YAPClassic: Leila Hormozi, How to Attract Top Talent to Your Business | Leadership

20:06And then I will take those apart and I will break them down into questions. So competitive greatness, for example, if I wanted to figure out if somebody has competitive greatness, I would ask them, why do you want to work? What motivates you? Why do you come to work every day? And if somebody says money, it's not competitive greatness to me. And if a portfolio company, I say, why do you have your company? And they say, well, I want to make$10 million. I'm like, it's not competitive greatness to me. Competitive greatness is an unending process, right? It's a continuous cycle of self-improvement, knowing that the challenge itself is what creates who you want to be.

20:38Another example would be sincere candor, which would be, tell me, I'll give this one. You would think it's like easy and people could fake it, but nobody ever does. I say, tell me the last hard conversation you had and tell me how it went. And I swear, most of the time, nobody can think of it. I could tell you what I had a day ago. I could tell you what I had a hard conversation last night. You know what I mean? If I'm looking for someone who's sincerely candorous, I'm going to ask that. And you're going to be able to tell by their reaction, not just what they say, but their reaction in terms of like, do they actually have that?

21:07Yeah. And then in terms of the skill side of it and their experience, it's asking people to recall how they drove results. You know, I think it's, you can talk about the actions you took on a daily basis, but I don't really care about that. I want to know, tell me about results you drove for a company that are similar to the results I'm asking you to drive here and tell me how you did it. How did you go about it? Give me a summary of that. And that's typically what I'll ask. So if I have somebody I'm hiring for director of customer success and I need them to reduce churn for a customer base, I'm going to say, tell me about a time that you reduced churn, how much did you reduce it by?

21:39And how did you go about doing that? And you can tell when someone's answering those questions, if somebody doesn't know how to do that, and you have any, as the CEO, of course, like, I feel like I have to have knowledge of every department, like I have enough to know if somebody is bullshitting me, or if like the answer they're giving is mediocre, what I'm looking for most of the time is that I learned something from that interview. One, I want to feel like the values are true to them. The other side of the experiential piece in the education is I want to feel like they're able to teach me something on that interview.

22:05And so I leave being better for it. Does that make sense? Yeah, total sense. So I know that the end of the process is that you believe as long as you're a relatively small company, a thousand employees or less, it should end with a CEO interview. And I know that a lot of small entrepreneurs, even if they have 20 employees, they do not do every single interview. This was one of the biggest mistakes I made as a young entrepreneur. My business scaled to 60 employees and I started to have lower level employees hiring my employees. and then it was like a mess. I had really bad talent for a little bit and I had to let go a lot of my team and it was really hard.

22:40And so I learned that lesson first year in business, like I will never do that again. Talk to us about why that's so important. I believe that if you are truly a people first company, if you really believe that your employees and your team are the most important to the business, which I would argue in any sense the way they are, they are the business, then you would think that the CEO would show with the most valuable resource they have, which is time, not money, time, how important those people are to them. And I don't think there's a more important way or a more impressive way than having the last interview.

23:13And basically what I do on that interview is I show them that I'm not just here for you with this job, but you as a person, which is what are your personal goals? Do they align with the opportunity that we have within this business? And that's what I'm trying to figure out. And so I come on there and I want to set the tone for what their relationship is going to be like with us and be like with the business, which is it's not, you're just a number here. It's not this, it's person first, human first. I wanna show you why you're important. And I'm showing you right now with my time. Yeah. Just like a parent, if they have a kid, it's like, cool, you can pay for them to like, go get ice cream with their kids and go to this really cool amusement park.

23:49But like, there's nothing more meaningful than it being their time. Yeah, 100%. Okay, so like we mentioned, a lot of people are having a little bit of trouble hiring right now. There's more opportunities to start businesses. It's easier than ever to kind of be a freelancer. And so people have a lot of options. So I heard you say something that was really interesting to me, which was that we really need to create a bigger vision so that people actually feel they can fit within that if we really want them to work for us because they could just really work for themselves now. Could you talk to us about that?

24:20So I read the book by the CEO of Blackstone where he talks about it's just as easy to create a big company as it is to create a small company. And that really resonated with me. because I think that what he explained is that it is easier to recruit talent if you have a big vision than to recruit talent if you have a small vision, because big talent doesn't want to work for a small vision. And so that really hit home with me. And it showed me that you can't have one without the other. It's almost, I cannot even get top talent without a big vision. And you can't create the thing that creates the vision or fulfills that vision without the top talent.

24:57And so that really hit home with me. And I realized that you have to have a vision big enough that other people's visions for their own lives can fit inside of it. And to the degree of which somebody's vision for themselves fits inside the company is how long you'll keep them. Once they see that they've hit a point where their personal trajectory of their life has say the business is here and they're here, and then they go up here, now there's a deficit. They're feeling like they're lacking something in the workplace because there's some kind of experience that they're not getting from the workplace that they're getting outside.

25:24And so I think the most important thing that we can do is be very explicit about the vision, be very explicit about where we're going, and very diligent in making sure that when you bring people in, you understand how much runway they have. I will never tell somebody that they have a long runway if I know they don't. If somebody doesn't have a long runway, I will absolutely tell them. If somebody comes on to be an EA for me, I'm like, I don't really want you to go anywhere. I'd like you to just want to be an EA forever. because like anyone that's on our administrative team, like there's not a ton of upward trajectory, obviously promotions and raises in like small amounts, but becoming a director of operations or director of HR, that's gonna create a huge hole for me to fill.

26:03And so I'm not really looking for that versus if I bring somebody into a new department and I put them as head of business development and there's one person in there, I'm like, hey, one day I'd like you to be VP of revenue or, you know, CRO. And so I hire according to that, which is what is their personal vision for themselves? What's my vision for the role? And I want to make sure that the two match. And I think that a lot of times when we're recruiting, the reason a lot of people can't get good talent is because they think that they're like, oh, it's just money. I just can't afford to pay top talent.

26:33Okay, well, when we had Gym Launch, I was able to get some really big talent that wouldn't have otherwise worked for us because we had enthusiasm, we had vision, and we had an ability to show those people how they would be able to grow within our organization. And so we didn't have the biggest opportunity, but we could show them that their opportunity could at least fit inside what we did have in that company. And I think that a lot of people are just so focused on money and thinking about the competition that's trying to recruit people. I'm like, people want opportunity. That's what they really want.

26:59They want to see, it's almost like in a relationship, right? When you get with a guy or a girl or whatever, right? You get in a new relationship. You're going to treat it differently if you think that you're going to be in that relationship for a long time than you would if you think you're only going to be there for a few weeks, a few months, or even a year. It's the same way it goes for employment. And so it's reciprocated because if I feel that somebody really can feel like I can tell that they think their vision fits within the company, I see how they act. They see how I act. It's a much more trusting relationship and you have a lot more loyalty with each other than you would otherwise.

27:28And I think a lot of people just don't use it to their advantage because one, they're probably scared to think too big. They're worried that they'll fail. The reality is you'll for sure fail if you don't think big enough that you can't attract the right talent to build something. So smart. And I heard you say before that basically people hop from job to job so they can level up in their career. They need to be able to hop in your company too, from job title to job title. Is there a certain way that you kind of show that to your employees or something that you do to show them the trajectory? Or do you just give them new projects all the time?

27:59Like, is it obvious? I think for executive level, it's a little bit different. Executive level, it's often showing the business. Like I have the business projected for the next 10 years along with like an org chart for the next three. And so people can see what kind of responsibility they'll continue to assimilate as an executive team. For people under the executive team, there's two things that we're working on right now because you have to remember acquisition.com is pretty new. Competency maps. So a competency map is basically showing you here's the levels in our organization. So say there's six core levels.

28:27Here's the skills and the traits needed for each level. And so if you want to get from one level to the next, here's the skills and the traits required to do so. And here's what the pay raise looks like as well. Here's what the opportunity looks like. Here's what your relationship with management looks like. And so I try to do that within one, the organization as a whole, and then within each department that makes sense. So two that are very typical would be media. So if you have a large media team, like we're building out one for our media team right now to show everyone like, here's the levels needed to build out the media team.

28:54And here's all the room you have upward, like upward trajectory wise. Same with a sales team. That's a very traditional one is to show people based on their experience, how much, what their close rate is, all those things. Here's all the levels that you can get to. And here's how much you can make along with the opportunity that you'll have in the company. And so it's called a competency map. If you look it up, you can find them for other companies. And for a small company, the thing is, it's actually easier to make because you have less people. And so you could even just show like, if you don't even know, break it down to like three levels, individual contributor, manager, leader, individual contributor, manager, executive, whatever it may be.

29:29And I think that if you can just start by showing people, it shows them that you give a shit. And I think that a lot of people are like, well, it's not going to be perfect. It's not going to be as good as Layla's that she's describing. Okay, well, the point is that you give a shit. And that's what people want to see is that you're thinking about their future. Most bosses don't even think about the future of an employee. It's so true. So let's say we've used all your guidance. We've hired a great team. But if you have a great team and no accountability, then you're at risk of not getting much done.

29:59So you talk about your accountability framework. You even go as far to say that But instead of CEO, you call yourself the chief accountability officer. Could you talk to us about your accountability formula? Yeah, it's understanding that accountability doesn't exist without measurement, without feedback, and in a timely manner. And so a lot of times, the two things that are missing is the measurement, which is, are you showing someone where they fit on a spectrum? You know, on a scale of one to 10, how well are they doing their job? Are you letting them know that they're only at a seven and what they have to do to get to a 10?

30:33that's one of the first things required for accountability. It's just like if we were a weight scale. So if I go and weigh myself, right, the scale is basically the accountability officer, as I would say, which is the scale gives them a number. It gives them feedback. Now, the way that we can amplify accountability, the only way that we can actually multiply it is by giving the person feedback of the measurement. So it's like there's the measurement, which is telling them how good they're doing. And then it's how many times are you telling them in how many ways how good they're doing? Are you doing quarterly reviews?

31:02Are you doing one-on-ones? Are you having conversations with them? Are you slacking them feedback? So like, for example, we just did a kickoff with a new partner company. And the first thing I did this morning was I wrote feedback to the person that conducts the kickoffs. I said, here's all my feedback for you. Here's how well I think you did. I actually thought this was the best one you ever did yet, right? And so I'm telling him where he's at in terms of my expectations. And so the best thing that we can do as CEOs, entrepreneurs, people that employ other people is really just the feedback. Like if there's one thing that you could do, because especially if you're a small business, that the crux is always, Hey, I don't have measurement.

31:37I don't have things in place yet. Well, you can at least tell someone verbally in a qualitative manner, how they're doing. And you can do it more than mumbling it on a call with them when they're not really paying attention in a way that doesn't even sound direct or like it makes any sense. Right. Cause that's what a lot of people do. The way that they give feedback is, Oh yeah. And then, you know, next time you, you know, do that presentation, maybe, maybe we just do it a little bit differently. And it's like, they, they say it in a way that's very non-direct. And I think the best way to give people feedback and to hold them accountable is to be as clear as possible.

32:06It's like when you measure yourself on the scale, it's not like it says like, it's not like blurred. You're not like having to like lean in and really wonder what it's saying. You're like, is it say 150 or 155? Like you would be like, I don't know what the feedback is. Did my weight go up or down? Five pounds is a big difference. That could have been up, it could have been down. And so when people are vague with their feedback to employees, it's the same as the scale being that way and being vague. It's like a small amount of nuance makes a big difference. And so you have to be very clear in your communication because a lot of times when If someone's delivering critical feedback, the employee actually thinks that it's positive feedback because the way that they're delivering it is so poor.

32:36And so I think it's being explicit and being able to find your voice is a really important piece of that. And you don't do that unless you have at-bats. And so in the beginning, you're going to suck at doing it and you just have to get better and better over time. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors.

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37:08Would you say that feedback should be continual and not just like once a quarter or once a year performance review? 100%. It's the only thing that can amplify and multiply accountability. It's the only thing that really strengthens it to a high degree is giving that feedback. And it's just the more you can normalize feedback, the easier people can take it, the more likely they are to act on it. But a lot of people avoid giving feedback and they create a culture of secrecy and of, you know, whispers and gossip. when the reality, if you give feedback on a regular basis, everyone gets used to it and then it doesn't feel bad.

37:44It's just like discomfort. It's something that's uncomfortable. Do it enough times. It's not uncomfortable anymore. Yeah. And it's so important so that your employees actually get better at their jobs and continue to learn and improve instead of making the same mistakes over and over again. 100%. Okay. Let's take it from the employee perspective. Let's take it from, you know, a lot of my listeners are entrepreneurs, but at the same time, A lot of them are corporate professionals. They want to level up in their jobs. They want to be seen by their boss, taken up for promotions. So what can somebody do as an employee to really stand out?

38:17I get a lot of shit for this, but I believe in it, which is the only way to stand out truly is to exceed expectations. Humans, when expectations match reality, we are neutral. We feel nothing. We feel that was how it's supposed to go. So if somebody does their job exactly how it's laid out, I think to myself, that was how it's supposed to go. Now, if somebody does their job worse than the job is laid out, I feel disappointed. I feel frustrated. I feel angry. The only time somebody will really stand out in a job is if they exceed expectations. Meeting expectations is not enough. You don't stand out.

38:53Nobody feels anything from that. Like truly, your nervous system does not get excited by that. But the moment that somebody does beyond the job description and exceeds expectations is when the boss will feel like truly, like actually feel excited, feel elated, feel encouraged. And so I think that a lot of employees say, you know, doing my job is enough. Doing beyond my job takes too much effort. It's not always about the amount of work you're doing. It's how you do the work. Yes. You can exceed expectations in the way you do something, not even just there's doing something and completing a mission, which is expected, but how you do it is also what's going to make a difference.

39:30So if you're told to make a presentation to train a team, you can make a presentation that can train a team and it could be sufficient or it could have animations. You could bring in a guest speaker. You could think about it like that. To the degree at which you do every of your daily tasks is the degree at which you will impress the person, whether you exceed expectations on a consistent basis in the tasks you're doing or whether you're not meeting expectations. Because just meeting them, you'll just blend in. I totally agree. There's this trend of quite quitting, I was talking about basically what it is, is a lot of people have just decided I'm going to do the bare minimum.

40:00And to your point, they feel like I should just do what I get paid for. And that's it. But if you do that, no one's going to like as a boss, it's like you don't nobody wants an employee like that. You want an employee who's going to be worth 10 times what you pay them, right? And that's why you're going to promote them and let them lead and become a manager. So I feel like that's just a recipe for not moving in your job. It is. And I think here's the thing. I talked about this and I got a lot of backlash in terms of people saying, well, Layla, these people treat me like shit. They don't give me promotions.

40:29They don't give me raises. I'm not recognized. I understand that. But I just don't think that acting in despite of someone else's actions is going to help anybody. Because at the end of the day, for me, I had plenty of jobs before I had my own company. How I acted was more important to me for who I was, or my integrity with myself than it was for the person I was working for. Because it's not about them. It's about me, who I am, how I work, how I show up when nobody else gives a shit. And so for me, it's not even about either of these things. It's about who are you? Because you're not defined by how you think and feel.

41:04You are defined by the actions you take. And so if you act like a lazy person and you don't work, you are a lazy person. It's like when people say, you know, if you feel nobody cares how you feel. They just care how you behave. And that is what you are identified with. You are identified with your actions. So people are like, oh, he had good intentions. I don't give a fuck. Intention doesn't equal impact. So it's like, well, you know, this boss isn't going to be a promotion. But I'm like, that says a lot about you. Because I can tell you that I worked my fucking ass off for years in jobs that I never got a raise and I never got a promotion.

41:31I did it because that's who I am. And I do everything with excellence. And so to me, it's the employees are shooting themselves in the foot because they are degrading their own character. I don't care about the boss piece. I'm just talking to you as a human, which is like, why are you doing that to yourself? You're literally fucking yourself by doing that. Yeah, not to mention that like your vibe and your energy is that of a lazy person. You're gonna attract lazy opportunities. You're not gonna be even to be able to attract the things that you want in your life because you're not doing them. So I totally agree with that.

41:58Okay, so closing this out, Layla, what a great interview. I heard you on Brooke Castillo's show and you teased possibly starting a podcast. So do you wanna tell us about your possible new podcast? Yeah, if anyone out there's a podcast producer, That's the only reason I haven't launched it yet. Oh, just so you know, we have a whole media company over here. Oh, okay. Yeah, truthfully, that's all it is. I want to start a podcast. I want to call it Build with Layla. Build your business, build your life, build yourself, build your company. I think just talking about building in general. And I liked that word.

42:33So hopefully it's to come by next quarter. I'm not sure yet, but it'll be a little different than the YouTube channel, but a lot of the same kind of content. Awesome. Well, let me know when it comes out so I can tell my listeners to tune in. All right, so we close out this interview with two questions that we ask and then we round them out and summarize them at the end of the year. So the first one is, what is one actionable thing that our young and profiters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow? Make a list of five things that you can do tomorrow that you've been avoiding because they're uncomfortable and do them.

43:07Despite how you feel, despite how you rest tonight, despite how your mood is tomorrow, commit to five things tomorrow that you've been avoiding, write them down and do them. Get uncomfortable, right? And what is your secret to profiting in life? The ability to take action quickly after failure. So I think that a lot of the times when we're getting uncomfortable and we're doing things that are uncomfortable, we fail, we stumble. I do not let that, I don't dwell on my failure. I don't find that to be productive. I just get up and I go and I try it again immediately. not the next day, not a week later, I tried to do it immediately.

43:43And so I think that there's nothing wrong with failing. It's the fact that most people dwell on their failure for so long that that becomes their life when you could have just gotten up the next day and done it again. I love that. And where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do? You can go to acquisition.com. We have some free courses on there for business and you can opt in for our email list and we email out like different interesting nuggets. You could also go to at Laila Hormozy on Instagram, Layla Hormozy on YouTube and Layla Hormozy on Twitter. And I am pretty active on those three platforms.

44:15Awesome. And I'm going to stick all those links in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for having me.