Robert Glazer
👤 PersonPodcast Appearances
Yeah, I think I was probably always a marketer.
I think I was born that way.
And I ended up after college working at a strategy consulting firm and that started a business incubator project at it.
From there, I went to an actual incubator and then a venture capital firm before going to operate a business.
And I think...
What I realized really early on was I liked fast growing businesses and being part of them.
But what I realized and led to a lot of the work that I did was that really at the end of the day for a consumer business, what mattered was could you acquire customers cost effectively?
You'd hear a lot of times people, oh, there's someone who does this in this part of the country.
But if no one knows about them, that doesn't matter, right?
So the businesses that win in the long run figure out how to get customers cost effectively.
And that actually eventually led me into partner marketing and a bunch of different things.
But I think it was those insights, fast growing businesses, and then how do you win in that space and
I started doing that when the whole e-commerce digital DTC boom happened.
And so that just sort of became the intersection of the things that I focused on.
Yeah, that was right before the whole direct-to-consumer revolution.
And I remember when this business called CSN Stores was launching all these crazy different brands and 100 different brands.
And then it all became Wayfair and people were first selling stuff online.
And...
And I got very into SEO initially.
And that was what led me to the product review site.
The Bobby's best stuff was figuring out how do you get people to your site and then how do you convert them to buy things elsewhere?
And that's where I first ran into affiliate marketing.
And I just became fascinated with it, but also found it ironic that it was so lowbrow when there was an opportunity for the enterprise segment to use the same model.
I was always the person.
I had consumer reports.
People would ask me for everything like, which TV did you buy?
Which whatever did you buy?
Like otherwise.
And so eventually I was like, this feels like a job.
So why don't I set up a website and I'll pick one thing for each category.
And I started having kids.
And so people were like, okay, can I have your baby list and all this stuff?
Also,
got a lot of interest in these lifecycle markets where the same people, whether it's weddings or babies or certain milestones, are going to be looking for the same things at the same period.
So I set up this newsletter, but then I also set up a website.
This was kind of the birth of SEO.
And I realized, oh, yeah, there's the thousand people I know, but there's the hundreds of thousands I don't know.
So how can I rank for these things?
And then particularly getting the deals on these things.
And...
I think a lot of my friends thought it was just the silly kind of newsletter, but I was ranking tremendously high around certain products and deals and discounts and making a ton of money.
And no one realized it.
I kept it very down low.
But like anything, eventually, you had RetailMeNot and big sites coming in the customer shopping.
And I just couldn't keep up.
And I was also building acceleration partners.
And so, look, some things are designed to be cash cows.
Some things are designed to have enterprise value.
At some point, I just had to make a decision.
Do I keep doing this thing or do I build a bigger business?
And so I just let it die off.
It was all connected.
One of the things that I was doing incredibly well with was I was working at a company, this company called Tiny Prince, which did the first high-end photo baby birth announcements.
And I hooked up with that company and I was their biggest affiliate.
And I went to the founder and I met him and I was like, because I worked at a business that was oriented around babies and parents.
I said, look, I'm doing all this and I'm brokering deals for you, but you could set up an actual affiliate program.
And he said, I have no clue how to do that.
And so I researched it and I was an affiliate, but I didn't know how to run a program.
And I was like, all right, I'll try to set this up for you.
I looked around and some of the networks, what they were doing didn't make sense.
Everything was deals and coupons.
And that program, we went out and we just found all these mom bloggers and baby bloggers.
And they love this product.
And they were making a ton of money.
And the program grew like crazy.
And eventually, they sold for hundreds of millions of dollars to Shutterfly.
And what happened was I was running that program and then I got another referral.
And the people from that company, as happens in the Valley, they had great success and they went elsewhere.
And then people started calling and saying, can you do that same program we had at Tiny Prince?
And they had a wedding site, Wedding Paper Divas.
And so, classic story, I did it and then I got one person to help me.
And then we...
Kind of went into the affiliate industry that was very focused on lowbrow, coupon, loyalty, no one having any clue where their partners were and did the first... Let's go find content partners and people related and build high-quality programs and make sure there's no fraudsters in it.
And kind of this white glove program and...
At the time, most people's more in the weeds, but they went to their network and they got the technology and the agency.
And we basically said, you don't go to Facebook, you know, to be your Facebook agency for obviously reasons.
You don't go to Google to be your search agency.
You really should keep your agency that's focused on ROI separate from your technology.
And we helped start this industry of independent agencies that manage technology.
affiliate partner programs.
And we helped drive and expand that industry into the high-end white glove.
There was always the email offer, but this was the targets and the Ebays and the Ubers and people wanting to run very global, high-quality partner programs that had hundreds or thousands of partners in them.
Yeah, and the influencer stuff's now crossing into the partner stuff.
And when you think about, if you're an advertiser, you can buy a click or an impression.
But if you can just pay on performance, if you could enable all of these people, and it's coming to podcast a little bit.
So brands are excited to pay for marketing after they get a sale.
And so we are now over 300 people global.
We partnered with a private equity firm a few years ago, and we helped run some of the biggest programs in the world.
Yeah.
So a couple of things.
I've identified my sort of core purpose is to share ideas and help people grow.
And so when I figure out something, I kind of want to share it.
And so building the company and trying to build a company that had a great culture and was a place I wanted to come to work every day, we broke a lot of rules and we did things differently and we felt like it really worked.
And so I started writing about those things and talking about those things.
The big tipping point for me was after a leadership training, I was talking a lot about the importance of reading something positive in the morning and writing something positive in the morning.
We had about 40 people at the time, and we were all distributed.
And
I decided to start this newsletter, which I changed the name or this note like five times.
It was a Friday thing.
And it was not about work.
It was not about our business.
It was about just getting better or something about improvement.
I didn't have the term building capacity at the time.
And I started just sending this note every Friday to our team.
And I honestly didn't think that anyone...
I was even reading it or cared, but people started to write back and they said, you know what?
I really love that.
Or I tried that or I did that.
Or actually I sent this to my brother.
I sent this to my husband.
He forwarded along and I was like, huh, I wonder if people outside the company would be interested in this.
I was at an EO, an entrepreneur's organization event.
I was telling people as a best practice that this was something I did and I was getting good feedback.
And they all said, oh, well, send it to us.
And so I threw them on there.
And three of them were like, this is great.
I'll just send this to my employees every week.
And the fourth one started his own and still does.
And I said, huh, so maybe, I don't know, I'm managing this at BCC.
People are asking me, I wonder if people would be interested in this outside the company.
So I took like 300 of my friends and family.
I created a newsletter list, but it just looked like a regular email.
I just couldn't manage it anymore.
I threw everyone on.
I waited for the hate mail, like, what the hell is this?
Take me off or otherwise.
But I kept getting great comments.
It kept getting forwarded.
So I called it Friday Forward.
Three or four years later, I woke up and there's 100,000 people in 60 countries
signed up for this email every Friday, and I've been doing it for eight years.
And so that led to a book sort of on the Friday forward.
And actually, that book was rejected, which turned out I went back and wrote the Elevate book.
So there's a whole story there.
But that simple email every Friday now built a multi-hundred thousand news.
I think I just looked like 140 countries now, people reading it every week.
You know, Steve Jobs had this quote about the dots connecting and only in reverse.
So I went to school, super competitive business school.
I didn't get into the business school initially.
You can't really transfer, but I wanted to take advantage of it.
And so I ended up creating my own major, focusing on the sort of team human behavior side and then the business fundamental stuff.
This may resonate with you deeply, but having now run professional services firm for over 20 years, all the business fundamental stuff is so... I could have been a psychologist and it would have been the sort of same background.
Because in a professional service business, your product is people, your customers are people, your partner are people.
No one ever calls me and tells me a machine is broken, a widget didn't come in otherwise.
So I do feel like a professional psychologist in some ways.
It's always a human issue.
So that side of it was super helpful.
And obviously, the business kind of fundamental and basic and management accounting is helpful.
But particularly in where I landed up in professional services, it just worked out perfectly.
It is interesting.
And we spend a lot of time on people and capacity and helping people build and develop leadership and really passionate about that.
And when you really get into it with people, it's a lot of personal things that are holding them back and things that they carry with them and things that have nothing to do with the workplace.
And the more that you have these discussions and kind of authentic and vulnerable with people, you see a lot of those same patterns.
So
I feel like at this point, I almost have a psychology degree.
How people work and react in teams and personality types and all of that stuff in communication styles.
That's all the stuff that shows up day to day and in the workplace in leading and management.
There's a short and a long definition.
Capacity building is the method which individuals seek, acquire, and develop the skills and ability to perform at a higher level in pursuit of their potential.
That's thrown my long winded.
The short thing is I think this is actually the formula for how we get better.
And it's not about doing more, it's doing the right thing.
It has four pieces.
And if you can imagine four quadrants of a ball
Spiritual, intellectual, physical, and emotional.
And I'll explain each one.
But to me, it's if you're working on those things and growing them, you have this ball, bigger mass that's rolling.
When one of these gets out of whack, you can imagine it kind of flying all over the place.
But these to me are the four things of how we improve.
So spiritual capacity is not religious.
It's about understanding who you are, what you want most, and the standards you want to live by.
I think for most people, it's their core values and what it is they value at their core.
Intellectual capacity is about how you improve your ability to think, learn, plan, and execute with discipline.
This is like your personal operating system.
How do you get better at something?
How do you learn something so you do it better tomorrow and faster and smarter and don't make the same mistakes?
Physical capacity is your health, well-being, and physical performance.
And then emotional capacity is how you react to challenging situations, your mindset, and the quality of your relationship.
So if this was a race car, spiritual capacity would be designing it.
Intellectual capacity would be building it.
Physical capacity would be like taking it on a practice track.
But then emotional capacity is like what happens when other people are driving their cars at 200 miles an hour, right?
Now it takes on a whole different thing.
And so I think for all of us,
working on those four pieces interconnected are how we improve.
And we're always a little out of whack, but some of us are really out of whack in a couple of these areas.
Elevate actually was a Friday Forward compilation that got rejected because the editor said, look, you've already written all these things.
I love the compilation, which I ended up writing later.
But like, what's the story behind the story?
And when I realized all these Friday Forwards I read, what were the themes?
And so I went and extracted them.
I said, oh, each one of these things touches one of these themes.
And this is actually the process I've used to make huge improvements in my life and what I've seen other people do as well.
The people I see killing it have these four themes.
elements well then at the same time we were really struggling with the company was growing really quickly some people were growing along with it or even getting better some people were kind of falling off the cliff as i'm sure you've seen as your organization grows fast and i was super frustrated i couldn't figure out who was who and which was which and why that was and eventually i realized it was actually the same formula and that the people that could grow with the company
had built the ability to build their capacity at an equal or greater rate to the organization.
And that actually, we had been training around these four things.
And we had been focused on this in leadership development.
We just not consciously, and I didn't have the words or otherwise.
So once we had the words, we could really double down on it.
So what changes in that context, kind of same formula, but for teams is that
Spiritual is about helping make sure your teammates understand their values and what's important to them because they're not going to become great leaders if they aren't introspective or self-aware.
I think level five leadership, as Jim Collins defines it, requires you to be who you are and be comfortable with that.
A lot of us start out in leadership and we take a bunch of best practices from other people that we saw and a bunch of things we hated about bosses that we had and we mash it together, but it's not super authentic.
Intellectual capacity in the workplace is about creating this culture of learning and feedback and growth and people who want to get better and want to improve and otherwise.
Physical and emotional is, again, are we creating an environment that lets people maintain good physical and emotional capacity?
Are we destroying it?
Are we burning people out?
How do we create an environment that is about results, is not about hours worked, and then, again, doesn't burn people out?
And then emotional capacity in the workplace, a big degree of that is psychological safety, right?
Are we creating a workplace that is psychologically safe?
Are we getting teams that focus on the things that are vulnerable, that are talking to their team and that focus on that?
the pieces that they control and not the pieces they don't control.
And look, we see this a lot.
You've probably seen this in organizations.
And I think this gets fostered by leadership.
There are sales teams.
They've never lost a deal that was their fault, right?
And this gets permitted.
We got screwed by the partner.
We got screwed by the client.
They're just not even looking at what they did wrong or what they could do better last time.
And so that's something you either allow in your organization or you don't allow in your organization.
You seem like you were born one.
Yeah.
I was.
Yeah, there's so many different ways to answer that.
Let me start at a high level, which I think we're coming off this extraordinary period.
So for anyone who's 32 or under, the last 10 years before the last two years, they might think that that was normal, but historically it was an aberration.
It was free money.
It was hyper growth.
It was you didn't have to make money.
It was valuing the top line.
And so the goal was just grow the business.
And if you destroy the people along the way, that's fine.
My analogy is if NASA said, hey, we're going to put a crew on Mars, thing flies to Mars and they open it up and everyone's dead.
I don't think everyone would be cheering.
Right.
But this was sort of how companies ran.
We're just going to hit this goal and it doesn't matter.
That's gone.
People are burnt out.
The money's not there.
We're not valuing the top line.
So now we have to build companies by building the people.
If you picture growth as like a wave, instead of being crushed by the wave, we need to ride the wave.
And the way to do that is make sure that they're building their capacity and growing with your business.
And it's kind of a win-win, not a win-lose.
So to what you were saying before, my definition of an A player, it's not an absolute.
You've seen people grow into ones and out of ones and cycle.
It's the right person in the right seat at the right time.
And when your business is changing that much, the seat is changing.
And some people don't want that next job.
So some people, they're good from zero to 5 million and they need to do that again.
But some people just aren't improving at the rate they need.
If your business is growing 40% a year, the leader of each of those functions needs to grow 40% a year just to stay at that job.
That's a really hard...
thing to do.
So I think we should do everything that we can do to help our people grow with the businesses.
But then we also have to make those hard decisions when the job just isn't the same job anymore.
And I think a lot of people, the job has changed, but they're afraid to admit that and they don't want to do it and they don't want to give it up.
But frankly, that's where the leader has to come in and say, I don't think you want to do this.
Let me help you find something else somewhere else.
This isn't the same job it was two years ago.
I think you can prevent it, but that's what coaches always told me.
And that was sort of why I was like, I don't wanna do that.
I don't wanna change the tires every two times around the race course.
So how do we focus on finding high aptitude people and creating a culture where we have all of these things, where we have introspective and learning and we're not burning people out and they're growing.
What's exciting to me is when people always grow and take that next seat.
And when you build from your draft class, because it's just like sports, the overpaid free agents often aren't worth the money.
It's better to build through the draft.
So the book talks about really all the things that we can do to try to give ourselves the best shot of building from the draft.
The goal is to do better than that number.
I don't think it's fun.
You don't want to break half your people every two years, right?
I mean, you want to be in the battle with these folks and understanding that over time, yes, people will cycle in, they'll cycle out.
The 50% rule was presented to me.
And a lot of this was how do we not fall into the 50% rule?
We have a core value of excel and improve.
And I always explain it to people that excellence requires improvement.
So if we have a best practice way of doing something and you have no clue how to do it, you probably should use that.
But you also need to be constantly looking at changing that or improving it.
The thing is, improve the operating system for everyone.
Don't just improve it to yourself.
That to me is the excellence and the standardization.
But we should always be looking at every process we have and
blow it up and make it better and roll out the new code to everyone.
When you move away from excellence is when you're running 4.0 and I find 5.0 and hold it to myself and then Sally finds 6.0, right?
You want Sally to find 6.0 and then tell everyone running 4.0 and 5.0 to...
upgrade.
So to me, everything has to be revisited.
I tell an onboarding culture story about one of our core values, about one of our best traditions in the company and this award ceremony.
And it just went from nice to not working as we went from 10 to 75 people.
And we had to totally reinvent it to bring back that special piece of it again.
And then three years later, we had to reinvent it again.
So that's always going to happen.
And that requires that psychological safety, right?
It requires a culture where people can say, this is broken, we need to fix it.
And they don't get the, it's always been that way, it works, leave it.
If you don't know what your core values are, you don't realize how much they're driving your behavior in leadership and in life.
We just did this with a group of leaders and two of the people in the organization were really struggling with each other.
The root of both of it was childhood experiences that strongly impacted their values and how they behave.
So I can give you an example of this.
Let's imagine we have a lot of people, when we've done this process, they have a core value of trust.
For most of those people, there was some violation of trust in their life that made trust really important.
But that's their operating system.
That's how they operate.
They trust their team.
They keep them close.
They have a small circle.
What was happening was a leader who has, and every time this has come up and you ask them this, if someone on their team was a little bit late, missed a deadline, couldn't be found at four o'clock, that strikes like, this is someone who can't be trusted.
And they put them in a penalty box and locked the key.
And these people didn't know about it.
So once they have that awareness and when they understand these things, but they would go to their team and say, look how you're my new employee.
Trust is really important to me.
And I am going to give you trust and you're in my circle.
But by the way, once it's broken, it's broken.
And here are some of the things where that can happen.
Well, now you're leading with that and you're using that.
So I think there are a lot of these things that, again, I tried a hundred words and I know spiritual, it is just about
understanding yourself, understanding your strengths, your inclinations.
They're all different for each of us.
Honoring that, understanding that about other people, because most issues are communication issues.
And then using that to your advantage to be the kind of leader that's authentic.
I am a totally different leader than the other people in my organization.
And I would say, I'll say to people, this is why you'll hate working for me, or this is why you'll like working for me.
It's the same thing.
So I'm just going to lay it on the table for you and you can decide.
Yeah, and Darius is really good.
And I've done some work with him on the business ones.
Yeah, I ended up creating a course on the personal ones, which align.
Like if people understand their personal core values, they will align mostly if you get the right person to Yap's core values.
So we did that with so many leaders.
And when they read Elevate and they talked about, okay, I buy this personal core value thing.
I want to figure out mine.
How do I do it?
And I was like, it's not that easy.
I have a whole process I do with the team.
Like, well, can you share that with us?
I was like, I don't really have a great way to do that.
So I turned it into a course and over 2000 people have taken that and just figured out their personal values.
Yeah, they can go to corevaluescourse.com.
Yeah, so I've taken all of these and I'm not a fan of them.
I actually, I love them, whether it's DISC or Values or Colby or any of these things.
I just don't think they should be used for interviewing because what happens is you have this bias where people go for the same as them and you actually want a team that's different.
But it's super helpful for me to know that you are an S or I am a D or other, because it helps with all the communication stuff.
So I don't think you should use them for hiring.
I know Adam Grant, some people have said, look, I don't really see them as personality as much as they are your styles or your preferred form of communication or the way you kind of operate.
I don't look to put someone in a hole, but they are incredibly, we've done the why stuff with Gary Sanchez.
And when two people are in like a real argument, I first go to that information.
What are your whys?
I'm like, oh, this is why you're doing this.
Understand this because there's some just natural conflict points between those two different profiles.
And yeah, we've done a lot with Gary Sanchez and his why archetypes.
I have found those to be the most accurate as to the behavior that drives people at their core.
He took Simon Sinek's Now Find Your Why.
So Simon got everyone convinced that they should know their why.
But then going to figure out your why is like not an easy thing.
And Gary developed archetypes, nine specific why archetypes by interviewing thousands of people.
And so I feel like Simon kind of wound it up and Gary actually made it doable for people because he gives you an archetype and the strengths and weaknesses and all that stuff.
Yeah.
So first, for all these things, people are the same inside of work and outside of work.
They're not really good with money at home and super energetic and walk into work and are terrible with budgets and exhausted.
These things are consistent.
And so I think learning cultures and feedback cultures are how you get better and grow.
So simple things like having a book club or I guess a podcast club because it's free.
We pick an episode, we listen to it, we talk about it, we talk about how we can do something better.
We also focus on what are healthy routines?
What does a good morning routine look like?
We do a lot of Hal Elrod's Miracle Morning.
Because again, if your people are well-rested, if they're taking care of themselves, they're gonna come to work
better.
A lot of two is feedback and learning how to have these difficult conversations and framing it when you're growing around.
This is about learning and not making the same mistake.
And so many people don't know how to have these conversations that they put them off and then they lead to even worse conversations.
So we even have a whole module and we talk about some of it in the book around how do you practice having these difficult conversations so that you don't wait too long to have them.
Yeah, most companies don't train and people don't train on how to give it and how to get it, right?
And a lot of feedback is way too personal.
One of the things you should never do is tell someone they are something or they aren't something.
I've talked to people who are five and 10 years later still have PTSD from being told they weren't strategic or they weren't funny.
Strategic is a perfect one.
Telling someone they're not strategic doesn't feel like something they can fix.
Explaining to them, hey, in the report to the client there, these are the places where more strategic insight was.
Now, it may be true that they're not strategic, but if you're trying to give feedback, you need to explain what strategy looks like and examples of how they can improve it.
It should always be depersonalized.
Just like in parenting, you should never tell someone they're smart or not smart.
You can say something they did was smart or something they did was not smart.
And one of the frameworks I like is really simple, SBO, situation, behavior, outcome.
What happened?
What did you do?
And then what was the result?
What was the outcome?
And why does the outcome matter for you?
this happened on the call today.
And I think you really want to fix this because you're going to lose the sale or people aren't going to want to work with you or, you know, and not have it be sort of about me.
So that's the giving.
On the receiving side, particularly upward feedback,
The first time you're not receptive to feedback, it'll be the last time you get it and people will just go tell everyone else, not you.
So I think you have to make it clear that your door is open and you're always willing to feedback.
You have to just shut up and listen.
If you try to formulate your response as the person is talking, they can tell you're not listening.
You just have to listen.
Even if you don't agree with it, you just have to listen.
And then you have to thank the person.
And then you can take your time to reflect.
You can act on it.
You can follow up or not.
But doing those three things like my doors open, just listen and thank them means that people will come and share things with you.
Otherwise, they won't.
And I would much rather have someone tell me a problem to my face than tell everyone else about it.
Yeah, that person feels heard.
They don't feel like you're fighting with them and arguing with it.
So you just have to, again, eat the key, swallow it and just listen to it.
It's actually a worse practice.
And our training around this, where we model fake conversations, where boys have to sit down and they only know one side of the story and not the other side, and you watch what happens, you see how poor it is.
Because how many conversations has someone told you about where like, yep, I talked to the pala, I gave her her warning, she understands.
And then how I was like, I thought everything was going great.
And what happens is when you watch people do this, again, we don't like to give...
hard feedback so we warm them up with a compliment then we kind of say the thing that we want to say and then we kind of end with a compliment and people just miss it they miss that that was the important part and i've done this training a hundred times after one of these scenarios and we ask the group of everyone watching and we say how many people think that that person knows
that their job is on the line.
And no one has ever raised their hand after doing this training because the default of the person is to kind of launch that in.
When they do it again, it totally changes.
I have the kind of couple lines in the book.
And the last time I had to do this, I just did this.
And I got in and I said, this is gonna be a really difficult conversation.
I need to tell you some things.
So now there's no sugarcoating it.
There's times to compliment and otherwise, but when you particularly were talking about a conversation where someone's job might be on the line,
You want to be really clear and make sure that they understand that and that they aren't confused with good, bad, good.
I'll give you the example that I use in my training.
And this is kind of, I like to use law and order ripped from the headlines.
So years ago, we had an employee who was very cerebral and let's just call this person Jamie and like to think through things before answering, but they were in a client service role.
So several times in a week, they had been on a call with their manager and the client asked a question and there was awkward silence for like 10 or 20 seconds.
So manager could say to Jamie, Jamie, there were two calls this week.
You sound like an idiot when the silent was so awkward for me.
It was awkward for everyone involved.
That's the classic personal attack.
It's bad for me.
It's just being mean.
The SBO approach would be like, Jamie, I noticed on the call last week, twice, there was an awkward pause after the clients asked you a question.
I know that you're someone who likes to think through something.
But frankly, I'm worried that the client thinks you're not going to know what you're talking about when you have that.
So let's think of a crutch phrase.
Maybe it'd be better for you to say, let me look into that if you need some time and just use that to buy yourself some time and come back.
Because I know you know what you're talking about, but I'm just afraid the client's going to be worried that you don't.
Totally different approach.
One is about the actions, how you can get better, approve, why it's helpful to that person.
The other one is just a personal attack.
And I think that's what most people default to, unfortunately, is the first one.
And why is it bad for them?
Everyone cares about why things are bad for them.
They don't care why it's bad for you.
So when we say something from a place of annoyance or like it's bothering us, that sounds like, why is it bad?
They care about what, like, again, Jamie, you're a really smart guy.
I don't want clients to not think that you don't know what you're talking about when you do.
So I think this is the type of strategy you need to bridge that gap.
That's wanting to help Jamie do better.
Similarly to the not strategic person.
Look, there was three or four times in the presentation where the client needed some strategy.
This is what it looks like.
This is what they needed to hear.
And what they got was tactics.
You want to criticize the actions or the behavior, not the characteristic of the person in any way.
Right.
And nicer is a nicer characteristic.
Right.
So.
Right.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Right.
And you can say, Holly, you're a superstar and you're a high achiever.
And so that's going to be threatening to other people.
And so you're going to want people on your team to be supporting you.
So here are some of the things you might want to think about to do that.
Right.
That's probably how you'd want to land that message.
I told you, I can give you a list of people where they've said, they can remember the person who said to them, I remember a boss who said, wasn't a kid, but he said, there's nothing you won't waste money on.
But they have this list.
It's like a flashbulb memory of what they were told.
It's like the Hippocratic Oath in medicine.
First, do no harm.
So I tell the story of Marissa Meyer, right?
Marissa Meyer came into Yahoo.
She was heralded as this top employee at Google.
She bragged about her 130-hour work weeks and articles.
If you've done the math on that, that's 18 hours a day for seven days, so barely enough time to even sleep.
And bought 52 companies at Yahoo and got fired, and the whole thing was an abject failure.
Now, there's no question that Marissa Meyer worked hard, but...
hard work and smart work are different.
So I still think we have way too much focus on hours and inputs and not outputs.
So I think getting people focused on outcomes and not celebrating heroes, hours and inputs, because we're not,
I mean, you're salespeople.
You're happy if they are making a lot of calls or if they're selling things, right?
Which do you want to do?
People need time off.
They need rest.
They need to step away from work.
You need a culture where it's okay to take a vacation and people cover you and you turn off your phone and you come back rested.
But if I, the leader...
And look, the leader emulates for everyone.
There's a great example.
So if I'm going on vacation and I say, hey, team, I'm going on vacation next week.
But if you need me, Slack me, text me, email me.
I'll be on every day.
That clearly says one thing.
And then everyone emulate that behavior.
There was an email I saw from a guy at a venture firm.
He said,
Basically, like the difference of I'm going on vacation.
I'm going to be with my family.
So here's my wife's cell phone and text her if there's a real emergency and she'll find me.
And if you need to reach me by email, please use interruptmyvacation at the company's domain.com.
Right.
Sends a totally different message to the team around taking time off.
Another very simple thing I started doing years ago as the leader.
Look, I would get up when I had little kids and I go through emails on a Saturday.
And as the CEO of the company, you get an email from the CEO and you feel like you have to respond.
So.
I started using delayed delivery.
So if I'm sending something to anyone, particularly if they're below you, and I don't mean that pejoratively, but I say that because I think people feel a really need to respond to people above them in the org chart rather than peers.
And it was like late nine hours or whatever.
I just said delayed delivery until eight o'clock the next day.
This also can make you look like a hero on Monday morning.
You're sound asleep and like your email's firing off.
stuff to everyone.
But people appreciate that because nothing's urgent.
But look, a lot of us entrepreneurs in our brains either use that tactic.
The other tactic I did was I had a OneNote thing for everyone on my team.
And when I thought of that thing, I just put it in the bullet thing.
And I put it in under their list for our next one-to-one.
Or if I would send one email with the five things rather than constantly them getting my epiphanies
via email.
So I think people just appreciate some of those boundaries.
And frankly, they'll be more energized.
I mean, we have societal burnout going on right now.
So you can try to work people to death, but you'll have to find new people and they're all tired too.
So I think it's much better to try to focus on outcomes, give people this rest and relaxation and model behavior where they can have life outside of work, but then they come to work and they're all in.
Right.
You're being respectful.
You're also, if you make everything important, nothing's important.
Look, there are times when there's a big million dollar proposal and people need to work on the weekend.
They need to pull it together.
And I'm sorry, that's the trade-off.
I think everyone wants the flexibility in one way.
It's got to be both ways.
It's got to be when the business has a core thing, you got to rally around it.
And that's the trade-off.
The problem is if you're constantly forcing people to do stuff out of hours when they don't need to, it's hard to rally them around when it actually is something that requires that.
They're happy to be a firefighter if you are not the arsonist.
Psychological safety, what is that?
We hear it a lot.
My definition is it's like trust as scale.
So if you and I have trust that we build up, how does someone walk into a team and feel that trust all around?
And so there are a couple ways to do that.
And there's this exercise called the Johari window that shows that if you ever heard of it.
But the two main ways are vulnerability and sharing.
Vulnerability is opening up, letting people know things about yourself, having these conversations, building that trust.
And then the feedback component is people know that they can speak up and they can speak truth to power.
And you talked about that earlier in intellectual capacity, just letting people know they can say stuff.
They can sense when they can walk into a meeting.
There was a great tip I heard.
I think it was actually Kim Scott who said it.
And they said, if you want to know if your team has psychological safety, give them something that's completely impossible to do and see if anyone says anything.
A task that just can't be done and see if someone says something.
I was like, that's kind of a great idea if you want to see whether people feel comfortable speaking up on your team.
The other thing is really getting your team and organization focused on things that they control.
Again, when we talk about why we lost the sales deal, we don't talk about external factors.
We call the client.
We ask them for their feedback.
We ask what we could have done better.
We focus on the things that we control.
So think about when COVID happened.
We give way too much credit, I think, to the initial kernel of something that we don't control than the whole spectrum that we say this thing happened when it's really not true.
The stimulus was not controllable, but the response was controllable.
So think about COVID happens.
obviously not controllable, shuts down every restaurant in the world.
There's a whole group of restaurants who were like, we're not going back unless we can do what we were doing and how we were doing it and we're not changing and otherwise.
They're mostly out of business.
There was another group of restaurants that were like, signed up for every delivery app.
We need to figure out how to do this.
Started selling wholesale produce to keep their people going, built outdoor things and totally changed their business model to survive.
They had the same thing, the thing they didn't control, but they had choices about how they responded.
Waiting for the external in the world to change is much harder than focusing on the things you control.
So I think leaders of great companies get their teams inherently focused on what they control, and they just don't let them even use the excuses of external and outside and otherwise.
There's a lot of partners that we work with and they have sales teams.
You've seen this a lot with sales where there was a team that they had never lost a deal that was their fault.
It was, we could have teed them up better.
It was the partner.
They got screwed because it was the end of the quarter.
The client didn't call them back.
The whole team, it was a cultural thing.
They would just always blame everyone else.
There's no way that team's getting better or learning from the mistake versus the sales leader who says, let's do a debrief on this deal.
What could we have done better?
Did we wait too long?
Was our pricing wrong?
Did we ask the client for feedback?
I mean, I have had people ask for feedback before and then fight me on it.
If you're going to ask for feedback and fight it, like I'm not going to give it
I'm not going to give it to you.
And do we look at all the things that I literally like, why did you go with this other?
I was like, look, I'm telling you the truth.
If you want to fight me on it, I don't need to have this conversation.
And then they focus on winning the next time.
So again, I do see it a lot in sales.
There's another story I share in the book.
We actually had a partner, a partner that came into our industry.
We do the services piece.
And then there's people that do the technology piece.
Unfortunately, some of the tech vendors still have services.
And so there's some awkward conflicts at some point.
And then there's some pure play technology companies.
Well, it's one technology company come in to the business.
They hired a big agency team.
They went and sat down with all the agencies.
They never bid for services.
And we started doing like a lot more business with them because they just really were doing a good job.
And this other one, we kept giving them feedback.
Your pricing's too high.
Customers want different feedback.
There's an awkward service thing.
And we were at a conference in London and someone from that organization went up to our team and said, I know for a fact, we know it's a lot talked about in our organizations that you take kickbacks from this other organization.
That's why you're doing so much business with them.
A, we had never taken, I was like, I'll give you a million dollars if you have proof of that.
We had never taken any kickbacks and we had been very vocal about how there shouldn't be conflicts of interest in our industry.
Basically what happened was they were losing a lot of deals to this other company.
Instead of actually changing any of the factors about why they're losing the deals, it was just easier to make up this narrative that we weren't working with them because we were getting kicked up.
That to me is low emotional capacity.
Yeah, there's a book on that if you're interested, and we did this at a company event.
This is 303 in the vulnerability world, not 101.
So if you're trying to introduce vulnerability into your organization, just little things.
When you do a call or a team call, like, hey, personal high from the weekend, personal low, professional high, professional low.
We did a quarterly thing.
What was one thing you screwed up this quarter that you'd like back?
Look, sometimes you find out something really bad happened to that person that weekend.
And that's kind of what's in their mental space.
So mix people up in meetings.
Start with how's it going?
How are you doing?
What's going on?
That's the 101 version.
303, one last talk was we had four employees that were coached by Philip McKernan, who wrote the book at our actual annual company event.
And they gave these one last talks.
And these are the speech you would give the day before you're leaving the world and the thing that you haven't said, but you need to say.
And they were
deeply emotional and vulnerable and things that people had not shared anymore and discussed in front of the entire company.
And there just wasn't a dry eye after any of these stories.
I mean, one was about someone who had the BRCA gene and how it weighed on them.
Another was about someone who came out, another person
I was leaving their family at a very young age.
But the ripple effect at the retreat the next two days of people who were just like started having real personal conversations with people that they had worked with for five years and just didn't really know anything about them.
I say actually the one downside of it was we had a hard time putting the genie back in the box.
At some point, stuff was coming up that we were like, we're not going to deal with this.
Yeah.
The initial reaction was incredible.
I think those people felt seen and heard, but it just modeled for everyone else that it was okay to talk about these things in your life.
And so it was really powerful.
Again, don't recommend that as a first step.
I think you have to have a high degree of psychological safety in your organization to do something like that.
Yeah, and you often find, look, I had one of these yesterday.
You know, there's a lot of times, hey, how's it going?
And you just mean that generally or to a client.
It's always a good, or some people know really how's it going, some people say.
And you know what, yesterday they were like, not good.
And I have this, here's the personal thing that's going on in my life.
It was sort of a checking call, but that's what we talked about for half the thing.
That was what on their mind.
And if I didn't ask that question, I would be like, why is this person being short and aloof with me today?
And did I do something wrong?
But that's just where they were emotionally.
And I think I was happy to have that conversation and try to be helpful if I could.
Very hard to fix bad hiring, yeah.
First, read Jeff's smart book, Who, because he's the smartest guy on hiring in the world.
And he's kind of the expert.
And we've built a lot of our things around that.
Jeff Smart, you should have him on.
First of all, he's hysterically funny and he's the top.
He built the McKinsey of sort of hiring consulting firms.
Okay, love it.
You might have heard of Top Grading.
His dad wrote that book.
He was born into this business.
I happen to make an intro.
So one is, first of all, make sure everyone is agreed on the job description and what good looks like before you post it.
I've seen a lot of people, hey, do you have some advice?
I want to hire a sales and marketing person.
Uh-oh, I'm sure sales and marketing both want different things.
So make sure, super clear on the job description.
Hiring should all be behavioral-based questions.
Jeff will say, if you ask hypothetical questions, you'll get hypothetical answers.
And we break ours down into half is around our core values, and we have behavioral-based questions around all of our core values.
And then half is around the actual job.
And there's some exercise or work product or whatever that mimics the work they would actually have to do.
And we try to make it clear that it's not valuable.
We're not trying to get free work.
And people say, oh, I missed that or I didn't.
And like, this is the job.
You're going to have this same sort of time frame to get this back to a client.
We give them a client report that has a lot of errors in it.
We see which things they fixed.
And they don't fix.
And the people that are natural at that are good at.
So we do 50% on aptitude, 50% on values.
Do reference checks.
Ask hard questions.
Don't just give the two people they gave you.
Like for senior roles, you have LinkedIn.
Do some back channeling.
People hire people that used to work here all the time that know us, that we work with.
I'm shocked.
that they don't ask us.
On a couple occasions, I would have been like, no comment, you know, and could have saved themselves a lot of time and money.
So verify that what people are saying to you is true.
And in that process itself, don't ignore the little things.
Were they a pain to get scheduled with?
Did they show up on time?
Did they write a thank you note?
How did the person sort of behave and operate during the process?
And then another best practice that we got, and by the way, you should try to score everyone and make these questions numerical so that you can objectively, you should evaluate a couple candidates at a time, but have someone in the hiring meeting that's disinterested, that's
not part of the team that's hiring, that represents the company hat, because the people who want to hire are often really need the job.
They really need that hole filled and they're kind of, and that person's supposed to represent the company.
Yeah.
They're supposed to be like, look, you keep wanting to hire Sarah, but like you told me detail oriented is important.
And I'm looking at the
things here and detail scores are really low.
So it really helps to have that person in that room.
And adopting this question is the last thing.
Is this person better than 90% of the people or they raise the bar for the company that really forces you to
Does bringing this person in raise the bar for the organization?
And everyone has to answer yes to that.
So that's some of them.
I talk in the book too, just about if you want to hire high aptitude people, I have a couple of tips around that.
The people that are the fast learners, because that's about, are they good for the company and the culture?
A couple of tips are, one, look for people that were promoted in place.
These days, a lot of times people are lured away and offer a promotion they're not qualified for by a new job.
If the people that worked with them wouldn't promote them and they couldn't do better in the same place, I don't think that's a great sign.
Look for people who are voracious learners.
They're learning things.
They're improving things.
They're telling you about the lessons they did or otherwise.
Then this one took me a long time to learn too.
But particularly for candidates that are 10 years into their career, 30, 40, if they left jobs a lot of the time, why they left the job is important.
If people pulled them that worked with them before, that's awesome.
Well, then Hala pulled me here and then she went to another company and pulled me there.
If they're 10 or 15 years into their career and they've never worked with this recruiter before, and it doesn't seem like they're working with anyone who worked with them before, that's a big red flag.
Even that the recruiter that worked with them last time isn't working with them before.
So you shouldn't be 30 or 40 or mid-career and be totally outside of the network that you've been in looking for a job.
That's kind of a red flag for me, too.
1% a day.
That's all you need.
Yeah.
I love the 80-20 rule.
So I would say, go look at your clients, team, whatever, and you will find that 20% of the people are responsible for 80% of the outcome.
That's where you should focus.
And you can stop doing a lot of the stuff where 80% of the effort is getting 20% of the outcome.
It's very hard to escape the 80-20 rule.
If you don't believe me, walk into your closet and look at your clothes, and you wear 20% of your clothes 80% of your time.
Look, and this is, I guess, the core of affiliate marketing.
I thought about it.
I've tried everywhere to build mutually beneficial outcomes.
Win-win sounds so trite, but I think in everything we've done, whether it's between the organization and the team or partnerships or the core model of what we do,
try to focus on outcomes where everyone can win and not win-lose.
I think that works in the short term, but A, it's no fun in the long term and it doesn't work.
So I really focus on, I'd say, mutually beneficial outcomes.
Everything is totally integrated now at robertglazer.com.
So the books are there, the podcast there, the Friday 40 email, if you want to join it on the course and I'll get you that code as well.
Yeah, we really focus on a combination of CEOs and people that have done it and been in the trenches, as well as world-class thinkers and writers and authors around aspects of performance, where if you want to get better at something, then they're the person that can tell you how to do that.
So yeah, it's the Elevate Podcast.
Join wherever you listen to your podcast.
Thanks for having me, Hala.
A lot of values decisions may cost you something in the short term, but it's almost always the right decision in the long run.
I think your core values are the non-negotiable principles that guide your behavior and decisions.
Some people, they're really stressed to figure out their purpose.
If you can figure out your values, they're like the pillars and the purpose is kind of like the roof that sits across all of it.
I went on like a three or six month journey to figure out my core values.
And when I had that definitive list, I started making a lot of changes in my personal life and in my business.
Every time the company doubles, you have to decide, do I want to be that leader, that CEO?
I think if you really can connect to your values, you can...
Good to see you.
Thanks.
I'm glad I made the cut.
I'm sure it's hard to get back.
Always hard to get back.
I've been doing work with people on this concept of core values for a while, and it was one of the things that made the biggest change in my life.
And I think we have these rules and we have these things we should follow.
I think the problem for most of us is we don't actually know what they are.
We know kind of when we've made a mistake.
So I like to say it's not super helpful if you hit the electric fence and you get electrocuted and you're like, oh, I shouldn't have done that.
Having done a lot of this work on core values, and I think the compass within is, how do we figure out what it is that's most important to us so we can make decisions about what directions to go into and not to go into?
And I think a lot of people, like I said, they have a sense of their values, but they can't articulate them.
And if they can do that, that really is the compass.
The origin story of this to me was in about 2013.
I was at a leadership training right as I was building my company.
And I thought it was going to be a lot about how to lead externally.
But really, it was two days of who are you and what do you value?
And you need to figure that out first.
And I got a sense that I was very values-oriented, but I couldn't articulate what they were.
I probably said similar things that I hear people say now, like integrity and family and things that are one word that aren't very helpful.
So I went on a three or six-month journey to figure out my core values.
And when I had that definitive list, I started making a lot of changes in my personal life and in my business and doubling down on certain things and get rid of other things.
And when I was
Speaking, I think it was about three years ago, someone was reading my bio at the event and I chuckled because I realized that every single thing they read from that bio was after that 2013 event.
Let's start with what a value is, I think, because then it helps.
So I think your core values are the non-negotiable principles that guide your behavior and decisions.
So it's important to understand they're intrinsic, not aspirational.
They reflect who you are and probably who you've always been.
They're consistent.
They show up in all areas of your life, your relationship, personal decisions, and they're clarifying.
They help you make better decisions.
So the problem with these one-word values like integrity is it's really what's below integrity.
I've heard 10 different people tell me 10 different versions of integrity, and I'm sure it's more.
But when I really ask them, what does integrity mean to you?
And they're like, your words should match your actions.
I'm like, that's a lot more specific.
And if you want to make a decision based on a core value, it's got to be worded in a way that you can say, I did that, or I didn't do that, or I can make a decision.
Same with family.
I'm like, okay, well, how does that help you as a leader?
How does that help you with your friends?
But when you ask someone, what does family mean to you?
And they means you always show up.
I'm like, oh, okay, now I understand probably how that impacts with your friends and otherwise.
So the problem with these one words is if you really want ones that are actionable, can help you with decision-making, one word isn't going to do that.
Well, that's a key point.
I think one of the biggest problems with society today, particularly with digital, is that people are willing to show up digitally and do things and say things that they would not do in person.
And if you want congruence and you want to feel good about yourself and what you do, you should be consistent.
So I agree with you.
When I did a branding exercise, my core values, they'll sound different.
I mean, they're find a better way and share it, which is why I'm here today.
health and vitality, self-reliance, respectful authenticity, and long-term orientation.
And so, yeah, when I did a personal branding exercise, those were very close in there.
And when people write me after my newsletter and they are very upset about something and they want to talk about it,
I totally lean into that respectful authenticity and I respond to them.
And so I can point to a lot of things I've done in my business.
My whole two weeks notice book was very much a respectful authenticity thing with my kids and self-reliance.
So yeah, if you want to be happy and engaged, you want to live in congruence with these things.
And I think online has made it way too easy for us.
There's stuff we say online that we would never say to someone's face if we were sitting down in a conversation.
A lot of people want to figure out their purpose.
So my purpose is to share ideas that help people and organizations grow.
That's what I figured out I really enjoy.
I think that if you can figure out your values, they're like the pillars and the purpose is the roof that sits across all of it.
Some people, they're really stressed to figure out their purpose.
It's like, show me what you value and the things that you want to do.
And then it's easier to sort of look at an overarching purpose that sits across that.
But I think it's almost easier to help figure out the values piece before the core purpose thing.
I did.
I stepped down almost four years ago now.
That's a great question.
And I have been with so many entrepreneurs that have struggled through this.
And I feel like I tried to learn from all of them beforehand, but it was still not easy.
We brought on a growth partner for our business.
I, for years, had been the R&D department, I think like a lot of founders were.
But at that point, we were a 250-person company.
We were growing.
I had a number two.
Every time the company doubles...
You're growing a business.
You haven't done this for the first time.
Every time it doubles, you have to decide, do I want to be that leader, that CEO?
And if you do, there's a whole bunch of stuff you need to learn and get better at and otherwise.
And I had made that decision at 10 million and 20 million and 40 million.
And I looked at it, I was like,
I don't really want to be the CEO at the next doubling.
It's not the stuff that I love to do.
I like the creating and the ideas.
And this is about managing a lot of people and the day-to-day operations.
So I had started my, you know, I like to say my lifeboat with a lot of the personal brand and the speaking and writing and something I felt like I knew I could go into.
And I also had a transition period.
We worked on it for about a year or two.
And I went from five days a week with a business down to three the next year and down to one.
Even with that, there were some struggles.
Even though my brain was like, I want this, my body didn't adjust.
It had been running 100 miles an hour for 10 years.
And it was like, all right, where's the juice?
So I had to work through that.
But yeah, a lot of people really struggle.
There are a lot of people who sell their business or step out or otherwise who are super depressed.
because their identity was really wrapped up in their business.
Because look, for a lot of people too, that business was the first thing that started to pay you back and give you the A's that you never got in school.
A lot of entrepreneurs were not great students and people that start businesses.
So it becomes hard when you have to decouple that from you.
And it's an intentional process that you have to go through.
Yeah, he was my number two.
He was the president of the company and we had worked together for 10 years.
So I knew him and he knew the culture and he was doing a lot of this job anyway.
That's the thing, as the job kept growing, I was like, I don't want more people.
They'll report to you, right?
And at some point I had to look around and be like,
Look, not having a team and working on all the new stuff is not really CEO of a 300-person company.
That's the stuff that he was good at and the stuff that he liked to do.
But yeah, it's hard.
And the problem with strivers is they get to a goal and they barely celebrate for five minutes and then start figuring out whatever the next one will be.
So...
Arthur Brooks wrote a great book called From Strength to Strength.
And I think it's really helpful to start thinking about how you think about success in the present and yourself in the present and how you make those transitions.
No.
So I'm executive chairman.
And when I gave up the CEO role, I moved on to the board.
I've done a lot of things wrong.
I think this is one that I did pretty well, which is I stopped going to the meetings.
Look, I've been the CEO for 10 or 12 years.
If you're in those meetings and you have the new CEO, they're going to like, is this what you really want?
Are you sure?
So in that transition year, going down from five to three, I would still go to the offsite with the team, but I would come to the dinner and I would
get out of the planning session.
So this is something if people want to do, you really can't be half pregnant on.
And they said to me, am I talking to you as a board member?
Am I talking to you as sort of a team member?
And so at some point I had to be like, look, I'm the board member.
So the stuff that I stay involved with outside of my board and exec chair duties is
are I still run the new employee culture onboarding.
I run leadership training classes.
I coach people individually.
I do a lot of stuff that helps build the team, but that doesn't mean I'm not responsible for operational decisions.
Call me when you're ready.
We'll have a glass of wine and we'll discuss that.
A lot of values decisions are going to cost you something.
It may cost you something in the short term.
It can be hard to make that decision, but it's almost always the right decision in the long run.
I think double clicking on something I said earlier, the biggest problem is that high achievers start getting their satisfaction from chasing something.
Can they keep getting it and they realize, huh, not as satisfying as I thought it would be.
And I think if you really can connect to your values, you can think a little bit about your work more in terms of instead of it being a destination, how do I pick a climb that I'm super excited about that climb every day?
If I climbed it for an hour, I call it the third climb or eight hours, it's hard, I'm sweating a little bit and I'm working, but it's got a great view and I'm enjoying it the whole time and I'm not doing it just to get somewhere.
This is the work that I love to do and I want to do and I'm not thinking that the destination is going to provide all of the rewards.
And I think, again, if you're trying to figure out what that is, you really would be able to want to rattle off your values and say, these are the things that I would enjoy.
If I could figure out how to orient my work about fulfilling these things each day, that I would enjoy the climb and I wouldn't have to make it as much about the destination.
Again, there are a lot of depressed, successful looking people out there.
It's like the world's smallest violin, but they don't realize like a lot of these people, they just don't know how to turn it off and they don't have as much fulfillment as you would think.
They asked people with a million dollars and a hundred million dollars in net worth, what was enough?
And basically that was the answer.
It was always 30 or 40% more than whatever they had, which again, just tells you that people say it's not about the money, but it always felt like more would make them happy.
And clearly the people with more still felt that more would make them happy.
But then when you have it, you're going to just say, yeah, but that's good.
If you can't figure out how to be happy in the moment with what you have, it's hard to believe that you'll be happy at some arrival moment.
Yeah, I call it the three climbs.
So I think for a lot of people, we hear about the first mountain, the second mountain.
I'm not sure it's the mountain as much as the climb.
The first climb is you kind of got bullied onto this climb by family or otherwise.
And they said, look, you've got to be a doctor or a lawyer or something.
And you went and you got good at it and you hated every minute of it and you hated the top.
The second climb is what we were talking about that I think most of us have been on or a lot of us have been on that listen to your show, which is
No, I chose this.
I wanted it.
And I liked most of the day's climbing.
There was some good and there was some bad.
But I really thought the top would make the whole climb worth it.
And you get there and you're like, it kind of wasn't.
And that's where that third climb is, where it just stops as much being about the ascension and more about...
Enjoying the climb and you can make plenty of money on that and you can have a lot of fulfillment in that.
It's just you're changing your orientation from it's this delayed gratification that I'm working for.
It's always great to have goals to I want to do this thing every day and I want the process to be fun.
I'm on this climb with this book.
I've set financial goals.
I've set growth goals over the year.
My goal for the next five years is to help a million people figure out their core values.
I have seen how powerful this work is for people.
I've watched what it's unlocked.
I've had some incredible discussions leading up to this launch and vulnerable moments with podcast hosts like you and talking about stuff where people are like, oh, that's why I do that.
And every time I see one of those, I'm like, that's awesome.
And it's super rewarding.
So my goal is this impact goal of how do I help a million people unlock their values in the next five years?
We'll talk through a couple of them, but people are always jotting to write them down.
So if you go to robertglazer.com slash six S-I-X, I just have them all there with a video of me doing it, if you're interested.
So they start with simple ones.
The book is a parable, we should mention.
So it's actually a story where you watch this character, Jamie, go through the struggle.
He's having some relationship issues and some work issues and deciding where to live and sort of figuring out his values, how to reconcile each of those.
And he's coached by a mentor in the book,
through this.
Both you'll watch this happen and then you're told specifically the questions and how to go through them.
But this would start the process, which is in what non-work environments are you highly engaged?
So outside of work, what are the things that you do that light you up, time flies, makes you happy?
And then similarly, where did you do your best work and where are you happiest?
And that's, it could be I worked for Hala, but what's more interesting in those notes is
I worked for Hala on a small team of people who were chasing big things and we all had a lot of independence and I got to do what I wanted to do every day.
It's more important that you understand what that environment looked like.
Then we get into the negative questions.
I'll do this test with you.
I've done it in a few interviews and it's always really interesting.
Yeah.
So we got a deep one, like what would you want said about you and your eulogy?
A lot of people, how they want to be remembered is about what's important to them.
But as we talk about the core validator, maybe a little later, which is the thing that screens, is this a good core value?
One of the tests of a core value, because it really doesn't feel good when it's violated.
And so a good way to test it out is to look at the opposite.
And so this question tries to reverse engineer that.
So this question says, what are the qualities in other people that you really struggle with the most and frustrate?
So I'll ask you that because it's always interesting.
What's the stuff that makes your blood boil that people do, either behaviorally or how they act?
So I think you and I share maybe some crossover and a value there because I would say a very similar thing.
And I told you, one of my values is find a better way and share it.
You should figure out how to get better, how to improve.
And I work with your company.
You guys are constant tinkerers.
It's in your DNA.
Like, how do we make it better?
How do we improve it?
What's the new thing we can do?
But I told you, I also have that value of self-reliance.
My villain at the party is the person who's telling me about their woes and the world is happening to them and they're not doing anything about it and their trust fund payment didn't come in on time.
It's like kryptonite to me, right?
So is loyalty for you trust at the end of the day?
Is that people you can trust?
Right.
So you probably have a couple core values in there.
You spit out a bunch, which is great.
So they're probably different core values.
You probably have one about getting better and improving.
That's probably a core thing for you.
You probably have one about being someone who's trustworthy or loyal in situations.
You may even have another one about thinking about the group or the team or...
Someone last week, he said, it's not about you.
That was his core value.
And he's like, I can't, if I walk into a room and the person's, you know, he's like, I'm using that in my company.
I'm using that in my thing.
Like, it's not about you.
It's about us.
So the opposites are really good tests of what it is that we value.
And if we had some time and you work through that, it's interesting to have those words on the positive side, because you can start to think about that.
And you could be like, you know, in my interviewing, like I want to ask some better questions about
okay, I've seen you, you've jumped around jobs every year.
Tell me about why did you leave those jobs?
And it just, what you start hearing is, you know, I deserve better.
I didn't get a raise.
You'd sense that this is not a person who's really loyal and connected.
Sure.
So I have five, and the dominant one is find a better way and share it.
I've been doing that since I was very young.
Health and vitality, which has also been elevated for me after some health stuff that I was explaining actually happened after I stepped down after CEO.
Self-reliance, respectful authenticity, and long-term orientation.
So again, again, for me in the long-term thing, I really can't stand people who are trying to make a buck off the crypto scheme of today and don't care who gets screwed today.
I'm always focused on how's this going to work out in the long term.
I mean, I met my wife when I was 17.
We got married later.
Aww.
But generally, I have a long-term orientation.
And so, again, that can clash with someone who's, oh, there is no tomorrow.
Let's just focus on today.
All right.
First, I love this.
Second of all, it's the perfect demonstration of trying to use it as a decision maker.
So go ahead.
Like I said, the interesting thing about these decisions is they can cost you, right?
So if I do not believe that is the right decision for the long term to mine, and I don't think it's the better choice, I'm probably going to push back on that because I know that this is the hot thing of the week, but is it the hot thing of tomorrow?
And it doesn't match with my vision.
Now, the investor may own the majority of the business.
They may own a minority of the business.
It may cost me the investor.
It may have to lead to a discussion where I have to find someone to get this investor out because they don't believe in my mission.
It's going to be really hard as an entrepreneur to build a company that you don't believe in.
It's hard enough when you do believe in it and everything goes wrong in a given day.
It's really hard if you don't believe in it.
So I'm just not good about being excited about something that I don't believe in.
And honestly, with AI, I'm always like, hey, if it can make it better, let's look at it.
But I'm an AI middle-ist.
I'm not a maximalist.
I use ChatGPT every day if you're not learning these things.
But there's also some data coming out on the trillions of dollars that have been spent versus the like $12 billion in revenue that has been raised that it's not hitting every business model the same way.
A lot of companies fired people and have hired people back after that.
There were some companies that did massive layoffs in customer support and whatever because they thought they were going to automate it all with AI.
And it made a mess, and they ended up hiring back the customer support team.
I've seen a few high-profile cases.
So I had two of these.
I had one that probably did change the trajectory of our company.
And it was like a fifth grade graduation.
And, you know, kids have a graduation like every year now.
And I decided to miss it.
And maybe I was a little selfish at the time, but that decision got us our first marquee client and probably led to 10 others over the next few years.
But I made one solid promise, which was through all three of my kids who are all now teenagers, but was I was never going to miss a birthday.
So I never missed a birthday.
And that was sort of a hard and fast rule around that.
But those things are challenging.
And I did cancel a speech that someone got.
I thought I was going to be able to leave on the morning of my son's birthday.
And my wife actually called me out on it.
And she's like,
look, now you're getting slippery slope.
Now you're like getting home in the morning of his birthday.
What if you don't get home?
And so she called me to the mat on that and I stayed with that.
So if I look at my long-term orientation and finding a better way, I would have been like, look, this is setting us up for the long-term.
The problem is not to be morbid.
You never know when you're gonna die, right?
And so you could miss something and that could be your last event.
But at the same time, kids have a gazillion events these days, right?
And so if you're gonna be at every one of them
My kids are teenagers now and they can travel.
And I made a lot of sacrifices 10 and 15 years ago that give me a lot of flexibility to do stuff with them now.
Had I died 10 years ago, then maybe they'd be like, well, my dad had to work a lot and stuff.
But I feel like now I can do things with them and they want to go somewhere.
So perfect example, my daughter...
I always challenge them to do new things.
And she's running a 10K for the first time at school.
And I said, okay, I'm going to come down.
She said, do you want to come down and watch?
I said, I'll come down and run it with you.
So I'm getting on the plane on a weekday, I'm running it with her, and then I'm flying home.
And most people would think that's crazy, but that's something that's fun for me to do with her.
And we're training together over text.
Authenticity is really important to me.
That one I would not do.
I have had arguments with publishers and agents not over that, but on this book won't land with people.
And I'm like, this is the book I want to write.
This is what I want to say.
So I can't remember ever writing something because someone told me it was better for the market.
I would not feel good about that.
And so I have no problem saying no to that one.
So what I heard recently was there was a guy named Yvonne Chouinard, who was from, I think, Norway.
And he was an entrepreneur and one of the first outdoor entrepreneurs like 60 or 70 years ago.
And he was a big climber.
And he invented this climbing, I think it was called like a pivot technique.
that you could put into a rock and nail it into a rock and basically hike.
And it totally changed hiking and everyone all over the world was into him.
And he was going out hiking and seeing his invention in the real world.
He was seeing all these holes in the rocks and all this permanent damage.
And he
loved the environment.
And this pained him personally.
And it was when his father said, you do the right thing or you take care of the environment.
It was just a core value of his.
This product was like 80% of his revenue.
He decided to stop selling it, pushed himself to innovate a totally different system that would wedge in and didn't go into the rocks.
Yvon Chouinard is actually the founder of Patagonia.
And that ended up being the launch point of Patagonia.
And look, Patagonia might not have been what it was if he had kept selling the product that destroyed the environment rather than helped it.
And you remember when they closed on Black Friday, they encouraged people not to buy stuff years ago and to bring your old stuff in and they would sew it up.
That's living your values.
There's another one I really like where the CEO of Dick's Boarding Goods.
So I think it was about 10 years ago and there was a school shooting and
The CEO found that the shooter had bought guns and ammunitions from his store.
And while it wasn't actually used in the shooting, he was incredibly shaken up by it.
And he said, my dad always told me, you take care of those in the community that you live in.
Very close to the line.
It was something like that.
And so Dick's basically decided to bump up the age to 21 in the store, stop selling automatic weapons and a whole bunch of stuff.
And all the analysts and stuff told them they were going to lose hundreds of millions of dollars.
And basically a month later, the stock was up $500 million more.
And 10 years later, it was up 10x.
And he's just like, we just have to do this.
And the company in the long run was better off for it.
We gave up our biggest customer years ago because they violated one of our core values of embraced relationship.
They made our team miserable.
They made everyone miserable.
And we just decided we're not going to renew the contract.
And I think we had so much turnover on that team.
And I think it bought us a ton of credibility with our team and helped our culture grow.
I think values decisions cost you more in the short term.
Usually there's an upfront cost because it's easier to do what's easier, right, in the short term.
But I think you gain ultimately in the long run if you're willing to sustain that short term.
CVS also years ago, when they rebranded as CVS Health, they stopped selling cigarettes.
They lost $2 billion a year, but they were like, look, we can't rebrand to CVS Health and sell cigarettes.
And CVS did fine over the next couple of years.
They started all these new categories and selling other stuff.
So I think it's the people who are just weaker in the moment and not willing to give up anything.
There's another story of founders who are willing to give up their entire company rather than have politics going on and work all day long.
They said that we're not going to have politics anymore.
And their company is thriving years later, but they were like, look, we were willing to like go home and shut it down.
It was not the type of company we wanted to work in.
So they have to connect.
So a person should try to figure out their individual values, which is the framework that I'm giving to them in the Compass Within.
And then they can try to match it up against companies.
But a person's values fully reflect me, myself, and I. A company's values reflect things that they want the company to have.
And if you're 10 people, it's like, what is the best...
pieces of all of us and behaviors.
They're behaviors that you want to reinforce.
But I will say that as someone who does work on company values and stuff too, 98% of it is BS and crap.
So I'm also fully aware that integrity and respect, the company has values, which is the behaviors it's rewarding.
The question is, are those the same things that it's saying?
So you might have to
take a bigger look to what the company values.
But I think it's really helpful for people to be like, oh, I really love this company.
It really does align to my values.
I'm a find a better way person.
And it's all about improvement or this company doesn't align to my values at all.
And in that case, as I say in the book with a big three, if your relationship, your community or your job don't align with your values, it's a very low chance of success in the long term.
Look, if values can help in decision-making, I think those are the three of the biggest decisions you make in life.
And hopefully you don't make all of them way too many times.
I think on the relationship side, my wife and I are different people, different personality.
This isn't about being the same.
Different activities.
But around the big stuff and our kids and what we want for our family and
where we want to live and how we're always on the same page.
I think some people may have the opposite.
You know, they might see a lot of compatibility and activities and otherwise, but around the big things, they're not.
And we didn't talk about this earlier about where values come from because this is important to this part.
They generally forge during childhood or formative experiences of your life, and they come from things that you are doubling down from or that were painful and that you were running away from.
So in a relationship, when you bring these things to it and they're really that deep as an adult, it's really hard to move away from it.
So I was telling a story recently.
Let's imagine a couple is married, and this is based on not a real couple, but two real stories.
So one had a parent who was given a year to live when they were younger and then ended up living seven or eight years.
So for them, there was like never a tomorrow.
So they had decided as a young age, you live for today, there's never a tomorrow.
That was sort of how they lived.
Another grew up in a family that always spent all its money and gambled and they never focused on tomorrow in a different way.
And so that kid really developed the thing of, look, you save and you take care of yourself and you don't make frivolous short-term decisions.
Well,
If those two get married and one wants to live for today every day in what they do and the other wants to plan for tomorrow, that's hard.
And you can work around that if that's one of four values.
But imagine if we did a similar scenario with three or four values and these people are together and they have the opposite orientation on each one.
That's like a Mac operating system and a PC operating system trying to run the same software.
I'm not saying it can't be done, but that's really hard at the end of the day.
I think politics has become a little bit weaponized.
Unfortunately, I think the birth rate in our country is going to decline precipitously because if you read it, it's like the women are all going liberal and the boys are all going conservative.
But I actually think politics has become a form of tribalism.
And there's some stuff going on in politics where people just doing things that don't make sense or saying things that are just not consistent or incongruous because they're in a team sport.
I think if you can peel out some of this stuff and say, what is my actual value?
So if your value is...
we treat all people with decency, then you don't get pulled into a group who says, yeah, yeah, but we should treat these people terribly because they're horrible.
That is a tribalistic thing, not a value thing.
So I think our politics has become very tribalistic.
You have conservatives that aren't acting very conservative about things, and you have progressives that aren't acting very progressive about certain things.
So
I don't think politics is a showstopper.
I think some of those beliefs that sit behind that could be fundamental.
But I think it's always like maybe someone whose faith and not faith might even be more important than which faith, right?
It is complicated, but I think they run board of the person's personal operating system.
For you, if you have someone that's disloyal, all those other stuff doesn't matter, right?
That's going to be the showstopper.
People have a loyalty or trust thing.
It's like if you cheat on them, there's no coming back from that.
That's probably like almost a more relevant thing than some political stuff.
Yeah, I think it was team voting.
And look, the thing about, I think, using your core values to understand your authentic leadership style is that whatever that is, it may not be for everyone.
And I think eventually I just got comfortable in saying what I believed and saying like, look,
If you work on my team, again, find a better way and share it.
We are going to work on making things better.
If you don't like that, you like steady state and doing the same thing every day, you don't want to be on my team.
But I feel like I always supported people.
I was respectful for them when it didn't work out.
I would have a direct conversation with them.
I tried to help make people better.
That's my North Star.
But at some point, I just got comfortable being who I was and not trying to be anyone else.
And like universities are an interesting example, right?
I'm looking at schools tomorrow for my youngest and there's like, you know, big city schools and they have a value proposition.
And then there's rural liberal arts schools.
And you could love one of those schools and probably hate the other one because it just doesn't work for you.
What those schools don't do is to pretend to be the opposite.
I think too many leaders try to say stuff that appeals to everyone or everyone would want to hear and they're trying to be everyone's friend rather than saying the stuff that they really believe and they can stand by and is consistent and understand that that's not for someone.
Some people may want a company that's super political and competitive and others may not.
But I think that is ultimately about understanding your authentic leadership style.
And Jim Collins talks about level five leadership, the highest level.
I think that's very much understanding your values and saying, if I'm Hala, look, loyalty is important to me.
There are a lot of things I can put up with on my team, but disloyalty isn't one of them.
And you should know that.
And if someone has a problem with that, they'll go work on a different team.
You don't want loyalty, but bad behavior.
There's good loyalty and bad loyalty.
Bad loyalty is I tell you to go do something illegal and you do it.
I assume part of loyalty for you is you do what you say you're going to do.
You're trustworthy.
You follow up.
You're reliable.
That's all part of that.
if you actually broke that down.
I think it's more honest to let people know that and say that, that that's something you really value in people.
And I'm sure you're finding it.
And some people don't care about that.
You probably don't want the people working at Yap who want a job for a year and then want to job hop and use it as a resume builder.
So I'd be chasing them away before they came to my company.
And I would be saying, this is not the place to come to get a title bump and then leave.
And it won't serve you very well.
Other places don't care.
My definition of weaknesses are strengths over use.
So you're probably going to do some things to a fault.
You know, the struggle for you is going to be when people aren't doing the job well anymore, but they've really been good soldiers.
I think that's common.
struggle sometimes where the team, I'm trying to make everything better that I'm overwhelming everyone and I'm not making anything better.
But look, at this point in our life, it's fully baked.
And if we had a lot of time when I got into that, I'd probably find a story from your childhood where someone was incredibly loyal to you and it made all the difference or someone was really disloyal or broke your trust.
And that's why it's so important to you.
And I think it's just understanding that.
It's part of your operating system.
It's gotten you through life.
It's what you're good at.
Anything we're good at has an Achilles heel to it.
And that's probably the case in that one.
We, ironically, and it was really tight.
It's funny because you do these things by accident and then you figure out your values and you realize why.
To my respectful authenticity, we changed how people left our company.
I was like, this whole process of people saying they have doctor's appointments and two weeks notice seems crazy to me.
And this ended up being my TED Talk.
Could we like have an open transition program and have more honest and open discussions with people?
And they were like, look, I think this isn't working out.
I want to do something different.
We say, okay, great.
You can work here for a few more months and go get another job.
Because I always felt like the leaving part wasn't consistent with the type of culture we wanted to build.
And I think actually having that policy made it safer to come work at our business.
It made us able to have more buy-in and do stuff.
It was called an open transition program.
So you could opt into it or we could have a discussion about opting into it.
And they would get two to three months to keep doing their current job and go look for a new job.
And we do it with totally open discussions so that leaving wasn't this taboo thing.
And look, we're in a client service business like you were.
And the number one thing that pisses off clients in a client service business is their account manager leaving suddenly.
And sometimes you don't recover, right?
So we were like, look, we would much rather have
holla here half time while we start sliding in Ben and getting Ben on the account and recruiting Ben and having her here in some form and keep that consistency for the client, even if she's looking for a new job and we do that.
And so we just felt like it was better for our clients and it was better for the team.
Oh yeah, the tactical one, we did quarterly two-day offsites for all of our high growth years.
I think that 90-day period for a team to opt out of the day-to-day, leadership team go off-site, the first day was always a recap of the quarter.
What did we do well?
What did we not do well?
And the second day was planning for the next quarter.
I just think that if you're a high growth organization, that is a necessary discipline.
We used to do one days and once we did two days, I don't know how we ever did one day, but you get off the hamster wheel and you get a chance to discuss the business and plan for the next 90 days.
Yeah, I got a lot of my networking DNA from Keith Ferrazzi's book, Never Eat Alone.
And I think also, you know, I try to get my kids to read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale and Carnegie.
The title makes it sound so cheesy, but the advice is so deep.
And so I focus on mutually beneficial outcomes for other people.
The problem with networking, and I'm sure you've seen this, Hala,
You hear from the person you haven't heard from in nine years.
Can we meet?
Can we catch up?
And it's because they need a job, right?
That's not great networking.
And that's how a lot of people use their network.
So I'm always listening for opportunities.
For one thing I need from my network, I probably put three gives into it.
I think it's kind of a giver's
gain thing.
I think if you're putting people together genuinely that you know both, not one wants to sell something to the other, but when someone says to me, LinkedIn just dumped us from our podcast, I'm pretty sure that if I send them to you and say, this new podcast is looking for a new home, you're going to want to talk to them.
They're not trying to sell you anything.
If someone says, I'm looking for a lawyer, oh, I know that lawyer.
A lot of people make referrals to
was someone trying to sell something to the other person.
You're like, Robert, Steve really wanted to talk to you, you know, and Steve's trying to sell me something.
That's not a helpful networking thing.
That's doing a favor for Steve by exposing someone in your network.
So really, it's that simple.
I try to connect with people a lot, talk to them when there's no agenda, and I'm listening.
And when people need something, I take the time to write a good introduction and introduce to people.
And I do that all the time.
And
When you launch a book and you have to call in every favor you've ever had for the last 10 years, people will help you if you've helped them.
There's your loyalty core value again.
You're basically just describing it.
We lose a lot of days at the beginning of the day by playing defense.
So if you wake up in the morning, don't turn on your phone, have a morning routine, pick the three things that if you accomplished them today would get you towards your goals and make sure you did them for noon and before your day gets totally out of control.
And you do that for a quarter, that's 90 things.
I think you'll see a material difference in your goals.
it's playing the long game there's a lot of things that you can do in the short term that just are going to cost you or aren't going to work out so i think if you're looking for long-term happiness and profitability then think about decisions in the context of someone once said how will i feel about this decision in 10 days 10 months 10 years i think that's a great orientation
Sure.
New book is out.
I think the week we're running this and I have the course that actually started the book, which is the core values course.
I'm giving it away for free during launch week.
So if you go to compass-within.com, you can both buy the book and then there's a form right there to put your receipt in and we'll send you the course.
All of my other stuff is at robertglazer.com, including Friday Forward, which is my newsletter.
And if you go to slash six, we talked about those six questions.
If you're interested in taking a few pieces of paper and writing down the answers and seeing what comes up for you.
It's getting a lot harder, but I think that it's mostly through sharing, I found.
So people tell me they share it through the company or otherwise.
So I think thinking of your context in the newsletter of how can someone forward this to someone else?
And then how do you have a message where, hey, if someone forward this to you, here's how you subscribe and join.
I think that's how I get the majority of my new signups.
Thank you very much, Hala.