Camille: Let's record episode 23. And let's just wing it today. What do you think of that?
George: Well, yeah, I have a story I wanna share with you and then I want to talk about it with you.
Camille: Instead of wing it, I should have said, let's just have George's agenda. George Agenda Day.
Camille: So let's talk about whatever George wants to talk about, because you had some cool ideas.
Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores. What you really need to know about building a successful small business.
Camille: I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: small business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
George: So last night I was talking with my wife about some news that happened this week.
George: And as we were talking about, it occurred to me that one of the belief shifts came to me as I think relevant to the situation. And I thought of you, so I sent you this text during dinner breaking our no phones rule. I had to do it. And I just sent you this short text, not really enough to be a complete thought, but I thought you might get it.
George: And the text was, Jacinda Arder, the Prime Minister of New Zealand is resigning. I think it relates to one of the belief shift. Can we talk about that?
Camille: And I instantly said, no way.
George: Yeah, so I'll give some background for the audience. Jacinda Arder is the Prime Minister of New Zealand. She became prime Minister at the age of 37.
George: About what, five years ago I think. She had a baby while in office. She managed New Zealand through two of the biggest crises this country's ever had. It's a country of about 5 million people. And I'm just giving you, giving context. Not saying that it's important or not important, but she's the leader of that country.
George: During her time, there was this domestic terrorism shooting that was religiously motivated. It was horrible. And she brought the, the country together around that. Uniquely. And interestingly, there was also, I think, a volcano explosion that happened in New Zealand as New Zealand. You know, the cost of traumas led the country through that.
George: And then the, how they dealt with Covid was uniquely good amongst the very few countries that actually managed through the early days. She was an amazing leader.
George: All the while she was, she got engaged, she had a baby while in office and still did the job. So just this week amazing, just Dier announced that she's not going to run for office again, and there's a whole bunch of stuff is going on about it.
George: Her party is not doing great right now. And if so, she were gonna run for her office. It would be a big challenge. She'd have to put a lot of effort into it. And she basically said, look, I love doing this job. I don't have anything left in the tank to be able to do what's coming next. And so I'm making a decision not to rerun and go back and do something else.
George: The B B C apparently wrote an article about that and the headline was something about our resigns or decides not to rerun. So women can't have it all. Something like that basically.
George: There was a lot of backlash to that article and the BBC then apologized for writing it that way and I think reprinted the article.
George: That's the background. When I first read the story, I thought, awesome. Once again, she's amazing and I'm happy to say why. But then we talked about this article and I just thought the BBC got it wrong.
George: My wife had a different thought about it that I also agree with. So how do you wanna do this? Do you want to tell me what you thought when you heard the story?
Camille: Yes. That's what I wanna hear first.
Camille: So before I jump in with my own, cuz I, then you made me go look and I had heard about it, but then I went and dug into the, some of the different articles and how they were. Couching this whole thing cuz they all Yeah, of course. Can't do it without an opinion, even if they're not supposed to have an opinion.
Camille: It wasn't an opinion article, but it sure sounded like that . But talk to me about like, what was the belief shifts that wa popped in your head as you were thinking about this?
George: Here's what I was gonna say. Triggered. I was not triggered by the b BBC article , but when the BBC article basic questioned whether women can have it all, I'm like, you're too late. She does have it all. I mean, look at her. She's the prime minister of a country.
George: She had a baby during office and did the job. She had a relationship and it sounds like they're finally gonna get married. They haven't had time to do that, but she had the relationship. She's led the country uniquely through several major cause. She is doing it all.
George: She's doing it all and she's deciding for herself. I know what it's gonna take to do the next thing I'm choosing not to do that she's on, she is doing it all. She's making her own decisions, which is trade offs over sacrifice. That's the belief of, that's clearly she's not sacrificed. You could look at it as she's sacrificing her ability to get married to do the office.
George: You could say she's sacrificing her ability to stay in office cuz she can't do it all. That's not what she's doing. She's making, she has made, is continuing to make very clear choices about how she wants her life to go in balancing all these factors, she's making the decisions and she's telling people in the way she's done this whole time, clearly this is what I'm about, this is what I'm capable of doing.
George: I don't have any more in the tank. She's being very clear. Awesome. I'm just applauding it and B B C you just do not get it. And doing it all doesn't mean you have to do everything.
George: Okay. That's my rant. I have very strong things about this, it is really cool that for me, the thought was, oh yeah, that's, she's doing the belief shit, right?
George: Trade offs over sacrifice. Best business example I can think of right now. Okay. I'm done.
Camille: like we need some applause.
Camille: Woo. Entered in here.
Camille: What do you think?
Camille: I think you're spot on. I instantly, of course, when you said her name, I was like, oh yeah, she's talking about making trade-offs versus the, sacrifice and she's just made a choice. It's as simple as that. Yeah.
Camille: But underneath that, in all of the articles and the way that things can get couched, there is what it means for a woman to make these choices and the types of trade-offs and the way those trade-offs are presented versus the way it's presented if a man is in that position.
Camille: So I read about things like her choosing to, you know, so she had a baby while she was in office, right? She is doing it all. She didn't say, no, I'm not gonna have kids because I'm too busy running a country. She I can have kids and run a country. I can do both those things.
Camille: And she did. And then she got backlash for only taking six weeks of maternity leave, which, you know, it was like, come on. That was also her choice, right? That was also her choice to do that. And yet we criticized her because she chose the country and her duty. This is what they're perceiving, right?
Camille: I'm not saying mm-hmm she did this, but they perceive it as, oh, you chose that over your child. How dare you? I challenge anybody to find an example where that same question or that same criticism was given to a man who chose to maybe only take six weeks of paternity leave from a position.
Camille: Yeah. That never happens. No. So she's got a completely different standard by which she has to live up to. When I think about her saying she's burned out, I think about how, yeah, she made these choices to do all the things and she could do it, but what she had to do to make it work.
Camille: Dealing with that level of misogyny and the criticism and even the threats that she got later. Yeah. And just the extra layer . I think all politicians have this layer of criticism they have to deal with. I think she has an extra layer because she's a woman doing it. Mm-hmm. And probably also a young woman doing it.
Camille: If she had been, yes, post, I already have kids and have a family, those things wouldn't enter into it. But even then, she'd still have a layer of being a woman.
Camille: That means that the level of effort she has to put into this work, I think is much greater. The stress component, the tension, the balancing act she has to constantly navigate is a level up for her versus a man in that same position.
Camille: So, Yeah, that makes sense to me that she's burned out. Like, whew. Actually that was a lot to take on.
George: To be clear about this, the issue is she's not rerunning, she's already currently managing through the current situation, burnt out or not. She's doing it.
George: She's looking ahead and thinking, okay, I'm gonna have to do all this and this much more to keep the party in power. That's what's stopping her. Right. Not even necessarily burnt out like, I can't do this anymore. Right. She's saying I can't do this, plus what the party needs for me to rerun.
Camille: There's a statement she made where she said, I know that there are others who can do this better than me now.
Camille: She is doing that forward looking of, you know what the best thing for me to do is I think there's some people who can now come into this cuz they're gonna come in with fresh energy and you know, new whatever the party needs. So she's also recognizing that, which I think of this as in business.
Camille: If we're translating it back to that, how businesses struggle to have really amazing leaders know when their time is up. Yeah. Right. Like when is it Absolutely time for me to either step aside or even as a small business owner, when is it time for me to hand this thing to someone else in my company?
Camille: When is it time to bring someone on to do this work? Because they can actually do it better than I can do it. Whether it's because I'm burnout or because whatever position I put myself in.
Camille: I now wanna do this other stuff, which means I have to make a trade off. I have to let something go. How do I let that thing go? Oh, I should let that thing go to by hiring a person to do that for me instead. Her version of that is, well, I have to hand this whole job over to someone else and she'll go off and do whatever she's gonna do.
Camille: But yeah, it's that trade off and it's a decision point in life, which it is interesting because it's so public and because it's about a woman and it's this leadership role and there's all these other things going on behind that's complicated, right? There's all this stuff going on that of course people just make up all these different stories about what it is, but at the very heart of it, it really is just as simple as a human being who is doing this amazing thing, has decided to go do something else.
Camille: That's it. Yeah. So what isn't that literally everybody all the time?
George: Yeah. Her decisions are not static.
Camille: We get to do that whenever we want to without all the backlash, because we're not public figures.
George: And think about the alternative. If she's gonna make this change in how she conducts her life in a little while, and she didn't announce this, then the country has no time to process or deal with it.
George: When she makes that change, all of a sudden just decided not to rerun. Her party doesn't have time to start planning for it, but she's made this announcement to the country, so the right, the country has time to think through this and get through all their garbage, critiquing her or whatever, but they're getting ready for a time when she's not in the role.
George: Her party has time to work with us and start thinking about who they wanna support for the role. She's done a great service to them by announcing, now I'm making these changes. There's gonna be a whole lot of drama later that will not happen now because she's had the foresight to put her agenda open.
George: What a gift. Yes. That people do not realize she's given them.
Camille: Yeah. Absolutely. I read too, just there's that angle of, well, maybe she's doing it because the party's performing badly and she thinks she's gonna lose, so why bother running? Yeah. And I thought, why would that be a bad thing?
Camille: Yeah. So if she thinks like, you know what? We might lose this next round. And I certainly don't think I'm the person who's going to get us over the finish line, so I should let someone else try. Mm-hmm. They couch it, like it's, oh, she's running off because she doesn't want it lose.
Camille: And it's like, well, yeah, of course she doesn't want her party to lose. Yeah. And if she thinks she's gonna be the loser, then she should hand it to someone else because maybe she's burned through all of her credits with all of her people. And so somebody fresh has to go like, this is politics.
Camille: That's how it works. Right? Yeah. There's so many angles on this and this, I mean, we could, a heck could go on a whole ret about just the exhaustion of how. News is not news and just, yeah, the media is just going for the clicks.
Camille: And it speaks to when you started talking about that first version of the, the fact that the B B C had to like reversion, their telling of this story is kind of ridiculous.
George: Yeah. They really whiffed, really whiffed on that.
George: I just thought this is a great real world example. Neither small business nor big business, but government. But still the belief shift supplying. I mean, really applying and seeing somebody take control of it was wonderful.
Camille: Yeah. And you know, we talked about when we first came up with these, how they're not really specific to small business or business. Most of them are just kind of life in how we move through life.
Camille: Because I think the other one that I think of in this example with her is planning it over winging it.
Camille: So your whole point about like, she's being thoughtful about her decision.
George: My second one. I'm doing great at this class. I'm ace In this Belief Shift class.
Camille: You are getting an A plus on the Belief Shifts.
George: So why do you say the planning of doing it is.
Camille: Yeah, because as you talked about, how she's being thoughtful and letting her party have time to prepare by letting them know this is what is going to happen as opposed to having it be some last minute decision or even preparing the country for it.
George: Just to be clear, you don't think she woke up one morning kind of grouching and called her press secretary and say, I arrange a pest conference today. Get it ready in 45 minutes. I wanna talk. Where's my coffee? Just word salad. You don't think that's what happened?
Camille: I highly doubt it. She does not seem like the type. She doesn't.
Camille: But even in terms of, even if she was fully planning it, yeah, she could have planned it in a way that forced other people to have to wing it. Because she delayed telling them, or you know, there's also a level of, have I trapped somebody into a position of, oh thanks, but you didn't give us much time to really plan for what we're gonna do with this.
Camille: So she's, she's planning at that level of depth, which I think is, we haven't really talked about this, but when you are doing a good plan, cuz there's such a thing as writing a bad plan and a bad plan would've been her being like, don't tell anybody. My plan is to not tell anybody until the end, or until I see how such and such plays out. Or she could have completely just navigated this in a very selfish way. Yeah.
Camille: She hasn't, at least the way things have been playing out, it doesn't appear she's at all, it appears not, she's very selfless, but making a decision that is really important for taking care of herself.
Camille: So some might think, well, she's making a selfish decision cuz she's doing her own thing. No, she's, she's doing what she needs to do as a human being and then letting everybody else know with enough time to do what they need to do. Right. To make sure that it all works out okay. And that's a good plan. And making a good plan does mean thinking about all the other people that are gonna be impacted by the, what you're going to do and also setting them up for success.
Camille: Yeah. Right. So if I'm gonna write a really thoughtful plan about how I want my team to go about executing on something, , I'm gonna tell 'em about the work in as far in advance as I can. I'm gonna be clear about when they need to do what and how I want them to do it. Like I'm gonna give as much clarity in that plan as I can so that they can be successful, as opposed to showing up just randomly one day and saying, Hey, I need you to do these five things today cuz it's in my plan that I haven't showed you until or never.
Camille: I never showed you. Right? Yeah. So that's not a good plan. Like I'm just, I'm making you wing it by just dropping it on you. So I definitely thought about that. I was like, oh, she's being very planful about this. Very thoughtful about how she's going about this transition and her decision to communicate this and.
Camille: Yeah, it's just really interesting to see that show up. And so I do think most of this, the most of this is you know, kind of life skills that we're talking about and how you take those. And the reason I think they come up for me is belief shifts when we talk about small business. Mm-hmm. is, for some reason, I find a lot of business owners sometimes forget to do some of these really logical things inside their business.
Camille: I don't know what happens to our brains, but we somehow, like we get into our business and we start getting in sort of this frantic mode and we forget, oh yeah, I do that over there. Why am I not doing it in here? Hmm. That's not all I mean, some business owners just never are really good at planning things, so that is a new thing for them to do in their business.
Camille: But some of them, they're like, you know, I actually am pretty good when it comes to this other thing in my life. and I do a pretty good plant job planning it. I wonder why I don't do that in my business. And it's just a, yeah. You know how you have stuff in your life. Like I'm really good at it with that, but I'm not good at it over here.
Camille: Yep. Absolutely. We're we're just kind of inconsistent by nature as humans, right? Yeah.
Camille: I'm glad you brought that up. Maybe this starts a new little segment for the podcast, which is Belief Shifts out in the wild. Yeah. Whenever you spot them.
Camille: What's happening in Georgia's world? Let's do a small business versus big business problem challenge.
George: So I just traveled for business this last week. I was in two and a half days of pretty intensive meetings with a group of six others. What happened a couple of months ago, our boss, our vice president, resigned. Left the company, went to another company, and it turns out that we were more of a mess than we were led to believe.
George: For example, once this guy was gone one of us was chosen to be interim lead of the group, wasn't me, it was another peer. She's doing a great job. She's really good, very calm, very smart, good, good thinker. So it was a good choice to be the interim. And she was interacting with our senior vice president, who I also think is very smart and good listener.
George: But that SVP was kind of relating back like, here's what I think your organization's about. And she was getting a lot of it wrong. Like, just to be clear, we're in an organization of maybe 700 people. We are the subgroup of about 110 people, something like that, around a hundred people.
George: And our S V P got significant things wrong about who we are and what we do and what we offer as an organization, which is bad. She just hasn't had time to turn her attention on us, and this is a year long reorganization she's been part of for the company. She's had so many things to do in her role, which is a whole other story.
George: We are not the big problem child, and she's had this VP who's both kind of handled things and also withheld information from her as it turns out, that she hasn't had an accurate picture of who we are. So now she's looking at us. She's like, I'm not sure your organization makes sense as an organization.
George: You need to explain to me what's going on. I'm sort of much nicer than that, but really that's what's going on. So we've been having these conversations to close out the year. Great holiday conversations. Yay. Do we need to be together? Do we need to split up? What do we need to do? I guess the good news is that we seem to have the control of that agenda.
George: We get to decide or make a proposal about do we need to be together or not? We're under travel, budget restrictions. So we thought long and hard about whether we should actually meet in person versus over, you know, video conference. And we decided we need to spend the money on this. We need to meet.
George: And it was money well spent. We met for two and a half days to talk about things like, what's our core mission? What do we do? What's the work that we do? What value should anybody see from us? And pretty basic questions and try to see how far we could get.
George: We had done an exercise like this with the VP who quit. Back in April. Similar length of time, two and a half days. I tell you, Camille, I'm good at this. I do this all the time, you know, big enterprise, multi-day meetings like you're about to do for one of your clients and they can get tiring. But I've got good stamina.
George: In April when we did this, my brain was fried after day one cuz it was just so overly packed with the agenda from this guy and there wasn't enough follow through. The way he expressed concepts was too abstract for me to absorb.
George: I couldn't do it. And so I find that tiring when you can't fully understand what's going on. You're trying to keep up. I was fatigued and I told the group like, I'm checked out. I'm sorry. I would like to keep participating, but I can't right now. I'm gonna have to hang here as a passenger and regroup.
George: This exercise, this last week went much better and I can tell you some of the things that made it different.
George: We didn't scope creep. We didn't do too much. We had two main conceptual things we want to handle. And that was you know, what's our figure out, what are our goals and the work to do? And figure out a couple of services that we offer, two main services that we think we offer and try to articulate them and to make them actionable, not just fluff.
George: And then we had a couple other things to do. Like we have to get ready for a quarterly business review to report out. It's promotion season we're talking about. Electing a very, very small number of people for talent retention rewards. A couple of things like that that take time. But they weren't the main agenda.
George: Last April we would've just done the conceptual stuff that doesn't really get us anywhere. So we had a good mix of stand back and think conceptually what's going on. And realize it always takes so longer than you think. Even if you structure it, what it always does.
George: And also we rewarded ourself by taking care of some of the mechanical things that we had to get done. Like this week we made time for that. The conceptual stuff didn't push that outta the way. So actually got stuff done. We all left, got on our planes thinking, oh, this time was really, really good work.
George: And I think we have a pretty clear idea about what we offer. Not all of it, but some of it.
George: What we didn't get to was goals, which is the next step. And then organizational design. Like once we know what's our mission, what services do we offer, what are our goals, what are the roles that we need to produce those goals. We didn't do that part yet.
George: That's still hard work to come, but it was good.
Camille: Wow. It sounds like you basically started the work of a business plan just for your slice of the business, right? Yeah. What's our mission? What's our vision? What is our business model within the bigger business model? You have your own inside there.
Camille: We have specific products and services that we provide. What are those and what does that actually mean? What is the value of those?
Camille: It's interesting to hear you talk about needing to do that
Camille: within a department, in a bigger organization, you're having to do the same thing that you have to do at the bigger organization level.
Camille: Right. And yes, I think that gets missed a lot. I'm actually experiencing that with one of my clients. I'm not sure that that's happening consistently within the different departments that they're taking the time to do that. But it's the same thing any small business needs to do and should continually do.
Camille: Because as you were talking about it, I was thinking about this example the translation into a small business, right? So, Hmm. You're having to do it because there's been some change where somebody is now questioning the value of this department. Like, what are we here for? Yeah.
Camille: The translation into small business would look like this to me. My business has stopped growing and I don't have a lot of clients. So maybe like you've sort of plateaued in your business or, or maybe you're even kind of shrinking and going backwards and you're like, I'm still doing the same thing I always do. Why would it shrink?
Camille: Well, it's because you haven't put the energy into refresh that business or reestablish the value of that business. And the world is changing. Even though we all want need, we've gotten to the point where we need our iPhones, they keep giving us new ones.
Camille: So they keep giving us new ones and refreshing themselves so that we don't someday go, well, I'm kind of bored with my iPhone. Maybe I'll try a different one. Maybe I'll try that Google thing or that Android thing, right? It's like there's a reason they keep doing it. Even if we get a little bit annoyed by it. It's also, oh, I do want that new fancy camera they talk about . So your business is the same.
Camille: I have to keep up, I have to keep pushing the envelope in terms of what I can provide for people in some way, shape, or form, right? Whether it's a different method of doing it or whatever, whatever that looks like. It doesn't have to be this big innovation of iPhone, but I always think of that as this great example of they keep providing the new things so you'll keep buying.
Camille: That's how they keep their customers. That's a brilliant idea. It's a brilliant plan. So every business needs their version of that. It's not always to that extreme. Yeah. But we all need that version of that. And you're doing that now within your department. Like, whoa, what, cuz ultimately you guys had to come out with. We have to provide value or we're done. Yeah.
Camille: I have to internally provide value to our internal customers, which means ultimately providing value to our external customers in a way that internally they see, yes, absolutely we need this.
Camille: That's the connection you have to make. This is what we do and why our customers care, and so therefore, that's why you guys bosses internally should care.
George: You reminded me of something else as well. The guy who ran the organization had been at the company for a long time as well, connected, and people kind of thought of our organization as his organization.
George: It was a personality cult in essence, and I'm not making a judgment about that, but when he left, things change. Because of his connections there's a lot of stuff that we don't have to justify cuz they say, the other stakeholders would say, oh yeah, we trust that guy. I'm sure he's doing a good job of doing whatever they do.
George: I think about a small restaurant in town that has a long-standing clientele. They've been there long enough, they deal with strong relationships with their clientele. They don't have to justify a lot of stuff to their clientele cuz they, they trust them.
George: But if the clientele goes away or if they move to a new location, they don't have that anymore. They have to justify why they're good and worth going to as a business anymore. And that's what's happened to us.
Camille: That's fascinating that culture of something within an organization, existing really primarily because of one person's energy and the capital they have in that company, the trust that they've built is problematic too.
Camille: And I see leaders doing this, creating departments around themselves or structures within the organization around themselves that are basically a way to say, I'm invaluable to you because of all of the stuff I do and nobody else can do what I do. Yeah. Which is good for me individually, not good for the business overall.
Camille: Then that whole structure just falls apart once that person leaves.
George: The company's just lucky that the people who reported to him, me and my peers, are so awesome and amazing that we're gonna be able to fix this thing.
Camille: Well, and that's one way that you actually mitigate that risk, right?
Camille: Is you hire the right people who, you know, share your same vision and will can carry it forward. Even if it's rough. You're having to go through this rough transition. You have the right people who can carry that forward in the best way possible. Like that's what you're supposed to do, right? You're supposed to have good succession planning and people who are gonna pick this stuff up.
George: He hasn't done that either. No succession plan. This goes back to what you're saying earlier. He put together the organization that suited him. He sort of accreted different departments and added us. And like we lucked out. I respect my peers, they're great and we worked together well.
George: So we're able to get through this. Despite him, really, we are not gonna come out with the organization that he wanted. We're not. We think he was wrong about some things.
Camille: Yeah. Leaders really struggle with succession planning. It makes some sense if you think about it, like, why would I wanna think about the end of my time here and handing it to someone else? Wow. Or why would I put my energy into that? Especially if either my focus is, I'm gonna stay this job forever. Right. Maybe that's what you're thinking.
Camille: Like, I don't wanna go anywhere else. Or I'm putting all my energy into just getting my next move up. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's not my problem how they fill my seat. My only problem is how I get to the next.
George: Selfish. I'm smiling because at home we have a succession plan for our son. What happens if something happens to us as parents? There's a lot of reasons you wanna do it.
Camille: You should do it. At a bare minimum, do it for your kids, for heaven's sake. Yeah. But you should do it within your company. So small business owners, their version of this is what is my long term?
Camille: Like what am I doing with this company when I'm done? Am I selling it? Am I giving it to my employees? Am I just done when I'm done? Any of those are good choices, but what are you choosing to do? Because I do have business owners who are like, I wanna sell it in five years, but they're not setting themselves up.
Camille: They're not setting the business up to be optimally sellable. That's not how they're running it today. And they realize that, oh, I need to change how I'm running this business if I actually wanna sell it in five years. I'm not setting myself up for that. Yeah. Or if I wanna, you know, my plan is to hire somebody who wants to take over the business eventually.
Camille: There's very deliberate decisions you make. And that would shift that long-term view. Going back to the planning perspective. Right. That long-term view then affects the goals you should have this year. Yeah. Right. And what you're gonna focus on.
George: I wanted to talk about being uncomfortable as we do this.
George: Another thing that happened I get your take on this, we're in this process of kind of starting from whole cloth and figuring. What do we think we provide? What's being asked of us? What did our SVP ask us to do? Let's pay attention to that and how do we optimize for that?
George: And there was a period of time where we don't know if we're gonna survive as a group. Some of us may have to move out, do other things. And so there's this tension about that that was sitting with all of us, but I thought we did well, that it was important for us to be able to accept that tension and be able to live with it in order to do the planning.
George: Knowing full well that we're gonna make decisions that may affect us. That is not easy to do. I could see individual suggestions that would come up, that sound like, oh, this is a job preservation suggestion. Really. This is not really a, what's the benefit of the org suggestion?
George: My peers are all good. So they would offer suggestions. Some of us would say like, really ? I don't know if that really works. And they'd back off and they'd be o they'd be okay, but put 'em back in a tense place. So I mean, what do you have to say about if you're doing kind of goal setting or planning, but your decisions might be scary decisions on how do you be brave enough to keep doing it?
Camille: know exactly what you mean because it is gets back to something a theme we haven't talked about for a while, but I think we've mentioned early on in the podcast and I talked with my clients about all the time, which is there's what you want versus what the business needs.
Camille: Yeah. And they do not always match. And that's what you're talking about is what the business needs us to do isn't necessarily what we might want to do. Cuz what I want to do is keep my job and keep doing all these things and have my colleagues and my team, and maybe I even wanna do some new stuff, but I wanna create a job for myself that I love or keep the job that I love now, but that might not be what the organization actually needs from us in order for the company to perform optimally.
Camille: And that's the tension that I think all teams are up against whenever they have to go into any of this strategic planning and goal setting kind of process is how do I take my personal needs out of this and really think about what's best for the company first. As individuals then we have a responsibility to ourselves to say, okay, now how do I fit into that?
Camille: And is this actually what I want? And we're not really great about doing that. We want the job to adjust to fit us, right? Yeah. Sounds great. But if you think about it, it doesn't make any sense. Like if all I did was build a company that I just created a bunch of jobs that made all of these people optimally happy in doing the work they wanted to do, that would not be a well-functioning system.
Camille: And a business is a system, right? All the little cogs in that system have to all work together. Yeah. I would basically have just all these little independent fiefdoms trying to do their own thing. Maybe some of them would align and collaborate and kind of work together. But ultimately, if I don't design the system first and then fit the pieces into it, then that business as a system isn't gonna do very well.
Camille: So the best ones will design what is optimal for the business and then find the right people, the people who do want to do that, to fit into those, those roles. I was even thinking about this related to, you know, right now there's a lot of announcements of tech layoffs and there's a whole sort, all sorts of reasons for that to happen.
Camille: And I think if we simplify it to any one thing it we're doing a disservice to how layoffs happen. Cuz companies don't really want to do them. No, but they do them for lots of different reasons. And one of them is at some point you've probably hired some people in your company that don't quite fit in the system or where the system, the business is going and you need to make a change, right?
Camille: You need to make some adjustments. And the best way to do this is kind of like maybe clear the decks a little bit and then do some rebuilding. And so as much as we want to believe and as much as companies want us to feel like so one of my I guess red flags going into work for a business is if they're like, oh, we're like family here.
Camille: I don't wanna work for that company. Cuz that's fake for one. No business should run like a family does. That's not how it works. Like a business is business. Right? I would like it to be collegial. I would like it to have shared values with that business, all of those kinds of things.
Camille: But I don't want you to be family.
George: Have we talked about the Netflix manifesto and what they say about that?
Camille: Yeah. You mentioned this once before, say more.
George: A long time ago, Netflix put together this manifesto about their philosophy about hiring people and managing people and how the organization works.
George: And they talk about that explicitly as well. And they say also, we don't believe in the analogy of we're like a family. Our analogies, we're more like a professional sports team. We hire the best talent and we treat you well, but not everybody belongs. Think about that. People get traded away or fired. Clear minded.
Camille: Yes. I think that's a much better analogy is you are more like a sports team, and so you see sports teams changing their players all the time. For some reason we get really upset when companies do this. We're like, oh, they're so heartless. No, they're just trying to do what the business is supposed to do, which is make money.
Camille: Some of them go about that in a very heartless manner. Alla, Elon Musk. And he's not the only one. Like you hear this all the time where they're like, oh, people who got laid off and they did it in this horrible way. Like, I saw somebody had posted on Twitter recently, my husband just got laid off from Google after being there for 15 years.
Camille: You think they would've done more than just send him an email? You think it would've been a conversation? I kind of agree with that, like, yeah, could your boss have not had a conversation with you? Even if you've been there for two minutes, I think it should be a conversation, right? Yes. But when they're doing mass layoffs, they do emails because it's efficient.
Camille: At the end of the day, they're kind of like, I don't need to maintain this relationship either, so why would I be nice about it? I mean, that sounds heartless, but.
George: My speculation about them, why people like to say it's like a family is because that necessarily has the connotation of compassion.
George: And of course you treat your family mostly with compassion. Forget the family, depending discord. But I think the sports team analogy is also good because a good sports team, you're trying to, you only work really well if you build a team camaraderie and if you have bonding, those qualities exist in a sports team.
George: But without the permanence of family, it allows you to make changes.
Camille: And there is so much about team that is so valuable. It doesn't have to be a family to be Yeah.
Camille: An incredible. Collegial community feeling of that connectiveness that we want when we say family. I think you can get that from just being a really solid and high performing team if you pursue that. Yeah. There's so much goodness in there.
Camille: And there's so much more too, when thinking about a business and a team and that sports analogy, there's so many other things in the sports analogy that really play out in business.
Camille: I was thinking about this the other day and the idea that I don't see enough, and especially in small businesses, I don't see enough huddles, so, huh. People aren't huddling at a planned moment in their business. If you are a small business owner and you have just like three team members, you're probably like, well, we don't need to meet all the time.
Camille: You don't. You don't need to have big meetings that take up a bunch of people's time. That'd be wasteful. But what you should be doing is a regular huddle, at least on a weekly basis, if not on a daily basis, depending on how your business operates. Hmm. To just make sure you're constantly doing this check.
Camille: Are we all rowing in the same direction? Okay, we are great. Everybody go right. And just doing that on a regular basis. Because otherwise it's like, imagine if you know in sports, if it's football, and what if the team never huddled and they were just like, well, I guess we're running X play. And then everybody goes off and does whatever they think the next play is.
Camille: That's what you're letting your business do. If you don't meet with your team, like everybody's showing up and they're running a play. They think it's the right one. And some days it is, and some days you guys are all running the wrong plays. Or we're all running different plays and we were supposed to be running this one play.
Camille: I think of that analogy a lot because when I start talking about the issues that they have so many times I think, wow, that could have been solved if you just had a simple 10 minute huddle, 10 minutes people, not an hour, but 10 minute huddle.
Camille: That was just targeting what is important today and what's everybody doing. You would've caught that thing that somebody was about to do that you didn't want them to do that day. And then later you were like, shoot, they did and I didn't want that. And it's messed up this whole other plan. It always has all these repercussions, right?
Camille: yeah. You could have saved hours of grief if just you had spent 10 minutes huddling. So Yeah. Yeah. So many things about that team aspect that I think makes so much sense.
George: I have one last thing that I wanted to relate about what happened this week in our team meeting. And I guess it's a little self-serving, but I'll take it.
George: At one point during the meeting, one of my peers was standing up and explaining something and it seemed like everybody else was on board, but I didn't get it. And I said, wait, can you say that again? Can you explain what's going on? I don't get this part. Here's what I think you're saying.
George: And I laid it out and was like, really? Is that what you're saying? That's basically he stopped instead before he answered, he said, George, I like how you do that. And he didn't explain exactly what he meant by how you do that, but he went on and then he answered my question. We went on, there was some basic conceptual thing that I just wasn't getting and I kept doing that during the week because we would talk about these high level concepts and people seem to be on board and planning on like, wait, I don't get the high level concept.
George: Can somebody explain it to me otherwise I'm just a passenger of this meeting and I wanna be driving. And so that would happen. Later on I was asking one of my other peers like, Hey, this guy, he said, I like how you do that. Do you know what he meant? He said, well, I remember that moment. I don't know if this is what he meant, but here's what you did that I think is very useful for us.
George: You will stop and ask a question if you don't understand something. When most people don't, most people they just won't ask. They'll just go along. And oftentimes, George, I find that when you ask the question about something you don't understand, it's something I also didn't understand, but I haven't bothered to ask.
George: I've just been kind of hoping I would get it later on. So then you get the clarification. That's really helpful. So guaranteed, George, when you're asking that I don't get it question, there's probably at least one other person, sometimes most of the people who don't really get it. So please keep doing that.
George: So I tell you that because of course this makes me look good, but I do think that's important. If you're in one of these meetings and stuff that's going along and you don't get it, just please speak up and say you don't get it cuz you're probably not the only one. And you're going for clarity, so why not get it right?
Camille: Yes. Oh my gosh. This is literally , one of the biggest challenges of facilitating. So I'm about to go into facilitating this three day retreat. I really was telling you about this is the biggest challenge is not enough people do that. And it's such a blessing when they do, when somebody's, like, oh, I'm so glad you asked that question.
Camille: Yes, let's get into it. Because I'm trying to read their minds like, are you guys getting it or you not? And even if I pause for questions, they'll just be silence. And I can feel when it's like they're not really tracking with me, but I'm not exactly sure where. So I'm trying to fill in a gap and provide more information when I'm not really clear what they need to know.
Camille: But they're also just being a little bit too, they're in that space of, well, I think if I just listen more I'll probably get it. Or they're like, no, I totally get it. Yeah. But they don't. Yeah.
Camille: So even prepping for this next retreat that I'm doing, and we were talking with the big boss in charge and, you know, we're talking about what we're gonna go through and how we're gonna do it, and any guidance of blah, blah, blah.
Camille: One of the comments he made was he said, yeah, I just wanna be really careful. We're gonna be bringing a lot of new stuff to them. A lot of people haven't done this before. This way that we're gonna be working through the strategy and the plan and roadmap, mapping it and, you know, I just wanna make sure people are getting it and so let's just pay attention to that.
Camille: And he said, in fact, I may just ask you questions even though I understand what you're doing. Oh, saying could you explain that again? I'm not sure I'm following. Just for the benefit of others who I know aren't getting it, but aren't willing to ask. And I was like, what a brilliant leader move.
Camille: Right? Yeah. What a brilliant move for a leader to just be like, and telling me as the facilitator, like, I'm gonna do that to you. So just so you know, I am tracking with you, so don't worry about that. Hmm. But I'm gonna ask you just for the benefit of others so that you can walk through a particular topic. Cuz he knows them better.
Camille: It's his leaders, it's his team. So he'll be like, I'm pretty sure so-and-so's not. I can tell they're not quite tracking. And I did say to him, you know, my biggest worry is the ones who think they do know. And so they're not really listening and he got a smile on his face, like he knew exactly what I was talking about.
Camille: And he is like, yep, those will be the tricky ones, because there's always somebody. So how are you gonna deal with that? Yeah. Those are harder because usually what happens is you kind of bring them along through the force of everyone else. So there's usually just a couple singled out and if you just keep moving the group in this direction, they will start to call out a few questions here and there that are kind of challenging what you're saying.
Camille: This has happened a few times, so they'll try to call you out as either being a hypocrite, well you said this here, but now you're saying that over there. And they're trying to make it sound like these things are in conflict. And so I have to explain.
Camille: No, those aren't in conflict. Cuz they're like wanna make it very black and white, which I've said before is like completely, one of my most annoying things that people try and do. Nothing about this process is black and white, right?
Camille: So usually what I'll do is I'll be, oh, great question and I'll open it to the group and when the team starts to answer him or her, whoever's, you know, going in that direction, they start to soften to it a little more than if it's the person in the front of the room.
Camille: Cuz I think there's something in there also about somebody of authority trying to tell them, you know, that they're wrong. That doesn't go well. Yeah, they're gonna be more resistant. Yeah. The more I use data to back myself up, the more resistant that person will become. And so I usually try to leverage the team to bring them around cuz they also know that person better.
Camille: So they'll be like, oh yeah, so hey, so and so, this makes me think of that example you and I were talking about the other day and somebody else will do a lovely job of bringing them through it. So that's usually the best way. It doesn't always work out to somebody who steps up and has a good example, but if I can see that that person is resisting in that way, almost every other person in the room can see it too.
Camille: And I count on that. Like they're all smart people. They see, they can see that person's being this weird resistor. And they'll help me. They'll help me bring them through. Oh. So that's usually what I try and do. That's cool. I like that.
George: Yeah.
Camille: This was fun. You know, it made me think about the bigger picture too, as you were telling the story of what you guys are doing.
Camille: And I was thinking about, oh yeah, this is also tied to when I talk about what it takes just for a high performance business and those three elements of clarity systems and mindset. And you guys had to go right back to clarity. Like, we gotta get clarity. We gotta start with that.
Camille: Your next move is now we gotta figure out the goals so that we can have systems to actually execute on the stuff that we say we're so valuable for. Now we have to actually deliver the value. But it all starts with getting that clarity, hearing that you guys valued the time in person together, I do think clarity is one of those places we're doing it in person is worth it.
George: I think so too. We all agreed, we checkpointed on that and agreed.
George: This was important enough that even though it's money we're taking away from other stuff, we're gonna do it quarterly at least right now until we get clear. Yeah. And actually, I can't believe I didn't think of this. You mentioned clarity. Clarity was one of the top level things that our SVP was asking for, like driving principles, like clarity.
Camille: Which is good. That is actually what every leader should be asking for is clarity. And then their job should be, is that all lining up? Yeah.
Camille: Again, back to the, if you guys came up with something and it didn't actually dock in with the whole system of the business, well then their job would be like, Hmm, let me come and coach you guys on why that's not gonna work.
Camille: Yes. And you go back to the drawing table, right? Yes.
Camille: All right. This was fun. I liked the George topics. I'm gonna have to do more, George. Just George.
George: This is really cool. I had fun talking about it too. Both of the topics we talked about are fresh from this week. I like that too.
Camille: Yeah, it's good. And I do think even though you know, you were coming at it from a big business perspective, again, so much of this stuff, I think just businesses is business. Every business needs to go reflect back on that clarity component of their business.
Camille: Revisit the mission and the vision statement. Revisit. Yes. What does it means I provide value to my clients and my customers. And I think that's just important work we should all be doing. And small business has the challenge of trying to do it before you are becoming irrelevant to your client base. Yeah.
Camille: Right. You need to do that before people start to question whether they should even buy from you, which is why we make it a repeatable process, like doing it all the time. Some years you'll see big change to be had and some years you'll just be like, I think we're okay. But if you don't do that reflection, that word keeps coming up for us.
Camille: Right. If you don't do that reflection, then , you could miss it and, and then bad things happen. Chaos and en toos.
Camille: All right. Okay. Thanks George.
George: Thanks, Camille. This was fun. Have a good week.
Camille: That was fun. Yeah, you too. We'll talk to you next week and we'll be back in everybody's ears next week as well.
Camille: See you everybody. Bye.
