Speaking and Communicating Podcast

And people want to be part of organizations that they feel like they get great communication from their leaders.

And that means, how much money do we have in the bank?

When are we gonna run out of money?

Our people knew exactly how much money we had in the bank, because I would tell them every Monday.

Rather than hiding it, and then everybody's wondering what's going on behind the president's door, and then you're suspicious, and then in response, you're so scared.

You're like, well, then I better go get another job preemptively, because I just don't know how this one's gonna end.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Robert Angela.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development.

And by the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify, and leave us a rating and a review.

Now, let's get communicating.

Now, let's get communicating with Bill Gruber, who is an entrepreneur, author, and pilot, who flies from coast to coast.

Bill is here to help us with so much, including how to make your employees more engaged, how to create a better culture in your workplace, and we will be sharing some of the strategies he shares in his book.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show.

Hi, Bill.

How are you, Roberta?

Thank you so much for having me on your show.

I am honored and really appreciate it.

My absolute pleasure.

Thank you for being here.

And I know that our listeners are going to love this conversation.

But before we get into that, please introduce yourself.

So I started out, I went to college for a finance degree, but had no idea kind of what I wanted to specialize in.

Ultimately, went to work for Procter & Gamble in sales, was there for five years, and then got recruited away into the medical device business at Boston Scientific, starting in sales.

So I went from management at Procter & Gamble back down into sales, had to go back and start over, and then worked my way through sales at Boston Scientific and was the director of atherosclerotic diseases when I left to go to work in startup medical device businesses, venture-backed startup companies.

And three companies, and ultimately was the CEO of the last two companies.

One was successful and one was not.

And through all of that, I learned a tremendous amount about managing high-performing teams.

How best to get the most out of the organization for the greatest success and also the greatest happiness of the team.

And think that through my penchant for learning as much as I can by reading what others are professing and making a lot of mistakes myself, I came up with a system that I think can save others just a tremendous amount of failure that I had to experience in order to become what I thought was a successful leader in getting great results with terrific teams.

Let's start with your sales experience.

What do you think would make for a successful sale versus if a person says, ah, it's a no for me Bill.

Next.

Yeah, I think part of it's listening.

And I think that's one of the things that we end up not doing, right?

That's come through in some of your recent podcasts where some of your interviewees have said that we don't do a good enough job listening.

And I think that's the key to selling, is you have to really understand what the buyer wants.

That's true with employees, right?

We have to understand what the employees want in the organization.

I think it's foolish for us as leaders of organizations, whether you're a president or even just a team leader, to go in with this mindset.

That you just have to get as much as you can out of the employees in order to further your own success at the organization or the company's profits, right?

Are we going to suck the souls out of all of our people, get the company ahead, and then just discard these people?

Well, that's the wrong way.

That might help you in the first couple months, but your people will all leave.

I mean, when I had horrific bosses, that's what I felt, right?

I felt that they were just sucking the brains dry of all the people and then for their own good, or taking the work product that their people did and using that to just help themselves get promoted, only to have the rest of us get no accolades or no recognition as well.

And so I think that's the wrong approach.

Back to your question, I think if we can figure out what the buyer wants and then figure out how our product meets the needs of the buyer, they're going to buy.

If, in fact, we can't adequately convey to the buyer, that in fact, our product or our service meets the needs of that buyer, well, then they probably shouldn't buy, right?

Because we either haven't done a good enough job or our product's not right for them.

That's why they say you have two ears in one month, use them in proportion.

But here's the thing about listening as well.

I know that usually when you get a sales job, and probably this was applicable in yours as well, you do get training and a script in what do you say and how do you...

But I find that sometimes when people are in sales, they stick to the script a little too much, which then kills the listening aspect.

I would totally agree with that.

I thought that's where Procter & Gamble was absolutely fabulous.

Not only did we have to go through sales training where they would videotape us selling, and then a whole room of your peers would then basically critique how you answered those questions, as the person on the other side was trying to give you objections, just as you suggest, Roberta, they're giving you suggestions, you know, objections, and you're trying to get around those objections, but you're trying to do it in a way that demonstrates to them that your product meets their needs and gets around those objectives.

And that's the hardest part in selling, is how do you think on your feet?

How do you adjust on your feet?

How do you ask more probing questions from the buyer to figure out whether there is an opportunity for your product or service to meet the needs of the buyer?

And I think those who fail either don't ask the proper questions or assume they know what the true problem is.

And sometimes by just digging into the buyer's problem a little bit further, before answering and trying to just fit your solution into their problem, keep asking questions about their problem itself, you may uncover a lot of reasons why your product really is a good fit, and it makes it so much easier to articulate why your product is a better fit for that buyer, if you really understand that.

But a lot of us fail.

You were either lazy or to your point, you stick to a script where I hear the one objection.

Now I just have to meet it with this counterpoint that I think will work, rather than really digging in and finding out the true objection.

And a lot of objections are false, right?

They just want you out of there.

They want you to move along.

And so I think spending the time to listen to what the true objection is, you may find out it has nothing to do with the initial objection that you received in the front end.

That is so true.

And you're right.

Because here's the thing.

They say, we don't want to be sold to, but we want to buy.

So if you keep asking me questions and probing, you can find something deep within me that was skeptical.

And so when you reach into that, I'm more likely now to be open and say, hey, wait a minute, let me listen to Bill.

And that's what I agree with, right?

Is that if we can dig in and not just be so quick to respond to the initial objection, because many times we'll never get over the initial objection, but five questions in and it's a dialogue, it's a discussion between the two of us about your problem.

Even before I get to my product or service that I'm selling, we may find that we start to build trust because we're now having a conversation and people buy from people whom they trust.

Right?

And if there's no trust there, you don't want to buy from me.

That's an important part of making sure it is a dialogue and a discussion, and it just doesn't feel like it's a competition.

You're trying not to buy and I'm trying to sell, and you and I are opposed in that discussion.

As opposed to you and me sitting down and figuring out what common areas do we agree on of a problem that you have, what you've done already to solve the problem, because you've probably already tried some things, and whether I might have some insight on that.

And in the end, sometimes, at least the initial visit, I may walk away and say, this isn't the right product for you, but I may have some others in the future.

You know, maybe I'll come back when I have those.

But the next time you and I engage, there's trust, right?

And you're much more likely to buy because my product might not have been right for you initially.

All of us have this same issue with regard to ideas and companies.

So, you know, your podcast really focuses on communicating and communicating in companies.

And one of the things we're all doing in companies is we're selling, right?

We're selling our ideas.

We're selling our concepts.

We're selling our plans, our budgets.

All the things we do in companies are selling.

But one of the things we fail to do when we communicate is asking enough questions by the other people who are supposed to be buying our solutions.

Do we really solve their problem?

Do we really understand the problem, or do we just come up with our solution, and now we're trying to shove it in to their problem in hopes that it fixes it or not?

Same thing is true.

We need to ask more questions first to understand and then to solve.

Right.

Shout out to everybody who's in sales.

I know they have this pressure of targets and numbers, and the sales managers are pushing them, but sometimes falling into that pressure is the reason that they get trapped in these things that we've talked about.

Now, you say that you were a CEO of two companies.

One was very successful and one was not.

What would you say would basically the top two or three lessons from the one that wasn't successful that you learned?

That's a great question.

Thank you.

So I think the second one, the one that was not successful, we were unable to achieve a clinical success point on a clinical trial.

And we had done four large clinical trials, which are very costly and very time consuming.

And that company took us the better part of 10 years to do all the product development, redevelop the product.

And in the end, we had to roll up the company and the investors lost a lot of money.

And some employees lost money as well because we were investing alongside the investors.

But in the end, I would say that the endpoint may have been a financial failure for the investors.

However, I would say that it was a success, in my opinion, as to how a group of people were able to function and achieve extraordinary accomplishments, getting through all of these clinical trials right in the middle of COVID.

So we started our first clinical trial right when COVID started, and yet everybody jumped right in.

And we were traveling around the country on planes alone because no one was traveling on airplanes at that point in time.

And so everybody was fantastic at problem-solving, managing to budget, getting the enrollment completed of these clinical trials.

And so for me, one of the biggest lessons was, in the end, was that although not a financial success, I still think it was a professional success for all the people that were involved, for everything everyone learned and contributed to this grand project that was just an enormous one to overcome.

I think the other thing that we did well was, we were raising money.

The company ran out of money midway through.

We were able to go raise another big financing, venture financing, and that came down to the wire as well.

And I had already severanced all the employees.

We ran out of money.

I gave them their severance, told them if they need to go get other work, get other work.

And I was the last one at the company raising money, dialing every day.

And I decided that I would still have my Monday morning staff meetings.

So if anyone who wanted to call in for the staff meeting, they'd call in, because my staff meetings are all company staff meetings.

I would tell them exactly how I was doing at raising money, good and bad, whether I was going to be successful or not.

Now, they all were severance, so they didn't have jobs, they didn't work.

But I said, if you want to call in to the conference number, I'll tell you all exactly how I'm doing.

And I said on this date, it was like January 20th.

If I don't have the money by then, then the company is going to shut down.

But over this period of time, it was six weeks if they want to call in.

And so everybody keeps calling in.

Even though they're all looking for jobs, they keep calling in.

We called staff meeting.

I said, okay, here's who I'm talking to.

These are the ones on the shortlist.

Here's where we're going.

Right.

And I just kept going on.

And two employees said, well, even though I'm on severance, I'm going to keep coming in and working anyway.

Even though they should be out looking for other work.

So then we get to the 20th that I got one person left to get money from.

And they're going to potentially give $5 million of investment into the company.

And if they give five, another group is going to give 12.

So we'll have $17 million and we'll continue on our way.

And so it's 4 o'clock on a Friday, and I get the phone call and they said, we're in for $5 million.

I called everybody back in the company.

I said, well, if you want to come back to work, come back to work.

And if you don't, you've already got another job.

You've already been severance, right?

And they all came back.

Everybody comes back to work on Monday.

And we were off to the race site, wrote them all letters, gave them all their, you know, they've been paid their commissions.

So we re-instituted all any bonuses, and everybody was on their way.

And we were back at company within five days of that.

And I think part of that goes back to communication.

They needed to be told exactly what was going on, right?

Hyper communication with them.

If I had just said, here's your severance.

And then I waited six weeks and called him back and said, hey, I actually got the money.

Well, they would have been gone.

I would have been gone.

I would have found my next job.

But these people also were running out of severance.

If they hadn't had a job, I only gave them six weeks severance.

So their severance was going to run out that week too.

So these people didn't go out and get other jobs yet.

Or if they did, they were waiting to accept those jobs because they still wanted to come back to our company for a job.

What my lesson there is that you've got to continue to communicate with your people.

And they're all adults.

They can handle bad news.

Sometimes they can handle a lot bad news, much better than most people think.

As long as they know that you're trusting them with the information and they feel like they have all the information to make good decisions.

Right?

They will make good decisions.

And people want to be part of organizations that they feel like they get great communication from their leaders.

And that means, how much money do we have in the bank?

When are we going to run out of money?

Our people knew exactly how much money we had in the bank, because I would tell them every Monday, here's the date we run out of money.

Here's what I'm going to do if we run it out of money.

You're going to get severance on this date, all the rest.

They all know that.

Rather than hiding it, and then everybody's wondering what's going on behind the president's door, and then you're suspicious, and then in response, you're so scared.

You're like, well, then I better go get another job preemptively because I just don't know how this one's going to end.

Well, I think that's the complete inappropriate way to manage your team.

They need to be told exactly what the program is.

Here's how much money, here's why we should be making these financial decisions.

And what happens is you find an interesting thing happen.

And your people, the people in the company, they start helping you.

They want us all to be successful.

We're now part of a team.

It's just not me with a CEO title in trying to pull all the strings and then saying, hey, guess what?

Today's your last day.

Here's severance or no severance.

A lot of people in small companies get no severance, right?

They just let go.

Today's a Friday.

You're let go.

Monday, you don't have a job.

I think that's the inappropriate place.

And even though we're a small startup, I think that you've got to be very forthcoming with information and trust that your people can handle it.

I think a lot of leaders, a lot of managers, are afraid if their people know all this stuff, their people are going to leave.

And I think it's the opposite.

If you share all this information with your people and you tell them why it's important and how it affects them and how it impacts the company, they're really engaged on the success of the organization.

First of all, I'm amazed at your level of transparency because I don't think it's that common, at least not in the corporate world, in any country, not just in America.

But secondly, like you said, if I don't have any information, if nothing is being communicated to me, I'm going to start making horror stories in my head.

Yes.

Just as humans, we usually go to the worst case scenario.

I totally agree with that.

I would, right?

We catastrophize, right?

We get it snowballing in our head that this is going south and he's just sugar coating it or she's just telling us all the good stuff.

But if you lay everything out as to here's my plan, here's how this thing runs, here's what the budget looks like, you guys all came up with the budget, here's how much money we have, and everybody knew what our daily burn rate was.

We weren't selling a product.

We were just had a chunk of money in the bank, and we were just burning through it in hopes of trying to get our product to market.

So I knew how much money we would spend a day in salaries and keeping the company going, and they all knew it.

That also engages your people because here's an example.

I would say to our team, we spend $20,000 a day here.

So our burn rate is $400,000 a month because we either have 20 days in a month.

On average, we spend 20 grand a day.

So every day, we save off our timeline.

Every day we can pull the timeline in, we save $20,000, right?

So if we all start thinking about daily burn rate, and that we ought to try to get things done quicker, or every day, for some reason, the timeline gets longer, we just didn't get it done, right?

The product, we ordered this raw material.

It didn't come in.

Well, we just lost $20,000.

If you can start to equate for everybody how money translates or how time translates to money, people start making decisions differently in the company, rather than many CEOs or many leaders feel like they can't trust the employees with that information because they either can't handle it or they'll leave the company because they get too fearful.

And my attitude, and I think most people who can be successful in these roles, is much different.

Engage them.

Show them exactly how the math works.

Because if they understand how the math works, they get it.

And then pretty soon, they start coming up with really great ideas on how to really shorten the timeline and unique ways to problem solve for fractions of a price of what you'd normally problem solve.

For me, that was the difference between a big company and a small company.

So in a big company, if there was a delay, they said, well, we can't get this raw product.

We need this raw material.

We need this piece of metal, for example.

And we would sit in a team meeting and they'd be like, well, okay, so order it.

And they're like, yeah, well, it's six weeks to order this piece of metal.

Purchasing would be like, well, okay, six weeks.

Project's going to be delayed six weeks for this.

In the small company, we would say, okay, so we need this metal.

Person would say, well, it's six weeks.

And I'd be like, okay, so how much is the old order?

And he'd be like, well, it's a $5,000 order for this piece of metal, and it's going to take six weeks to get here.

I said, well, call them and ask them how much to expedite it, whether we can expedite.

The person, engineer comes back in and will say, well, I can get it in three weeks, but it's going to cost more.

I said, well, how much more for a three-week savings?

And they said, well, it's $2,000.

Versus the $20,000 a day.

It's $20,000 a day.

So at $20,000 a day, we're going to wait because we can expedite it from, say, three weeks for $2,000.

So my question is, well, how about this afternoon at four then?

Right?

Because I pay $100,000.

Right?

I mean, tell them you'll pay them $15,000 if you get it today.

Part of that's just a different thinking.

But if you share that information with the employees, if you engage in, if you show them how the money is spent within the organization, they won't take it and do nefarious things with it or change careers or leave, they might help you problem solve.

And in fact, they start making decisions differently about all the things they do because they're engaged and you've shared all this information with them.

In all the interviews I've had regarding employee engagement, this is the first.

I mean, literally, this is the first.

I feel like we just gloss over the concept of employee engagement and if discussed, it's usually, oh yeah, when we sit in the boardroom and explore the project, people come up with ideas.

It's always just this generic definition of engagement.

I remember the one person who was different with their explanation of the term said to him, engagement means you care, that employees care.

And what you just described, because you are very transparent with what was going on, you created the care in them, even though you said to them, go find other jobs, I've given you severance.

They still cared enough to join in on the calls.

So that caring is created by the leader in how you engage them when something goes wrong or goes...

Because like you said, sometimes they fall for the trap of, we just tell them what's only the stuff that's going right.

Right?

Exactly.

But that level of transparency will create the caring in employees' cause they know...

You're a perfect example of what you just described, that they care.

They trust and they trust you, right?

And they trust that you're not doing something behind their back because you're being really forthright with them.

And I think the other thing is that always drove me nuts when I was being managed was, I want to know how my participation is impacting the organization.

I always want to know why.

I hated when my bosses would tell me to do something, but I never knew why.

And I always wondered whether it was just a fool's errand.

Is this project really something that's advancing this, or am I just doing it to make my boss look better, or am I doing it because he doesn't have something, he or she doesn't have something else that they have me to do?

But once people understand how their decisions directly, straight line, impact the organization, they feel value in the organization.

They understand their impact in the organization.

And then they enjoy going to work because they know that they're changing the company and they have impact on the company.

There's nothing more dreadful than going to a job and not wondering whether you're actually moving the marble or not.

Whether if you didn't show up, nothing would differ and the company would ever happen, right?

Do people just in general in corporate America, do they know they're billable?

Because I worked in engineering, so you know you're billable hours.

I think the formula was minimum three times.

So let's say the company pays me $100 an hour.

The invoice, my part of the project, they're going to charge $300 at least to the client per hour.

So I knew what my billable hours are.

Is that information commonly shared in America?

Well, it depends if you are a service provider, perhaps.

If your company is a service provider and you bill on billable hours, yes.

If you are in a corporation where you earn a salary, and nothing's done by billable hour, well, then no.

You just get a salary.

You have no idea how much the company is spending on your position or on your divisions, how much burn rate there is.

Because it's all in this big, huge pot of a big corporation.

I don't even think the CEOs, for that matter, know what their daily burn rate is, and they're making lots of money, right?

So you have a lot of money coming in, and that's why we could have a lot of money coming in and a lot of money being spent on product development, etc.

But has someone really parsed what the daily spend is and what we're spending that money on?

It's much easier in a small organization than it is in a multinational or a large organization to figure out what the daily burn rate is and whether the employees are advancing things and doing so on a timely basis in order to minimize the spend to maximize the revenue someday.

For us, we don't have any revenue.

It's all spend, right?

So let's talk about your book, The Literature Blueprint.

How did the idea of writing the book come about first?

And what is it that you wanted to share by writing the book?

Very good question.

So I got done with the last company, and I was like, okay, so I'm not going to do another one.

It takes a lot out of you, I'm going to be done, going to retire, so to speak.

But I've had such fantastic teams I got to work with.

And what I ultimately did in the last couple companies through reading great books like Start with Why by Simon Sinek, or Matters by John Doar, or The Alliance by Reid Hoffman.

So all of these books, they don't invent those concepts, they just do a really good job at describing the concepts of creating a mission, or management by objectives, or OKRs, objectives, key results, things like that.

They do such a great job at those.

So what I did is I was using all of those things in a plan at both my last two companies, and finding it to be really successful, because it was super easy for me to employ these ways of communication that you and I have just discussed.

If you start with a great mission, and the mission is not to make the CEO wealthy or the shareholders wealthy, that is not the mission.

The mission is what problem are we solving for our customer, right?

How are we helping people?

That's the mission.

And then can we create a set of outcomes that would suggest we hit that?

We sold to 100 million people, or 90% of the people come back and reorder.

What defines success relative to us solving their problem?

And then creating objectives and key results for everybody in the company that all work, and they all see each others, that allow us to achieve those major objectives that define our mission, right?

And that way, you're tying everyone's daily activities to the goal.

The goal of the company.

Everyone understands that everything they do, because it's in their objectives and key results, is tied to that, right?

So you have to...

Like you were saying, the straight line.

The straight line trickles down to everybody in the company, and they see mine.

I show them my objectives and key results, and then at the end of the month, I'm showing them my successes and failures.

I did these three, but I didn't do these, right?

So you have to be transparent in that regard, and then you have to also have values.

So we need to create values as a team.

When I say values, how are you and I going to work together?

What are the rules of engagement for us, right?

Well, we're going to be transparent.

We're going to be team-minded problem solvers.

We're going to be accountable.

We're going to have a great sense of urgency.

We're going to hedge everything we do.

We're going to come up with backup plans for every plan we have, things like that.

And that's what we're going to recruit people who have those same set of values.

So we bring in like-minded people into us.

And then, in the end, we have to give back to the employees.

This is where Reid Hoffman's book, The Alliance, helps you.

What is their tour of duty?

How, when you come into my company, Roberta, am I going to give you the career education that you want?

You may want to start in engineering, but then move into quality.

Okay, then we're going to set that up.

And after two years, we're going to put you into a role there.

And then you say, gosh, I love sales.

I really want to go into sales.

Great.

We'll put you into sales position.

Sure.

So, you can go to sales position.

It's the same reason why an office manager at one of my companies became a fabulous clinical research associate.

And to this day is now a clinical research associate, because she said, I no longer want to be an office manager.

I want to be a clinical research associate.

Well, she was already fabulous at what she did.

So, she could learn that position.

Why wouldn't we do that, right?

I mean, because now we're investing in her career.

She's never going to leave.

She's getting what she wants from us, and she's so valuable.

She's going to work her tail off in that role to prove that that was a great decision on our behalf, to give her what she wanted was to be a clinical research associate.

And so, moving people around the organization so they can build skills of themselves ultimately to go off and be wonderfully successful in their own careers, I think it's incumbent upon us as leaders to be able to do that, rather than to keep our foot on their neck and just hope we can get as much out of them in their existing role until they decide to leave and go do this for somebody else and be miserable.

That's not good.

That's very short-term thinking, yeah.

Also, there's this saying, when you're a leader, you inspire people and grow them to the extent where they replace you.

Good leaders would allow them to do that, right?

So, one of the chapters of this book is, A players hire A players and B players hire C players.

And the mindset there is that bad leaders are intimidated by the knowledge of their people and are fearful that they will unseat them in their leadership role, right?

That's B players hiring C players.

So, what they do is they hire people who aren't as smart or aren't as upwardly mobile or aren't as going to contribute as much as they can so they can continue to be the leader.

A players hire anybody they can who are smarter than them, and they hire for areas where they're not good, so that they can keep building a team that is smarter than they are, and are self-assured enough to feel comfortable that their people can all be wildly smarter and better than them because the whole organization will grow.

And that's a security thing.

Are we insecure enough to just, I'm just going to hire people who are not as smart as I am, so I will be fearful of losing my job.

And I think that's somewhat true with transparency.

Some people are afraid if they share the information, that they've shared the power, because information is power.

And by holding information back, they have power, no one else does.

And I think that's crap.

That's not the way good managers manage.

No, it's not the right mindset.

And speaking of hiring people who are smarter than you, the A players, hiring A players, I think it was the 90s when Richard Branson started becoming this, oh yeah, he's a UK billionaire, he's got NECA Island.

So he wrote the book, Screw It, Let's Do It.

And I read it, I was in my early 20s, I think.

And he said, I'm a billionaire because I hired people who are smarter than me.

Yes.

I used to think that should just be the norm.

If you want to be successful, you're going to hire people who are smarter.

So if you let the ego and your insecurity make you think that you, like I said, have your neck on people, it's just not a recipe even for you to win.

I would agree.

I think one of the best quotes, I'm a big fan of Zig Ziglar.

Oh, yes.

Right.

I was reading in his books when I was in my 20s, when I was learning how to sell and trying to suck the words off the pages of what Zig Ziglar had written.

He said, if you help everyone else get what they want, you will get what you want.

And I think that's true with great leaders, right?

You just have to be able to give back so much to your people that ultimately they will work so hard and the organization will do so well, the team will do so well.

Invariably, you'll get what you want.

You'll get a raise or promotion or whatever else.

But if all you want is a raise or promotion, you have to realize the only way to get that is to give back to your people and to bring everybody along.

You'll still make it.

But I think those people who try to oppress others, they're not long for this world.

They're the ones who get the boot out of their jobs early.

I think that's the poor leader.

Yeah, because right now, I think most of this generation, first of all, is very courageous compared to us, courageous in the sense that if they're not happy in the workplace, they leave.

They do.

Yeah.

So if you don't create a place where they can have that level of loyalty for it, like you just described with your previous clinical trial company, if you don't do any of that, they are not as long standing, even though it's not so fun type of position like our generation did, they're going to leave and it's going to cost you so much more to keep replacing people.

High turnover.

It's going to cost you so much.

And anybody in 2025 who is not any leader who is not getting on board with this, they are just shooting themselves in the foot.

Yes.

I couldn't agree with you more.

That's why I'm so convinced that any blueprint to being a good leader starts with communication.

It's just exactly what this podcast is about.

We also, to your point, people are much more willing to leave a position now because traditionally, over the last 10 years, it's been so easy for them to find other positions that as a leader, you have to be really good and really sharp at continuing to engage your team and help them with their own careers if you expect them not to leave.

Because my attitude with being a leader and people leaving my team is, if they left, it was my fault, not theirs.

My attitude was, if I couldn't create a better work environment here where you could be rewarded monetarily, but also professionally, through education and through a great work experience and enjoying the people you work with and being challenged and feeling accomplishment, then you should go somewhere else.

If I can't provide that at my place, this place that I'm supposed to manage, then everyone should go somewhere else.

So it's incumbent upon me as a leader to create an environment that I'm delivering all those things to my employees, right?

The people who report to me and depend on me.

Otherwise, I shouldn't be surprised when they leave.

I, in fact, should be jealous that someone else created a place that was more attractive that did that for them, right?

Right.

Absolutely right, Bill.

You have a freebie for us, which we are grateful for.

Thank you.

A recruitment freebie that's on your website.

Would you like to tell us more about it?

Sure.

So my website, www.billgruber.com.

One of the things in the book that I created was a recruitment binder.

I'm a real big proponent of recruiting for culture, for values.

That's how you build a team of, I think, cohesive people who have the same values and want to work together to accomplish the same things.

So what I did is I put this all into a Word document.

And the reason I put it into a Word document is because I want people to change it and make it their own.

And so what I did is I just took the values that our team had come up with.

I did not come up with the values.

The team did it as a group.

And I put them on the website.

And if you key in your email address, you could just download it at no charge.

And the reason I keep the email address, I don't sell them or anything, is just in case I do another book, which I've got rattling around in my brain, I could let you know that I decided to do another book.

And it's too big.

This binder is like 60 pages long, but it will allow you a great starting spot to maybe create a set of values that you agree with and plug it into the same format.

And it goes through a whole interview process, interview questions and everything like that to allow you to try to interview and hire like-minded candidates that share the same values that you have.

So you end up building a cohesive team.

And also on that website, you can also click, and there's a link in there to get you to Amazon, where my book exists in paperback and e-form.

So that's it.

The Leadership Blueprint on Amazon, also on the website, billgruber.com, where you'll find the recruitment binder.

Would somebody who wants to do better at job interviews, would they also be at an advantage if they look into the recruitment binder?

Absolutely.

And this stems from a horrific mistake I was making when I was interviewing people.

The biggest mistake I made when I interviewed people, which was a shock when I finally realized it, is I was giving away all of the answers before I should have.

So when I would bring somebody into the company to interview, I spent the first 20 minutes telling them how great the team was, why our values work so well, how cohesive we are.

These values aren't so important to all these reasons.

And then I would say, so what's important to you?

And they would say, well, these values that you mentioned.

What you just said.

Exactly, right?

That's an open book test.

So it's like one of those moments where you're like, am I nuts?

Right?

What have I done?

It goes back to your question.

If you give them all the answers before you ask the question, you shouldn't be surprised by the responses.

So in the end, I've learned, and I say this in the recruiting guide, that you ought to just keep your mouth shut, let them find out what they want about your company, right?

But at the same time, make sure that the questions you are asking aren't just all questions about whether you can do the job.

The questions are about how you think, what values you have, are you accountable?

And show me instances of accountability.

Show me instances of a sense of urgency.

Show me how you hedged or how you had backup plans for all your programs, because that's how we think.

Show me instances of transparency.

How were you transparent with the people who worked alongside you in the same team and other teams?

So really trying to pull out from these people, whether the same things that motivate us to work with each other is the same way that motivates them to work with their counterparts.

Because what we do know is if you and I have a cohesive team, Roberta, and someone comes in who has completely different values than you and I have, it could be really bad.

It can be distracting.

Yes, and it can really be a poison pill to our very cohesive group.

Right?

And they might be better in a different organization, but not our organization.

So understanding what your values are for your organization, and that's come up with by our team, not me.

I'm not saying here's what the culture should be.

We all agreed on these values and then hire for those values.

Even if somebody has lesser experience but has the same values as us, we know that we can bring them up in their contributions, right?

In their knowledge so they could be a great contributor.

This is why I always say college is going to teach you the technical skill, right?

The engineering, the doctor, whatever it is, lawyer.

But in the job is where you learn the actual work.

Yes.

Yes, yes, yes.

If you come with the values, the right mindset, you will learn the actual work because, yes, college will teach you the technicalities of the profession.

But when you actually enter the corporate space, that's when you learn the actual work.

I would agree with you.

Now you've hit another hot button, and I'll just briefly say, I think the three courses that should be taught in college, which are not taught at all, which are, you brought it up first, sales.

Because again, we're all selling.

We're all selling everything, right?

Negotiating, right?

We don't have any college course that says, okay, here's how to negotiate anything.

And the other one is personal budgeting.

How do you manage your personal money, your personal wealth?

How do you pay off your student loans?

And then how do you start saving?

How do you ultimately try to get a mortgage?

How can you set yourself up for financial success as a new person in the world?

So we do all these other things in college, right?

You could take real estate classes, and you could take finance classes and all the rest.

But day to day in, day out, I think those three courses are just would be so helpful.

They would have been helpful to me.

We still highlight that for sure.

Yes.

All of the intangible skills.

So yes.

Yes.

Because yes, we do need you.

I need my surgeon to know how to operate my heart and keep me alive, bring me back to life.

Yes.

I need him to know everything there is to know about whatever it is.

However, you do need to have those extra additional skills.

But more than anything, if you have the mindset and the values, when you enter spaces like your organization, you will then be part of this coercive team.

I agree.

I agree.

Any last words of wisdom, Bill?

Anything you were hoping you'd share with our listeners that I haven't asked you yet?

I know this has been super fun.

It's been a pleasure to speak with you.

I love your questions.

And I just hope that I'm able to help some people not endure the scar tissue that I had to endure to ultimately come up with what I thought was a pretty successful way to manage fabulous teams.

And that's my whole hope, is just to give back and maybe accelerate someone else's success, because it took me 30 year career to do it.

But I'm just in awe of the experience you shared with your company.

And hopefully, the more leaders that listen to you, the more that they can start to realize that transparency and communicating with their team openly creates that kind of loyalty that seems because everybody is wondering why is nobody loyal?

They have these terms like quiet quitting.

Nobody is invested anymore, and they're starting to wonder what the solution is.

Why is everybody leaving?

Or if they're here, why do they do the bare minimum and that kind of thing?

And so hopefully, if they hear your story, they'll be inspired to start to do things a little differently.

I would agree.

And my hope is the same as yours.

I like that.

What's the wisdom from Bill Gruber, the entrepreneur, author of The Leadership Blueprint, and I learned to fly from coast to coast.

Thank you, Bill, for being here.

This was really fun for me as well.

Thank you for having me.

My absolute pleasure.

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