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Speaker 1:
This is Unleashing Leadership, and I'm your host, travis Moss, with our season five co-host, dave Nurchi, where every season, we take an inspirational book and we break it down into bite-sized pieces. This season's book is the Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. We're going to take our observations and then talk about our experiences with those observations and implementing them, or, if we haven't, why and what might we get out of it? Or, if we're doing it in real time, what the experience is like In our day life. Dave's the chief operating officer at Seed Planning Group. I'm the chief executive officer at Seed Planning Group. So these are things that we do every day. We talk about them every day, we work at them every day. Every day, we try to get better as a company, get better as professionals, get better as people. We have works in progress. You can call us whips. We're just working on it. We're not already completed.
Speaker 1:
Our takeaway for today, what we're going to be talking about, is don't let the smartest people in the company be the worst employees. Ben categorizes a couple of these. One of them is called a heretic, which is a really I have small in there. I think he meant smart that's probably my shorthand A really smart employees looking for faults to build their case. So these are typically people who have been disempowered. They're kind of maybe they're rebels or they're immature, naive employees, and then there's also flakes. So we have heretics and flakes. The flake would be somebody who's just totally unreliable, pretty much a jerk, and especially in a leadership position. These types of people just absolutely destroy communication. They destroy trust, and Ben his mic drop moment, which I absolutely love you should get t-shirts made with this on it is if one of your big dogs is a jerk, you have to send them to the pound. So this is if you're watching this and you've got employees that are heretics or flakes, and especially if they're one of your important people, I would say any of them. We've had plenty of discussions on this internally. If you have people that fall into there's, all you're doing is pushing off the inevitable, and the question is, how much damage are you going to have from from the beginning to the end?
Speaker 1:
Okay, so I'm getting ahead of myself. We got to talk about our sponsor really quick. Um, then we gotta let dave talk. He's gonna get his talk time in. Um. This is brought to you by ditch the suits podcast. 2023. Podcast of the year in all categories by Quill Podcast Agency, and that's where I work, with Steve Campbell as a co-host, and we help you focus on all the things that you can do to get more out of your money and life, and you can find out more about that show at DitchTheSuitscom or wherever else you can find podcasts. And do us a favor like or subscribe or share this podcast so that other people can find it and that'll help us out and we'll keep doing more podcasts for you so you can keep learning, all right? So, dave, back to our big point. Today I already said my piece, I'm done. So what you got, man?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, if you do, let this happen. Right, if the smartest people in the company are the worst employees, you got a big problem on your hand. Because that's an example, right? We always talk about leading by example and doing and not do as I do not do as I say.
Speaker 1:
Maybe I'm not saying that right, but yeah, You've been hanging out with me too long. You say yeah, I just started saying that.
Speaker 2:
If that happens, you're going to get your, your good employees right. The people who do care and are there for the right reasons are going to say, like what, what the heck's going on here? Right, like this, this person doesn't, doesn't fit in in our company, but they're kind of given a free pass. Right, are they? They're allowed to do whatever they want because you know they know what they're doing or they're smart or their role or whatever it is, and you lose the trust.
Speaker 2:
We talk about the trust bank all the time. Well, if we're saying you got to do all this stuff or this is how employees at our company work, and you're tolerating the ones who aren't doing that, is there a better way to lose trust? You're literally not doing what you are preaching and saying every day. So I think you just create a huge problem in the trust bank and what you're trying to accomplish as a company if you tolerate this type of behavior, this type of employee, for any reason yeah, people, people, um, tend to look up to the smartest person in the room a lot of times.
Speaker 1:
If you don't have good leadership in your organization because I don't think this happens in a place where you have good leadership if you have good leadership and you have what we talked about a couple episodes ago warriors in your organization, then I don't think you have this problem, because people will disregard the smart person as a jerk, right.
Speaker 1:
But if you don't have good leadership, then the smart person is going to be the one people turn to because they're smart. People go you know, they know things, so I'm going to go to that person when I need to know things, and so that person becomes an authority on stuff, whether or not they're even right. People just start to accept the fact that they know stuff and and and therefore they start to put their trust there. And the problem with that is that if they're disempowered, if they're rebels, if they're immature, if they're naive, if they're me first, they then use that trust and all the power that comes with it and they'll use it against the organization. And so that's where you have to be very, very careful about this is really about a leadership void or a vacuum right when people decide that the leader in the room is going to be the smartest person you know on a subject. I think it's just extremely dangerous, especially because smart is kind of, if you are smart, it's based on who else is in the room.
Speaker 2:
That's relative right.
Speaker 1:
Right, I might be smart about leadership amongst my peers, but maybe I go to some leadership conference and I'm just a baby, I'm just an infant learning Right, so it's like I can be smart, so everybody will come to me, but if I get into, you know, a bigger pond, maybe I'm still just very naive and I'm still learning Right, right, and so it's a little bit of in the eye of the beholder.
Speaker 1:
Um, then there's a different kind of smart too, and we talk about this sometimes is the smarts as in how to kind of manipulate people and how to use people. So you don't necessarily have to be book smart to be smart. You can also be smart, as far as I understand how people work, no-transcript, and there they use, like if you ever had certain problems in your organization where everybody's always getting upset and the same person's involved every single time, you know at the heart of it, and and that's a person who is smart in a way that, um, it's manipulative. Yes, they're able to manipulate, cause they like the drama. Some people just love the drama. They love the drama.
Speaker 1:
Or they're fighting for control or power or relevance or something like that. But a lot of times it's just the drama. You know it's and you see that with a lot of the you know people bringing in personal causes into the company and stuff and disrupt the entire company because they want to fight for whatever their personal causes and and they, they use it in a way to galvanize people and before you know it, people are infighting or people don't want to get any work done because they're focusing on the cause or something and it's got nothing to do with the business or alignment of the business mission.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and that brings us back to I, the business, or alignment of the business mission. Yeah, and that brings us back to I think the main point right Is like, if you let the smartest people right Whatever kind of smart we're talking about be the worst employee, that's what you're going to get. You're going to get the drama. You're going to get these personal type of missions or gatherings of hey, let's do this, like, let's start this. I don't like how this works.
Speaker 2:
Because they're not the good employee first. And it goes back to the whole the hiring, the developing. If you don't have good employees, what does the skill set or the smart mean if they're not operating in the bigger picture and they're not a good employee first?
Speaker 1:
Well, I think it goes back to the business's job is to create a culture back to our warriors and everything but a culture that fosters the right behaviors, right? So if you hire smart people, hopefully you're hiring smart people, hopefully you avoid the situation where people are feeling disempowered, rebels, immature, naive. Or if you end up in a situation where a smart person is feeling like that and they start to use that to kind of create some ruckus, the rest of the company says, nah, that ain't happening here. You know, I get it, you're upset, and I get it, that wasn't. You know, in your perspective, it's not fair to you.
Speaker 1:
However, we're not burning this thing down just for you, right, we're moving on and that sounds insensitive, but that's the reality of life, right, it's like our explanation with the. You know, a couple episodes ago, we were talking about playing sports. You know, sometimes somebody's just better than you, yep, or sometimes you really are better off someplace else. Um, but I love the point about if your big dog is a jerk, you gotta send him to the pound. You know, as soon as somebody's manipulating stuff, you gotta knit. You like every time we've allowed drama to fester because it's like oh, you know, you just don't understand, or they're just trying to figure out their place in things, or they're going through a hard time. Every time we call it drama, every time you let some of this drama fester, it never turns out right. I've never seen it turn out right.
Speaker 2:
It ruins everything you're trying to accomplish. Right, because it takes the focus away from what's important. It gets people good, you know good employees, not so good employees doesn't matter. It gets them unfocused and distracted and then thinking twice about, like, what are we doing here? What? Is what I heard true, and now they're questioning everything right and it's like you.
Speaker 2:
You gotta then spend so much time to build back that trust if you lose it. So I think the big part like when I hear that take the big dogs to the pound it's like you're setting the example and you're setting the tone there, as I don't care who you are, what your title is, what your position is, if you're not acting right, you're gone yep man, avoid toxic culture, right right, make the cuts that that are that need to be made.
