on it Right, Because we are going to do this together. It's not about me doing it for you, it's about us doing it together and moving forward.
