How You Can Scale Your Business Through Trust and Inspiration w/ Stephen M. R. Covey

0:00My father used to say life is about contribution, not accumulation. So it's not an either or do you achieve the task or build the relationship. It's both. Stephen M. R. Covey. There is just so much genius in today's interview and you should have expected it. Trust is really a hard edged economic driver. In addition to being a social virtue, most success is ultimately on the far side of failure. Shift the paradigm of how you view failure. Moving from success to significance. It's a big idea. So Stephen, tell me your definition of success. How do you define it? I like to look at it in this phrase because it contains all the elements.

0:38To live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy. See, that's the body, the heart, the mind, the spirit. To live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy. So to live is the whole economic need and the need to survive and even to thrive. to love is the whole social, emotional need to connect, to get relationships, people that matter so much. And if we get the economic need and the goal, but not the social and emotional goal, what have we gained? To learn is the mental intellectual need to grow, to develop, to progress, to get better, to improve. And then to leave a legacy is the holistic or spiritual need, the need to matter, the need to make a difference, to have purpose and meaning and contribution.

1:39And all four of those elements, I think, are intertwined. And if we achieve success in just one or two of them, at the neglect of the others, I don't think it's a complete, whole success. I think we have those four needs, body, heart, mind, spirit. And an expression of that is to live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy. Wow. Dang, dude. I've never heard it put that way. That is an amazing definition. So did that evolve for you over time? How did you learn to have that definition? Yeah, no, it absolutely evolved because I think most of us start with kind of the traditional measure of success around achievement and goals.

2:24And that's a good thing. And, you know, and accomplishing what you're seeking to accomplish, all good things. And I would put that in the to live, you know, the economic success. And a lot of us are trained with that. But over time, you realize that you could have an economic success and lose relationships that are most important to you. So you've got to add your love to it. And then you also, though, could achieve something, but still not be growing and developing as a human being, as a person, and really your gifts and your talents and your uniqueness, your skills that uniquely can contribute.

3:01And then finally, all of this, you've got to have some bigger purpose than just about yourself. And my father used to say that life is about contribution, not accumulation. And so the idea of contributing to other people's lives, making a difference, mattering, and really in a sense, moving from success to significance, it's a big idea. Dang, dude, you're dropping. Amazing. Okay, let's go backwards then. You mentioned your dad. do you feel like you were born into a success mindset or did you choose where did success become your choice I think both I think there's no question and I I was fortunate I was blessed and I acknowledge this with an extraordinary father equally extraordinary mother just not as well known yeah yeah and and so great parents who taught me this way so this was ingrained in me and And this whole mindset of contribution and mattering and relationships, as well as traditional goals and achieving.

4:09Yeah, yeah. And so that was instilled in me as a young boy growing up in our home. And so that was beautiful. It's a gift. What a blessing. And I feel a sense of responsibility and stewardship for that because of it. and at the same time you still make those choices yourself you still choose yourself to say this matters to me and and um i'm going to try to do things the right way yes i want to achieve but i want to do it in a way that values people and that builds trust and builds relationships so it's not you know an either or do you know do you achieve the task or build the relationship It's both.

4:53It's and. And you want both. And you always want to get results, but do it in a way that inspires trust and builds relationships and develops people and grows people and moves and brings them with you. And so I also chose myself into it at some point. And really, I think I choose myself into that type of success again and again and again, because it's a constant choice of wanting to make sure we do things consistent with kind of our values and our sense of purpose. What do you think is like the formula or the methodology by which success happens that like this is the way if you do these things, you will be a success or have success or create success?

5:39Yeah. So I kind of go back to what my father taught in Seven Habits of highly effective people. And the idea of, you know, that to be proactive, in other words, we are responsible for ourselves and for our lives. Just taking that ownership, that responsibility, I think is part of it. That's kind of habit one. Habit two, begin with the end in mind. You know, so if habit one says, I'm a programmer, not a program, habit two says, write the program. What matters to me? What's my end in mind? What's my purpose? You know, who am I? What am I about? What does success look like for me? And kind of define it and identify the first things in my life.

6:29The most important thing is what matters most for me. And then habit three is to now put first things first. Now live by it. If I've identified what matters to me, now live by what matters to me. And that could be both the achievement, but also the relationship. It could be both how we do what we do, as well as achieving what we're seeking to do. And so I think it's all of this thing. And so for me, that's a simple formula that take responsibility and to own it yourself, to begin with the end in mind of who you are, what you're about, what matters most to you, and then to live by it and to try to do your best to put those first things that you identified, put them first in your life, live by your values.

7:22And in that sense, there's a sense of what my father referred to as a private victory. And those private victories precede the public victories. So that's from the seven basic habits that my father taught years ago. I think it's a nice formula for achieving success that's very distinct and unique to everyone because we all have our own definition of what it looks like. So defining it and then living by it and taking responsibility to own it to begin with is a good way of bringing it about. doubt you know buddy i remember when i first read your book the speed of trust and i still remember when i first read your dad's book the seven habits and i the first time i met your dad i still remember the first time i met you in in london i still remember so i i've i've been a coffee fan for a long time i love the campus up there and and and uh i want to ask though a question that failure and success, how do you view that relationship?

8:28They're inextricably intertwined. They go together in a sense that most success is ultimately on the far side of failure. And it's through our efforts to try, to attempt, and to take a risk, and to fail, but then to learn from the failure and grow again and try again and to fail and to learn. The idea of fail fast, but fail forward, fail often, learn faster. I think that we succeed by failing. That sounds like a nice tried expression, but I think it's really true. To most, success truly is on the far side of failure from our repeated attempts to learn to get better. I know that's been that way for me.

9:22I feel like I've failed many, many times. And in the process of doing so, I try to learn. And so that I course correct a little bit and maybe get a little bit better and a little bit better. Then over time, I maybe start to see some success with it. And it's partly because I've learned to fail. I love Michael Jordan, the great basketball player. And this was a quote he gave some time ago that just hit me. And he said at the time, and I think these numbers ended up changing as his career progressed, but he said, 27 different times at the end of a game, I've been asked to take the final shot and missed.

10:08And then he goes on to say, I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. You know, we can't be afraid of not trying. And so I think that it truly, we do learn from our failures and that is ultimately the manifestation of what can become success. So I want to ask your thoughts then, how does someone who has that fear of failure, that not wanting to look bad, not wanting to make the mistakes, how do you get them through that in your teaching? partly is literally to shift the paradigm of how you view failure to reframe it and even the name failure you know just sounds oh no none of us want to fail and but but just to see this as failure and failing maybe to reframe it as not failure but failing going short and then learning from it is all part of the formula of succeeding so that we reframe it.

11:15We see it differently and hear it differently and not with a shudder of, oh, I can't have failure, but rather as, oh, I'm on the journey to success. So the paradigm shift and the quickest way to change your behavior is to change your paradigm, how you see something, see failing differently, see it as not as failure, but on the road to succeeding. I just love, I just love, you just changed my whole, just the language shift from failure to failing, shifted it in my head immediately. I love that. Hey, again, you're on the Big Success Podcast. We're going to be back in just a moment and we're going to get into the subject of trust and inspiration with Stephen M.

12:02Markovie. Start living your life on purpose and with a plan. As Brad Sugars teaches, you only get 4 ,000 weeks. So learn the principles of success and make the most of your life. Join Brad's Purpose event now and create the life that you deserve. Visit bradsugars.com to attend this program as a standalone or as part of Brad Sugars' Entrepreneurial University. And we're back. Big success. Now, a big part of success is trust. And the genius of trust, Stephen M. R. Carvey. Buddy, when I first read The Speed of Trust, two things that stood out to me was speed and costs. Can you elaborate on that? But first of all, give us your definition of trust.

12:43Yeah. So here's the most simple definition I could give. By trust, I simply mean confidence. Confidence as opposed to suspicion. See, and the confidence, where does that confidence come from? It comes from having two sources. It comes from both character and competence. Character and competence, both are vital to sustain trust. Think about it. If you have one but lack the other, you'll never sustain the trust. So someone could be honest and caring and kind and have integrity, but not able to deliver or perform. So I might trust them to watch my home or my apartment. I went on a holiday right out of vacation because they're honest, but I might not trust them on the key project, the key client, the key deliverable if they don't have a track record of performing.

13:39Now, the reverse could be true. Someone could be high in competence. They deliver. They get the job done, but maybe low in character. Maybe they're running people over in the process or cutting corners, being unethical, violating the values, the beliefs of the company or of the person. So I'm going to not trust that person either. In the long run, I need to see both character and competence to have the kind of confidence instead of suspicion. So that's the simple definition, confidence. Yeah. How does suspicion creep in? And if it has creeped in, how do we remove it? Yeah. It naturally creeps in because, especially in a low trust world, which we're operating in today, where everyone becomes a little bit more careful, cautious, guarded, because none of us want to get burned.

14:26So we start to question and wonder. We see a violation of trust somewhere. And it's very easy to have that creep into saying, I wonder if that could be happening here. or there or in this part of my life or with this person. It's very easy to have suspicion creep in. In a sense, distrust is contagious. And so we got to become aware of it. But trust and confidence also can become contagious. When people are trusted and feel trusted, they tend to perform better, which then reinforces that you can trust them. And it becomes this virtuous upward spiral. and they trust you back when you trust them.

15:02There's a reciprocity of trust and we can find ourselves creating more trust intentionally and on purpose when we are both trustworthy, that's having character and competence, but also trusting, being willing to give the trust because trust is both earned and given. We need to be both trustworthy and trusting. And I think our job as a leader is to go first in leading out in both being trustworthy and trusting to counteract the distrust, the suspicion all around us. Hey, Brad, to your earlier point, can I just make this comment on the speed and cost question? Oh, yeah. This is a big part of the speed of trust, is that I'm highlighting that trust is not just this soft, nice-to-have social virtue.

15:49Trust is really a hard-edged economic driver, in addition to being a social virtue. It's financial. You can put a value on it. And here's why, because trust always impacts two outcomes. These are the economics of trust. It's speed and cost. And there's a simple formula that looks like this. When trust goes down in a relationship or on a team, in a company, in a culture, anywhere, in a marketplace, when trust goes down, here's what you will find. The speed will go down with it. Everything is going to take you longer to do and the cost will go up. Everything is going to cost you more to do. Now that is a tax.

16:29It's a low trust tax. It's a wasted tax. Why? Because when the trust goes down, now we've got to take all these steps to compensate for that lack of trust. That's checking, verifying, validating, dealing with redundancy, bureaucracy, rules, regulations that get put in place in the lower trust environments. That's the tax. Yeah. But here's the good news. The converse is equally true. And when that trust goes up in the relationship, when the trust goes up on a team or between teams, in a company, in a culture, in the marketplace with customers, when the trust goes up in any relationship, the speed goes up with it.

17:04We can do everything faster and the cost comes down. It costs us less. Now that is a dividend, a high trust dividend. It's that simple, that predictable, but speed happens when people trust each other and nothing is as fast as the speed of trust. There's economics to it as well as being social. Now I'm reading this new book. It's some handsome guy wrote this book. You might, you might know him, uh, trust and inspire by Stephen M. R. Covey, um, about the first page I marked up was page 17 and 16, where you talk about how the world's changed, but leadership hasn't. Take us through a bit more of that thinking, because I think it's important for people to understand your perspective there.

17:49Yeah. The world has changed in profound ways and changing right in front of our eyes through technology. The pace of change, the amount of change, the type of change, disruption. We've got AI, we've got virtual reality, augmented reality, robotics, 3D printing, all these things, all these changes hitting us. technology is changing everything, but also the nature of the work itself is changing. Work today is far more collaborative, interdependent, team-based, and also service-oriented. The nature of the workforce is changing, where we have multiple generations at work with completely different expectations of how they want to engage and be led, especially the younger generations, millennials, Gen Z, and this upcoming Generation Alpha.

18:37The nature of the workplace has changed where suddenly there's remote work and hybrid work, intentionally flexible work in a way that didn't exist even a few years ago before the pandemic. And the nature of the work, excuse me, the nature of choice has changed. We've gone from multiple choice to infinite choice. People have choices and options in a way today they didn't have before. I can live here, work there. And, you know, it just gives me options and opportunities. And so all these changes are taking place. And yet the way that most organizations and people are still leading today is in the old model of leadership that came out of the industrial age.

19:22I call it command and control. The traditional top-down hierarchical approach that we've just become better at. We've made it more of an enlightened command and control. Yeah, we've made it seem more enlightened, but it's not actually. Yeah. So let's dive in then to the three stewards from the book, because when you put those three circles together, I think that that changes a lot of people's ability to see what you're saying with this thing. Absolutely. Yeah. So rather than command and control, we want to lead with trust and inspire. And there's three stewardships to this trust and inspire approach to leadership.

20:00And these are simple. they're just not easy. First, we model. Second, we trust. Third, we inspire. Modeling, trusting, inspiring. So modeling is who we are. That's our credibility, our character, our competence, our moral authority. It's who we are as people. We model. We go first. We model the values that we have. We model the behaviors that we would like to see. We go first. We want more respect? We model respect. We want more openness and transparency. We model openness and transparency. We go first. Second, trusting. We have a stewardship or a responsibility to trust those who are leading, those who are serving, because people want to be trusted.

20:51They do their very best work when they're trusted and they perform better. They rise to the occasion and they reciprocate and return the trust and they grow more. So we have a stewardship to trust those around us because we see the potential inside of them. It might be lying dormant. It might be unseen. But we see it. That's what great leadership does. It sees and develops potential in others through trusting and believing in people. And it's not a blind trust. It's just indescript. It's a smart trust with clear expectations and with an agreed-upon process for accountability. But when people are trusted, they perform better and they develop more and they reciprocate and return the trust back to you.

21:35You build more trust. And finally, the third stewardship is to inspire those about us. Now, sometimes people say, well, I'm not charismatic. I'm not inspiring. No. Inspiration and charisma are two different things. They're not the same. I know some people who are charismatic, but who are not inspiring. I know others who no one would describe as charismatic, but who are extraordinarily inspiring because of who they are, how they lead, how they connect, how they care. So they're different things. Inspiring others is actually a learnable skill that we have as a leader. I believe that everyone can inspire.

22:15And we inspire when we connect with people through a sense of caring and belonging. When people feel that we care, experience that we care, and even love, and they feel a sense of belonging and inclusion, they feel inspired. And we inspire people when we connect them to purpose and to meaning and to contribution, to mattering, to the success. We're talking about the significance, making a difference, mattering. We can inspire. We can get good at inspiring others as a leader. And I believe there's actually a stewardship, a responsibility that we have. So those are the three to model, to trust, and to inspire.

22:56I love the whole who we are, why we do what we do. And I love that you've added that matrix or that third part to it of how you lead and that trust is that way of leading. Gang, you're on Big Success Podcast. We're going to be back in a moment. We're going to talk about going for scale and going from good to great and get Stephen M. R. Covey's opinion on how you can do it too. Stephen M. R. Covey is the bestselling author of The Speed of Trust and the newly released Wall Street Journal bestseller, Trust and Inspire, How Truly Great Leaders Unleash Greatness in Others. To learn more about Stephen, please visit speedoftrust.com.

23:35So, Stephen, when we talk about scale and growth, you did it with Covey Leadership, taking it to a massive organization. What happened there? How did you do that? And then I want you to describe maybe your theory on how scale works and how people can do not just good, but great. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, when I came into Covered Leadership Center, we had a great purpose and mission, but we hadn't figured out our business model. And so we could grow because people liked it, but we didn't figure out how we could make money. And so what was happening was that we were growing, but we had low margins.

24:17In some cases, no margins. We had negative cash flow. We didn't have outside capital. And we had a lot of debt. If you do the math on that, we're going to grow ourselves right out of business. And yet, seriously. And yet everyone was excited about our purpose and our mission that we were having an impact on the world, on people. And so I didn't want to lose that, the sense of mission and purpose. But at the same time, we had to figure out a business model that worked for us. And so I came up with a little mantra. it was very simple. No margin, no mission. We got to have both. We need the margin in order to have a mission because in the long run, if we don't succeed as a business, we're not going to have a mission to move forward.

25:06So we kind of said we got to do both. It's not either or. It's not margin or mission. It's and. We are a business with a purpose. We are a business that matters. And so not just an ordinary business. We wanted to be an extraordinary business with the purpose to exist, but we have to be a business. So we tried to figure out a business model. We learned how to do it again through trial and error and learning things. And we learned how to trust our customers and empower them and license them and certify them so that we could scale ourselves. But at the time, today it looks logical. At the time, this was breakthrough thinking to say, we don't have to come out and train your people.

25:49We'll certify and license you to train your own people. We trust you to be able to do that. And we trust you that you would appropriately pay us for people that you're training. And there was a breakthrough at the time. But it enabled us to suddenly scale ourselves where now we could impact 10 times as many people, maybe 50 times as many people because we didn't have to hire our own people to go out and deliver it. Instead, our clients were delivering it. And they'd pay us a little bit for each of those delivery, not as much as we got on our own, but we could do 50 times more than what we could ever do on our own.

26:28So we scaled ourselves. That changed everything. Now we're reaching more people. Now we have a model that is producing some profit so we can have profitable growth and can reinvest in the business and reach more people. Now we truly became a business with a mission and a that matters. And that changed everything for us. So we had to figure out our own business model first without losing our unique purpose and mission that we felt everyone felt so passionate about. What do you think is the formula for scale then or the methodology via which companies do scale, businesses do scale? Yes. I think you find the way that you add economic value to somebody and then to say, okay, now how can we have this become a force multiplier?

27:20In other words, how can we do something once in a way that has an impact on many and not just one-to-one where it's just one part in, one part out? What if there could be one part in, many parts out? and that's for us became licensing and certification that we could hold train the trainers we could hold certification workshops and bring people in do one event and yet impact many many organizations that then take this and run with this and so this idea of a force multiplier like they talk in military terms of you know one one input multiple outputs and we found our version of that for us in a way that really says our strength is our intellectual property, our ideas.

28:14Why do we have to be the ones that deliver them? Let's empower others to be able to deliver them to their people. They can do it just as good and we can reach a lot more people this way. And it worked. So you find the equivalent of a formula like that that might work for you, where you're trying to move from one to one, one input to one output to one to many. And I think to add to that, some of the genius of what you guys did there was it wasn't just one to many. Everyone that you created, created an ongoing permanent revenue stream to the organization. It wasn't just you got paid like one to one.

28:55It was one to many, but those many then became many, many more. all over time. Absolutely. Yes. Thank you. That's another key thing. It was one to many, and then those many spread it from there too. And those many became a recurring revenue stream. And that you did not have to resell them every time, but rather they were champions. They were advocates. They were users. And they would then order new materials and the like, and they became champions. And they also would spread it themselves. And so they became part of the process of spreading this and growing this. We just broadened the tent and they would go deeper themselves and they would spread it out.

29:38So they would go deep and spread it wide to other people. And that way it kind of became this ripple effect and multiple ripples effects going on in multiple clients. And we let the very power of the experience that they were having, they became the advocates and the champions to spread it to others. Our best sales always came from our clients telling other people, you should do this. This really works. And the best part was, I remember sitting at your campus with your team one day, watching how when someone that got trained in a company that they used to work for moved to a new company and became an advocate for you in the next company, it's like, dad, this is like the force multiplier effect, you guys were like a mission that was supercharged.

30:25But I want to ask this. Most people don't go for massive. Most people go for okay, or many people go for survival. What in your mindset is the difference between someone who sets goals to be good or okay versus someone who sets amazing goals or goes for that massive thing? Yeah. I think it's an important distinction and progression. And there is a little bit of Maslow's hierarchy of needs here, right? So you start with that security. You got to survive. Here's how I liken it to is kind of look at four stages. You go from survival to stability. Now you're stable. To success. Now you're really succeeding.