Weekend Favs June 17

Weekend Favs June 17 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week. I don’t go into depth about the finds, but I encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an […] The 5 Key Skills That Successful Managers Possess written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing Marketing Podcast with Dave Dodson In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Dave Dodson. He is on the faculty of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, where he guides students in tactical execution. He was a McKinsey & Company consultant and left to become a serial entrepreneur, where he operated six companies as CEO or Executive Chairman.  Dave is also the co-founder of Sanku, a company that developed the only successful technology to fortify grains with lifesaving micronutrients in rural African mills. Sanku was listed by Fast Company as one of the “Most Innovative Companies.” and named by Time Magazine’s 100 Best Inventions. His newest book The Manager’s Handbook: Five Simple Steps to Build a Team, Stay Focused, Make Better Decisions, and Crush Your Competition; will help managers, executives, and other business leaders interested in dramatically improving their ability to lead people and inspire loyalty. Key Takeaway: Have you ever wondered why some people are better at getting things done than others? Dave identifies 5 skills that these individuals have mastered in order to become successful managers: team building, setting and adhering to priorities, seeking and taking advice, being a good custodian of your time, and being fanatical about quality. These skills combined with one another can be learned and practiced by anyone, regardless of their inherent attributes or personality traits. Dave emphasizes that this is a how-to manual rather than just theoretical concepts. Each chapter focuses on actionable steps where the goal is to make readers acquire and apply these skills effectively in their professional lives to become better leaders. Questions I ask Dave Dodson: [02:08] How do you define the term manager? [03:27] How’d you come up with five steps that you lean on as being the critical elements? [05:11] Can you mention the five skills in the compact organization? [06:28] What do you feel like you’re adding new to the genre of leadership books? [08:19] Can you explain this idea of hiring for outcomes and how that’s different than hiring for resume experience? [09:47] Please develop the idea of curing the digital disaster. [12:36] Where does a board or a mentor fit into a company’s structure or an individual’s structure? [14:05] You introduce the operating plan, can you please explain that? [17:51] So the fifth step is quality, how do you make quality a part of culture in organizations? [19:10] How would you recommend that people make the ideas in this book stick? More About Dave Dodson: Pre-Order your copy of The Manager’s Handbook: Five Simple Steps to Build a Team, Stay Focused, Make Better Decisions, and Crush Your Competition Reach out to Dave More About The Agency Certification Intensive Training: Learn more about the Agency Certification Intensive Training here Take The Marketing Assessment: Marketingassessment.co Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please! Duct Tape Transcript Email Download New Tab John Jantsch (00:00): Hey, did you know that HubSpot’s annual inbound conference is coming up? That’s right. It’ll be in Boston from September 5th through the eighth. Every year inbound brings together leaders across business, sales, marketing, customer success, operations, and more. You’ll be able to discover all the latest must know trends and tactics that you can actually put into place to scale your business in a sustainable way. You can learn from industry experts and be inspired by incredible spotlight talent. This year. The likes of Reese Witherspoon, Derek Jeter, guy Raz are all going to make appearances. Visit inbound.com and get your ticket today. You won’t be sorry. This programming is guaranteed to inspire and recharge. That’s right. Go to inbound.com to get your ticket today. (01:03): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Dave Dodson. Dave’s on the faculty of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business where he guides students in tactical execution. He was a McKinsey and Company consultant and he left to become a serial entrepreneur where he operated six companies as CEO or Executive Chairman. He’s a co-founder of Sanku, a company that developed the only successful technology to fortify grains with lifesaving micronutrients in rural African mills. Sanku was listed by Fast Company as one of the most innovative companies, and named by Time magazine’s 100 best inventions. We’re gonna talk about his book called The Manager’s Handbook: Five Simple Steps to Build a Team, Stay Focused, Make Better Decisions, and Crush Your Competition. Boy, a lot of promise in that . Dave, welcome to the show. Dave Dodson (02:01): Good to be here. John Jantsch (02:02): So this may seem like a really dumb question, but I think it’s actually going to be helpful to hear how you actually define the term manager. Dave Dodson (02:12): Yeah. You know, John, I struggled quite a bit with whether I should be saying entrepreneur or manager or leader and manager seems sort of vanilla, right? Yeah. But that’s what most of us do every day. We’re managing and one of the things I wanted to do with the manager’s handbook is to take it from sort of some lofty concept down to what do you do every day Monday morning so you can get stuff done? John Jantsch (02:33): Yeah. Cuz you’re right. I mean, entrepreneurs, business owners, you know, they, they may not have manager in their title, but they wear the manager hat every day. Right. Dave Dodson (02:42): 100%. And the biggest leap that somebody makes is not becoming a manager per se, where you’ve got two or three people reporting to you, but it’s when you become a manager of managers because then you can’t cheat anymore. You can’t sort of stay up late or redo someone’s work. You have to manage through the organization. And one of the magical things about it, if you learn the skills on how to manage managers, is that’s completely scalable. All the way up to running the biggest companies in the world. Yeah. John Jantsch (03:10): So, so with your McKinsey and Company credentials, you know, you had to have a framework here, right? Five simple steps, uh, to build a team. So kind of in obviously a great deal is drawn from your own experience managing companies and teams. How’d you come up with five steps that, that you lean on as being really the critical elements? Dave Dodson (03:33): Well, first of all, I am the least likely entrepreneur. I grew up in rural Colorado. The closest town was about 300 population of 300, and we were kind of divided between farmers and ranchers. And I was on the farmer’s side cuz my dad made farm equipment. My, my stepdad built houses and my two grandfathers, one ran an auto dealer and the other ran a coal mine of all things. And what links all four of these people together is all of their businesses failed. Huh. And so I should have just gone out and been a McKinsey consultant, but I didn’t want to do that for whatever reason. In spite of that background, I decided to wa wanted to be an entrepreneur, and things were going well. And then the first time I really stubbed my toe hard and I was like, holy smokes, everything I do doesn’t work out. (04:22): That’s when I started to look around and say, how come some people are just better at getting stuff done than other people? And that led to this three, three year search really to try to understand what is the difference. And what I quickly realized is the difference is not that people have certain attributes, they’re born a certain way, they’re charismatic, introvert, extrovert, but that they’ve mastered five skills. And I wasn’t looking John for a framework when I wrote that the manager’s handbook. I was just out of curiosity, and it just ended up being five skill areas that was universal. I don’t care who you were, you, Oprah Winfrey, you know, Rupert Murdoch, everybody mastered these five skills. It’s very interesting. John Jantsch (04:59): And when we’re gonna call them skills, I mean, there is a o obviously there’s an implication that that can be learned, that can be practiced , that, you know, it does take intention to, you know, to bring them into every meeting. So let’s dive Well, well first off, I, I want you to identify the five skills kind of in the compact organization, but then, then I’ll sort of dip my toe into each of those and ask you to go a little deeper on something. Dave Dodson (05:25): Yeah. So for example, the first one was the ability to build a team, right? The second one was an ability to set and then adhere to priorities. One was to be able to take advice from others, be able to seek and take advice. Another was to be a good custodian of your time. And then the last one was to be fanatical about quality. So those were the five. And I, again, I didn’t start out looking for five, but I ended up with those five. But then I had this predicament, John, because I didn’t wanna create a PowerPoint presentation or have a academic paper now that I teach at Stanford. I wanted something that people use. And so the trick was then how do you convert this insight that I had into a practical way that people could easily acquire these skills? Yeah. And that, that was my biggest challenge, honestly. Yeah. John Jantsch (06:09): All right. So let’s dive into the first one. Team building, you know, frankly, every leadership book, every book on running a company, and it has at least a chapter right on this, because obviously if you’re gonna grow a business, you know you’re not gonna do it all by yourself. There’s a couple things that show up higher for outcomes, 360 degree, you know, reviews. I mean, what do you feel like you’re adding kind of new to that whole genre really, of leadership books? Dave Dodson (06:35): Oh my gosh. You know, I teach at the Sanford Business School, right? And every class says, you gotta build a team. You gotta, but nobody says how to do it. Right? The inside here is that act. Actually, interestingly enough, John, it was, I was watching somebody play the piano, and I was thinking about how do you learn to play the piano? And I realized, well, first you learn how to get, position your fingers over the keyboard, 88 keys. Then you learn the difference between a sharp and a flat. Then you learn what the pedals do. And I realized that you learn to play the piano because you learn a set of sub skills, you combine ’em together and you can play the piano. And I realized the same thing was true with these five skills. So in, in, to use your example about building a team, then I looked at, okay, of the people who were great at building a team, this is not about how I did things. (07:20): I studied the best, the very best leaders for the manager’s handbook. What were the characteristics or what were the, the sub-skills that they had mm-hmm. that led to building a team. So you mentioned 360, doing 360 reviews. So in as few pages as possible, I describe how to master how to do a 360 review, the questions to ask, who should ask the questions, how you curate the information. Then at the end of each chapter, I have a checklist. So when you get ready to do it, you don’t have to reread the chapter, because I wanted this to be a book that you could use. And I did not want it to be a, an inspirational book where you read it and you got all excited while you’re reading it, and then Monday you do the same thing over again. John Jantsch (07:59): So hiring for outcomes has become a, a pretty hot topic, I think mainly because, you know, the whole quiet quitting or whatever the silly terms of, of the day are about those, that, that, I think it’s changing how people think about who they hire and who they, you know, what, who needs to be doing what roles and how to keep them happy at work. So talk a little bit about this idea of how hiring for outcomes and how that’s different than say, hiring for resume experience. Dave Dodson (08:26): Yeah. So I completely turned the whole notion of hiring on its head. And you start with building a scorecard, which is what is, what do you want this person to do? Not what they did, not what their credentials are, but what you want them to do. And then you hire against it. So I remember when I first started hiring, I looked at clever interview questions. So this question that I used to ask everybody is, when you close the refrigerator door, how do you know the light goes out? and I, it was just, I was just impressed with myself, you know, and it was a creative answer, but that had nothing to do with the job and what I wanted someone to do. And so now what I’ve done is I’ve learned that you say, okay, what do I want this person to, I want them to drive sales by 15%. (09:08): I don’t care what school they went to. I don’t care how old they are, I don’t care what they do before. Can they drive sales by 15%, sales by 15%? And then you ask the question, well, how will I know? What are the things that I can do to determine that? And that’s what you interview against. And it’s a completely different way to interview. And by the way, though, in terms of insights of the book, I do this all in about 15, 20 pages. You don’t need to read seven books on hiring to learn how to be good at hiring. John Jantsch (09:32): But you could because it’s currently, it’s a very large section in the bookstore. All right, so let’s move on to time. And this is a tough one. Another one that there’s an entire category probably in the bookstores. There’s one I want you to really focus on curing the digital disaster. Dave Dodson (09:50): Oh my gosh, , you know, before the digital age, the average executive had got a thousand pieces of communication. A year. John Jantsch (10:00): A Dave Dodson (10:00): Year. Wow. Today it’s 30,000. 30,000 and growing John. Yeah. And all these productivity tools are just making us less productive. So we all know it’s a mess out there. We all know that we read unproductive email. In fact, 50%, it’s reported 50% of the email that we read, we don’t think we needed to read. So we all know we have a problem. But the problem, but the issue is we wake up every morning, we do the same thing over and over again. So I didn’t wanna just sort of present a problem that everybody knows, and I didn’t wanna ask people to radically change how they think and how they behave and where their habits are and where their weaknesses are. So I said, you know what? I’m gonna give you seven tips. You do these seven tips and you’ll save 40 minutes a day. That’s it. And so that’s kind of throughout the book. That’s what I do, is I say, look, I’m not gonna try to change your life. I’m gonna give you seven things to do tomorrow morning that will solve this problem. John Jantsch (10:53): Yeah, I actually just hired somebody to delete email for me. That was the solution to that one. Dave Dodson (10:58): Well, John, I’m glad you answered my emails, at least. . John Jantsch (11:01): . And now let’s hear a word from our sponsor, marketing Made Simple. It’s a podcast hosted by Dr. JJ Peterson and is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals marketing made simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly, make it work. In a recent episode, JJ and April chat with StoryBrand certified guides and agency owners about how to use ChatGPT for marketing purposes. We all know how important that is today. Listen to marketing Made Simple. Wherever you get your podcasts. (11:39): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days, or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification. (12:27): So, so the next category is advisors. So, you know, especially since we’re addressing the manager’s