Roger Connors, Chairman of Oz | NYT & WSJ Best Selling Leadership Author

Welcome to the success story podcast, I'm your host, Scott Clary. On this podcast, I have candid interviews with execs, celebrities, politicians, and other notable figures, all who have achieved success through both wins and losses, to learn more about their life, their ideas, and their insights. I sit down with leaders and mentors and unpack their story to help pass those lessons onto others through both experiences and tactical strategy for business professionals, entrepreneurs, and everyone in between, with a further ado, another episode of the success story podcast. All right, thanks again for joining me today. I'm sitting down with Roger Connors. Now Roger Connors is a four time New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author. He is ranked as one of the world's top 10 organizational culture professionals. He is co-authored the most extensive body of knowledge on a workplace accountability ever written. He's recognized as a leading follower on the topic of organizational and individual performance, bringing over 30 years of extensive expertise in assisting senior management teams to deck it is all over the world. As a pioneer in performance improvement spaces, Roger has developed an award-winning content and he's published it across many works. He's co-authored bestselling works. He's written books himself. We're going to speak about one of his most recent today. He's appeared on various radio, television, webcasts, podcasts. He has also been featured as a speaker at the executive office of the president of the United States. He is a chairman and co-founder of 0-10, a coaching and leadership training company. He is a co-founder and former CEO of Partners in Leadership. They've trained millions of people in 50 countries. He is a graduate faculty professional member of the Utah Valley University, an adjunct professor for MBA program at Woodbury School of Business. He's a very accomplished, really, really impressive guy. Thank you so much for joining me, Roger. I really appreciate the time to talk and give me some insight as to outside of the accolades, where did you come from and how did you get to this list of really, really impressive things. What's your story? Well, thanks, Scott. It's great to be with you and I appreciate you having me on. So it's interesting. I think as a young man, probably I was maybe 10 years old, or remember sitting at the kitchen table with my family having dinner each night. My dad was a middle manager at, I think at the time it was either Farmer's Insurance or State Farm and was an underwriter, a field underwriter. He was in the middle of this corporate mechanism. He would come home every night and he was a wonderful man, but he would complain and grouse about his job and sometimes he'd be so frustrated and so irritated by what he was doing. I was watching this and it left a really early impression on me that, you know, people are in jobs where they feel like it really sucks and their organizations aren't working and it's not good for them. And I think that was an early impression on me that caused me to be interested in organizations and how you fix it, how do you get that working better? That transitioned into kind of a lot of interest around human performance in any field, in any endeavor, and looking at how do you optimize human performance. So my career has been, you know, really focused on that in terms of how do you scale improvement in human performance in organizations and in every type of setting, charities, non-preprofits, schools, wherever it may be, and it's been a great experience. I've loved every minute of it. And just from the entrepreneurial aspects, so now, you're sort of a thought leader in the space. I would say that's something that I feel comfortable saying, considering the body of works you publish, the amount of effort and time and energy you've invested, you know what you're talking about at this point. How did you get to this point? Because although I think everyone who's worked in a company ever sees a ton of issues with the way that organizational structure, management, coaching, training, there's so many broken pieces, incorporate, I guess, corporate, what is known to be a corporate status quo, but not everybody just builds a career out of it. So walk me through how you got from, so 10 years old, you saw issues with middle management, but that's a far cry from building out the repertoire you have today, where did you go from there? So after I got my MBA, one of my went to a small niche consulting firm, and I have a very curious mind. I mean, when I see something going on with people, I love kind of watching people and healthy performer, why they perform. And one of my first projects was a three mile island, I don't know if you remember that from way back when, but they had a nuclear power plant that almost melted down. And my first task was to go in with the team to figure out what was going on in the culture of the human dynamics that actually allowed that to happen. My second project was over on the other side of the nation with Drexel Burnham Lambert, and it was with Michael Milken, if you remember him, the junk bond king. And this was after he was taken out of the business, I went in and the task was figure out how does this organization continue to run without him as kind of the king kind of the organization. And I was hooked at that point. It was like, OK, these are really interesting things. And so my focus has always been on thinking about how do you get traction, like real traction in organizations. So I'm theories interesting, but it's not as interesting as actually helping people make movement. So after my MBA and I went into this consulting firm, I just kept working on consulting projects where the task was, how do you create real movement? You're seeing people, teams, companies create billions of dollars of shareholder wealth. I became very converted to the idea that culture in an organization and team can drive performance in a pretty significant way. Now do you find that every organization that creates that wealth has an optimized culture? Or do you think that that's something that maybe is more of, when I think culture, and optimal culture, and good culture, and people focusing on culture? Has that always been the case? Or is that something that's more of a relatively new phenomenon in terms of focusing on it? Not just having it by chance. Is that correct? Is that incorrect? No, that's right. When I started 35 years ago, culture was like not on anyone's radar screen. But today it is a core competency for every leader. They're all thinking about it. But the way I define it is your culture is producing a result. Whatever results you're getting at is coming from your culture, the way people think it at, and that for the moment works, but it may not be working for what you need to have happen. Every organization is pivoting through some real unique changes. What has to happen, too, is that one of those changes has to be a culture change. That's where our work comes in. Scott, when we talk about a coaching culture, that's a unique aspect of a culture that really makes things work for people and teams. What is a coaching culture? What is a standard status quo coaching? Let's describe what bad is, or let's describe what normal is, normal bad, maybe they're interchangeable in some cases. Let's describe what bad is, and then let's talk about what you do, how you improve it. Yes, so normal for any organization, whatever field they're in, whatever industry, they're all trying to figure out how do we get people to perform at a level that produces a result they're looking for. Performance management is a process, human resource organizations use to kind of objectify what are the things I want to focus on, and I get rewarded or compensated based on my performance. That system is pretty broken in organizations today. There's often a mismatch between the work I actually do and what everyone thinks we're doing and setting objectives around. But what people are really looking for, particularly the younger millennial generation, is not looking for a command and control kind of structure, they're looking for a coaching organization where they're learning and development is fostered and they're able to get real time information about how to take the next step. So in most organizations, we've actually found in our research that the average person has what we call 10 coach-ready skills, meaning, Scott, if I sat down with you and said, okay, list your skills, people hate doing it, by the way, it's a hard exercise because it's hard. You list two or three and you're like, okay, what are my skills? And then if I said, well, Scott, what are your skills for putting on a podcast? You'd probably come up with 50, right, how to set it up, the technology, getting guests on, I mean, there's lots of skills involved with that. So if I facilitated that conversation, you get to six to your 70 skills. But now I ask you to get to your coach-ready skills, what are you interested in coaching on? Like, of all those things, what do you really want to coach on? And then secondly, where do you feel sufficiently competent to coach on? Now, that's an interesting conversation because people generally feel like on a scale from zero to 10, which is the name of our company, by the way, zero to 10, on a scale from zero to 10, they think they have to be like a seven to coach someone, like pretty competent. And what we found is that that's not the case. Research shows that recency is more important than expertise in helping people take the next step. So if I'm learning how to golf, I usually ask people when I'm in a workshop, like, well, who do you want teaching to play golf? And everyone says Tiger Woods, right? And I'm like, Tiger Woods would go nuts trying to teach me how to play golf. Like he's such beyond a 10, he wouldn't be able to relate to my low level of competency. My best coach is going to be a two or a three on a scale. If I'm a two, it's going to be a three or four, right? So we call that a level up coach. So when you introduce that concept and you ask people, okay, if you need a level up coach, if you could be a level up coach, how competent do you need to be to be a level up coach? People usually say a four or a five. So on your coach ready skills, you're willing to coach on it and you're at least a four or five competency wise, we can come up with 10, at least 10 per person. So let's say you have an organization of 1,000 people or a company of 10, multiply that by 10, 1,000 people, 10 coach ready skills per person. That's 1,000 coaches that are just sitting there in your organization ready to be activated. And when you say, well, what's bad? Like what are we not doing? Organizations aren't operationalizing that peer-to-peer collaboration around coaching when people need it. There's people all around you that have the skill to help you take the next step. They're just not being asked to do it. So a coaching culture is when you unleash that and you get those 1,000 coaches working. I, I, on everything you're saying makes sense. The, the, I love that quote, the, the recent C over experience, first of all, I just, I didn't mention, when you mentioned it, someone to let you go, but I love that quote, that seems very, very impactful because how often do you see people that haven't done it in 20 years, but they used to be an expert trying to coach or teach on something. So that's something that I thought was, that's a, a really good one-liner. But I'm locking the, like, the peer network within a company. It makes a lot of sense. And I've seen it done in some circumstances, but not formally. I've seen people that seem to gravitate towards leadership and they want to take on more. And they feel like they have something to offer. They step into that role and they take on duties outside of, you know, what was on their job description. But I feel like for some organization, maybe some employees, I don't know, is it, you, you get pushed back from the employees saying, that's not my job, I don't, I don't feel the need to do that. I'm, I'm too overburdened with the things that I'm already doing in a day. Like I don't want to take on more. And, and that's like the, the confrontation that, you know, the, the employer has with the employee when trying to implement something like this. Is that a, is that a problem? Or is that not? Yeah, it can be, I mean, that's why it's a coaching solution, a culture solution, not just a coaching solution. You're creating a coaching culture where you create a mindset about, you know, being willing to give and to get. But here's the thing, this, this was everyone away. Most people think there's, people will be resistant to be willing to coach. That is not the case. All of our research has shown that 90% of the time people are going to say, yes, one, one case and point real quick, we had a, it was a gifting attorney at a university. And she wanted to get some help on something she was stuck on. And so she said, okay, Roger, I'm going to try this. I'm going to reach out to get some coaches. So she reached out to 15 people outside of her organization. She'd never met before just new of them in the industry. All 15 so they'd be willing to coach her. She was, she was totally blown away. She said, okay, now I have a problem. I got to interact with 15 people. I wasn't expecting this. She said she went ahead and leaned in on it. Not only did she get an answer to her problem, she created a network of people who wanted to continue a conversation every time. And she got some ideas to bring back to university. She wasn't even anticipating. So we usually, Scott, the coaching is what we call bite size, right? So there's kind of three types of engagement from our research. The type one is a pick your brain. It's a, it's a 15 minute session, like, it's really quick. Type two is, you know, like, I'll go to lunch. We call it, get some coaching. It's about an hour long. And type three is that work traditional, you know, coach, long-term relationship we meet often. 85% of the coaching happens in type one and two, and 68% happens in type one, meaning almost 70% of the coaching that occurs happens under 15 minutes. So it makes it really like off the cuff, like ad hoc, like, like, like, quick, quick, quick. Yeah. Yeah. We call that real time bite size on demand and skill based. It's not mentoring. It's not executive coaching is that skill based coaching. And even though, let's, okay, so let's look at other, let's look at other stats. So even though you see the majority of the coaching taking place in that 15 minute, approximately, you know, engagement, where do you see most organizations spending the time? So I don't think, from my experience, it's in that 15 minute interaction. Yeah. But when it comes to coaching, they're using the older traditional model of hiring a coach, top down multiple sessions, kind of the scope, there's a lot of scope creep involved in that. That's what people are thinking when they think of coaching. The coaching's any advice, suggestion, knowledge transfer that helps someone take the next step. If I could just say this real quick, there's, we found that there's five conditions where a coach needs to, you need to reach out for coaching. Anytime you're stuck, doing something for the first time, you're trying to accelerate your performance, whatever it is, it's strategic or you want to crush it. If you're in one of those five situations, you should reach out and get a coach. Now we looked at a high-performing team and said, okay, how often does this happen? So we had them kind of, kind of track how often this occurred for them. There were 170 coaching conditions for a high-performing team with 20 people at any given point. What we found is that the average person has 12 things they can put into one of those categories. It makes sense because all those coaching conditions, they're all points when you have to be, I guess, self-aware enough to accept that coaching as well. I think the culture piece is probably one of the most important things that you mentioned because there's all these different coaching strategies. There's a point where people should look for coaching. But also, you have to have a culture that enables and encourages and promotes peers to want to coach, but you also have to have that culture that encourages people to accept that they need coaching. They have that psychological security because if you don't have that, then people aren't going to put their hand up and say, I want to crush this or I don't know, or this is the first time because they think they're going to get reamed out and get trouble. The culture thing is probably one of the most important pieces to get this right. That means leadership. Whoever, the relative leadership of any organization has to buy into the idea that, look, we want to encourage people to raise their hand if they're stuck or doing something for the first time. It's not a sign of weakness. It's a strength. That's a core competency. You know how to get a coach. The other thing we do that helps us is we flip the model. It's not top down as bottoms up. The learner, who used to be called the coach, we call it the learner, they take accountability to go get the coaching they need when they need it. Now it's my job as a learner to reach out and get a coach, get the information I need, and then move on to the next thing. I'm in charge of that. No one's doing that for me. That self accountability seems to help be a key factor in that culture you're talking about. You have to have that understanding that we want people to do that. Get a coach, be a coach. This is the book that we were speaking about ahead of this call, and this is the book that has a lot of this modeling in it. Now for this book, who is this for? Is it for the business leader? Is it for the individual, maybe who wants help, wants a coach, wants a mentor? Or is it for everybody? Like what's the core premise of this book? Let's pull out some models from this book. I'm looking at this PDF, and there's a lot of stuff here, some of the stuff you mentioned, but I want to know who benefits from this most. Yes, so we had everyone in mind, there isn't a dividing line between personal and business when it comes to coaching. For example, I play the guitar. I play the guitar for 50 years, and I have a nice guitar collection. I have to tell people, it's more like I played the guitar for one year, 50 times. Because it creates the right expectation when you heard I played for 50 years. But I play the guitar, and I love Eric Clapton, love his songs. There's a song I love, Leila, you may know the song, and there's a lead line on Leila, it's a little bit complicated. So I've tried it on YouTube, right, and it's hard to get. So what I think now is, okay, who can I get to be my coach to help me learn the lead line on Leila? I don't need a guitar teacher. I just need someone to know how to do that. So the concept is, look, you can use these principles everywhere for anything, building a house, playing the guitar, moving a team, these principles apply to everyone. How do you, so the principles are good, and it makes a lot of sense, even the example you gave me before, which I think is a valid example, you're remodeling your home, and you mentioned that, actually, tell me the story again, because it's a good example, like the parallel one was good, but I want to really drive on the context of why it's so important to have these little coaches, mentors, whatever you want to call them in every aspect of your life, because I really do believe that if people can first adopt the concept of a coach in business, that's step one, and that's a lot of things people don't do already. But then, take it a step further, adopt that concept of a coach and a mentor in so many aspects of your life, and it's not just the one person, like you said, you're going to have one person for your, but you're going to have one person for your professional, you're going to have one person for perhaps, if you're doing a side hustle, you're running a podcast, you know, you're going to have one person made you for your relationship, maybe if one person for, you know, how you work out at the gym, what you eat, so many different aspects. So, just the one you mentioned before, is a really good, another good example of, like, just like, practical day to day. Yeah, so that, I've spent a lot of money in my remodel, kind of fixing things at the very end of the project, and one of those things that happens, I walked into a room, the baseboard, as I looked down line of sight, it was looking like an S-curve, you know, it looked like a snake, and I'm like, I think that should be straight, I don't like that's right. So, I talked to the contractors, they said, yeah, that should be straight, and we were talking about what happened. He said, well, you know, the finished guys, when they put the baseboard on, the wall was crooked, so they're blaming the drywallers, and the drywallers kind of, you know, blame the framers and said, well, if the framing was done correctly, it would have been straight, and I don't know who the framers would blame, the wood guys that, you know, cut the trees down, I guess, but I told a friend about this, telling him the experience, and he had built two or three homes, and he said, oh, Roger, you should have come to me right at the beginning, I said, well, why? And he said, well, I could, I could have told you what you do. Every night, when their framers are done, I go in and I run a streamline on walls that need to be straight, and I make sure it's straight, and if it's not, they fix up the next morning, then everything else at close, so there's no problem. I'm like, oh, geez, you know, I should have asked him a long time ago, that would have saved me a lot of money and grief. So now I think coach, God, I think coach, if I've been swimming for the first time, I think coach, and because they're 15-minute exchanges, I don't get one, I get two or three people to give me input, and it's really a game changer in terms of performance improvement, for sure. And Roger, the one thing that I really like to point it out was it doesn't have to be so much of an investment. It can be very like casual, and the ability to understand that and to put yourself out there knowing that, you know, you don't have to, you know, you're not becoming this person, you know, best friend, and you're spending 40 hours a week with this person. You're just getting little bits of advice. You're getting little bits of advice from people with experience and insight, and you know, YouTube is good, but it's good to a point, and YouTube can't provide experience, right? YouTube can give you a transactional, relay of information. It can tell you like step-by-step how to do something, but it doesn't give you like, it doesn't give you what you just mentioned with the framers. It doesn't give you that insight. After years of experience, and 15 minutes can save you like, well, to be honest, like a couple thousand dollars, it's not more, but yeah, so it's incredible, like just, and this is, you know, regardless of what you're in, just put yourself out there and ask, like I can't remember who I got this quote from, but it was just like just being ask whole, like just like don't care about asking, just don't care about asking, and I was on a call this morning, with a guy who works at fresh works, and he reached out to me on LinkedIn, and he just said, hey, Scott, like you might, you know, putting a, if I can just chat with you for a few minutes, I want to talk about my career, and I said, yes, and I didn't mind it, and you know, I probably could have found work to do this morning. I've never haven't, you know, enough hours in a day, but he asked, I said, yes, and he got some value out of that, and oh, I hope he got some value out of that, but it was just asking, and it was like one of those super casual, like, ad hoc, like I just need a little bit of advice, I saw what you did on this, and I want to ask your question about it for my career. So it's super, super easy to do, you just have to do that, you have to put yourself out there, and there's a logical principle there, too, that's working when you kind of compared it to YouTube or, or Googling, right? And it's coaching, coaching and codes the brain, that didactic kind of experience, causes you to learn differently, you know, I can sit and read something, or even watch a video, but there's when it's engaging like this, even through video like this, you know, you coaching me and I coaching you, it encodes my brain differently, I learned and processed differently, that translates it into action. So there's a role for all these learning mechanisms, but if you don't have coaching, you don't have the most important piece of that learning process, and it's true for, I can't tell you the number of organizations have gone through like sales training, and they've done sales training, and then they go try to operationalize them in the field, and they see they're not firing on all cylinders, it's like what's missing, well, it's that coaching piece that causes people to really deepen their learning and understanding of what they need to do. Now, the one piece that we spoke about was very important, but we didn't get into the weeds on it. We figured out, you know, coaching and some, there's some really like actionable takeaway, so you mentioned five times when you should go get coaching. There was a few other like list items that, you know, knowledge, transfer, collaboration, closing skills, gap, all these different types of things you mentioned, not only enabling peer-to-peer coaching, but also accepting coaching and accepting in every part of your life. So these are all like very coaching center topics, obviously. Oh, this is at first time stock, accelerating, strategic or crushing it. Those are like the coaching figures. That was another, another grid list. But how do you, how do you fix the culture in an organization? Just, so the obvious answer is leadership, but say leadership is willing to learn, because that's the first step. So leadership is open mind. So what does leadership have to do to start changing the culture? Is it just leading by example? Is it the way they hire, the people they hire, they have to do a revamp, you know, fire everyone and start, like, how do you, how do you change that leadership culture so that coaching is poor? Yeah. So let's start with the team, because the team culture actually is a great microcosm of an organization, and it's actually more important than the enterprise culture, because you have a culture on your team. It all happens there. I've been involved in large-scale culture change on my career, and the bottom line is if you can't affect team leaders, you can't affect anything. So we'll take a team, for example. So what a team leader would need to do is say a couple things and mean it. Like number one, we want people to raise their hand when they hit one of these five coaching conditions. Like, that's the way things work around here. We want you to do that, and we tell them, we tell them share coaching callouts, and a coaching callout is at the beginning of a team meeting, you use examples. You say, hey, Laurie raised her hand the other day, she's doing some of the first time, she's doing an Amazon AWS, and, you know, needed help, and she got connected with Frank, and that was a great thing, and that's what we want around here. So the coaching callouts is a focus on, you know, these are important to us. The second thing is that you have to begin to create a coaching culture by having people know who to reach out to. Now, one way we do it in our business, we have software. So we come in like if we went into IBM, we create an IBM coaching culture, we teach them these principles that we're talking about, then we have software that matches people together. So, you know, you go in and Scott, you say, hey, I want to learn about podcasts or whatever, and you hit submit, and then the algorithm returns all the people in the company who have experienced it, you can reach out and offer coaching. So, some form of, you know, facilitating that is important in a team and an organization. But, but no question, if the leaders not reaching out and getting coaching too, that modeling is absolutely critical. And our research has shown by far leaders are highly ineffective at modeling that coaching process to their teams. That's a great place to start in terms of letting their teams know they're reaching out and getting coaching. What, what CEO, most of the CEOs I've worked with in my career have professional coaches. Many have multiple. Last time I just work with had three different coaches they work with. These are paid, you know, executive coaches. But the concept is everyone ought to have several coaches on these topics like you were mentioning. There's several things you can get coaches on that you're working on. And having leaders demonstrate that is really key. Now, there's one concept in here that I saw the connector, the connector manager leader. I saw that it mentions four roles of a connector manager leader. It says, ignite coach, connect and lead. What is that? What is that? Is that in ignite ignite? What's that kickoff point? And what does this framework really mean? I want to understand this a little bit more. Because I know there's something to it. I just don't understand it. I'm glad you asked that because this is really key. So like we were talking about team leaders are key in making this happen. So the basic premises look, the old model was it's your job to solve problems if you're a leader of a team. The new model is it's not your job to solve problems. It's your job to make sure problems get solved. That's a different orientation in the old model. Everyone brings me to their problems. They can't solve. I'm trying to fix them. I'm coaching them in the new model with expansive control organizations are flat being people are being furloughed, whatever it might be. You know, there's no way for me to reach everyone with the coaching they need. So I need to connect them as a connector manager leader to the resources that could coach them to help them solve the problems that they're facing. So ignite is a whole idea of having a leader introduce this concept to their team and start building this coaching approach where we're self directed. So remember flipping the model learners and charge. So in the old model I come if you were my boss that come to you and say, hey, Scott, your team leader, you know, I'm stuck I can't I'm stuck on this problem. What would you do? How would you fix it? You're going you're scratching head going well. Let's see. Let me remember how I did that. You know, what else would I do? In the new model, I should be coming to you saying, Scott, here's the problem I'm working on. Here are the three people I reached out to for coaching. And here's what I'm hearing. What else would you give me to say? And you're like, well, this is a great Roger on the right trackers. Consider reaching out to so and so and and then if you have some input, you give it as well. So that's your neighbor. That's real flip in the model. Yeah. That's what ignites me. And then and then coach. So then obviously coaching is is enabling. Um, you can't give feedback, but you're letting people come to like their own conclusions about what works and what doesn't. Yeah. And and you're right. You're directing a self directed process. So that but there are times when you need as a leader to just give your coaching that you give. But there are some watchouts with that in terms of making sure you're not taking the accountability in the situation to solve the problem you leave without what the team member is working to solve. You know, the only other thing that I wanted to that I wanted to understand as I'm going through all the concepts because so we hit the coaching model, coaching triggers, engagement types. That's one thing that I didn't bring up before. So the three types of engagement, the 50 minute, 50 to 60 minute and then the ongoing sort of like mentor. Um, then we got, uh, then we got the the way to enable and and basically lead your team as an effective leader. There was one thing that that we didn't touch on that I I really want to focus on because it's something that I think would apply to everyone and that's the skill index and leveling up. Um, oh no, we did speak on that. Sorry, that's when you say you just go to like one level ahead of where you're at. That's what I mean, you go to one level ahead of where you're at. Oh, okay, I understand I understand. It wouldn't be Tiger Woods coach. You may be, it'd be someone really basic and then okay, so then my question would be for that. So how do you find somebody who is the right level for for coaching you? How do you find that mentor? You know, that's that that actually is a good question because it's hard to do that without some kind of technology to help, meaning like when we use our software with the client, they input their skills. You would you would input your 10 coach ready skills and you would put a level on it from zero to 10. You'd say I'm a seven or six or a five or whatever. And so when I'm looking for a coach, I can actually see, you know, where do you say you are? And if you're a 10 and I'm a four, I probably I probably wouldn't reach out to you. I'd reach out look for someone who's a five or six. So without that, it's more of a concept where you're thinking, okay, I could go to Joe, everybody knows Joe's the pro or maybe I'll go to Mary instead because she's maybe not not as far as fans as Joe, but she's, you know, she's closer to where I'm at. That's more the thinking that you'd have without some kind of software facilitating that. And I also, I also, one thing that I've noticed is of an indication of a good coach is that it's when somebody can describe something without confusing you. So if somebody can describe something in very layman's terms, even if they are much farther ahead, not much farther, like you said, you don't want to align with somebody too far, but if somebody can be a good coach or somebody is right for you, they don't have to over complicate the process and they can they can effectively break it down because they've done it so many times. That's I think another really good thing to look for. So you have an understanding of where people are at, what they've accomplished. You obviously, you're having a conversation with them. You don't have something like software system to figure it out for you, but then also just somebody who, you know, who can actually teach it over properly, somebody who can break it down and put it into a concept or layman's terms, you can understand somebody who you vibe with and somebody who's relatable and somebody who you enjoy working with. Like I think that's something that people don't take into account. You can have the best coach in the world, but if personalities don't mesh, like that's going to be an inhibitor towards your learning. So there's a whole bunch of things you have to look for, but I think the overarching high level message is just to start looking for these people and start incorporating them into your life. I think that's right, but what we've also found is that most world-class experts are not world-class explainers. So they may be really good at what they do, but trying to transfer that to you is difficult as you're describing. So what we do in the flipping the model, Scott, we actually have to teach the learner how to, it doesn't matter how good the coaches are explaining. We teach them some techniques to get whatever they need from any coach, whether they're good at it or not. And we start with the, just real quickly, we start with the ABCs. When we were developing our content, we had, I don't know, maybe 15 focus groups over about a year. We were watching people explain what coaching they need, and we were just, we was dismal. I mean, after about 10 minutes, like, you are not clear at what you're asking your coach. So we came up with the ABCs of coaching. It's really simple. It might be like, Scott, I'm learning how to manage a matrix team. I think I'm a two on a scale from zero to 10. I'd like to be a five by July. I've read one book called Managing Matrix Teams. In 30 seconds, you know, okay, I'm the wrong guy for you, or I'm the right guy, or I really suggest this person, or here's what I would do next. And then, and then we teach them to use one of the high five coaching strategies and just use one. So those are top three questions. So I come and say, Scott, I have three questions. I want to ask you in the next 15 minutes. Here's what they are. So I've set the agenda. Or I'm saying, Scott, I'd like for you to model this. Show me how to do it. Or I might say, Scott, I want to show you how I do it and get your input. We call that practice perfect. Or we look at game film together, you know, look on a on a iPhone or recording, you know, we're watching that together. But those strategies combined with the ABCs helps people get what they need from a coach, even if the coach is bad at explaining things. That's really interesting. And I like that framework a lot because that's, I've never, I've never, I've never heard of like a, but it's so succinctly. I've always found that even for myself, like when I'm trying to get something out of someone, it's like, it's exactly like those focus groups that you mentioned. It's just an absolute chit-chat. No one knows what's going on. And you're trying to verbalize, but you don't know what you don't know. And it's very hard to ask if you don't know what you don't know from the coach. Do you find that some of the lessons that you learned, you know, I'm curious because you work in coaching and you work in organizational management. Do you find that some like sports teams have better practices in place either thoughtfully or by accident than organizations in terms of coaching and, and I guess, like culture that would enable coaching. Because I've seen a lot of, I've seen a lot of, you know, football analogies for coaching and, and a lot of prolific football or basketball or hockey or whatever coaches write books on leadership and coaching. And I'm just wondering if, if there's some, if there's some, I don't know, camaraderie that enables like a higher level of communication or something along those lines. Yeah, it's interesting because if you took that, that sports analogy and you change the name from coach to boss, it just doesn't seem to work, does it? I mean, like, okay, the boss of the basketball team is here. What do you want us to do, boss? But because we say coach, we know that they're in charge, right? The coaches in charge, but they're in charge in a way that's different. And in organizations, I've seen that work where instead of thinking boss, we were thinking coach and it had a profound impact on the organization. But that's a major, my ship that needs to happen in organizations today. Bosses need to become coaches. Bottom line, that's what needs to happen. Yeah, and that's part of that culture piece too. I like that a lot. And that does make a lot of sense when you, when you think about, when you think about the best leaders or servant leaders, right? They're not people that are, are stock ranking against their employees. They're people that are on that same level that are enabling like he said, serving, coaching. It's very good. So just before I want to ask you a few more questions just about insights that you've sort of garnered over your career. But before we move off the topic of coaching and some of the some of the practices that were mentioned in this book, was there anything else that you wanted to bring up this sort of relevant to coaching culture for an individual or for like a leader of some sort? I just don't, I just think there's no time better than now to get started at reaching out. You're going to be amazed at the response you get. You know, when I do my MBA class, I have the students, you know, text immediately, like in the class, okay, text five people that you could reach out to on this problem and see what happens. And before the classes over, they've got responses from at least three and they're like, yeah, I'm totally willing to help. You know, that's the idea that look, people are willing to help you and they're going to help you become more effective, more successful. And then MBA class has talked about I had 13 professional MBAs, six of them received promotions within the first two months of the class simply by practicing the principles of getting coaches. So I would just encourage your listeners to don't wait. Get started. It's something you can do right away. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Now just pivoting back to your career and things that you've learned because you've had a very long career. So I always like asking sort of these these wrap up questions. What would be one life lesson that you've learned over your career in particular that you could give over that could be agnostic of industry that would help someone sort of improve themselves professionally? Organizations are designed for people to not tell the truth. There's too many too many political issues going on and other conflicting motivations that cause that to happen. So when you're in an organization, if you want to know the truth, you're going to have to really work hard to get it. Don't expect that what you're hearing is what's really going on at any level of the organization. So I kind of kid with my MBA class, I start by saying just one of the principles you should know is that in organizations, all people are liars. And it's true because they're it's designed into the system. Like I can't really tell my boss what I really think. I can't really tell at HR what I really think. There's too many ramifications that come from it. I've learned in my career that if you really want to hear what's going on in the organization, how people really feel, you have to go on a campaign to convince some of that's the case. It's not going to come easily. So that'd be one insight that I've had. That's a good insight. I've never heard that insight on this show before but I think that something that a lot of us have experienced. Unfortunately, is there you notice that you work with a lot of companies. You notice that some are a little bit more transparent. Is there something that like people can look for when they're looking for moving into the next, you know, rear opportunity job, changing companies. There's something that you should maybe build into your own interview process that you can sort of vet the transparency of a company or is it just like something that plagues everyone past, you know, 10 people? I think it's a common human condition but I think it's less present in when an organization is not super command and control. So one of the things that I would look for in interviewing is getting a sense of is there still a strong command and control kind of leadership style and approach in the organization. If so, you can just expect that there's going to be those kind of issues going on. Where an organization has been able to collapse that, then you do have more transparency, more authenticity in your ability to collaborate but definitely would be on the watch for that. Good good points and good things to look for because I think that, you know, that's one of a lot of the stuff that we're speaking about, like the whole culture shift in an organization. I can't imagine a command and control structured organization being as open to revamping their culture and enabling people and all these different good things that you want to see in a company in 2020. I think that they're probably the last adopters. So I think that, you know, if you can sort of figure that out and I always tell people like when you're interviewing, when somebody's interviewing you, it's just as much of an interview for the company because if you land in the wrong position for an extra 5K or 10K, you aren't going to enjoy it. So don't make that move unless you really are sure. And if you aren't in the best spot, then try and make the move. Obviously, when things are a little bit easier and the economy isn't shut down, it wasn't so much an issue, but right now it's a little bit more stressful for people, but still when things are back to normal, try and make that move. The last question I like to ask, what would be one, it could be podcast, it could be book, it could be mentor, you're not allowed to name any of your own books that you want from. Well, that's a good question. I'd have to think about that. There's been so many inputs. I'd say as a mentor, very early on in my career in consulting, I had a leader, his name was John Childress, and he was exceptional at kind of looking past the obvious and seeing what was really going on kind of root kind of a root cause guy. And that trained me early on to say, look, don't believe what you're seeing. Don't believe what you're hearing. Go deeper than that and you will find the root cause. And I've had companies paying a lot of money to do that for them to not believe what I'm seeing, to not believe what I'm hearing, and to find the root cause and really discover what's going on. That's a difficult skill to master, but I think that can benefit a lot of people and a lot of companies, but it's funny that companies pay someone to look under the hood of their own company when there's a trust transparency issue. And I bet, you know, I bet in most cases, if people were more, if companies were more transparent, they wouldn't have to bring that outside council to look under the hood, but they just have that issue being honest and open. So they need someone else to tell them what they're doing wrong. Which is unfortunate, but I think that's just like you said, that command and control structure sort of reinforces it, not in a good way. I've also seen the opposite, by the way, where a company's gone from command and control to kind of a holistic where they have, you know, no leadership is all self-directed. And honestly, Scott, they have just as many problems. They're all sorts of transparency issues and, you know, because they trust people to work, work whenever they're going to work and come in when they're going to come in. And it's not any better. There's just some basic good principles about how humans work together. If you get that right, then everything's going to be fine. But I've also found that later. Go ahead, sorry. I'll just say either extreme doesn't seem to do the trick. No. And I also think that a lot of it comes down to, if you really want to go into, go into the weeds on this, I think it comes down to hiring the right people, hiring for certain behaviors, figuring out, you know, are these people, are they going to vibe and work with the culture that this organization is? And if you can figure out and hire those people, it's obviously a huge effort and it's timely and it takes a lot of time and energy and it's very costly. Like, you can't just rehire your whole organization, but to start from here, if you're hiring people, maybe understand how you hire people, what you look for. Are you just looking for, you know, 20 years industry experience and certain KPIs have been outlined on the job wrecks for the past 10 years? Or are you looking for behaviors that are going to guarantee success in whatever industry this person steps into? And is this person focused on growth? Is this person focused on being a team player? Is this person like tying all these cultural points that are so, so key to success? Right? And if you have repeated hires like that, that's when an organization wins regardless of the management structure. There's some that play better or worse, but I think that the people are people first always, always, always. I also think we don't know how to hire. Most people don't know how to hire properly. I think that's also totally right on. Last last thing, where do people, you know, get in touch with you? Can they email, LinkedIn, websites, you know, where do they get the book if they want to go read the rest of the book? What are the best places? Yeah, so our website is 0-0-210, so z-e-r-o-t-o-t-e-n.com and then you can cook up with me on LinkedIn, Roger Connors on LinkedIn. We're sending email and that's roger.connors at z-e-r-o-t-o-t-e-n.com. The book is coming out, was coming out in August, it's been delayed because of COVID actually, the publisher has pushed all their books back to January. So it comes out January, we have the dance readers copies, we can supply anyone who's interested. So just get in contact with me, I'll get that to you. That's all for today. Thanks again for joining me on another episode of the success story podcast. You can download or stream this podcast wherever podcasts are available, including iTunes, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, and many others. You can also watch this podcast on YouTube. If you haven't already, please subscribe and share this podcast with your friends, family, co-workers, and peers. Please leave us a rating on iTunes, it takes about 30 seconds, as it allows other people to find our podcast and lets our amazing guests reach even more people with their message. And remember, any rating is fine as long as it contains five stars. I'm Scott Clary from the success story podcast, signing off.