2125 - The Power of Visionary Leadership in Creating a Culture of Excellence with The Excellence Advisory's David Jones

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1:05With us right now, it's David Jones. David, you are the founder and president of The Excellence Advisory. Your website is theexcellenceadvisory.com. David, thank you for joining us. Well, thank you, Josh. Yes, what an honor it is to be here. Love what you're doing. You're building communities of communities. It's just awesome. Well, that's very kind of you to say. But David, I want to hear about you. Tell me the work you do and the community that you've built. Well, I work with leaders and owners of businesses to help them break free from the bonds of mediocrity. So many organizations, they end up on treadmills where they're just dealing with the same.

1:45It's like a whack-a-mole kind of existence. They're dealing with the same problems over and over and over again and wondering why they can't make any progress. And I help them break free from that with systems and processes. Not rocket science, but it does require some discipline and some perseverance. and the results speak for themselves. Yeah. Well, so what does this, when you say excellence, I mean, obviously that's a pretty broad term. You know, we might think of excellence as being one of those, you know, on one of those, you know, motivational posters from the 90s that were hanging in offices everywhere.

2:23Let's define that out a little bit. Awesome. Because I don't want anyone to blow this off because they just think we're talking in, you know, just vague, you know, terms or whatever about what this is. Give us a mini TED Talk. Okay. All right. So let's start with the concept of perfection, because that's really what we're talking about when we talk about excellence. But that idea of perfection really, it gets conflated out in social media, out in the world, because you see all these memes, all these people saying, oh, no, it's progress first, progress over perfection, all this stuff. And that is only true partially.

3:07Where it is true is where you have a creative endeavor or something going on that doesn't have a definition of 100%. So what's 100 % in an email or what's a perfect email? Well, who's the judge of perfect emails out in the world. I don't know of any, you know, there's no source, there's no criteria for that. So spinning your wheels, trying to, you know, where should I put the comma, you know, spend a half a day doing that sort of thing doesn't lend to progress and it doesn't make the email any more valuable than it was before. But when you do know what 100 % is, for instance, the greeting that you want your people to use when clients come through the door or when they call on the phone.

3:59You know those exact steps? You want your people to follow those to the 100 % level. They're already defined, and if you've worked through this, then they should be your best known way of greeting the guest when they come through, or serving the food, or writing that software code, whatever it is for you, you have a best known way of doing that. You want your people to follow that to 100%. So as close to perfection as possible. We're never going to be perfect. Yeah. But how do we then kind of contrast that with perfect is the enemy of good? Yeah. So that's in the creative side where what's the perfect pizza or what's the perfect painting?

4:47Who knows, right? There's so much subjectivity involved that, yeah, that's good enough. The other area where it comes into play is where it's not really important to your mission. So it doesn't move the ball down the field any further to keep trying to polish this apple so we're wasting our time. Good enough in that case, if it's not aligned with our mission, good enough is good enough. But when we know what it is we want to do, by golly, we should be doing it to the 100 % level every time. 100 % right, 100 % of the time in 100 % of the situations that you're involved in. Do you see, I wonder if this topic, if not fully understood, however, could end up, I mean, listen, of course, yes, you know, for, you know, for competing, if we're in athletics, I mean, we certainly have enormously high expectations for ourselves.

5:53And I wonder if that gets to a point, though, where that may be personally unhelpful if we become a little bit too much of a perfectionist in some areas and nothing is ever good enough. Because I wonder, David, if perfect to me always feels like a little bit of a myth. And this kind of this never obtainable, and granted, I'm coming from my own experiences, my own background on this. But to me, you know, I worry that that's just going to lead to a lot of burnout and a lot of unnecessary stress. When, you know what, did I do a good job? Heck yeah, I did. Did we accomplish great things? You better believe I did.

6:36Did I leave it all in the field? Of course I did. Guess what? That's perfect. As opposed to, you know, this mantle of perfection, which is never, never attainable. Right. So I want you to think about it this way. I don't know of any individual or organization that started at the top, that they were the best in their field or they were the, you know, the pinnacle of anything. We all have to work our way up to it. So having that goal that's above where we are has this pulling effect. We'll never be perfect. We're human. We make mistakes, but we can get as darn close to it as possible in the areas that are important to us and where the steps are known.

7:23So we can perfectly follow that process. We can perfectly follow that procedure. That's not stressful. If we've set it up right, that actually is the easiest way to do it by just following the steps. That also frees our mind up for those higher level activities like, how could we make this better? How could we improve? how can I plus this for this client that's right in front of me right now? I can follow these steps to 100 % level. How can I make it even better for them? How can I tailor it for them, make it unique and special? We can do that when we know the steps and follow them. We free up all that bandwidth to do those above and beyond sort of things.

8:08Then that 100 % pulls us ever forward, ever forward, ever forward. If we set the goal, Josh, at 90%, say, hey, 90 % is good enough for the way you greet customers when they come through the door. Well, then we're also saying, it's okay if you hack off 10 % of our customers as soon as they come through the door and they turn around and go away. I'm actually authorizing a 10 % failure rate on customer greetings when I say 90 % is our goal. Wow. How is this being received within organizations? Because I'm, again, my concern with this is, you know, again, this just, I think that this has to be very carefully addressed.

8:54because, you know, I'll tell you, like, if I'm an employee and I'm already like, I've got my own priorities, like, am I here to do great stuff? Absolutely. Right. You know, if I'm a manager or whatever, like I want to, you know, but I have my own stuff too. And so it's like, if I'm, you know, if I feel like I'm never good enough and, you know, again, you know, the boss is always just asking me to be a hundred percent perfect or strive for a hundred percent perfection. I would be concerned that some of that language, if not delivered correctly, could really cause a little bit of a backfire effect.

9:31That's just, again, maybe I'm wrong, but that's what I would be concerned about. No, absolutely. You're right on target. And what we find is 80 % of the problems, the mistakes, the defects, the things that occur that weren't to that 100 % level, 80 % are management controllable. so when there is a mistake when there's a problem the leader isn't going in beating the the person you know the beatings will continue until your performance improves but rather what did we do to not set you up for success what caused this to occur 80 of the time we know it's on us so how can we work together to make this better for you to to really make this play out as best as it possibly can.

10:19So it does take a skillful leader. It does take someone with a little different mindset that, yep, we're striving for excellence. We have to aim for perfection if we want to reach excellence. Vince Lombardi said that, you know, his quote, we're going to aim for perfection and along the way, we'll never be perfect, but we'll achieve excellence. That's the kind of thinking. Yeah. And then how do we define, what is the process for defining what excellence or perfection is? And by the way, do you ever get leaders or folks that, like I'm feeling myself actually getting a little triggered by this, and maybe it's kind of coming out in the questions that I'm asking.

11:07And I'll tell you, it comes from historically being part of a very high demand organization that I was never good enough. And I suspect that there are other people that maybe came from maybe it was a church, maybe it was, you know, something like that. Maybe it was a job where they were never quite good enough. And so now when they hear this kind of language, you know, my my my my hair is kind of standing up on the back of my neck. Like I'm, you know, I'm kind of trying to understand this, but, and I suspect there are other folks that might be in my boat. Absolutely. There's a lot of folks in your boat, Josh.

11:45In fact, only about 10 % of leaders and managers really want to achieve excellence in what they do. Now, if you ask of them, all will say, yeah, we want our operations to be excellent. Of course. Excellent. But if you watch what they do, you only see about 10 % actually put their money where their mouth is on this. They have to be skillful. They can't just go in and demand, demand, demand 100%. It doesn't work. First, we have to understand our clients' requirements and their expectations. Those are two different things, requirements and expectations. requirements is I'm buying shoes. I'm buying running shoes because I want to run a marathon.

12:30And I walk into a running shoe store and say, I need size 11, 4E running shoes so I can run a marathon. Great. But I might have expectations in the back of my mind if I don't speak those, if they don't ask and draw them out. Like I might want these to be a certain color because it'll match my new running shorts. Or I might want to set a new personal best. Or I might want to not just a marathon, but it's a tough mudder. It's a trail run. So the company has to understand the requirements and the expectations. You have to have the right people on board that have the mindset that I want to be better and better and better all the time.

13:19And so the leader has to have the mindset of not, I'm going to whip you, so I'm going to get better. But no, you and I together are going to create a workplace that gets better and better and better every day. So instead of saying, gosh, it's hard here because we're being pushed all the time, it's more like, it's great here because this work environment improves every day. It's a better place to work each and every day because of the efforts of everybody to strive to be the best we can possibly be. I did some more. Oh, sorry. Please. I worked for seven years for PALS Business Excellence Institute.

14:09And that is the teaching arm of PALS Sudden Service. That's a small 31-store restaurant chain in East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. And they're one of the best-run businesses in America. And that's why they set up a training institute, because everybody kept coming to them saying, teach me how to do this, teach me how to do this, teach me how to do this. And what they found was only about 40 % of the population was a good fit to be an employee in their organization that shared the same mindset. And so they screened for that when they're hiring. And it turns out they have a marvelous employer brand.

14:51I'll give you a real quick example. I was traveling on business, wearing a ball cap with pal sudden service on the cap and I'm going through the hometown security line to get to the gate for the airplane. And the TSA agent stops me after I go through the scanner. And she says, I like your hat. I said, oh, thanks. Appreciate that. She said, my son's going to work there. I said, fantastic. What store is he going to work in? She said, I don't know. He's only five years old, but when he's 16, he's going to work at PALS. Now, that's an amazing employer brand where parents are planning decades in advance for their children to go work there because of what they learn and what they gain in their, essentially, you know, it's high school kids, first year, first couple of years in the workforce experience.

15:48So PALS screens for those kind of kids. and develops that environment where, hey, we're all striving for 100%. Yeah. David, tell me about the work that you do within organizations, both in speaking and consulting. It's all around these topics. It's all around the idea of your destiny is determined by the culture you create. So if we have a culture of mediocrity, where we accept people slacking off, not giving their best, we don't want to hold them accountable, then we're going to get a mediocre result. Our performance is going to be well below what it could be. But if we have a culture of excellence, then what we find is the results are generally 100, 200, 300 % higher than peer organizations that have a mediocre mindset.

16:42Now, mediocrity is not bad. If you're in the middle of the pack. You're in business. That's not easy these days. You're doing okay. But your life is probably full of hassles and long hours and late phone calls and lost sleep. When you perform at a high level, your job actually gets easier because you don't have to work as long. You don't have to work as long. You're not chasing those fires all the time. You're not doing all that stuff. your job gets easier and better at the same time. Yeah. David, your website is theexcellenceadvisory.com. To our friend that's listening, maybe they were kind of doing a Google search for you and this podcast came up.

17:27But what would you recommend maybe next steps if they've really enjoyed this message? Yeah. So I'd, you know, obviously reach out, contact me, talk to me, or find a business excellence consultant, David McClaskey is another good one, the McClaskey Excellence Institute. He and I worked together for many, many years. He's phenomenal. Find some structure. A structured process will beat a random process every time. So find some structure to base your business model around. But most of all, start with a clear vision and mission for your organization. And when you go to my website, you'll also see the story of my trek to get to my daughter's wedding on time to walk her down the aisle.

18:21And Hurricane Helene came between me in South Carolina and her wedding the next day in East Tennessee. It's just on a normal day. It's just a two hour drive. Seven hours into the drive, I came to the end of the road. And the only thing left to do was to walk from there on out. It was two in the morning, pitch black. The state troopers are advising me to stay in my car. And I'm saying, my daughter's getting married at 11 o 'clock in Johnson City. and I'm going to walk her down the aisle. That was my mission. My vision was to walk her down the aisle. My mission was to get to the church on time. I went, it ended up being about 10 miles of hitched rides and 17 miles of crawling and climbing and walking through the debris, the destruction, the absolute pitch dark.

19:19The power was out everywhere. It was eerily quiet, but I made it. And the wedding was still on. The wedding was still on, yeah. After the storm went through. Hey, listen, these two young 'uns are going to get hitched. It doesn't matter what kind of thing we send at them. No, that was actually featured on the Drew Barrymore show as well. So, David, thank you so much. And I apologize just looking at the time here. But listen, I know that if our friend is listening right now, you go to the excellenceadvisor.com, connect with you on LinkedIn as well. That's where you're going to see, you know, some of your your story.

19:56And, you know, and by the way, if you want to see some of the media clips where you were featured, I would highly recommend checking it out because it's a good story. David Jones, they're all on there. Yes, yes. Thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate it. Josh, it's been a true pleasure. You asked great questions. I love the way you drew out the essence of this topic.

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