What To Do When You're Stuck | Ep 780

0:00Hey, what's going everyone? Welcome back to the game. I'm furthering this spirit of telling you guys It's actually just going on in business, and maybe it will help apply to your business. This week, I had a frustrating issue with one of our departments, and we have had this recurring issue for three weeks, and it's been driving me bananas. One of the things that happened was last week, we had the issue. The week before, we had the issue. The week before that, we had the issue. And every time I'd arrive at the call, I would expect that the issue had been resolved, and it had not been resolved.

0:34And I heard this thing from Peter Thiel. It was said that he would mercilessly enforce a single focus policy. The theory or thought behind that is that people often add things to their plates that they know how to solve. And if you were to force rank the impact of the problems that they are solving, They will typically solve lower impact problems that are easier for them to do because everyone loves to cross things off their checklist and feel like they were productive. But the unfortunate thing about business is that most of the big leaps occur by solving more difficult problems, problems with more nuance, more data, more variables, more details, more parties involved.

1:20What ends up happening if you don't apply that kind of militaristic approach to everyone in the team and what they are spending their time on, then you get a poor return of the resources allocated. In this instance, the work of the employees, the work of your team, and you as the business owner, the cash that you're paying them, right? You're getting a worse return. I was thinking about that short when it came to this. And so I think there's a couple things that I take away and I'll tell you how we ended up solving the thing. First off, I see strategy, the word is this big amorphous term, but fundamentally it's prioritization of resources, You have unlimited options that you could do.

1:57There's a million things you could do in your business to grow it. So unlike who were like, I don't know what to grow, there's a gazillion things you could do to grow the business. The question is, which of these things will grow your business the most? And so the people who grow the fastest are the ones who get the best returns on their limited resources. Unlimited options, limited resources, what bridges the gap is strategy. And so that is a big fancy word, but my word that I prefer to use is prioritization. And so if you've ever heard strategy, I immediately translated my mind as priorities.

2:26And so they're like, he is a great strategist. It just really means that he's good at prioritizing things. Now, level two strategist is they have items that you can't see that they see as a higher priority than your entire list. And that is where people are like, wow, his strategy is brilliant. It's just that there's another thing that would give you an even higher return on your resources that would make you the most money, right? And so fundamentally, the better entrepreneurs that are out there see those other plays and then say, this is where we're going to allocate our attention. Chunked down a level, and this is if you're a manager or your team's call it, the team of direct reports that are underneath of you.

2:58I see a good manager slash leader as somebody who's actively, regularly, and ruthlessly pulling up their to-do list and saying, this isn't important. This isn't important. This is important. This is the most important thing. And to echo the Peter Thiel, and for those of you don't know who Peter Thiel is. Zero to One, it's a great book. His class that he taught at Stanford Business School on entrepreneurship is basically the notes summarized from that class into a book. So it's really valuable, very good. If you don't know who he is, he was a founder of PayPal, part of the PayPal mafia, Palantir, and a number of other massive companies in the multi-billionaire.

3:36If you were the leader, then one is you look at the entire list and you could say all of these things, though important, are less important than this big thing. And I think part of that comes down to giving the person permission, just let little fires burn. And it's a saying that Leila and I have in our inner world. It's like, that's a little fire and we're just going to let it burn for now. Because there is another thing that could, if accomplished, could make all of these other issues irrelevant based on the speed of growth that it would help us unlock. One of the things that I have learned from managing many people over my tenure is that if you want something to go faster, there are two big levers that I use.

4:13I'm sure there's other ones, but there's two that I tend to use. These are my hammers, you know, my hammer and my screwdriver. My hammer is eliminate everything else, which is I look at all of my subordinates and I say, this is the only thing that matters. Everything else that you have, like right now, I talked to you about this yesterday and today it is not done. Tell me what you did between yesterday and today on this problem. If they have no answers because they were working on quote other stuff, then I would say, I want you to understand, or I need you to understand that none of those other things are as important as this, which means you are wasting resources.

4:47So one is elimination. The second thing is embedded within that little example I had, which is we were meeting as a marketing team once per week. One of the things that happened is I said, we need to have a more frequent cadence. Whenever you have high priority issues, or at least whenever I have higher priority issues, I eliminate and increase frequency. of communication. So I eliminate everything else and say, we will talk every day or we will talk twice a day until this is done. Because it communicates a very clear message to the team, to everyone else that, oh shit, the boss thinks that nothing else matters and he's asking for us to check in on regular intervals.

5:28Which means from a behavior perspective, there's going to be a reinforcing event on a very fast cadence. Meaning if I want that reinforcing event to be a positive reinforcement, I should increase the likelihood of that happening by getting this shit done or at least making substantial progress on it. If the person then says, and this is why the hammer and the screwdriver have to go together, they have to go together because if you say, hey, we're going to now talk all the time about this thing and I'm going to be either really happy or really pissed, obviously I try to go for neutral, not pissed.

6:00But if we're going to have some outcome that hopefully I just want to say, great job, keep working, let me de-bottleneck this with you. Let's solve the problem and move forward. If that occurs, then we have to make sure that we've actually limited everything else from their plate. Because let's say, for example, you talk to a customer service rep, just using a simple one, and that person has to be on call all day to answer customer's complaints. If you say, hey, I need you to work on this customer service new SOP, so standard operating procedure, you need to give it to me by lunch or by the end of the day.

6:33That particular person gets to the end of the day and says, hey, I really wanted to work on it, but I had 16 customer tickets that came in during that time period from when you told me in the morning until now. And that is where if you didn't say, oh, by the way, I'm going to take you off the schedule until you solve this. I'm going to eliminate everything else or just say, we're going to let those 16 tickets that come in today, you're just going to save them for tomorrow or I'm going to give you overtime over the weekend, whatever it is. But this is more important. I'm willing to upset 16 customers because this thing is upsetting 500 customers.

7:06And sometimes you just have to spell it out because honestly, this is my experience. People want to do a good job. People don't want to be in the doghouse. People want the person who's doling out reinforcements to say, you did great. You're doing awesome, whatever. But the thing is, is they have conflict when they don't have prioritization happening for them. And so I would say the big meta lesson that I have, that I was reminded of, and that hopefully maybe this podcast will remind you of, is that your team, their to-do list will literally only get longer. And they will come up with other things for themselves to do that typically don't align with the overall strategy of the business.

7:42Now, I don't see that as a slight towards them or that they're trying to deliberately sabotage your company, more so that they just don't have the context that you have. One of the things that Layla and I are doing, this is a side quest note here, but what we're continually reinvesting in is even further transparency within the business so that there is so a lot of people are like really weird about financials or like you know proprietary data at least from the stuff that you've you know seen from how layla and i roll like we prefer to just make everything public there you go it's all there and for those of you who are like really weirded out about that let me just give you a hypothetical extreme for like i'm really worried if people don't like i don't want my team to do my financials it's like what do you think the biggest companies in the world have they have public financials they're publicly traded companies i heard sam walton say this in his autobiography he said it was one of the biggest mistakes not making stuff transparent earlier and not giving ownership, but he had all these concerns that ended up being unfounded.

8:31And so, and people ended up having better context to make decisions. They understood where their role contributed to the overall growth of the business in a much more significant way. And so that's something that Leland continue to strive to do is just get everybody understanding. Now, obviously some people don't take interest in that because that's just like not where their roles are. Fine. But for those people who want to, which is usually a more leadership oriented person who wants to move up, the company is more career minded, that information advantage, or rather not giving only a select few people the information advantage, allowing, call it mid-tier and individual contributors to have insight as to what is driving stuff in the business allows them to move up faster because they can actually make decisions that impact the company if they understand how everything ties together.

9:12I am actively looking to remove things, just like you as an entrepreneur, like us. We're always trying to, at least for me, I'm always trying to cut things. because as soon as you develop some level of success, some level of momentum, there are more opportunities that come up than you have bandwidth. It's just natural. You have very limited resources, your attention being the scarcest, your time being the scarcest of those resources. And the same applies to the team. And we assume for some whatever reason, at least I have this assumption that my team is perfectly effective, is always productive with all the hours of the day.

9:47I have found that to be not true the closer I look at things. in our one-on-one. Let's just pull up all the stuff you got going on. And so you look and all of a sudden you're like, oh my God. And sometimes you're like, oh shoot, I forgot. I told them to do that. And I forgot about it because it's not even that important. And they've been stressing out and spending 25 % of their time on this project that I actually forgot about and I don't even need them to keep working on it. And so I think the continuous cycle of pruning the tree, like if you see each of them as a tree that's being watered and grown from your leadership, your management, I need to cut as many of these other things that are having them grow these offshoots that aren't going to drive the overall height of the tree.

10:26Let's say height is the growth of the business for the analogy. I want to direct all of their resources towards this one point of leverage that this person or this department has the greatest influence over. And a lot of times it's like and sometimes it feels weird to say, oh, yeah, email follow up. We're just not going to send an email this week or you know what? we're not going to make a YouTube video this week, or I'm not going to release a podcast. Some people really pride themselves on like, I made a podcast every single week for five years. That's amazing. I don't like rules. I like the, what's the spirit behind it.

10:58If I miss a week or two, but during that week, because it was not as high of a priority for the week, obviously you have long-term priorities. Like, yeah, if we, if we eventually kill the podcast or we eventually kill the YouTube channel, then that's going to be a problem, right? But for this week, the incremental loss that we will experience in viewership, in whatever, is not proportional to the loss that we have by not getting this big thing done, I think a lot of people have a lot of superstition. And at least for me, it has served me well to at least know that I always have a trump card. I can always say, stop the trains.

11:36This is what matters. Let that fire burn. These aren't priorities. And for me as an entrepreneur driving growth, it's been incredibly difficult for me to turn down opportunities. I've made plenty of stuff about this. But the way that I do this is that I always try to crystallize them. I try to memorialize them, try to save them in some place so that it doesn't feel like I lost them. And what I found oftentimes, and this is what's wild about this, and we also see this with school, with the product iteration cycle. Let's say we've got five things that we think are priorities are very interesting, right?

12:10We still need to say of those five, which is the most important. And I encourage you, like thinking right now, you probably have like five things that you're like, oh, if we do these things, this will be huge. But if you could only have one of those five, what would it be? And if you just did that one, how much further would you be, right? So then maybe let's not distract the other resources towards the other four and just focus on this one. Now, this is where it gets really interesting. This is why I want to pull the school example in. What we have found, and we've seen this with the product roadmap, if we solve that big thing, sometimes one of the other four things that were on that list, we remove one or two.

12:44because people stop asking for that particular feature or that particular, that basically that thing, the problem that that other thing was going to solve has already been solved or at least solved enough that it's no longer a priority under this new cycle, under this new condition where this other variable is now in place. And you'll also find, or at least I have found, that there are new initiatives and new priorities that when examined in comparison to the remainder of those four lists actually becomes number one. And then all of a sudden we say, wow, we could have in an alternate universe still been spreading our attention between these five and not have accomplished any of them, or maybe we're chipping away at it.

13:27Or in this new universe where we just focused on one thing, solved it, we actually find out that the next thing that we need to do isn't even on that list. And so this process of continually pruning the tree and going down a level of organization. So I'd encourage you to do that if you have multiple tiers of management and saying, pull up what you have, tell me where your priorities are. Let me help you contextualize these things to say, this is the most important. This is where you should be allocating your resources. And if you do have, for example, something where like, let's say the customer service, except I had earlier, if the person has to do their job, right?

14:02It's like that, you know, we can't have the whole customer service not answering the phones. Because unless it was some major issue, you probably still won't answer your phones. But can I say, I want you to just do that between nine and noon for the next week. And from noon on, this is where I want you to allocate your time. And at the end of every day, send me your update. So that way you can have a reinforcement loop with them to say, oh, awesome job. Great work. Great progress. And then with any questions that are stopping them. Because sometimes a weekly cadence for something is just too long.

14:33It's like, I'm going to need to help them make a decision three times? It's like, well, I could probably help them make the decision three times in one day and get to the end of this thing and then save 21 days of delay. I made this tweet the other day, which I don't think got as many retweets as it should have. I feel as though the job of the entrepreneur is to make things happen faster while also dealing with the fact that nothing is happening fast enough. The biggest way that I found to move things faster is to remove everything else that doesn't accomplish the big thing. And that's from the organizational level to the leaders all the way down to the individual contributors is saying this is the priority.

15:09And that is how strategy gets translated from the top all the way down throughout the organization so that you actually have alignment of all resources to get the highest possible return. And when you get the highest possible return, it doesn't look like people are working frenetically. They're not working chaotically. It's not like they actually make their hands move faster. The thing that they're using their hands for is the thing that moves the company the furthest. And so I have thought about this in terms of speed and distance. And I prefer to use distance as the analogy is we cover more distance with each stride more than we stride faster.

15:48And I think that thought process really that visualization for how growth really occurs in a business is how you can unlock Huge upside with the existing resources you have I hope you find this more documentation style like stuff that's actually going on in our business today helpful If you do tag share it with a friend I look at the stats and so that's how I know if something's good or not And if it sucks, obviously share it with nobody never tell a soul that you hated this just kidding Love you all keep crushing and i'll see you guys next one. Bye