10MINMC.Ep29.V1.AUDIO
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Trey Sheneman: [00:00:00] Do you want an advantage in business? If you focus on this one thing, you will get the greatest advantage you can give to yourself as a business owner and to your team if they work for you. And that one advantage is solid organizational health. Because here's the truth, great marketing and great sales are never gonna be able to solve for an unhealthy organization.
Welcome to 10 Minute Masterclass, your weekly mic Drop for Business Breakthrough. I'm your host and lead MC Trey Sheneman, and it's our goal every week on 10 Minute Masterclass to teach you timeless business principles to help you solve today's business problems. Now, the way that we do that. It's through what we call the [00:01:00] core four drivers of growth.
So if you've not figured this out about me, maybe this is your first episode. Somebody shared this with you. If so, shout out to whoever that is. Thank you. Um, if you don't know anything about me, I have run growth for the last 16 years. About half of that time I spent running growth inside of organizations, some of which you've probably heard of before, especially if you've been around like the Christian public figure space or the other half the time I spent running growth inside of agencies, agencies that I was a partner in, which meant I was also then running growth for all of our clients.
That's what they were coming to us for, and it doesn't matter in any of those situations, every time I've seen growth become predictable, it has to do with solving bottlenecks, issues, problems inside of one of the. Four core areas of growth, marketing, sales, operations, and leadership. In today's episode, we're gonna dive deep into leadership, specifically talking about my favorite.
Author of all time. Pat Lencioni. Pat Lencioni. I just love the way that he writes. He, he kind of has this fable way that he writes and [00:02:00] teaches about business principles. I love it. Um, kind of a little known fact about me. I grew up being a spoken word poet. I still do spoken word poetry from time to time now, so I appreciate the creative lens with which Pat Lencioni brings to the table.
And he's written several books. He's got a lot of great books. Matter of fact, every one of our new clients, I send him a Pat Lencioni book as a part of a welcome gift when they, when they hire us, um, hire Herald. Um, but my favorite Pat Lencioni book that we're gonna do a deep dive in today is called The Advantage.
Um, and the whole premise of the book, the advantage is that organizational health isn't a part of the game of business. It is the game of business that the ability for you to build a thriving culture inside of an organization is the greatest marker on whether or not that business is gonna stand the test of time and grow.
So we're gonna talk about some of the lessons that I learned, some of the notes that I took reading this Pat Lencioni book, the Advantage. So let's jump in. [00:03:00] So a little bit about Pat. If you don't know or have never heard of Pat, uh, you can go check him out. He runs an organization called The Table Group.
Um, he's written several other books. Maybe you've heard of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team or Death by Meeting or The Motive or the Ideal Team Player, all great books. But this book, the Advantage It, when I read it, I think it was the third book that I read by Pat. Um, and I realized that success. And a business really ultimately is a measure of healthiness.
Healthiness in the founder, healthiness in the team, healthiness in the clients. Like all those things have to be true in order for the business to grow. So being healthier in the business is actually more important than being smarter in the business or being smarter at businesses. See, most businesses, most anytime I even go to networking events and listen, I, I can find myself.
Being subjected to this as well, partially because I'm a three on the Enneagram and, uh, you know, I really wanna achieve and be liked and fit in and [00:04:00] all the things, the stuff I'm working on. But the truth is, when you go to these networking events or you get around other businesses, or maybe you go to a conference, most of the conversation is gonna be around strategy or marketing or sales or technology, uh, or systems that they're building.
And it's, it's rare for you to meet a founder and be like, oh my gosh. We just have the healthiest team culture that you've ever seen. It's the whole focus of what we're working on. I, and I'm not trying to get all sappy, but I'm just saying you just, it's not something that's top of mind for a lot of people, but all of those other things they talk about, it's not that they're not important, they are important.
They're, they're, they're kind of, uh, they're, they're parts of the legs of the bar stool of running a good business for sure. Sales and marketing and strategy, all the things, but. If your organization is dysfunctional or divided or built on distrust instead of trust, it doesn't matter how good you're gonna be at those things.
You're gonna have turnover, you're gonna have backbiting going on gossip. But man, if you can focus on having a healthy team where they genuinely [00:05:00] value each other, uh, they genuinely want to see each other win. They wanna see the company win, man, you want to see a multiplication happen on your business. A healthy team is, is a multiplier in a huge way.
So in this book, the Advantage Pat teaches us the signs or the. Pillars that you can see to know, uh, that you're headed towards the healthiest organization possible. And I just wanna walk through what those things were, because again, this book really changed my life. It changed the way that I lead. I just read it again for a second time here recently.
The first focus is you gotta build a cohesive leadership team. The leadership's gotta be more than just you. You gotta have a team around you. And the biggest thing to make a leadership team cohesive is going to be trust, because if not, politics will creep in. Decisions will slow down. Silos will form trust has to be the, the foundation of a leadership team.
And it's not predictive trust, like just being telling, just them trusting each other 'cause they work together. It's vulnerability based trust. You need to make sure that the team knows really who each other is. They know [00:06:00] their spouse's names and their kids' names and their values and things that are important to 'em.
'cause when you have vulnerability based trust where they've been honest with each other, they've really been to the fire together, your business is gonna grow. So that's number one. The second thing is. Once you have, uh, organizational based trust, you have got to create clarity, cl clarity, clarity, clarity.
Most dysfunction comes from confusion. Not actually from like conflict, it's just because people are unsure or they're misled or they're not certain. So one of the things that Pat talks about in this book is the six questions that a leadership team must answer together. So powerful. Number one, why do we exist as a business?
Number two, how do we behave? Number three, what do we actually do? Like what are we in the business of? Number four, how will we succeed? How will we know what winning looks like? What's most important right now above all else? And who of us must do what? If you have clarity around those six things, as a leadership team inside of your company, at all times, your team won't help themselves but [00:07:00] being healthy, okay?
This is actually how you start to build some of that vulnerability based trust. Now, once you have the answers to those six questions. Now you have to over communicate. Clarity. Clarity's this weird thing that when people leave a room, somehow they get unclear real quick. So one of the things we have to do is we have to fight against that by over communicating clar clarity.
Leaders get tired of saying things long before teams get tired of hearing them. Okay? So repeat your mission, repeat the priorities. Repeat the playbook over and over again. A good behavior when you've gotten, uh, you know, to the answer of those six questions is to keep the answers top of mind and go over them every time you have a weekly strategy meeting or an L 10 or some sort of an all hands, whatever it is, just remind your team constantly about what you are clear about, what you are agreeing to and what matters most for what you're doing.
And a thing that I tell myself a lot is, even if I've said it 10 times. They probably [00:08:00] only listened once, and I hope that's not true, but it's a good reminder for me of making sure that the team is super clear. We've got a strategy meeting coming up next week, um, and I actually built it. It's the first time I've ever done this, rather than showing them the document day of, I built the agenda a week or two ago.
Uh, I sent it out to the team. I told them to review it and asked me questions ahead of time. I, I really dialed in the meeting minutes for the day because I want this to be a hyper clarity kind of meeting event at the end, and I, I have a high expectation of the speed and the growth of our team coming out of this meeting in quarter three and quarter four because of the way that I, it's been set up.
The fourth thing. So again, the first thing is the healthy leadership team. The second thing is creating clarity by answering the six questions. The third thing is over, over communicating that clarity. The fourth thing is reinforcing the clarity with your systems. Your hiring process should reinforce your culture.
Your meetings should then reinforce your priorities. And your rewards that you give out should [00:09:00] reinforce your behaviors. It's all connected are systems that drive for clarity. Um, 'cause your systems ultimately are like a whisper of your values. They show you and you and your team what's actually important to you.
And the other thing is, is a lack of systems will scream dysfunction. Okay. This is a huge area of growth for me right now. I, we are trying to build more systems inside of our business and I need so much help with it, and thankfully I've got some great people around me. Um, so those are the four steps. If you can get through those four steps, organizational health is almost assurity and your business.
So when I learn this. It was 2017, 2018, everything started to click for me. I stopped, even though my title was VP of Strategy in the firm that I was a partner in at the time. I realized that my number one job actually was a strategy. My number one job was clarity for the team, clarity for the clients, and if I created clarity, they would trust me more and we would be able to do better strategy together.
So every growth ceiling that I've ever hit since then, most of the time I [00:10:00] think every single one wasn't even really like a strategy. Ceiling or a lack of good thinking ceiling. It was something was broken organizationally and the health of the team, and we really needed to lean in and figure out what it was.
So this week, ask yourself the question, are we trying to be a smart organization, a cutting edge or organization, a trendy organization? Are we trying to be a healthy one? 'cause if you wanna win at work. But your team feels burned out, divided or confused you, you are not winning. So read the Advantage as a leadership team if you have to.
Um, I really hope you'll take to heart what I, what, uh, what Pat taught you through me in this podcast, because growth happens at the speed of trust. And trust happens when people are clear. So give people clarity and watch how fast they grow. Hope you got something out of this. Until next time, we'll see you on the flip side.
