BINDER #004 - Culture / Leadership - Make Money From Employees by Not Caring about Making Money from Employees
I don’t garden, and I’m not a great cook… but I do know the basics:
If you overwater your plants trying to make them “grow faster”, you’ll drown them, kill the roots, and ultimately kill the plant.
If you are kneading dough, and want to get it “really, really mixed well”, you’ll overwork the dough, making the final bread/baked good dry, hard, and undesirable.
My wife will verify if I am wrong about this two points, but I am 99% sure I am on the right track.
Overwatering plants or over kneading dough reminds me of an article I once read about the “Paradox of Success”. The more successful someone comes, the more likely they are to trip up and fail.
The idea of “doing more to get more” often has merit… but it often has the complete opposite effect when it comes to our employees.
The Fallacy of Small Business Owners
There is absolutely nothing wrong with intentionally keeping a business smaller. A business needs to keep growing in order to survive, but that doesn’t mean it has to grow in revenue (or even profit) - it just has to continuously innovate and evolve.
However, ask any of the “old timers” in your market or online why they kept their businesses small, and you will eventually stumble across a commonly held belief system amongst them, which manifests in slightly different ways:
“No one can do the work like I show them. I always outproduce them.”
“They just want to work their shift time, clock out, and go home. There is no hustle.”
“The moment it gets hard, they crumble, and I have to save the day.”
I could keep going, but I think you get the idea.
With each of those types of belief systems, you can trace them all back to financial impact:
If an employee is outproduced in the field by the boss, the company makes less money.
If they are unwilling to work longer or more difficult shifts, the company makes less money.
Failure to put on the Superman cape and save the job would make the company less money.
In an economic situation where the overwhelming majority of businesses don’t last more than 5 years, you can understand the frustration of business owners...
They’re trying to make payroll on Friday.
They’re trying to serve as many customers as they can.
They’re trying to be a profit-positive business.
From my experience (and, more notably, that of other successful business owners such as Gary Vee and even the “hardcores” like Andy Frisella), the best approach is simple: Accountability is good, but prioritize serving your employees first instead of prioritizing them serving you.
You may have heard the term “Servant leadership” before. The principle teaches that by prioritizing the needs, wants, and desires of employees ahead of what we’re trying to get from the - AKA, all the stuff I just wrote above about “commonly held belief systems - we will actually achieve the very thing we’re trying to get in the beginning anyway.
This is no different than the hundreds (or thousands) of golf instructors across the world who all teach the same thing:
“If you want to hit the ball harder and farther, don’t swing as hard.”
In other words, stop caring about hitting the ball harder. Those who do that - and focus on the actual important stuff, like mechanics, posture, and all the other stuff - will hit the ball harder as a natural by-product.
In business, it’s the same principle, demonstrated over and over again.
To increase sales, don’t focus on selling customers - focus on bringing value. Sales will follow.
To get a better return on investment from your employees, don’t focus on them making you money—focus on serving them first and foremost and having them buy into the company's mission. They will be happier employees and have increased satisfaction, which will naturally lead them to want to do more for the company.
There is a dichotomy to this, however. You can’t “fake” servant leadership. You can’t pretend to care as if it were a mask, behind it lurking your desire for better numbers at the end of the year. People will see through your crap, and then you have a REAL problem on your hands.
To help develop servant leadership abilities, here are some fantastic books that I can recommend that really helped me develop my leadership skills:
Twelve and a Half: Leveraging the Emotional Ingredients Necessary for Business Success - Gary Vaynerchuk
Leaders Eat Last - Simon Sinek
Leadership Strategies and Tactics: Field Manual - Jocko Willink