EP25 (Part 2) Getting and keeping the best people.

This episode focuses on creating an environment and experience that makes employees want to stay and brings out the best in them. It covers topics such as differentiating between leadership and management, creating predictable environments, intrinsic motivators, defining winning aspirations and goals, individual and company-wide meetings, and developing a value proposition for talent. The episode emphasizes the importance of intentionality, transparency, and building a strong culture.

Takeaways

• Leadership is about providing clarity, direction, inspiration, while management is about setting clear expectations and creating systems for accountability.
• Intrinsic motivators for employees include autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
• Creating a clear purpose and vision for the organization is crucial for attracting and retaining top talent.
• Regular one-on-one meetings and company-wide addresses promote transparency, accountability, and engagement.
• Building a strong culture requires intentional effort and a focus on creating an environment where employees can do their best work.

Chapters

00:00
Introduction and Differentiation between Leadership and Management

01:24
Creating Predictable Environments and Meeting Expectations

02:21
Intrinsic Motivators: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose

05:36
Common Mistakes in Creating Purpose

06:58
Defining Winning Aspirations and Long-Term Goals

08:14
Essential Intent and Annual Objectives

09:33
Quarterly Objectives and Weekly Leadership Team Meetings

12:27
Individual Goals and One-on-One Meetings

13:56
Competing for Talent and Developing a Value Proposition

14:56
Company-Wide Addresses and Transparency

28:00
Creating an Intentional Environment and Building Culture

29:25
CEO One-on-One Sessions

Find out more about working with me or about applying to join the ILN. mike@smbmastery.com.au

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeadamscott/

https://theintentionalleaders.com/

Transcript

Mike (00:04.022)
Hey guys and girls, good to be back. So let's jump straight in. Last episode was part one of two of a little quick series called getting and keeping the best people, possibly the hardest thing in business. Um, right up front, I think let's distinguish between leadership and management because for this episode, I think this matters quite a lot. So the way that I think about it, and if you speak to, you know, 20 founders or leaders, you'll probably get 20 different.

definitions, but this is mine. Leadership is about providing clarity, direction, inspiration. It's about the vision, creating it, and bringing people along with you. It's about modeling the behaviors that you want to see in the people that you lead. The more I observe myself, and the more I work with businesses and leaders, I'm convinced that any dysfunction in the business can be traced up to the leadership team. And its behaviors.

The behaviors that are modeled in the leadership team will permeate the business and ultimately set the culture, whether you like it or not. Do what I say and not what I do doesn't really cut it, at least not in my experience. Management on the other hand, is about setting very clear expectations and then creating and nurturing the systems that hold people accountable for doing the things that were agreed upon.

This is about creating predictable environments using consistent tools, frameworks, and meeting rhythms so that people can do their best work, all in service of the company's vision and its winning aspirations. Okay, so those are sort of my, at least how I sort of define or differentiate between leadership and management because I don't think they're the same things. But how do we do this? So in part one, it was all about giving yourself the best chance of success of getting the best people that you possibly can.

into your organization. And this episode is about keeping them in your organization. How do you make these people want to stay? And how do you bring the best out of these people? We do this by creating an environment and an experience that makes them want to stay, but how do we do that? So in this episode, I hope to be able to share just some practical things that you can implement that should help this tremendously. I wanna start with one of my favorite.

Mike (02:21.462)
Books, which is a book called Drive written by Daniel Pink. And he talks about what intrinsically motivates people. It's not money. And this is a good place to start. So I think it's important to note though, similar to sort of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the stuff that follows is only really applicable once people are earning enough money so that money is not a massive source of stress for them. If people are living below the poverty line, everything that follows.

is not going to apply because they're in a state of panic, crisis and desperation. So that's important to understand. Okay. So once people are earning enough money so that money is not their primary worry and actually that they're just living in a complete fight or flight mindset, we need to focus on three intrinsic motivators, autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Let's break those down really quickly. Now what follows is, you know, inspired certainly by Daniel Pink, but a lot of this is my own.

language, so just bear that in mind. I would strongly suggest reading his book. It's fantastic. Okay, autonomy. This is about not micromanaging people. It's about giving people the space and the environment to do things in the way that they see best as the experts. However, it's not a free for all. So this needs to be done within the context of clear values, clear behaviors, and clear expectations. The second one is mastery.

This is about creating the environment for people to hone the craft they are passionate about. To continually be able to get better at the things that matter to them. People that are passionate about what they do will not stay if they are not continually learning and growing. And this is a really big point here. There's a story that I've heard in many different forms, many different times. My sort of version of the story is as follows, which I really like. So there's a CFO talking to a CEO.

And the CFO says, but what if we keep investing all of this time and money in our people and they leave? And the CEO says, well, what if we don't and they stay? Really good to think about it that way. You may well invest a lot of money and time and energy and everything into helping people to get much better at what they do. And they might move on and that's actually fine because in my experience, when you...

Mike (04:35.81)
develop a reputation as a business that makes people much, much better at what they do. It's a bit of a, a bit of a circle, like a good circle. People will want to work for you because they get better and sure people will move on, but there's a flow to it. So we'll park that for now, but it's really worth thinking about. The third piece of this is purpose and this doesn't need to be some really deep and inspiring thing. This is just about being clear and making sure that everyone in your business is clear.

on what they are a part of and more importantly, what they are doing in the day to day and how that relates to something that is bigger than themselves. When we can see clearly how what we do every day relates to the bigger thing and we care about that thing, we feel a sense of purpose and that's when we begin to contribute at our highest levels. I see a lot of businesses getting these two things wrong and I've gotten these two things wrong many times and typically I see it going wrong in two main places.

Good intentions, founders and leadership teams try to create this with the best possible intention, but they end up over-engineering it. And they end up coming up with some overly grandiose, I can never say that word, but overly grandiose purpose that actually is just meaningless because it's nonsense. The second mistake that I see is kind of the other side of the scale or spectrum. They do nothing.

because they believe that their people should just feel lucky to have a job and to work at that business and they should just get on with it and they should just work. I don't think I need to explain too much around this one, but this really doesn't work very well either. What we need to do is we need to create a very clear purpose that people align with and buy into, but it doesn't need to be some massive life-changing thing. The reality is that most of the businesses that I know and have run and have worked in and with and what have you, they don't do life-changing work.

And that's totally fine. Being part of a growing business that is healthy, that is great to work for, that serves their customers really, really well, that is meaningful enough. And you should be proud to lead a business like that. And you should be proud to work for a business like that. It doesn't have to be like massive and grandiose. Cool. Okay. So following that, we need to get really clear on what we are trying to do here as an organization. Why did we start the business?

Mike (06:58.082)
Get clear on that. Was it to be better? Was it to be faster? Was it to be first? Was it, I don't know, just what was the purpose? Why did the founders start the business in the first place? The second thing is to get really clear on like, what are we actually trying to do here? So I love the strategy framework from Playing to Win, Roger Martin's work. The first question or the first choice that we begin with is what is our winning aspiration? What are we trying to do here? And how will we measure that?

We need to then move on to what is our long range goal? What is the most important thing that we want to achieve over the next, let's say, five to 10 years? Why is that the most important thing? We need to then move on to what do we want our business to look and feel like three years from now? Revenue, profit, sure, that's important, but how many people do we want? How many offices do we want? Where are we based? What sort of customers do we wanna serve? How do we wanna serve them?

What does the culture feel like? What is the work that we're doing? Like this stuff is really important to paint a picture, not just in numbers, but what do we want this business to look and feel like three years from now? And what's the delta between where we want to be and where we are now and how do we get there? Next, we move on to a concept that comes out of Greg McEwen's book, Essentialism. I love this concept. What is your essential intent? What is the one...

concrete thing that we absolutely have to achieve in the next, let's say, one to three years? Usually I like to work on sort of one and a half years-ish here. So what is the one concrete, measurable thing that we absolutely have to achieve above all else in the next one to three years? Another way to put it is what is the one decision that helps us to make a thousand smaller decisions?

What is the things that people can calibrate to? What is the thing that people can constantly ask? Am I doing something that is in service of this? Then from there, we build out our annual or our 12 month objectives. I really like OKRs as a framework, but I'm talking about goals here. So you might use OKRs, that's what I like. You might use ROCs, you might use smart goals. I mean, there's a whole ton of different goal setting frameworks. But the point is getting very, very clear on the three to five things that the business has to achieve.

Mike (09:06.918)
over the next 12 months, how we will measure those things, and to make sure that one person and only one person is accountable for each metric. From there, we break it down into 90 day or quarterly OKRs or goals, whatever system you use. Same thing, must be very clear, must be very measurable, must have only one person accountable for each metric. And then this is where the rubber really hits the road. That's kind of what your weekly leadership team meeting is generally moving along.

This sounds like a mouthful, but when you can answer all of these questions, clearly, succinctly, and document and visualize them, you paint a very, very clear picture of why the business exists, where we want to take the business, how we will get there, how we will measure it, who is accountable, and what your part in this is. This work is hard, it is slow, and it's iterative. It's not set and forget. We come back to this all the time, but when you can get this done, you have an artifact.

that is incredibly powerful for getting alignment in an organization. And why does this relate to great people? Because the best people, in my experience, they want to know this. They want to experience this. They want to be part of this. This is important. It's not enough to just have this inside the founder's head. So getting really clear on this, getting it out of your head as the founder and documenting it very succinctly, very clearly so that the entire organization knows it very well is really important. You can't assume that people know what you're thinking.

I used to do this a lot. It's not the case. Often it's there, often the stuff exists, but it only exists in the founder's head. So sometimes when I do this work with teams, it's all there and the founder's almost like rolling their eyes because they're like, oh, I know this stuff, but they're the only one that knows it. Sometimes it's not there. Sometimes the founder needs to work on this and it's actually a long and iterative process. Both of those things are fine. It's important to do this work. This is not about.

going away with the founder or the founders, using a ton of sticky notes and butcher paper and leaving a day or a weekend or whatever, feeling all inspired and pumped, and that's the end of that. No, you do that work. You do use off-sites for this sort of stuff, but these sessions are where the work starts. This needs to then be hugely simplified and documented so that it can be shared with your whole business, often and in a format that is very easy to access and very easy to digest. If you have a 30 page document for this,

Mike (11:28.658)
My challenge on that will be that you don't actually understand it well enough because you can't articulate this succinctly If you follow the scaling up process They use something called a one-page strategic plan and OPSP if you follow the EOS work They use something called the vision traction organizer When I work with clients and in my own business Kind of use the mix of all of these things and a bit of my own stuff The point is to create an artifact that is one to two pages long with very few words That is incredibly simple to give a full view of the vision

the strategy, what we're gonna do to get there, and how we will measure this. This is also where you model accountability in the organization. Remember, how you behave as a leader is how your business will behave. You can forget about creating behaviors and looking for change in the business if you're not willing to model them. So from a business level, we set these things, and then we model to the organization how we hold ourselves accountable and measure the progress towards the things that we're setting out to do in the business. Okay.

So from this, you want to be working sort of long-term to a state where every single person in the business has their own individual goals, all in service of the entire structure I just explained to you. Again, I like OKRs, but these might be rocks or SMART goals or whatever works. What matters is that everybody is clear on both what is expected of them by the business and the work that they want to do on themselves to get better and grow.

It's not always an easy process to implement and coach and sort of facilitate everybody getting goals and OKRs or goals or OKRs. Won't go into too much detail here, but it's really important that you get this right eventually, especially for the kinds of people that you want in your organization. Generally, I find that great people really want this kind of stuff. This stuff then really comes to life and into focus and gets leveraged and nurtured in the one-to-one meetings, one-on-one meetings.

It's my strong belief that every single person in a business should be having a one-on-one. Ideally weekly. Yep, weekly. That's what I said. A lot of people will be going, are you crazy? That's too much. But I don't think it is. I really do think it should be weekly. In some cases where this is just quite simply not possible and not realistic, we want to be doing them at a minimum fortnightly. To be really clear here, though, what I'm talking about is that we should have a standing calendar appointment on this cadence,

Mike (13:56.066)
probably not less than fortnightly, but that there should also be some flexibility on being able to reschedule these meetings and maybe even miss one. So what actually ends up happening is that in reality, nobody should ever really go more than three to four weeks without having a one-on-one. And my experience is that if you have a weekly diary event for these kinds of things, they'll quite often get rescheduled and put out, and that's fine, this kind of meeting is fine. But what actually manifests is that they end up having

on average throughout the year, probably one every two to three weeks, which I think is sufficient. So that's really important. What did these one-on-ones look like?

Mike (14:40.734)
Okay, so firstly, we need to get clear on what the intention of these one-on-ones are. So these one-on-ones are about four things in my opinion. They're around coaching and support. They're around beginning to build and continuing to build rapport, so caring personally. They're about challenging directly, hat tip there to radical candor, which I'll speak to a little bit later. And they're about accountability. I believe that in these one-on-ones, there are four key parts that every one of these one-on-ones should have.

It's a bit oversimplified, but I think there are four key parts that must exist. You can add stuff to the one-on-ones, that's cool, but I wouldn't take any of the following four parts out. It's also important to make clear that each manager will and should have their own vibe, their own style, their own all sorts of things, and that's cool. But every single person should have broadly the same experience of what a one-on-one looks like from a structured perspective. You can't have some people in your org having...

a one-on-one in a totally different way with totally different intentions and structures to other people. It's not a good thing because they're having very different experiences. Okay, so for ease of explanation, let's assume that these one-on-one meetings are one hour. They don't have to be, but let's just assume that they are for this. The first part that has to exist is you have to have a round of accountability, right? So I generally start with this. What do I mean by this? Basically the question, how did you go with the things that you said you would do in our last meeting?

I wouldn't spend more than five minutes on this. This is really just a report back, right? The second part of the meeting is a round of updates on their goals. So you might be using KPIs, OKRs, ROCs, whatever. Again, five minutes, it's a report back saying, this is how I'm progressing. This is whether I'm on track, off track, what have you. Also, wouldn't spend more than five minutes. From this, you then move into what is the bulk of the meeting, which is effectively leading coaching and managing. This is where you help the person to remove roadblocks.

to get over challenges, to challenge them to be better, to think out the box, to improve, et cetera. And this is where the leadership style specifically and differently comes in. And that's totally fine. Everyone will be different and that's good. What really matters here though, is that this is about support, clarity and coaching. So think more questions, less talking, right? This is about coaching somebody to get over through or around obstacles.

Mike (17:03.286)
That's the bulk of the meeting. If we're using an hour, I would say that's probably 40 minutes, 40 to 45 minutes. Then finally you end off with a version of the confirmation of what that person is committing to doing between now and the next time you meet. Remember when we started with accountability, that's to check in on the things that they said at the end of the last meeting. What are the things that you will be doing between now and the next time we meet? Really important that this is written down or emailed. It must be driven by the staff member.

They must commit to this. I find that Trello is a really great tool for this, probably the easiest one that I've used, but that's just a tool. You can use whatever you want. It doesn't really matter which tool you use, but it needs to be consistent across the organization. The stuff needs to be committed to, documented in writing.

This is not just where the rubber hits the road in terms of accountability and progress, but it's also where you build trust and that takes time and intention. It doesn't just happen. That's ultimately what leads to accountability. And that's ultimately what leads to the results that you want to see. Couple of things that I want to refer to and offer to think about here. Okay. The first one is very well articulated by a great book called Radical Candor by Kim Scott, and it's to think about this in a formula. In fact,

quite a lot of the stuff that follows is a nice formula. So the formula is care personally, plus challenge directly equals radical candor. So you can't just skip the care personally part and jump straight to the challenge directly part. If you do that, it won't work well. I think she calls that obnoxious aggression. You've got to do the work to build the caring personally part first. The second thing that I wanna point you to is I've taken a lot of inspiration from the EOS system and from the book, Traction.

Another formula here that's really helpful to think about, I've slightly sort of adapted the wording, but it's certainly inspired by EOS. And that is that another formula is strong leadership plus great management results in accountability. Again, you can't just skip the accountability, you can't just skip to the accountability part. That's not how this works. We need to be very clear on what's expected of us and why. We need to have buy-in before we are going to see and have demonstrated high levels of accountability.

Mike (19:19.086)
Accountability is the result of doing the first two good. It's the result of managing and leading very well. It requires intentionality, effort and commitment. You might've had some really amazing people in your organization before, and you just wish everyone was like them, but it's a mistake to build a business around these kinds of people. It really is. In fact, it's better to build your business around the assumption that everyone will be mediocre and that the business could still thrive with mediocre people.

Then when you've bought the business around being able to survive and thrive even on mediocre people, you still go after the best possible people. But the business does not then rely on individual heroics because that creates key person dependencies. It creates all kinds of power dynamics. It creates weakness in your business. So take it from someone that's done this badly many times through a few businesses and that's felt the pain that comes from this. So hat tip to Michael Gerber here from the E-Myth Revisited, another fantastic book. But...

Really important to remember that and very helpful. The last part of this or the last sort of, I guess, model that I wanna refer to is from, again, one of my favorite books. It's Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team. He has a very simple model that's incredibly powerful. It's a bit like Maslow's hierarchy of needs in that it's progressive. So you can't just skip a step, okay? Again, oversimplified in my words, the first stage of this model is trust. And without trust, if you don't,

overcome the dysfunction of a lack of trust, you don't get to move to the next stage, which is an avoidance of conflict. And unless you overcome that dysfunction, you don't get to the next phase, which is a lack of commitment or buy-in. And if you don't move through and over that dysfunction, you don't get to the next stage, which is a lack of accountability. And the final stage is an inattention to results. The point here is that you have to start with the building base. You have to start with trust and you don't progress until you've built that.

These one-on-ones are an excellent place to do that if they're done well and if they're done consistently. Final note on the one-on-ones is that as soon as possible, these should be run by the staff member, not the manager. That's important. It probably won't be like that from the get-go. You need to sort of establish a structure, but as soon as possible, it should be their meeting that they are running and that they are getting what they need out of it, but it must have those four parts in it. Okay.

Mike (21:46.686)
Depending on the type of business that you are and the talent market that drives your industry, you might have a tough time competing with bigger organizations that want the same talent. They can pay a lot more, they can offer a lot more money and benefits and all sorts of stuff, probably. It's really important, therefore, that you develop a clear answer to the question, why should I work for you when I can earn a lot more from the big guy, the incumbent, the bank, whatever. It's important for a few reasons. The first one is...

You actually should reflect on this so that you know the answer to that. You need a compelling proposition for great talent. It needs to be articulated beyond just, well, it's cool here with a small guys, et cetera. It needs to be way more articulate. So you won't be a great place to work for everybody. If you are a smaller business that competes, competes on talent with large businesses and corporates and what have you, your proposition won't be able to compete on money. If you, if, if you're looking to have people who are

totally money driven and you're a smaller business competing in a much, much bigger talent pool, it's almost impossible that you can be able to offer them from a money perspective as much as a bank or a massively funded business or something like that. So if I think back to Nona, we had top talent in software development and design. And, you know, in theory, sometimes in practice, we're competing with some of the wealthiest businesses on the planet and the best funded businesses on the planet. If someone was purely money driven,

Therefore, they would not be a good fit because we simply could not pay them more than a lot of these big guys. So that is an important, it's really an important thing to understand here. Then you've got to ask a question, well, if they're not money-driven, what are the things that they care about? And can we provide a better experience or environment for those things? So if you're super money-driven, Nona wouldn't have been the best place to work. You would have done better at Amazon or a bank or something like that. So we didn't even try to compete on money. Don't get me wrong, we paid competitively, but there's no ways we could pay what those...

big guys can pay. But if someone wanted to work, for example, in an environment that obsessed about quality, obsessed about how people were treated, about transparency, about a bunch of things that the big guys just simply couldn't do, then we would often win. So again, let me just be clear about this. You need to be market related. You can't be paying well below market, but you've got to figure out what you can offer that the big guys cannot, and then who actually cares about that. And we were able to compete.

Mike (24:08.95)
because we wouldn't lose on the latter things that I mentioned. We would lose on the money thing, if that's all people cared about, but that was okay once we figured out our value proposition. So this can be very confronting when you start this process, because you might not have an answer to that question. If you say, well, why you should work for us and not the other guys, they can pay you triple. You might not actually have an answer, but it's okay, because at least you can then start to say, okay, hold on. What would we need to look like?

for us to have a compelling answer, and then you begin to work towards that. Okay, the next thing I wanna talk about is company-wide addresses. So talking to the company as a whole. I found that great talent, especially in small and medium-sized businesses, generally really appreciate a lot of transparency.

And leveraging company-wide meetings for this is a great way to build culture. But again, it needs to be intentional. Something that is very useful to keep in mind when you're addressing your whole team and your full business is that mostly all ever people are thinking is, okay, thanks, but what does that mean for me? And there's nothing wrong with that. It is a great pointer though, to how you craft your messages and how you talk to your whole business. If you're giving updates that only affects the folks that own shares in the business,

Nobody's really going to care, right? But for example, if you're giving update on finances that relate to an accumulating bonus pool that everybody shares in, well then people will really pay attention. So just hold that question in your mind that everyone's just sitting there thinking, thanks for sharing that, but what does it mean for me? Give updates on projects that not everybody is necessarily working on so that everybody knows what everyone else is doing. Again, this is about feeling part of something bigger than just what you're doing. Call out and praise behaviors.

that your values are designed to ideally be guiding and inspiring. A note on this that's very important is that in most cases, you can always praise in public and should praise in public, but never, ever criticize in public. You criticize in private. So praise in public, criticize in private. The company-wide, we used to do it every week, but your cadence might differ. Really what matters is that it's about updates, it's about transparency, it's about...

Mike (26:21.566)
repetition on purpose, strategy and progress. The stuff needs to be repeated a lot and often. It's about what you're expecting, what you're learning and what progress you are making towards your vision and your strategy and your goals. It's about your vision, it's about your purpose, it's about the goals, it's about these things that I keep saying they need to be repeated a lot. You cannot repeat these things enough. I used to be pretty bad at these because mainly my nature is to follow the shiny object.

and how that manifested in these meetings, I would stand up and say, okay, guys, we're gonna do this and it's awesome. And then I'd be like, no, wait, we're gonna do this. And then the next month I'd be like, actually, no, we're gonna do that. And that's not great for alignment and inspiration, right? A lot of people would just kind of zone out and be like, oh, Mike's just, you know, following a shiny object again, whatever. Over time, I came to adopt what is sometimes referred to a mindset, which is kind of strong opinions loosely held. So what I mean by this is I shifted how I communicate with the business. It went from the above to...

All right, guys, right now we have deep conviction that this is the right path. If the environment changes, if we get new data, new information, we might change that path. But for now, this is the direction. These are the reasons why it's the direction, and that's where we're going. This is a very different narrative, and it increases the chances of engagement and buy-in quite a lot. When you change, it's important to explain why you change. So you say, right, well, we were heading in that direction.

This information changed, this environment changed, that led us to this new set of theories or what have you. And that's why we're now going in this other direction, very, very different level of communication.

Next, I want to speak about culture. So I think the thing that we actually did really, really well at Nona was what most referred to as culture, except we didn't really refer to it as culture. We spoke about obsessing over creating the environment in which the people that we have in the business can do their best possible work. This took the focus away from a word that I think is used far too much and is open to way too much interpretation.

Mike (28:27.582)
and brought it into a set of words that people can really understood and could really rally around. This is not about beer fridges and evening drinks and foosball tables. Like those things are cool, but they're really not the important thing. What matters is the environment that you are building and nurturing, and that it's intentional and in service of creating the best possible environment for people to do their best possible work in service of your vision and your winning aspiration, and that all of that is centered around

your customers, needs and wants and problems. It is really easy to get distracted from this. And the more you can have the discipline of continually coming back to this and iterating on it, the better the results will be. And that is what I believe most people refer to as your culture. The stuff doesn't just get better by itself. Your culture will emerge whether you like it or not, but if you want a great and strong culture, a great environment in which people can do their best work, you need to be very intentional about this.

The last thing that I want to talk about today is something that I used to hold as a discipline. And it was when I was CEO of Nona, I would have a one-on-one and would aim to do this with every single person once a quarter. Now, let me just be clear about this. This is not the same as the one-on-one that I spoke about earlier. This was not a manager employee one-on-one. This was a CEO talking to every single person in the business once a quarter. This doesn't scale. As you know, my focus is SMBs.

So this doesn't scale to large businesses. At the time that Nona was acquired, we were just under 40 people. And I would say that that's probably about the maximum size that this will really work effectively. I don't think I would have been able to keep this going if we got much bigger than that. So just keep that in mind if you're already a much bigger business than we were. This is very different to the one-on-one meetings that I spoke about earlier. I should probably give this a different name, but effectively this was just a session. I think it was 45 minutes where I would ask the person, I think it was 27.

questions. And then I would do my best not to talk, which is very hard for me. And I would really put my focus and attention onto actively listening, right? I would brief the person and say, Hey, I'm actually not going to say anything at all unless you want me to say something. So if I just keep quiet after you've said something, please don't be offended. I'm literally just wanting to listen. If you want me to talk or comment, I will, but I'm not going to unless you ask me to. I learned so much in these sessions. I can't even tell you.

Mike (30:51.754)
It's also an excellent mechanism to drive home the vision, the values, the focus, et cetera, of the business. Again, repetition, any opportunity you get. So I'll run you through the questions very quickly, but I won't expand on any of them. As always, you can reach out to me if you want to, but let me quickly shoot through these questions. Okay, so I'm just gonna go really fast. Obviously the meeting was quicker than this, but I don't wanna take 45 minutes reading out questions. This will be really fast. Describe how you are feeling right now in one word.

What's been your biggest win in the last 90 days? What's been your biggest obstacle or challenge in the last 90 days? What can Nona do to make you more successful? How happy are you on a scale of one to 10 and why? How do you think the morale of those around you is at Nona? Where is Nona weakest? Put yourself in my shoes. You're the CEO. What do you think the most important thing to fix in the next 90 days is?

Has anyone at Nona done something that has made a positive impression on you in the last 90 days? Do you mind if I tell them? How can I support you better? Do you feel like you get recognized when you do good work? Do you feel like you get held accountable when you do not? Do you feel safe at Nona? Why? What problem do we solve as a business? Who is our customer? Our core focus?

in our case was accelerating product development for fintechs and blockchain scale ups. Do you have any questions or is there anything that is unclear to you about this? What is Nona's purpose? What is your purpose at Nona? Do you feel like your purpose is linked and in support of Nona's purpose? Where do you think we will be as a company in 10 years time? Do you feel like what you do here every day is contributing to the vision and that you are a part of it?

If somebody asks you at a social event what it's like to work at Nona, what do you say? How can I be a better leader? What is an opportunity that you would like to be given a chance to fail at? Do you feel like your voice is heard at Nona? What is the next cool factor for Nona? It was work from home very, very early before COVID, but that's quite common now. So what's the next cool thing that could separate us?

Mike (33:10.258)
Is there something that we could be doing better for our customers? What is something that you learned or some value that you took from the session together and describe how you are feeling in one single word now? Okay. So this whole list from today is by no means an exhaustive list, but if you are not nailing this part of your business, that's keeping and bringing the best out of your people, there's plenty here that will give you plenty to think about and maybe even begin to implement.

If it felt like drinking from a fire hose today, that's okay. You won't be alone in that feeling because it was. The stuff takes a ton of energy, a ton of intention and time, but to me, it's a piece that you simply can't afford not to invest in. This part of the work is probably what inspired me most to get into working with other founders and leadership teams. And it's not a surprise to me that many businesses need help with implementing this stuff because for so many, it doesn't come naturally.

Cool, so that's it for today, guys and girls. I really hope that you got some value from today's episode. And by the way, by the time this is live, the new website is probably up, so you can go and check it out. It's www.smbmastery.com.au.

Mike (34:23.15)
Thanks for watching!