Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Go find someone or some resource that can help you build a framework and an understanding for how management works and apply your incredible skillset you have for performing to performing as a manager. Don't think, oh, because I was so great at this job and now that I've been promoted, I'm supposed to be equally good at this. That is a pitfall.

That will get you in trouble. Don't put that unrealistic expectation on yourself. Give yourself time to learn and grow into the role.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast. I'm your host, Roberta Ndlela. 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 with our audience.

We have our returning guest who we had such an amazing conversation with last time. Andrew Poles is back to delve deeper in one of the main topics that we discussed, mainly involving the skills that are different when you're a founder versus when you lead people in a very successful organization. And before I go any further, please welcome him back to the show.

Hi, Andrew. Hi, Roberta. Great to be back.

Thanks for having me again. And I'm glad you're back. Welcome back.

Now, before we dive deeper into the skills that you said were different if you're a founder or a CEO versus when you lead people, since our last conversation, have you had any clients who have faced that challenge and have come to you with it? Let's see. Yes, I have this come up very regularly. Very regularly.

Yes. Yes. In fact, I've had- I know it's like beating up an old drum, but I know that, yeah, it's a very frequent problem.

Yes, go ahead. Yeah, 100%. I was thinking both existing clients and a new client I onboarded were both dealing with this issue in the last month.

And did it occur to them that being successful in whatever area they are excelling in does not automatically translate to, that means I automatically know how to lead people in an organization and get a team together to be high performing? Usually that's a conversation we have pretty early on, but the founders that I coach oftentimes are coming to me because they've already like run headfirst into that wall at full speed and had a wake up moment where they're like, wow, I don't really know how to do this part of what I'm doing. I'm not doing this very successfully. So many times they're aware of something like that that's happening.

And we have that conversation once or twice in the very beginning of the coaching engagement, but it's kind of hard to miss. Something's not going well and that you need some support. You don't know how to do this piece of your job.

And has it ever occurred to your clients, especially when they come to you with a challenge that it also affects the bottom line? Yes, I think especially with venture backed startup founders, they're aware that everything affects the bottom line, but in their case, the bottom line, depending on where they are in the startup journey, the bottom line many times has to do with speed and therefore runway and how much time they have to be able to hit critical milestones to reach the next stage at which they could raise the next round of funding to support their growth going forward. With small business owners who have a team of say 10 people or fewer, I think when they feel like it hits their bottom line is when someone who works for them does something that doesn't go well. And maybe it creates some unplanned expense on a project or customer churn.

That's when they realize that it hits the bottom line, but it may not become something they're aware of. It's affecting their bottom line until it literally hits the revenue or the expenses side of their P&L. When they're just having friction with that person, they don't necessarily see that there's gonna be a profit and loss impact.

Because I'm wondering, we've talked so much on this show about how leaders think they've communicated when they haven't communicated enough on expectations, on what is it exactly that you do and how it feeds into the bigger puzzle of the organization. And so a lot of their team members don't even know what it is that they do specifically or what they are required to produce at that time because the leader did not communicate well enough. Yeah.

Just because you told me something once, Andrew, does that necessarily mean that I got it exactly the way you did? That's 100% accurate, yeah, yeah. So then how do they deal with that when they realize that this is the actual circumstance that was created? Well, I think if we just kind of pan out a little bit, if you look at this common theme that founders are usually, not always, but usually they're really great with sales and or fundraising. And the reason why founders tend to be quite strong in sales, and this is relevant to what we're talking about with management, but this is one of those facets of this larger conversation we're having about how the skills that brought them success as an individual don't always transfer over to what's required of them once they're in a position of leadership of a company and a team of people that they need to manage.

So in sales, a huge piece of being successful with sales is conviction, because what needs to happen in a sales conversation is that a prospective customer who's evaluating your business, your product, your service, they don't have conviction at the beginning, typically, that what you offer will give them the solution they need or get them where they wanna go. So part of what needs to happen is conviction. They need to become, let's just say, reasonably confident to all the way completely convicted that you can help them.

And so the conviction of the founder is a big part of that. Now, there's way more to it than that, but that's a big part of it. But when you go to start managing people and what you need to have happen when you manage people is you need to have them act in a very particular way to produce a specific outcome.

Conviction is not what makes the difference there. And to really appreciate this, you have to kind of understand the psychology and the neurology of how human beings behave. So human beings behave in this really weird way compared to other animals on the planet, as far as we can tell, which is that human beings can only act in ways that are logically consistent, that make sense to or from their view and experience of the world, not based on how the world actually is, but based on how they personally view and experience the world.

And human beings' ability to make sense of the world is mediated by language. We are fundamentally linguistic creatures. And most people don't think about this or appreciate this or really give this, it's due.

One of the simplest ways you can get how real this is is if you read Helen Keller's autobiography, right? And in her autobiography, she talks about the fact that from her point of view, before she learned a language, so in her first, I don't remember how old she was when she started to learn sign language, but before she learned language, her experience of herself was that she was just this animal of raw emotion. She didn't consider herself human. She literally says to herself, I don't think I was a human being until I learned how to speak and listen.

She said, I was just purely reacting to my emotions based on emotion. And she said, when I learned language, I became a human being. That's when, for me, I started to be human.

And so that's because human beings' brains are designed to make sense of the world through meaning, through context, through language. And there are many, many, many examples of this, but the point of this for our conversation is that every human being has a different set of experiences, a different cultural background, different contextual frameworks that they use to make sense of the world around them. And so everyone's actions are perfectly logistically consistent with, they are perfectly lined up with their view and experience of whatever they're dealing with.

If you're managing someone and you need them to act in this way over here, if people who are watching are pointing up to the right, but they're acting this way over here to the left, I'm pointing to the left, then your conviction that acting this way to the right is the right way to go is not enough to change the way that they view the world. You're saying something to them that doesn't make sense to them. It doesn't make sense to act that way.

They're not buying what you're selling. They're not buying what you're selling because it's not a sales context. So let's just see if we can make this more real.

Recently, I had a first coaching call with a founder and the founder's COO. They wanted me to coach them together. They were having real challenges managing the business together.

And the founder kept saying, everything just kind of feels wobbly to me. It doesn't feel solid. And the COO kept saying, we're just trying to do too much all at once.

And the founder keeps intervening sometimes and kind of throwing things off. So the two of them were not synced up. When we had the first coaching call and we were starting to talk about the system that they both had agreed to use to manage the business, which is called EOS, Entrepreneurial Operating System.

It's a well-known system you can use for managing businesses. And it's very effective when you use it the way it's meant to be used. We got to this point where the founder was sort of complaining that the rocks and the rocks, think of rocks if you're not familiar with EOS for your listeners as these immovable targets or goals that you set for the year and then you break it down into quarters.

And those are, they're called rocks because they don't move. So we design all of our strategy and all of our allocation of resources and all these things around these rocks to make these things happen. So the founder kept saying, I just feel like the rocks aren't solid and things are wobbly.

And then finally at one point in the conversation, the COO who's responsible for this said, well, what is the point of fixing these rocks if you're just going to come in and change them anyway? Okay. So his view, this is the point I want to make about this thing about managing people and learning a new skillset. His view and experience of the situation was that no matter what he did, if he made the most beautiful plan in the world, the owner was going to come in and sideswipe all that work by changing things.

So therefore the COO wasn't fixing the rocks the way they were meant to be done. He wasn't nailing them down and making them specific and making them concrete. And as a function of that, there was sort of like slop in the system.

There was room for ambiguity and that ambiguity then was making the founder feel very uncomfortable with how nonspecific the plans were, how much room there was to pivot and move around. And so he was intervening to try to fix that problem. Now he kept telling his COO, hey, there's too much wobble and you're doing too much firefighting, these kinds of things.

Like you were saying, but the COO wasn't, as you said, buying what he was selling because what the COO was dealing with is there is no point to me doing what you're saying because you're just going to change it. So when that finally got said out loud and we realized the whole dynamic was keying off of these two things, that the COO didn't want to fix things down specifically and the founder was therefore intervening because he felt very uncomfortable with the lack of clarity. They were able to very quickly just make an agreement with each other.

Like we're going to use the EOS system the way it was meant to be done and we're going to fix these rocks and no one gets to change them. And the founder said, if I come to you with an idea that I think is a good idea and it's going to undermine or move one of these rocks, your job is to tell me no. You say no, and I agree.

If you say no, we won't do it because the most important thing are these rocks that we agree on in advance. Nothing's more important than that. That's what the rocks mean.

It means these are the most important things and everything else has to come second to that. As soon as we got that sorted out, everything started to click in their partnership. So it wasn't about the founder selling the COO on his idea of like, there's too much wobble or you shouldn't be firefighting.

We had to understand how does the COO see and experience this whole situation such that he's not doing what you need him to do. And as soon as we got to that, it was possible then to shift the way that that COO saw the situation. He began to see the situation in terms of, okay, if we fix the rocks, I now have his agreement that he won't change them.

So now that's what I know I have to do because that's how management works. It just cleared up like that. So you can't sell your way into that.

So the skillset, for example, in managing people, one of them, not the only one, but one of the key ones that founders have to learn is this thing about how people's actions are logically connected and they're even constrained by their view and experience of the world. And so you have to learn how to see through other people's eyes. You have to learn how to see the way other people see the world so that when that way they see the world doesn't allow for them to perform or act in the way you need, you can then have a conversation with them, not to change their behavior, but to change their point of view.

Because if you change their point of view, then they will change their behavior. So that's one of many skillsets that don't translate directly from, for example, being able to grind and having grit and knowing how to sell with conviction and being a really good problem solver. Those things that tend to make people very successful as an independent contributor or as a sole operator don't translate into management.

So that's one example. I can clearly, clearly see the COO's point of view because there's nothing more frustrating than always doing something and then it just gets shut away. Because it's a waste of your time as well.

Totally. And that trust is lost because you know that I can put all my effort into this, but it's just gonna be shunned. There's no point.

And more than anything, the CEO being the one to change, but then also being the one to request these rocks to stay in place, it's almost like contradictory. Yeah, because the CEO has kind of called himself out. He has said to the COO many times, the reason why I hired you is because I am very creative, I'm very visionary, but I'm not a good operator and I need you to rein me in.

I need you to be my no man. I need you to tell me no. When I have an idea that's gonna derail what we're building, I need you to be the governor on my creativity.

He said, I am not capable yet of governing my own creative process. I always think of these new ideas. So that's why I hired you.

I hired you to say no. He's trying to authorize him, to empower him. I hired you to say no.

But the COO is very enrolled sometimes by these ideas, or he's uncertain about whether these ideas are a good idea and he's trying to be open-minded. But what they really needed was to see that they needed an agreement and a process for at the beginning of a year saying, you know what, the most important thing for this year. And this only works for companies that are pretty well established, by the way.

This does not work well for companies that are very new because they're still trying to understand what do our customers really want? What do they respond well to? And that requires a lot of testing and iterating and pivoting. But that's not where this business was. This business had a healthy, healthy business that people were responding well to.

And what they were trying to do was open up now more of these kinds of businesses in other locations and needed to replicate what they had done. And they needed to do it at a very high level of quality. And so they didn't need to iterate.

They didn't need to experiment. So in that case, what really works is to say, okay, these are the most important things we have to accomplish this year. These things.

And there's nothing that's gonna come up that's more important than this because if we can't replicate, we can't grow. If we can't do this repeatedly, we can't grow. We can't scale.

So for the COO and the CEO both to be sitting there and saying, well, maybe we should do this thing. Maybe we should do that thing. And maybe we should just throw all of this out the window is completely destructive.

The COO needed to understand that his point of view that maybe he should go along with these things, not because he was being a good shoulder, but because he was genuinely open-minded that maybe there was a better way was actually hurting the business. And as soon as he saw that, as soon as he saw, oh, this is hurting the business, I need to keep us on this track. And after this is solid, we can start iterating again later, but not now.

Boom, like I said, his view shifted. And then he became the governor on that process, holding the line on what they both agreed they were gonna do. So this is a very important skill, but it's not the only skill that people need to develop.

And I'll give you another example. And this one is equally powerful that new leaders and managers need to understand. And that is that there are three factors at least, and there's probably literally an infinite number, okay? But just to make this simple, there are three key factors that come into play when it comes to performance and performance outcomes.

Performance meaning people's behavior, what they're doing, the actions they're taking, and the performance outcome meaning the business results that happen as a result of that, whether it's someone sends off an email or someone closes a deal or someone builds a piece of software, whatever the outcome is. So when you're looking at how all the business behaves, you have the performer himself or herself, just the person taking those actions, right? And then you have, are the actions they're taking the right actions at the right level of quality and quantity. So I wanna talk about this rule, Roberta.

This is such a great and simple rule because any result that is possible to accomplish can get accomplished through taking a sufficient number of a sufficiently high quality actions. If you take enough actions that are sufficient quality, you can produce any result. Do you wanna sell whatever your product or service at a million dollars a year of revenue? We just have to contact a certain number of people who are the right kind of targets for your business, kind of prospects, and you have to have good quality conversations with them.

You have to take the right action at each stage, all these things. So it's quality times quantity. Quality and quantity are what allow people to produce actions.

And there's a lot baked into that idea of quality, right? You have to be, for example, building or selling something that actually works, that people are willing to buy, you know? So there's a lot baked into that, but you get the basic idea, right? Okay. So now one of the mistakes I see new managers make is that, and we all know this from our own experience, that sometimes you're just kind of in the zone and you're just producing incredible results and everything's flowing. And sometimes maybe you're new, you don't really know what you're doing.

Maybe you're doubting yourself. So you're being tentative or, you know, you're doing these other things that are kind of psychological in nature that are undermining your performance, but they're more psychological. Both factors.

It's not you just saying, oh my goodness, what is this? But they call it unconscious incompetence and unconscious competence. Yeah. So there's that piece of it, that unconscious incompetence, that unconscious competence.

And there's also sometimes like, oh, you know, my partner just told me they want a divorce. And now emotionally I'm wrecked and I'm going to work and I'm emotionally wrecked and I'm not present. And so I'm not performing as well.

And so there can be all kinds of psych, oh, I just got a diagnosis from my doctor and I'm feeling really scared. I don't want to share this with anyone at work. It's very personal.

There can be all kinds of things going on with someone psychologically that's affecting their performance, okay? So there's a psychological factor. Then there's sort of like, are the right actions being taken at the right level of quantity? So there's both of these things that are baked into performance. Most new managers don't understand that.

And the rule of effective management that I have found works is before you deal with anyone's psychology or emotional state, you have to look into the mechanics of their job. So are they using all the systems? You know, are they taking all the steps on their checklist? Are they doing the sufficient number of actions? You have to look into the mechanics of things before you deal with anyone's psychology because let's say you're in a sales role. This is the easiest place to understand this.

And in the sales role, you have to have a certain number of conversations to sell stuff. Like you can't just talk to one person and then say, well, I try, you know, you have to talk to 20 people, 30 people, 40 people, whatever it is, okay? So if you're looking at the sales person is not really producing results, the results that you want and you look at their performance, you're like, well, they only talk to two people a week. You don't need to talk about their psychology.

You just need to find out why are you only talking to two people a week? You need to talk to 30 people a week. You need to talk to six people a day. They're like, oh, oh, well, I don't talk to that many people because I only want to talk to the ones who are really well-qualified.

Like, no, you need to talk to 30 people a week. No matter what. Go talk to 30 people a week for the next three weeks, then we're going to talk again and watch what happens.

And they'll go and talk to 30 people and something will move. Something will shift, okay? So you have to understand how to diagnose when something isn't working or what are the root causes. And sometimes they're mechanical.

Someone just doesn't understand or know or follow a checklist or whatever. And sometimes they're more psychological or like what we were talking about before, like something's going on. And if you don't know how to diagnose what it is, then whatever you start to manage them for, it's going to be the wrong thing and it creates more chaos and it creates lower performance.

So being a great manager is a lot about being a great diagnostician and helping people get to the root cause of what's going on in their performance. Now we have two things, right? They have two skillsets. Leaders need to learn to become great managers.

And that's two of maybe, between five and maybe seven really core competencies they have to build to be as effective as a manager of people as they are as an individual performer. Yes. And the thing is, when you first mentioned the COO, CEO case, my thought was that's literally the root cause.

Do we ever look at the root causes? And now you just talked about it as well, that the root cause, diagnose it. Is it mechanical or is it psychological? Right. But whether we are coaching leaders, whether we are giving corporate training to a team, do we ever go to the root cause or we just say things that sound great? I mean, this is a good question.

And the ability to diagnose the root cause, it is often lacking. And it's a skillset you can learn. You can learn this.

But most people are never taught this. And so if it isn't intuitive for you, if you haven't sort of already figured this out, you will have such a hard time running a business. I mean, this is critical to running a business.

You have to know, is what's going on that there's something about our product the market isn't responding to? Are we selling it to the wrong set of people who don't really need this? Is the price point off? Is it something about our sales process where at some point where it's breaking down because we're having the wrong conversation? What is it? Because if you have a product issue and all you're working on is how well you sell a product no one wants, good luck with that. That's not gonna work. Converse is also true.

If you're working on your product and working on your product and you think that's the reason why no one's buying, when in fact you're not selling it to the right people or you're not selling it in the right way or at the right price point. No amount of tweaking the product is likely gonna fix that. So diagnosing root causes is probably the most important skill set for a CEO to have in running a business.

Right. And we say the same thing in communication as well when we say, if you improve your communication skills it will help you professionally and personally. Even in your personal relationships if you don't diagnose the root cause it's not gonna fix whatever the challenge is that you're facing.

Yes. Yeah, exactly. Because at the end of the day I think that a lot of times we gloss over stuff again with the psychology, whatever the fear is whatever the not wanting to tackle it because especially at work, you know how we think, you know what? I just want this to be here, get all the work done.

I don't wanna have to hear about your stuff at home, Andrew. You know, we only have eight hours in the day. Right.

There's a lot to do. Sometimes some managers, yes they do come with that perspective thinking let's just be productive. Whatever's going on, you'll deal with it at 5 p.m. when you get home.

Right. Yeah, and there's nothing wrong with that if it works but if it doesn't work, you can be right about that and continue to have underperforming teams or you can try something else. You know, if you're the CEO and you want a company where you don't have to deal with that then you can kind of go through people until you find people who do function that way very highly.

There are some people who can perform at a high level when they suppress or whatever it is or kind of like bracket what's going on at home. And that is a skillset. I am not trying to diminish what you're talking about.

If I have a surgeon who's gonna do brain surgery on me that surgeon's performance better not be affected by the conversation he just had or she just had with her husband or his wife. Better not be anything about that surgeon's performance that gets affected by their home life. And so having that demand for professionalism is totally legitimate.

However, depending on the kind of business you have and whatever and how big it is, how many people it might be really good for you to develop a sensitivity to the fact that sometimes people in certain roles are gonna be affected by that and to be able to skillfully support that because sometimes the person themself is trying to be that professional, that consummate professional. They are trying not to bring it up at work. They are trying to overcome it.

But the fact of the matter is it's affecting their performance. And so all manner of ignoring it, bracketing it or trying to overcome it is not gonna change the way it is diminishing their performance. And to be someone who can be like, hey, Roberta, I know you're sitting here working hard and everything, but I just feel like something's got you.

Something's bothering you. Are you okay? Do you need anything? And then, I had someone do this to me once. I'll give you this example.

Okay, I was running a huge event, huge event. And there was a lot at stake. And I had done this many, many times.

I was very competent at this particular event management thing. The leader who was leading this event had flown in from out of town and they were very, very skilled as well at this. And as we were trying to get the whole thing set up before everyone showed up for the event, like everything was just going wrong.

Nothing was working. And she pulled me aside in another room away from everyone else. And she just said, what is going on with you? Something is up with you.

I don't know what it is, just spill the beans, man. What is up? I had recently had a heartbreak in my professional life that was relevant to what we were doing at the event. Like I had this big goal I was going for and I've been working, working, working.

And I think I like, I didn't get through some interview process or something, and I was gonna have to repeat all this work I had done. And I was heartbroken, just heartbroken. And I hadn't really talked about it.

I hadn't really grieved about it. I was just like swallowing it, stuffing it down. And so I just like let it all out with her.

I just told her the whole thing. And then after I said all this thing, she said, oh, you're heartbroken. She put the word on it.

And then I just like started crying. You didn't realize that it was heartbreak for you at the time? I didn't realize it was heartbreak. And so as soon as she said that, I started crying.

And I was like, yes, I'm heartbroken. She goes, okay, I understand that. I get that.

She goes, can you just be heartbroken and run this dang event now? And I was like, yeah, I can do that. And we went back in there and it was like, boom, everything flipped because I just needed to kind of like had someone put words to that so I could understand what I was dealing with so I wasn't resisting my own self so hard. I wasn't fighting myself so I could just be heartbroken and go do my job.

So had she not done that, I promise you it would have been a disastrous night or at best like slightly below average, but we had a breakthrough event. So developing this skillset.