Proven Tactics to 10x Your Impact as a Leader | David Kline (ex-Bridgewater)

my experienced leaders who don't delegate that usually starts from like they're afraid of something like they're afid of losing their position and their craft and so there so sometimes people won't delegate because of the fear of being less cented to the craft or making themselves obsolete some people won't delegate because they're afraid the people they delegate to won't do it as well and that mistake could lead to either bad things for the employee or bad thing for you the manager overseeing the employee there's like birth place is just to get over the ear cuz a lot of them are they are through in the near term but they are holding you back in the medium to long and if you don't get over these fears you never really actually become a manager my guest today is David Klein David worked directly with Ray Dalo at Bridgewater and spent over 20 years leading teams we spoke about his journey from leader to solopreneur how to manage up well and how to dedicate and help other people grow David has taught over 800 leaders through his management course so I'm thrilled that he's sharing his insights here for free if you enjoy our conversation please like And subscribe to support this podcast all right so thanks so much for doing this with me I really appreciate it so let's talk about your I guess corporate career first right so before doing this you spent two decades leing teams at Bridgewater and M moodies and other companies and I remember like just like a couple years ago I read Ray D's book principles and like it was kind of like one of my favorite books so I'm just curious like what kind of things do you learn working at Bridgewater like in terms of the culture and stuff yeah I mean I was you know I was fortunate enough to spend 10 years there and a couple of them I work directly for right at some level it's hard to summarize like things

you've learned over a decade in like a single sentence his book the principles is very much about this idea of first principles thinging right like learning the Timeless truths that are unique to your own journey and then applying them and so of all the one I think that each Shar that I've taken away with and I'm like oh in reflection what have what's happened most impact on my career and on my life I would say it's the principle of you could have anything you want not everything which is you know to some degree a clever way of saying that you need to focus but a lot of times I think people are unwilling to sort of see that through right sort of you know and we're experiencing that very acutely in our creator Journey right like my wife and I do this together we refer to ourselves as do preneurs we have a live course right so every time we teach a live course we're not building a digital product or we're not writing the next newsletter we choose to write a newsletter we're not you know engaging with our customers Etc and so there's a real Relentless Focus for us on keeping the main thing because there's so many interesting shiny objects right now you know should we be chasing AI should we be you know leaning in Direction so that was just fall back to that principle that came from you know keep the main thing like Bridgewater got to be the world largest hedg fun really with two main products it's a great reminder to have lived that and now sort of try to keep reapplying it in my got it yeah like even working the different tech company yeah there's always L to chase the latest Trend whether it's like audio crypto or like now ai and usually it doesn't work out if it's like two separate from your core Bas so yeah that's def good to know real I think a real tension in that there's a lot of stories like you take Airbnb as being the pandemic when they were right they were going to start an airline and they had all these different initiatives and they came back to the Core you what's happened to them since and then you have tons of business you go back in time in like the H hackers and the 3M that started in business a and they pivoted to become a like wildly successful business in a totally different line and like you can imagine being in the seat of a founder and saying like which world am I in the world that I have to shrink back to only the thing that works or am I on the wrong track and I need that pivot so I'm apathetic to people trying to figure out that problem yeah I don't think there's like T it's like hard choices they make yeah I'd figure out how to write it if there was yeah so like so yeah so after Bridgewater or like just kind of walk me through your thought process and journey transitioning from this full-time role to kind of working for a software with your wife like why did you do this and like how do you do this yeah it's a great question so I would say the core pieces were one a little bit in My DNA like we always knew we would do it we just didn't know when and

I really thought you know I graduate with an engineering degree I thought get a couple years of business experience and start my business and I kept waiting for the big idea in two years became 10 became 20 plus and probably the most unlocking piece was realizing that I was a reasonably good operator and that I did need to have an amazing idea that there's lots of lucrative profitable businesses in the world that can just go be operated well so the I think the Thea moment was combining that realization that like oh what if we went and bought a business then we would have cash flow a Runway we don't have the big idea but maybe we can evolve the thing we buy into that and the other thing was more of the career side right like I had been to Bridgewater 10 years we moved people around a lot like if you were in leadership there you sort of moved different departments so I'd been the COO of a couple departments I had met a couple departments and I sort of looked up one day and like there's not another mission that I wanted to go take that I thought was going to be particularly additive so when you put those two pieces together it was time and then the inter question of how we spent we sort of had given ourselves a Runway we said like if we buy a business within a year we should be okay and so we had that year to explore and I we could cook hires on all kinds of businesses like an oil change franchise lots of digital businesses but the good like we were using each of those explorations to sort of test What mattered to us and we really wanted a relatively like high margin low employee business that was portable and so that was like a we didn't want to have to like have a massive team right away because we had never done this before and like I just I would feel very beholden to like these people's livelihoods yeah I'm okay to gamble with mine but maybe I wasn't quite confident enough to gamble with somebody else with the portable thing seemed appealing to us as we our kids get older and they will eventually go to off to college and can we what could we be able to travel Etc so we ended up buying a education review site where they look say different courses on L bin learning on UDI on skillshare a lot of our partners we reviewed them and then if people use those reviews to go purchase we get a small you know commission part of the logic of that was two things one we were seeing the rise of cohort based courses and so we thought hey we can grow this business to cover these live higher ticket courses and then the other piece was eventually could we have our own course content to drive traffic to from that site and so instead of getting a small commission we get the know the entire fee and those last two things sort of collided we got to know the Wes and gagin and Maven went through the maven accelerator and sort of tentatively offered a course on management um thinking we'd get you know eight or 10 people to come and that would be offset the cost of building the course and we had our first course our first proo had a weight list of 150 people we've now taught 10 toll cohorts in year one five of them on Maven sort of open to everybody five of them within companies weing cohorts of just that company's leadership teams so any it's been a wild Journey yeah that sounds amazing I mean management is like a skill that you kind of have to work hard to learn and like it doesn't come naturally and most people are pretty crappy for time man manages right so I'm really glad that you're kind of like teaching this and bringing it to the world but like why don't we talk more about that topic I guess like what don't we start with like if you were to Define what management is in one phrase like what would that be yeah it's funny you described a lot of people as starting the craft in a crappy way because if I were if I suit in one sentence I say management is a leadership done poorly interesting just to expand on that right the a lot of the phrases people will think about with management will be like directing controlling it's very much about like how do I get these people to do certain things on my timeline at my cost right it's sort of born I think the images a lot of people have is like born the Industrial Age like how do I run an assembly line and I think that that's not really management today at least not effective management that I see itive management I see looks a lot more like leadership right like how do I Empower people how do I get them the resources they need to go do things that they're more capable of doing than I'm capable of doing how do you inspire a tee towards a common Mission especially when that mission is knowledge work and sometimes you're in Uncharted Territory you know I mean it's not just make another car it's go like invent what a car can even be right we were talking about AI a bit you know like think about leaving like you can't run that like a factory because you're sort of inventing the factory as you build it think about the types of people you want to attract how you'd like them to work together and so that's why I think honestly like management is the entry coin to becoming a leader and management done excellently looks a lot like leadership yeah I love that definition because that means that anyone can be a leader if even don't manage anybody you can like craw some people together and just get something done yeah I love that wellth that yeah so I guess why don't we start from the bottom so let's talk about managing up ports if just like a regular employee like I and you know you want to build a graduation with your boss on your skip level like what are some kind of does

and don't doing that yeah well I'll give you one do and one don't why we start there and then we get standand on out or however you want so I'd say the do is p the boundary of your job you know like the I it's one of the it's like my current pet peeve is I read more and more things on social media where people are it's the foundation of quiet quitting you know this idea like draw a very clear boundary and leave and I'm I just think it's really shortsighted you know like especially early in your career it's a it's an opportunity to grow you want to go like collect as many experiences as you can you want to interact with as many people learn what you're great at and what you struggle with you want to sort of wrestle with some of those struggles and I think you're just slowing down that process by drawing a really hard boundary around yourself and that mean sometimes you work more hours does that sometimes mean you're doing work that's not officially your job like yes does that mean you'll grow faster you'll add more value you have more of those experiences absolutely and do you run the risk in some small percentage of cases that like a company or the manager will take advantage of you like yes you do run that risk but I just think it's a risk worth taking so if I'm leing you the do advice it's like just look for places you can add as much po value as you can and don't worry about like whether give you the title forward or it's in your job or not that's great yeah I would say the don't bucket I would say something one of the CEOs I work for and then I've sort of passed down through time to my team it's just like no surprises like don't let me find out about something bad a problem a time you needed help um from somebody else right like I will I promise that I will engage you in the most positive way we will collaborate together I just don't want to be surprised and so say like don't surprise your boss you know like unless it's maybe for their birthday maybe you can jump out of the room but otherwise like communicate transparently if you have metrics about your role you know share them when something bad comes up just like go own it it's fine like we're most of us are expecting you to make mistakes and we're still making them too like you said Management's a really hard craft and so we're going to be imperfect we expect you can only help them on the things we know about how do you I guess help your boss Empower you right like maybe was like a weekly one-onone or like where are some channels to like work with your boss to find a right BBE opportunities outside of your job and not surprise him or her you know I me yeah hopefully MFA hopefully your manager your the leader you work for is actually having a one-on-one with you on a regular basis assuming that's the case the mindset I would encourage people to walk into is that it's your meeting as the employee not their meeting as the manager right so you are the thing that I'll talk to the people I coach is like you're the CEO of your own area and I borrow that from one of my clients but that's how he runs his teams but he wants people to show up and say like okay in my in the for employees the for team leads the source for managers the source for people running divisions which is simply like what are my goals how is it going how am I doing in pursuit of my goals and so that might be metrics or okrs that could be you highlighting big wins and big losses like if you're in sales like did you close a big account did you lose a big account so I had a goal how's it going and then no matter what you're going to have problems right like you're maybe you're and if we saying the sales mindset maybe your sales script isn't good enough or maybe you're getting a lot of initial calls but you're not closing people you know like well what's the problem great do you know why you have a problem and so what are you doing about it like oh I'm not closing enough people so I'm going to our cop Sals person and having them review some of my calls and then is that on track to get solved and if you own your area in that way and you come to a meeting with me and say like these are my goals and how it's going the problems and what I'm doing et like I'm going to have a lot of confidence and now I get to be your coach the person who removes the obstacles I can like support you I can cheer you on when you get stuff right it's a very different one-on-one model than the other way which is like it's my meeting as the boss you just should up and saying what you know what do you want to know is why I have to like poke and prod and ask questions and it's putting a lot of weight on me than every answers and so I think if you're proactive in that way that's how you make sure they know what's going on in your area and you can use that same frame to say like hey I'm grabbing on this other goal it's outside of my day job I think it's really important they can always say like yes or no or you can you but most of the time again I think the great leaders are like oh my go that's awesome you're being proactive of course I want you to do that and here's additional context you might need to know here's a person elsewhere in my organization you should partner with but I'd much rather be there where I'm sort of like orchestrating people who are already in motion than trying to you know create motion from nothing makes a lot of sense yeah you should be kind of the drivery of your own career right make your manager I like to do that yeah makes a lot of sense how do you ask for constructive feedback to improve or like you know like assuming you have the gross mind mindset and and you want to improve like how do you ask people or

manager for this kind of Fe feedback I think there's two modes and I use one very consistently and then one occasionally so I think the two modes are going to be kind of targeted and then I'd say much more like open-ended so on the targeted for the folks that I've been manag they would have development plans right that we would say okay what's sort of the next thing we're driving to for your career right like is promotion is it an increase in compensation is it just sort of getting to be good at the job you're currently in is it becoming a manager like whatever what are we building towards and then we would look and say okay what competencies are you lacking like what is the thing that's GNA hold you back from getting to that like what do we need to have you demonstrate to other people what do we need what experiences do you need to have we sort of would have that understanding of what was the next thing to work on and that became focus of the development plan and so that's where you know if I have a development plan for myself and I'm chasing a goal the thing I really want the most focus on whether or not I'm making progress on that specific item right and so that's what I'm saying like that's the one that would have high frequency so I would really be reminding my boss of the thing that we are like talking about and saying like hey there were three things we did this week in service to this Development Area can you give me feedback on these three did it work did it not work was it better was it not better I presented in that meeting we were focusing on me being clear and more articulate and more concise yes or no that kind of thing so I think that would be if I was going to put most of my effort it would be that thing because you've got buy and from your boss hopefully your peers the people around you so everyone sort of focused on it you get the benefit of not only the feedback but the fact that like because they're paying attention they're gonna have the perception of you changing like one of the biggest challenges sometimes is people change but no one notices that's another part you want move out in the context of your career something I might do like once a quarter or twice a year which is much more the open-ended conversation of just like how do I get better you know what I mean so instead of saying like we've decided I'm doing this thing and this is like the very targeted it's much more what am I missing show me my blind spots there's a framework that's pretty common that a lot of people will use if they're not getting a great response from you know the people on their team or their peers or their boss which would just be what should I keep doing what should I stop doing and what should I start doing like could you give me like give me one in each bucket like what is the thing that is you know for the keep it is the it's the reason you would call me in for help it is like my superpower it's the thing that if I stopped doing it my value would greatly go down you know stop doing would just be the thing that I do that's annoying or non-collaborative or detracts you or you know hurts people and then start doing it's probably going to look like that first bucket is the thing you're doing to build in the future but it's like what are the folks who are in a spot like I am what do they do to add value and where am I not doing that so how would I start going in that direction I really like the advice about like focusing on one area I think usually people are kind of insecure about what they need to improve on and they don't really tell their teammates that they're working on this but they probably the teammates probably realize anyway cuz it's something you need to work on so I kind of like your advice to explicitly call it out and like hey I'm working on this give me feedback yeah there's this Paradox I don't know if it has a name or not but I've certainly experienced it which is the phenomenon you're describing is 100% or it happens very often right which is people think that they can hide their deficiencies and like highlight their strengths and in fact like people see you pretty clearly they'll see both one of the ways to remove the power is to just sort of call it out like people can't with power over you because of your hidden weakness if you're just owning it right it's like no longer a speaker like the power comes from a being secret once you're saying like I'm excellent at this and I really struggle with this and here's how I deal with this thing I struggle with like it loses all of its power and then mostly people go to a mode of like well how do I help or maybe that's where I pitch in or that's the place where I compliment you and 1 plus one equals free yeah exactly yeah how about when it comes to like promotions I think a lot of people a lot of Junior employees will realize that a lot of times like your manager don't actually has power to promote You

by themselves so it's more like a committee and like how do you I guess how do you build those relationship with the commit and how do you set yourself up well for a performance review or something yeah I have a lot of advice on this but I'll trying to keep it I think the first place to start is you have to know the game that like what are the rules of the game at the company you're in right if you're in a 10 person startup the rules going to look very different than if you're at a 50,000 person F and so once you know the rules to your point then might some of those rules might involve you who gets to make the choice right is it does your boss have full autonomy at a 10 person company usually the boss has the bout H there right they own the place they can just decide in 50,000 person companies is like they're going to be a profess in that committee and double checks and like constraints and budget things to your point that's where you'd want to know like okay of the people who make the decisions like what are the inputs and then like how do I influence those inputs like I worked at an organization where it was sort of the committee at a certain level right once you were above managing director that was the group that came together to decide promotions okay well then what's the thing I want to do I want to have just my B the you know just the managing director directly above me be the only person who knows me has ever heard of me or do I want the majority of that room to know who I am yeah and what are the things that I can do it sort of ties back to going past your boundaries like can you get to know them a little bit can you help them in any way I think a lot of times more I think early career employees under just how valuable it is to these leaders the types of usually technical capabilities that you have it's like this massive asset like there almost every I'm over 40something so I can say this almost every 40s something person I know has something on their desk that is horribly manual that they don't know how to do any better that I'm pretty sure the average like one month out of undergrad could automate in my and that is hugely valuable when you give this person back and hour or two hours or three hours of their time for something that you take for granted it's like such an asymmetric way to like contribute value so I would just look for this you know like that I just think it's a huge asset that people tend leverage and they're like shy to do it and I'm like no every time someone did that for me I was like how can I help you yeah and so anyways I think that's a not process look for the people in that process as you said and then sort of in that development conversation with your boss like tayor everything in support of that and I guess the last thing and I would say this to everybody on my tee I like underscore for people who are underrepresented right I'd say this for women for minorities Etc like make it clear as your goal like if you want to be promoted like it can't be a secret if you are relying on it to be exclusively them noticing your value and your Merit you're going to be sadly disappointed doesn't mean have to be you don't have to Advocate obnoxiously but I think just being very clear about I'm in this current role I have this aspiration to take on more I would like to partner with you as my manager to do everything I can to have the highest probability to do that and is a conversation I often felt like I shouldn't have to have but you do because there's somebody else who also wants that who is having that conversation so it's just a little bit of a let nudge to say like be your own bigest haboc yeah I think sometimes it's definitely like a cultural thing where yeah some cultures are a little bit more like oh I'll just do my work and I'll get recognized but I think in the US is work that way yeah well does it I'd be curious because I don't I I've managed teams in other countries but they've been connected to US based organizations like does it actually play out that way or do those people actually get recognize and promoted in their like 100% meritocratic way or is there a different set of forces that lead to get promoted I don't know but I think there's like a balance like you said you can't be you can't like every one be like hey when I'm G to get promoted you kind of have to just like indicate it and like draft a plan like work for manager to do it yeah and to be fair I wouldn't I agree with you and I think if you're phrasing is when do I get promoted you're having a bad conversation yeah I think if you're having the I think if you're saying am I doing everything I can to make it easy for you to get me promoted it's very different you know like you're allowing them to give you direction of how you can get better how you can be more impactful you're still saying the same thing which is like I would like to get promoted I am willing to put in whatever effort it is to change to take on more Etc to get that without putting them into a spot where you're asking them to control something they don't actually control yeah exactly before we talk about like being a manager I just want to real quick follow up on the point about like building relationships with other people in the room you know these people are like pretty BS right like VPS or like they have things on their mind like how do you even uh get them to know about you or like care about like you mentioned like trying to add some value but like how do you know what they want even if I mean it's going to BU Company by company so let me just give you a couple hopefully like germs of ideas and then someone can twist 30% to plug their organizations yeah so I would look first if I look at most companies at a certain level of management these people will be active on social media somewhere partly they're building a personal brand partly they might be using it to recruit so like LinkedIn Twitter sort depends on your company and like what the medium is in your world but they're active some of them and so that's a great place like can you support what they're posting or can you comment on and can you introduce more things there's just a little bit of can you go from being anonymous to them being aware of you right and I'm shocked by how often those comments turn into conversations those conversations turn into coffees those coffees turn into like you're working F this person all of a sudden and they like hey you can go outside your walls and sort of look there I've heard other stories of people just doing clever things like I I've seen this in a couple companies where someone just started writing a newsletter about a component of their a compon of their company that people were trying to stay on top of right so if I were that company right now that I wasn't in the AI space but like AI adjacent could be compl valuable for someone to say like yeah I keep I spend three or four hours a week looking at all the AI news and like these are the 10 things you should be writing or you should be reading I've like curated it and now all of a sudden you've become this expert sending out things of value and shocking the word of mouth you know all of a sudden your boss recommends it to the peers recommends it to their peers and you now have an internal brand by just repurposing something you already that's a really good point yeah maybe it's just like yeah it's almost like you know we're all talking about creators building personal brand outside they can build personal brand inside too like the last module of our course

is actually exactly that thing like this idea that you have a brand as a I really as any employee but we're focusing on leader you have a brand as a leader whether you like it or not and so the question we post to them is like are you being intentional about the brand you're trying to build and then we connect it back to the parts of the course because of course your brand is really just the sum of all those behaviors you're exhibiting in your one-on ones when you delegate work when you set expectations when you hire people like that's your brand so if you bring some attention to what it is you're trying to shape you can then look back on all those pieces and say like are they designed to like have me show up the way that I'm

intended yeah it's like what are the three things that you want people to know you for you know like yeah so that that's reallyy good advice yeah let's talk about I do want to spend some time talking about being a manager so I just talking about I really love that threat you wrote about as a manager how much should you dedicate and you basically answer like you should dedicate everything and and like I think that's something that's just kind of like a mindset shift that I think a lot of people don't real realize so how do you start dedicating stuff that you're good at without screwing up the product or something like how do you do this yeah you my experience with people who don't to like leaders who don't delegate that usually starts from like they're afraid of something losing their sort of position in their craft right a lot of your readers are going to be Tech focused right like a lot of software developers I worked with were like very proud of like how good they were at software development and all of a sudden they were going to lose their identity they were going get too far away from the core craft and they were going to have to go do this management thing and so there so sometimes people won't delegate because of the fear of being less connected to the craft or making themselves obsolete some people won't delegate because they're afraid the people they delegate to won't do it as well like and mistake could lead to either bad things for the employee or bad things for you as the manager overseeing the employee there's lots of there's like bir place just get over these fear because a lot of them are they are true in the near term but they are holding you back in the medium to long term right that your whole job is to get like the right people doing the right work in a high levered way um and so if you don't get over these fears you never really actually become a manager so then if I were doing it I would actually step further back than even where you started which is like not how do you get them to start taking the critical things that you're good at I would start with actually things e much easier than that one things that are lower risk right so things that might be on your team where you're in charge right it's not going to be like touching other parts of the organization it's not going to touch customers you can delegate that work pretty freely because you're the ultimately the person who decides whether to react or overreact makes sense also things that have like the experiment tag on them like every company has Skunk Works beta projects just things that by nature of thep type of work they are the brand they have are expected to go poorly you can delegate those as well because again they have more risk baked into them so I'm starting there on the work side and on the people side I'm starting with things I'm not good at like don't take something that you have a superpower in and give that away pick the things that you struggle with you never get to you constantly put off and find someone who's very different than you on your team and give it to that like they'll be excited right like their growth your grind turns into their growth and so I try to move that work first then once I've got like the stuff that I'm not good at but they are and I've got these like more experimental internal work then I start to move towards the critical things and start giving away the things that I'm bested at the reason I sort of lead off with like delegate and everything is because it's aspirational like even as you're delegating you then probably have more space to think more strategically to have more impact up that inevitably means your team is going to get more bad you know and now you're going to have more on your play to then delegate but usually the mistake May will be to delegate too late not too soon hire competent people Empower them right give it to them they usually won't scre it up if anything many of them will do it better than you were doing it yeah it might be pleasantly surprised more often than not yeah it's usually as from my experience it's usually easier to get someone else try to fill your gaps and trying to improve your gaps for yourself because it's just hard people to change you can find that person on your team who can is actually where good at where you're not good at that that's pretty amazing yeah and put the underscore on why you want to hire diverse complimentary teams right everybody is exactly the same you don't get any of that benefit if people like you said are very different than what they're capable of what they've experienced their points of view you end up with a much more resilient agile birou so like I guess just one more question on the management s like you know you have a team some people are doing an awesome job and some people are like underperforming how do you kind of balance your time between these people or maybe like I guess going back to previous question maybe the underperformers just don't have the right job maybe they can do something

very well in something else you know how do you yeah how do you manage that I think there's like two questions so let me pull them apart I can answer them they're connected but them separately there's a part of where you put your time your high performers or your low performers and then there is well how do you deal with your low performers on the first question I would say I screw this up I had this backwards I put way too much time early on into my low performers at the expense of my high performers and if you just sort of step back from that on like a math perspective it's a terrible tradeoff right if your low performers are producing at like 50% of an average employee and your highest performers and they tend to be it tends to not be linear like sometimes those High performers are like 2x right if I help this 50% person get 10% better I've now got a 55% person if I help my 2x person you know get 10% better I now have two and a half yeah right so you're like just like pure logic would tell you every minute in theory should be going to the high performers and yet because they're underperforming they're often causing you problems they're often most demanding you know it's you usually flip it so i' say like anything you can do in a disciplined way to make sure that you are continuing to invest in your high performers is a much better return so just skip my mistake and do that yep that said that you do have V performers it's inevitable like and it can be people who change it can be the you didn't get the job right there's lots of be reasons why the way that I try to work to the Lo performers is to move from what I would say are me causing the problem to the to them it being about them and so what I mean by me causing the problem is like I think of my responsibility to leader when I bring somebody into a role he's like I need to make sure that they have everything they need to succeed do they have the support the access the connections the passwords the hardware and software like there's lots of things that people need to be set up they have the access to me to get Guidance Do they have are they collaborating well with their peers there's lots of pieces where when I would go in and try to help people who were struggling in other areas and you'd find out that like the manager hadn't given them like all the tools to succeed yeah and you're well how can you expect them to do the job like you've literally like sent them out into the wild with no pris and so that's where I would try to start in that way and sort of work through all of that it has two benefits one it usually works like usually you've hire good people and giving them everything they need that was actually the problem and two if it's not you've removed those excuses like a lot of frustrating conversations when we get over to like a person who can't do the job or doesn't want to do the job they will point back to the environment or lack of support and so if I've gone through this in a diligent way and I've brought and I've included them I've eliminated that set of conversations so now we're just down to two remaining reasons right and they're both about them one is desire and then one is ability right one is Will and one is skill and the will conversation is the harder conversation but I try to have it first because if they don't want to do the job close the gap if they don't want to get better yeah then the last conversation about ability is the waste of time you know I mean I can't convince you to get better at your job you have to want to and so we try to have that conversation and then if they do you know we have those people who like they really wanted they're Earnest they're trying hard they're sometime they'll show up with staying late it'll show up with like they'll be frustrated because they're putting in so much effort and still not getting their result and if I feel good that we've gone through the other three buckets and that's where we are at some point it's just not you know that this is your B player a player thing and I believe everybody is an a player in the right context it doesn't mean that's your your company has that context to offer but if we can't get them to like producing enough value in that role then you sort of have to just be honest about it put a timeline on it and move on it they try to give them a soft Landy somewhere or something yeah and you can do that with because sometimes that you sometimes somebody else in your company has it and like what again like I have this great person who's trying really hard and we're just H them in the wrong spot it's happened to me like my first role Bridgewater like I was a b player in it like it was not a fit for me it was set up and really drawing upon part of like part of what I'm like that's weaker and then put no value on the things that I'm excellent at and then luckily I had a leader who was wise enough to be like you don't belong there you belong here and with that move was eight more years you know at a company like with Lo more in because we sort of were now playing to my strength and not for my that's awesome yeah maybe let's kind wrap up on that right like I think everyone has something that they're working on as a manager or as a leader maybe you can close of like a personal story of something that you

personally struggle with I mean now you're teaching like hundreds of people but what's something you personally struggle with along the way no we can do that one let me think about I just I like to like not give you a rehearsed answer I want to think about it plus without it the pause bad awkward yeah it's not awward like I'll give you my example like I I think I've always been kind of like an impatient person I always want to just like get sh done and I think it came down to like my manager had just like one of my manager s me down like Hey by constantly like pushing people on being so impatient you're like kind of leaving people behind is actually detrimental for your project because like you're going too fast and you're like you know missing gaps and you end have to go backwards and it came to that kind of like serious talk that maybe I need to really fix this and actually make a proactive effort to you know fix the problem that I had a good story I was just trying to think of like I had an anecdote of like someone really so this is one so I'll give to yeah we I tell the story in the class so there's this guy who worked for me and he was leading a team of two he'll come to me I promise he was leading a team of two or three people and he had just been promoted and then we did a reorganization he was working for me and so I have this brand new manager that I didn't hire and I watch him interacting with his team and we're having our one-on-one check-in he's being the CEO of his area and showing up and being like oh this you know it's really going not that well with person a and then oh it's not really going that well with person B you know and like week after week he'd show up with a different person on his team who what he wasn't getting along with or it wasn't going that well or they were underperforming and like by the end of like a month we had hit everybody on the team so he was really didn't along with nobody and I remember looking at him and he's like I don't I just don't get it I was like well I get it he's like well tell me and I was like you're an and he was like what do you mean and I was like well listen you every time someone brings you an idea you say yes but here's my better idea every time someone like says something that's dis interesting to you like open up your phone and get distracted every time we're in a meeting and it's driving on you put your head physically on the table I'm like would you want to work for me right and he was like and he says this thing which everybody says when you shine the mirror in this really uncomfortable place and he says but I can't change that's just who I am and I said well I know that's not true it's just who you've chosen to be until today and the reason I know that's not true is because 10 years ago I sat in your chair and my coach told me I was like Bally said the exact same thing because I had almost The Identical problems of being impatient of rolling my eyes of like letting my face say what I was a little bit too afraid to say with my words and not realizing that like all this thing that I chocked up to being like a little bit better or a little bit faster or whatever else was actually undermining my mission like I was pushing my team away not drawing them closer I wasn't like motivating them through this I was demotivating them and so like I don't know I tell that story it was very real it was and I am so grateful that I had a coach who was brave enough to be like you got to stop like that is you don't see it but everybody else does and so I guess that's my um part of the origin story of what I why I do what I do today because that changed the trajectory of my career that conversation and that same person 10 years later still writes to me from time to time and be like I still think about that conversation and I changed the truter at pis and yes um pretty fulfilling you kind of have to use some like uh strong language right to make them realize call them need to yeah wow okay and you mentioned you had a coach so this person was not like your management change just like someone that you woring work with man luckily they were investing in me and my manager was like I he was probably trying to tell me and I just wasn't hearing it and so like let's get you a coach so they got me a coach and then I heard it that's awesome yeah I should try to get a coach for myself I think that's pretty important for different leers yeah I think one of the most fascinating like in different place I see a lot of parallels between sports and business like I use a lot of analogies from Sports because they have the same Dynamic if they had a scoreboard like this is a little markier you know but like when a English Premier team goes out and plays football like there's a winner and there's a loser you score goals or you didn't and so all those the recruiting the development all those things come together and they play out in real time and what I'm shocked by is like so many people are sports fans we think it's totally reasonable that these Elite athletes don't even have one coach but many of them have like three four or five that focus on nutrition and focus on performance and focus on mindset and then focus on the game tactics and we're like that's totally normal and then we think we're going to go do something as complicated as leading in business and we're just going to figure that out by ourselves yeah exactly so anyways I'm I've had a coach multiple times you know different coaches are different seasons you should totally do it it's really helpful and especially outside of your management chain because as much as you can try to encourage people to be honest with you like if you have any impact over them their career the work you do your relationship like there's going to be a hesitation to tell you the unbar truth yeah that makes a lot of sense yeah and good thing like a lot of companies actually provide funding for co- coaches for leads so I'll definitely try to take advantage of that cool D well I mean thanks so much for your time and where can people finds you online yeah yeah I would say the two main places to find me one would be social media so I'm on Twitter and Linkedin about eil frequency these days they decline I on Twitter and Dave kin on LinkedIn and then we started writing the management Playbook it's a weekly less than a five minute read try to break down one specific management challenge every week and give you very practical how-tos here's some tips some tactics a template my goal is that everybody can sort of read it and go turn around and like take a step they can like put it in action I don't want it to be a it's not a bulletin it's not meant to be something that you pound and get to and read to whenever you want to I want you to be if you read it know that you can go pick action on it that's awesome and are you still teaching your course or we are so you can find that one on the MGMT accelerator the management accelerator on Maven we our next Cort will be in May so we kick off I think May cool