Executive Podcast #295: A Simple System for Success

Chris Goede:
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Perry Holley:
Welcome to the Maxwell Leadership Executive podcast, where our goal is to help you increase your reputation as a leader, increase your ability to influence others, and increase your ability to fully engage your team to deliver remarkable results. Hi, I’m Perry Holly, a Maxwell leadership facilitator and coach.

Chris Goede:
And I’m Chris Goede, executive vice president with Maxwell leadership. Welcome and thank you for joining. As we get started today, I just want to remind you, one of the things that we love about this is we hear from so many people that share this with their team and then, man, get their top takeaways as they start meetings.

Perry Holley:
Did you get that one from London from the evening? I mean, you’re not feeling global all of a sudden?

Chris Goede:
Yeah. And I got another story to tell you about even just walking in our office buildings and I said something, they’re like, hey, I know that voice podcast. Yeah, with our leadership team. So really just use this as a tool. We are doing this to add value to you and your teams, and that’s a great way to help you develop your team without spending a ton of time preparing for it. Let them listen. Come to the meeting, give us your takeaway. And one of the great ways to do that is if you’ll go to maxwellleadership.com/podcast, and under this lesson, if you’ll click on the learner guide that there’s Perry’s created that’ll go along with this, it’ll have some notes for the team.

Chris Goede:
You can also leave a question that you may have for us there about leadership. We’d love to answer it on a future session. Well, today’s topic is called a simple system for success. And I love where we’re going today because you have to have a system. I think everybody’s got to have the system. Chris Fuller, one of our great executive facilitator coaches, I always heard him say, lead where you’re strong and then, hey, put a system or a team around where you’re weak. Right. And so I know where my.

Chris Goede:
My weaknesses are, and I got to have some systems, and I think all of us, and I think successful leaders have to have systems. Perry and I are big sports fans, and so we’re going to actually lean into one of John’s mentors for this lesson. So I’m excited to talk a little bit about this and. And kind of talk about the relationship between his system and then what it looks like from a leadership perspective. So we’re talking about coach John Wooden, who is a. A legend when it comes to college basketball coaches. And Don had the privilege to be mentored by him. So let’s dive in and let’s talk about his system and then what it looks like for leaders.

Chris Goede:
Yeah.

Perry Holley:
You know, so I’ve led, as you have, for many years, and we’re always thinking about how to win, how to win, how to win. And, you know, the score and look at the scoreboard and got to get the quota. We got all these things. And I was reading John Maxwell talking about lessons he learned from John Wooden, a coach. Wooden. And they said the coach would always be asked, what’s your. What’s your plan for success? How do you plan to take these young men and succeed? And do you have a system? And I’m waiting, you know, to hear all this technical aspect. And wooden said very simply, yes, here’s my system.

Perry Holley:
Condition. Fundamentals, unity. Wait a minute. What? There’s no, you know, all the players when you hear. He never talked about winning championships. He talked about being in condition, being a master of the fundamentals and playing as a team. Unity on that. And I thought, well, I wonder if there’s a simple system for us as leaders.

Perry Holley:
Do I make this too hard? And there’s a number of examples I could give around the number of coaches that have figured it out that if you do the basics well, if you play well as a team and you’re in good condition, you’re going to go far.

Chris Goede:
I love the word simple, but let’s not mistake that it’s easy.

Perry Holley:
Right?

Chris Goede:
Because it’s not easy. But I love the fact that, that it’s simple, simply profound, is what I was thinking about. And then Perry, in my notes, gave me something to look at with Vincent Lombardi. Knows I’m a huge, huge football fan. And so same thing. What was his kind of system? And here’s a quote from him that we want to share with you. He says, football is two things. It’s blocking and tackling.

Chris Goede:
And I don’t care about formations or new offenses or plays or trick even. He says, you block and you tackle better than the team you’re playing. You will win. And it goes back to that simplicity of the fundamentals. It made me think, too. I’ve read some Lombardi stuff in the past, and no matter if, how many years you’d been in the NFL, as you showed up for training camp that next year, he literally, if you’re looking at us and joining us on YouTube, he literally would hold up the football. And if you’re listening to us, I’m holding my hand up in the air and he’d say, gentlemen, this is a football. And they’re playing.

Chris Goede:
They’re playing professional football. But he brought it back to the basics and really tried to keep everything extremely simple. Yeah.

Perry Holley:
Coach Wooden was well known as the very first day in camp after, and he won eleven championships. I think seven in a row was unheard of. But he said they start camp the next year and have an entire session on how to put on sweat socks. Oh, that’s right. Yeah. And it was. And you thinking, hey, we’re champions. We want.

Perry Holley:
He goes, yeah, but if you don’t put your socks on right, your shoes are not gonna go on right, you’re gonna have a blister. It’s gonna put you out. Fundamentals and basics and being in condition, I thought, yeah, there’s so many great examples of that. So I just thought, if we could just banter a bit on how does this apply to a leader? And are you, as a leader, trying to do too much? Do you have a simple system that tells people if we do these things, three to five things, we will be successful? But we don’t. None of these highly successful coaches talked one bit about winning a game or winning a championship or beating someone else. They all. It was all about beating themselves from yesterday, being better and than we were yesterday.

Chris Goede:
Love it.

Perry Holley:
And then when you do that on those fundamentals, you will be successful. So the first one was on Coach Wooden’s was, are you in condition now? Obviously, in basketball, football and sports, it means physical conditioning. You know, are you in shape? Can you endure the challenges of a 60 minutes game or, you know, playing three times a week if you’re in basketball? But how do you think condition translates to leadership and looking at ourselves, I think two way look at ourselves, and then how do we help our team when it comes to condition?

Chris Goede:
Yeah. So the first thing I actually went to is, is the physical side. So let’s. Let’s stay there just for a minute. As a leader, um, and as an individual contributor, there’s a lot of weight on what we do wear, the responsibilities. And so I think the more that we can take care of our bodies and be in condition, so let’s stay on the physical side of it real quick. I think the more effective that. That we can be, it gives you energy.

Chris Goede:
You know, you know, this. You’ve talked to me a lot about this and. And the amount of walking that you’ve done in the past and staying active, it gives you mental clarity when. When you’re in condition. Again, I’m talking about the physical condition right now. Helps you with decision making, stress management, and even just to be a little bit more resilient as you’re going through. So physical condition can help. But from a leader condition, like, how am I conditioning, you know, myself as a leader, it goes back to one of our core values here, which is growth.

Chris Goede:
Right? Like, am I continuing to prepare myself for what is to come? Am I right? So you think about during the offseason, a basketball player talking about coach, you’d be like, hey, we got to show up. We got to be in condition. We got to be in shape. Same thing all year long. We’re going to run because we got to be in condition for at the end of the season. Same thing is, is that if you wait, you know, to prepare for the moment, it’s too late. And so what are we doing to condition our mind around different areas of our business? What’s going on, the innovation? Are we prepared for meetings? Are we prepared for reports? And so you think about this as, am I prepared as a leader? The other thing is not only that, but is my team prepared from a growth standpoint? And one of the things that I thought about around this was, um, actually what we started the podcast off today. Is your team growing together? We.

Chris Goede:
We want everybody to have an individual development plan and a growth plan, and we believe in that. Um, but I would also challenge you. Some of the greatest, um, comments I’ve gotten from our team about when they felt like we were in the best condition as a team was when we were growing together. And they give me examples. Remember when we went through that study and on this and that? And I was thinking, really, like, at times, I was like, that’s another hour on my calendar, another meeting, whatever. But to this day, years later, they go, man, I feel like as a team, and so just allow that to happen, to build that condition of the team to be ready for what’s to come.

Perry Holley:
Well, you gave a great example of, you know, we talked on a podcast some time back about, well, I don’t have time. We got to add another hour. When am I going to do this development? And it really, the lesson we gave was stop trying to add leadership development to your calendar. Add leadership to development to the things already on your calendar. I know that you just made a change on our weekly team meeting that we, we had a little segment at the front that most people enjoy, but it didn’t add a lot of value. It was kind of a level two, get to know each other, but we know each other pretty well. And you add maybe some input you received, you say, hey, let’s, let’s take that. It’s already on our calendar.

Perry Holley:
Let’s add leadership development to that. So we’re going to, now we’re going to do a book study, one of John’s new book, high road leadership. We’re going to go through that together. I thought, fantastic. You just added leadership development to something already on your calendar. When I think of conditioning, I’m so taken by some of the great boxers that would say, you know, everybody wants to be under the lights, but are you willing to be, to do the things that I do to be under the lights? And so conditioning and that physical conditioning to me, I call this, and I’ve been teaching on this a lot. It’s getting a lot of attention from folks around. How do you invest or spend your unseen hours? Everybody sees you when you show up at the office.

Perry Holley:
That’s the lights. Everybody sees you when you make the customer. That’s the lights. Everybody sees you when you come into the team meeting. That’s the lights. What have you done when the lights aren’t on in the unseen hours, maybe early in the morning, maybe late in the evening, maybe during your lunch. What are you doing to pour into you, as you’re saying, this development plan so that you are ready and in shape. And I’m also taken by something you said around preparing is that John talks in today, matters about your success is made up of things.

Perry Holley:
Your daily agenda. It’ll determine your success is your daily agenda. But he talks about, are you preparing or repairing? I think the people that are conditioned are prepared for what’s happening today. The people that are out of condition are repairing from what they should have done yesterday. And so this idea of condition, while it sounds like a sports term, I think it highly applies to me as a leader. Am I prepared? Am I in condition for today and what’s coming? And is my team in condition? That’s great for what’s coming.

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Perry Holley:
Second one is around fundamentals, and this one probably seems a little more obvious, I think, around how to apply to leadership. But when you think about fundamentals, for a leader to have a winning system, a system for winning, what are the fundamentals we’re talking about?

Chris Goede:
Well, let’s talk about real quick. I want to go back cause you made a comment and you’re talking about, hey, how do we do this kind of as a team? And what’s going on in regards to behind the scenes when the lights aren’t on? What are we doing to build that? Again, we’re taking this word of, you know, are we conditioned to lead? Are we conditioned to be a team together? I go back to what I was thinking about was how we talk about a common language through the team, right. And that’s why we lean on the five levels of leadership, because it is a methodology that conditions us to have a common language that when the bullets are flying, decisions are being made, tensions are high, frustrations, whatever it is, we know that we have a common language where there’s not a gap of misinterpretation in certain things. Right. And so what I was thinking about in this was, man, that takes consistent work. It takes, to your point, in the offseason, consistently getting up out of bed and running, it takes sometimes consistently shooting free throws to be in condition at the end to be able to do whatever. And in order to do that, I think if you really focus on that from a condition standpoint and you do it continuously, what’s going to end up happening is that’s going to, it’s going to form your thoughts and your feelings and and your actions as a team. So I want to add that to that, because I think that that is something that when we talk about the condition of the team, you know, I wonder how many.

Chris Goede:
I wonder how many teams go through crisis mode and succeed because they were conditioned ahead of time as a team versus they weren’t, and then what ended up happening to the team. It’d be an interesting study. It’d be hard to. It’d be hard to pull that out. But. But we did a really good job of talking about condition in regards to condition, a basketball player, about leadership for the first half of our podcast. Well, that was all we had today. All right, so when you talk about fundamentals, uh, this goes right back to what I was saying when we talk about a common language around, you know, the five levels of leadership.

Chris Goede:
This is what Perry and I kind of built this podcast off of, and what we’ve seen change the culture of organizations. It is the basics. It is the blocking and tackling of leading, and not only organizations, but also leading people. Right? And they’re like, I’m not a leader. No, no, no. This is about influence. And so just real quickly, as you think about this as a refresher, we talk about, level one, being at a place to where, you know, people have to follow you. Right? You are leading because you have a title now, you’re going to start there.

Chris Goede:
But we all. We talk about all the time. You got to go quick. We don’t want you to stay there. We want you to move up, which is that level two. And these fundamentals are, do your people want to follow you? And that takes a lot of fundamental work, connecting with people, relating with people, understanding how they’re wired, how do they need to be communicated to, how do they receive communication? That’s a fundamental, but we got to know it at level two in order to be able to do that. Then at level three, we got. Man, we gotta produce.

Chris Goede:
We. We have to lead by example as leaders. And you have led sales teams. You’re, you know, in the sales world at a high, high level. And we joke around all the time where they take a. An individual contributor, that’s the number one sales in on the team, and there’s a leadership position open, and all of a sudden they take it. That may or may not be the right decision from a leadership perspective. Perspective, but then they quit.

Chris Goede:
Quit delivering. Right. Like, you still have to stay engaged at some point so you can lead by example and produce. It’s a fundamental. And then we talk about a level four how are we developing our people? What does that look like? It’s a fundamental. We have to develop and invest in our people. So anyways, that’s kind of a little bit of a perspective using and tying it to the five levels of leadership and the framework and the methodology that people can use in organizations.

Perry Holley:
Well, I think a fundamental is also, you talk about leading a sales team, is that I think back we got so taken by, I got to win this deal, I got to win this deal. And that’s not, that’s about focusing on the winning, not on the fundamentals. What are the fundamentals of winning in sales or winning in whatever role your team, people on your team are serving in? Could be. I mean, I’m in the accounting department, I’m in marketing, I’m in operations, I’m in sales. What are the fundamental, the blocking and tackling of your role? One thing I’ve seen, I know I did this. We’re so focused on the scoreboard, the lagging indicator. How are we doing at the end of the quarter? I’ll tell you how we did. And then it’s, if you miss, it’s too late to do anything.

Perry Holley:
So I started changing the focus on the fundamentals, the blocking and tackling to leading indicators. And we happen to know, because we track this, to say, you know, if we know as a salesperson in our organization for what we sell, if you make x number of prospecting calls a day, one or two, you have x number of customer calls a day or a week, if you have x number of customer lunches or whatever, yeah. You have x number of proposals presented that over the course of the quarter or the month, whatever your measurement is, you’ll make it. We’ve done the math to say if you do these actions, these basics, we know we’ll make, and I know you do this now because we are on our Monday meeting, we go through our sales team. How many calls did you make and how did you know, how many prospects did you, how many customer touches did you have? And that will give you an indicator of are they doing the fundamentals? So many people show up and think, I’m just gonna knock it out of the park. I’m gonna win this one deal and everybody will be happy. And then they don’t get the one deal, and guess what? They got nothing. So if you do the fundamentals, it’ll be there.

Perry Holley:
And so I think if you put, you’re in good condition, you’re taking care of yourself, you got the fundamentals working, you’re all you’re two thirds. I get. What I get where coach wooden’s going is that we’re gonna be winning if I’m doing the right things.

Chris Goede:
Love that. So that perspective right there, we shared with you the fundamentals. The first part was for yourself and thinking about the model, and then Perry gave us the fundamentals for the team. Well, let’s talk about the third component of a winning system, and it was unity for him. And you can. You can be the best condition. You can be the best at the fundamentals. But, man.

Chris Goede:
And we like to talk about that as the culture.

Perry Holley:
Right?

Chris Goede:
Like, what is that? Well, I shouldn’t say culture because you could not be unified, and it’s a culture. Right. So maybe that’s not the right word, but a unified culture where you’re kind of playing as one. You’re going to win together. You have a. I was watching real quick, I was watching the Atlanta Braves last night, and so it was interesting because, you know, these guys nowadays, when they get on base, they’re always looking back at the dugout and doing some type of kind of hand movement or gesture. And if you’re watching on YouTube, they’re doing this this year, right? And I was like, I didn’t get it.

Perry Holley:
I got it the year they did the job. I got that. What is this?

Chris Goede:
Yeah. So the announcers last night literally said. They go, hey, yeah, that’s togetherness. That’s their theme this year. And I was like, oh, that’s brilliant. It is. Like, that’s a great. That’s the unity, though.

Chris Goede:
They decided as a team, we’re going after togetherness. And so now every time they get a hit or on base or, you know, and depending who the player is, sometimes it’s a little bit more dramatic than others. Right. You see them kind of clasping their hands and it’s. That’s it together. See that unit unity theme. So, so how. Okay, give us some of your thoughts and some experience you’ve had or maybe some coaching calls you experienced where leaders are promoting unity.

Perry Holley:
Well, just are we together? Are we acting as a team? And just like the Braves thing is really a good mind, like a word picture to say, are we together on this? What happens in a lot of cultures is we set up, we compete with each other. We don’t complete each other. Now, competition, when it’s healthy, is great. And if you come from a sales culture, there’s always a little competition. But when salespeople realize that someone else on the team being successful doesn’t take anything away, from you, we can actually begin to develop, influence, peer to peer, and work together to help each other in a sporting environment. It would be, you know, somebody struggling, another person picking up their slack, helping them, coaching them, giving them feedback. I just love you say culture is, but it’s like you said, it’s not just what a default, it’s a design culture. We are going to work together.

Perry Holley:
We are a team. We complete each other. And having that everybody. One thing I didn’t do early, but I did later was I want you to know what your role and responsibility on this team. You should be clear. Everybody should know their roles and responsibilities. But do you know the other players roles and responsibilities? So we’d actually go around the table and say, what is it you do and why is that important to our mission? What does it you do and why is that important to our mission? And I found that when other people realize the reason Chris is on the team is Chris brings this and that makes us whole, that makes us one. And without Chris, we’re lacking.

Perry Holley:
And it may seem basic, but that’s what, that’s what wooden is saying is the basics here are simple, but it’s so. They’re easy. Jim Rohn would say, they’re so easy to do, they’re easy not to do. And we get my focus, changes to the scoreboard and winning and beating someone. No, no, no. Come back to the basics. It’s easy to do with or easy not to do.

Chris Goede:
Man, listen. Successful leaders, they implement systems. They have them. And when they’re doing that, I was thinking to myself, I was like, what’s the question that we’re answering to build a system as a leader, you’re sitting there thinking through something like, what is it? And what I wrote down here was how leadership is formally and informally exercised, staying to the sports theme for you throughout our entire team. Right? Like, how is leadership exercised throughout? And that will lead you back to a simple systems. And so going back to coach wooden, right, he’s like, no, no. Here are the three things. This is what leadership’s going to look like.

Chris Goede:
We’re going to do these three things. And this is our simple system for success. And I think what we’ve seen in coaching and some organizations that do this really well and some leaders that do this really well, um, I think when you do this, it. It sets extremely high expectations within the team on themselves. Right? They. They’re like, man, we are conditioned. We are. We got the fundamentals.

Chris Goede:
We are one. We’re together. We’re going to go and we’re going to win the championship, whatever it might be. I think it builds loyalty. You know, when you look back again, using my example, the Braves last night, you look back at that bench, the whole bench is like, you know, they’re loyal to each other, and they’re committed to it. And then finally, um, and Perry and I are big about. About this is that, man, it promotes teamwork. If you can develop, you can’t develop a system.

Chris Goede:
That’s hard to explain because not everybody’s going to pick it up. That won’t promote teamwork, that. That won’t put togetherness. I was like, it’s got to be simple. And the fact that coach wouldn’t. The great, one of the greatest coaches of all time, uh, literally had three words, is amazing. So, successful leaders need to implement systems.

Perry Holley:
I was thinking, now you’re talking. When you want to hold people accountable for something, hold them accountable for their conditioning, hold them accountable for executing the fundamentals, and hold them accountable for unity on the team. And that’s a culture development right there. When you see it working, compliment it. When it’s not working, coach them up on how to do. That’s what wooden would do, is you’re trying to be the best person on the floor, but we’re not the best when you’re on the floor. So he would bring people in and make that work better as a team. Great stuff.

Perry Holley:
Just a reminder, if you want to know more about our offerings, about others in our podcast family, if you want to get that learner guide, you may do all that at maxwellleadership.com/podcast. You can also leave us a comment or a question. We love hearing from you, and we’re very grateful you’d spend this time with us. That’s all today from the Maxwell leadership executive podcast.