Three frameworks for inspired agency leadership with Jonathan Raymond

Speaker 1:

It doesn’t matter what kind of an agency you run; traditional, digital, media buying, web dev, PR. Whatever your focus, you still need to run a profitable business. The Build a Better Agency Podcast, presented by White Label IQ will show you how to make more money and keep more of what you made. Let us help you build an agency that is sustainable, scalable, and if you want, down the road, sellable. Bringing his 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant, please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Drew McLellan:

Hey, everybody, Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute, and I am back with another episode of Build a Better Agency. Super glad to have you. I have a great guest for you. Before I tell you a little bit about him, let me just get some news in your ear. First of all, if you joined us for the Build a Better Agency Summit 2021, which was back in August, thank you so much for being with us. It was a blast. And in fact, it was so awesome we’re doing it again. So Build a Better Agency Summit 2022 is on the books, May 24th and 25th. The tickets are not going to get any cheaper as we get closer to the event, so if you were with us and you want to come back, which I really hope is the case, grab your ticket now. If you were not with us and you wished you had been with us, grab your ticket now.

If you were not with us and you have no idea what I’m talking about, head over to agencymanagementinstitute.com, and up in the upper left corner, you’re going to see a nav indicator for BaBA Summit, Build a Better Agency Summit. Click on that and you can read a little bit about the conference and who’s going to be speaking and all the things that we’ve got going on and we will get you all informed. But I’m telling you, it’s two days of learning, it’s two days of laughing, it’s two days of connecting with other agency owners and leaders. I had one agency leader text me and say, “I have never been so sad to leave a professional conference in my entire life.” That just made me so happy.

Yes, the content’s great, and yes, you’re going to learn a lot, but what you’re going to really do is connect with the Agency Management Institute community, other agency owners, and you’re going to find a lot of kindred spirits who are struggling with the same challenges, having the same successes and are really eager and ready to share with you what they know and to learn what you know. So I hope you join us May 24th and 25th. It’s in Chicago, and you can grab your ticket now. We are about a third sold out. It’s capped at 300 people. So it’s a nice small, intimate group people. It’s not thousands and thousands of people. But I do expect us to sell out. So if you’re interested, you might as well save some money and get your ticket now. That’s what I have to say about that.

All right, let me tell you a little bit about our guest. So Jonathan Raymond is the CEO of a company called Refound and the author of a book called Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For. And Jonathan has some really interesting ideas about how we should show up as leaders and managers. And I’m going to pick his brain because I think the book is brilliant, it’s super helpful, very pragmatic, lots of good applicable tips that you can put right into play. And he’s got some really interesting ideas around leadership and how to inspire your team to want to follow you. And I think you’re really going to enjoy the conversation and him and his insights. So let’s get right to it. Jonathan, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Jonathan Raymond:

Hey, Drew. Good to be on.

Drew McLellan:

So give everybody a little bit of your background and how you came to write both books, because you’ve got a new book coming out. And just give us the lay of the land of how you came to know what you know.

Jonathan Raymond:

Sure. So I started out my career as an attorney, actually, in a big firm in New York and became very disillusioned very quickly about life in a big New York City law firm. I transitioned… Actually, a few bumps in the road. Went into tech, went into clean energy, went into the nonprofit space, and I spent basically 15, 20 years trying to figure out what I was good at professionally. And it turned out what I was good at was taking ideas of whatever type and making them real. So I was good at the business development part of it, about explaining what we did how we did it and why it mattered.

But while I was doing that, mostly what my heart was in was as a personal and spiritual seeker. So I was really focused a lot on my own development. I was trying to figure out who I was as a human. As a young man, I was very depressed and single and couldn’t figure out how to do relationships and couldn’t figure out my place in the world. And so I was exploring all sorts of things; meditation, yoga, somatic psychotherapy, anything and everything I could get my hands on to try to figure out who I was and how I wanted to be.

And it was really the convergence of those two things that led me to what I do now, which is essentially how do you grow businesses? How do you get better at the business part of it in a way that is in alignment with your values of who you want to be and what does that mean to be authentic? And so that led me to the beginning of the current place in my role, which I know we’ll get into, but that’s sort of two lives converging into one, thankfully.

Drew McLellan:

So what about the convergence of that led you to start the company, led you to share what now as an author?

Jonathan Raymond:

It came to a head of really screwing it up where I was running as a CEO. It was my first real gig as a CEO, some 10, 12 years ago, and I thought I knew what I was doing. I thought I was reasonable, I thought I was generally good at talking with people. And I realized through very, very painful personal experience that whatever I thought I had learned in my own personal growth, in my own emotional work wasn’t translating. And I was still the same arrogant ass that I was beforehand and I had not figured out how to actually be a good human with the people on my team. And I lost my team, essentially. The business was okay, but I lost the momentum of my team and the culture that I had built.

And people, I just could tell that people just, they didn’t want to follow me anymore. And that was a rude awakening that the things as I said, the things that I thought I knew and the ways that I thought I had evolved was mostly BS. It was mostly a story that I was telling myself that I had evolved when I actually hadn’t. And that really led me to rethink what I was doing and how I was going about it. And that led me to change my style and approach. And not just at work, in my own relationships with my wife. We were going through a difficult time financially, changing how I was thinking really about everything. And so that’s really what led me to write Refound.

It was really about me being refound. And it was also, I started to work with clients and I started to have some successes with teaching what I was learning about myself, which was new for me trying to coach and teach other people. I was very transparent about this. I said, “Look, this is working for me. I don’t know if it’s going to work for you, but it’s working for me.” And here we are some, whatever it is, eight years later putting something good out.

Drew McLellan:

But now you’re finding that it does work for other people.

Jonathan Raymond:

It does, yeah. And I’ve been really surprised, because for example, I didn’t have you know… We have clients, some of them are creative agencies, some of them are big manufacturing, some are healthcare, some are tech, it’s all over the map. And my background was really as an office person, right? I was doing business development for software startups, energy businesses. And what’s been really lovely and surprising to me is how these ideas have translated across really all industries and different stages. So that’s been very rewarding. That’s been really the best part for me.

Drew McLellan:

So we keep talking about it keeps working. So what is it?

Jonathan Raymond:

Yeah, what is it? So there are three core ideas that I teach. They’re all in the book Good Authority. The first is an idea called More Yoda, Less Superhero. The second is idea around alignment that sparks ownership, and the third is a tool called the Accountability Dial. So we can dive into this a little bit.

The first one is really that More Yoda, Less Superhero mindset, which is what I found for myself was I learned how to be, I was rewarded for, and I only recognized myself as a superhero. Superhero, I got things done, didn’t take no for an answer, drove things forward, created results, solved problems, fixed things. I got it done. That’s how I knew myself. That was the self-value that I had.

What I didn’t know how to do was to be more Yoda. I didn’t know how to really be curious, how to hold space for other people to ask questions that they maybe didn’t feel so comfortable asking. I didn’t know how to develop people in a way that created productive discomfort. So I would be like, “Oh, you need to do this.” That doesn’t help anyone.

Drew McLellan:

The “let me just fish for you” model.

Jonathan Raymond:

Yeah. And so this idea of More Yoda, Less Superhero, all of the folks that we work with, whether they’re CEOs of multinationals or first-time managers, what we’ve seen is everybody these days, and was true before COVID, it’s even more true now, people are struggling to keep up with the amount of work, with the pace of work, and with the level of detail that shows up in your inbox. And if you’re not careful and intentional and thoughtful, you just end up in this perpetual scramble, in superhero mode trying to get everything done. And that shift to more Yoda, that’s the core mindset shift.

[inaudible 00:10:26] that look like? How do you really delegate in this crazy world we live in? How do you create space for other people to grow? How do you build yourself as a replaceable person in the org chart so that you can elevate-

Drew McLellan:

So how do you do those things?

Jonathan Raymond:

So the first thing that you do is you inventory, is you figure out how you’re not doing that today. So we have a set of exercises. We work with leaders in coaching programs, we work with managers in our training program to really identify what are the ways… We call it the Shape of Your Cape, is an exercise that we do. And what are the ways that you’re actually doing that today, where you are disempowering your team, and for example, disempowering your team and disempowering yourself at the same time.

So for example, I was walking with one of my… It was a client of mine who was a VP in a large business. And I followed him around for the day. We came from four different meetings, super interesting meetings. There was a lot of good stuff. He added a ton of value to those meetings. And we walked and we sat down and we went to go have some lunch, and I said, “So what do you think? What do you think I’m going to say?” And he is like, “Well…” And he went [inaudible 00:11:33]. And I said, “Why are you in those meetings?” And he looked at me and he was like, “I don’t know. I said, “It’s not that you didn’t add value. You did. That’s the problem.”

And he looked at me and his eyes lit up and he’s like, “Yeah, I just have this feeling I’m not supposed to be there, but I don’t know how to not be there.” And I said, “Okay, well, if you weren’t there, what would need to happen?” So we did a whole… “Well, what kind of visibility would you need coming out of that meeting so you can relax and not actually be…” So there was a whole process that we went through. Sometimes it’s really basic stuff, but emotionally, it’s really difficult to extricate ourselves to pull our fingers off of this journey.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. What’s interesting is I talk to agency owners and they are trying to get out of the day-to-day and focus on actually doing their job as the business owner. A lot of them will say to me is, “I feel guilty I’m not doing stuff. I’m not in the meetings. I’m not contributing.” And I’m like, “No, of course you are, are contributing, but you’re doing your job and you haven’t been doing it before. So you’ve been doing other people’s job, and A, it was easy for you because it’s old hat. But B, it was, you were making a thing somehow, like decision or actually making a thing, so that felt super productive. And your actual work isn’t about making things, it’s about knowing things. And that looks really different.

Jonathan Raymond:

And we can borrow from the big guys, let’s say, right? Like, so if you talk with a 50-year-old executive coaching firm, Refound is 10 years old, we do it a little differently. But the old guard has a lot to teach us. And one of the things that they would say if they were talking to any of those clients at the executive level, they would ask you, “How many days are you spending working on the future of the business?” And it should be like three out of five, at least. How about as a agency owner or a small business owner? Maybe it’s at least one. Let’s start with one where you’re spending one day a week, 20% of the week focused on the future of the business.

Guess what? When your team sees you doing that, senses you doing that, they’re going to love that they know that that’s what you’re doing. I’m doing that right now. I’m working on my second book, so I haven’t been around the business as much as I normally would be. I can feel it. My team, they love that I’m out writing a new book, putting something out that’s going to build the future of the business. If I’m there, they’ll ask me questions and I’ll have an opinion and my opinion will be stupid or smart or whatever, but they don’t need me there. They need me not there.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Well, one of the things I advocate is for agency owners to be out of the office at least a day a week. And I’m like, “You have no idea what a safety net you are for your team.” And they ask you questions, not because they don’t know the answers, but it feels better to have you validate the answer before they go ahead. But if you’re not there, they’ll figure it out. But we have to get out of the way. We have to be invisible a little bit.

Jonathan Raymond:

Yeah. And this is part of the mindset shift. This is a… We’ll do a little bit of maybe mass coaching here, is just to… You can and should say to your team, “Hey, here’s something that I want to be able to do, which is I want to spend one day a week out of the office, or two days a week, and it’s really hard for me.” You can and should be a little vulnerable about it. “This is really hard for me. You know me, I want to be in on everything, I want to… It’s really hard for me. I could really use your help. Give me a little poke. Be like, “Hey, Jonathan, why are you here?”

Drew McLellan:

“It’s Tuesday, get out.”

Jonathan Raymond:

“It’s Tuesday, get out. We don’t need you.” I give you my permission, I give you my blessing, because this is hard for me.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. And it also says, “And I have faith in you and I want you to move ahead without me. Don’t wait. Keep going.”

Jonathan Raymond:

And this goes to our second, the second of the three framework. So we say, “Hey, you got to be more Yoda, less superhero.” When you decide to do that, the next thing that you have to do is you have to make a set of new agreements with your people. That’s what we call agreements that spark ownership. So if I’m going to step away, if I’m not going to be up in their business the way I was before, well, we have to agree, well, what are their roles? What are they accountable for? What’s the purpose of their role? And there’s a tool that we introduce that we work with leaders so that people feel a sense of clarity.

McKenzie did this longitudinal study, eight million managers, what’s the biggest challenge? Setting clear expectations. So we introduced a tool for how do you do that in a way where people feel like, “Okay, I got it.” He or she is going to step back a little bit, and as a result, “Here’s what I need to own. Here’s, not what are the tasks in my inbox, but what’s the purpose? What’s the essence. What’s the question that I should be asking when Drew’s not here.” So that’s the second of the three things that we work with leaders on.

Drew McLellan:

So we keep talking about the book. So I just want to mention the book is called Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For. That’s the book that’s already written. And then you are finishing up a new book, correct?

Jonathan Raymond:

Yes. I’m working on a second book. We’ll see if the title holds, but the current title is Grow Out of Control. Okay. We can talk a little bit about what that book is about, but that’s the current title. And it’s a book for everyone. But Good Authority was really a book written for leaders and managers, and Grow Out of Control was a book written for everyone to move beyond this conversation around strengths or weaknesses, which is a really annoying conversation. It’s not about strengths. It’s not about, should you double down on your strengths or work on your weaknesses? It’s about learning what your strengths are and learning how to work with them responsibly.

Because what happens is we have a strength, everybody’s got a strength. In the book I talk about the seven strengths, but what happens is we overrely on it. We become a one-trick pony and we only know how to be that one thing. We hold ourselves back in our career as a result. So evolution is about saying, “Hey, I’m really good at that. I’m never going to not be good at that, but I’m going to diversify my portfolio of strengths a little bit.” So that’s what that book was about.

Drew McLellan:

So the third of the… So it was Yoda, it was align, have agreements that lead to ownership. And the third one again was?

Jonathan Raymond:

The third one is actually the one we’re most known for, it’s the most popular, probably for obvious reasons. It’s called the Accountability Dial. And the Accountability Dial is a five-step method for how to start, manage, and complete development conversations, feedback conversations. So it’s, how do you do it in a way that doesn’t leave people feelings defensive, that is based in curiosity, that assumes positive intent, that’s based in principles of psychological safety? Which are all words that mean something to some people but are irrelevant to most of humans. What matters is, does it work? What words do I need to use? When do I need to use them so that I can make observations about what I’m seeing in ways where people go, “Oh yeah, I hadn’t thought of that,” or, “I noticed that too. I wasn’t really sure why I did it that way.”

So it’s a five-step process that we teach for leaders and managers mostly. But it’s for when you see things that are happening that are not good, but it’s also for when you see things that are happening that are good. Leaders don’t do enough of that. How do we reinforce moments of good behavior, moments of good collaboration, moments where things are aligned, moments when people do do the right things? Managers and leaders don’t do enough to put their thumbs on those moments and say, “Hey,” not just, “That was good, but that was good because, and the impact that it had was blank. And if you do more of that, it’s going to lead to X.” That’s constructive feedback. At best, most people say, “Oh, that was good.”

Drew McLellan:

Right. So briefly just give us an overview of the five steps. And then we’re going to take a break and then we’ll dig into the steps after the break.

Jonathan Raymond:

Sure. So the mention is the first step in the Accountability Dial. It’s like, if you see something, say something. “Hey, I was in this morning’s meeting and I got the sense that people were a little bit unclear about what the objective was. Did you sense that?” That’s a mention. Now, there’s nothing punitive about it, there’s nothing hostile, it’s not aggressive. I’m not demonstrating my authority. It’s just, I noticed something I wanted to raise. That’s it.

The invitation is the second step, when you’re seeing a pattern. Maybe it’s a couple days later. “I noticed… Do you remember I said something about that meeting? I don’t know, it just seems like the team was a little bit less… They’re not as crisp as they usually are. I know there was this difficult moment that we had with a client. It seems like there’s a bit of a pattern brewing here and I don’t know what it’s about, but it seems like we should get out ahead of it.” So it’s pattern recognition is the second step.

The third step is what we call the conversation. So the second step we call the invitations. We had mention, invitation, wow we’re at the third step which is the conversation, which is talking about the impact. So who cares? So those things that you observed, why does that matter? So what impact is it having on the team’s ability to perform at a high level? What impact is it having on our working relationship? What impact is it having on our customer or partner or vendor? Let’s get specific. What are the impacts of that behavior? So we’re not just giving feedback to give feedback. We’re giving feedback because it’s connected to something that matters to us. That’s the conversation. And some of this happens in one-on-one conversations, but a lot of it can happen in a hallway, a virtual hallway or a real hallway, if you’re so fortunate in our world today.

The fourth step is the boundary. The boundary is, “Hey, what needs to change by when? What does change look like? How are we going to measure it? And what’s the agreement that we’re going to have?” So if you look at most teams and most organizations, to the degree that there’s feedback happening at all, it happens like little breadcrumbs and they never get picked up off the floor. So people drop hints. They say things, they make comments, but there’s no actual follow-through to create a boundary of what change actually looks like. We’re human beings; we need boundaries, we need structure. We need to know what change looks like and we need a partner to help us do it. That’s the fourth stage is the boundary.

And then the fifth stage is the limit, is when you as a manager or as a peer or as an employee say, “Hey, you know what? I feel like I’ve done everything I can here. I’ve tried to give feedback, I’ve tried to have these conversations. I don’t know what else to do.” And it’s firmly planting the ball in the court of the other person. It doesn’t necessarily mean quitting, firing somebody or telling them you’re going to never give them the time of day anymore. It doesn’t necessarily mean that, although sometimes it does. It mostly means, “Hey, I feel like I’ve done everything I can here. I’ve invested but I’m not getting anything back. I’m not getting any return on my investment.” So those are the five stages in the Accountability Dial.

Drew McLellan:

All right, well that teases up perfectly to take a quick break and then come back and we’re going to dig into how we approach each of those five stages. And I want to hear about the new book too, so we’ll ask both of those questions when we come back.

I know, I know you did not want to break away from the show, but I had to tell you about this workshop that’s coming up soon. One of my favorite workshops to teach is Money Matters, and it will be in December, on December 9th and 10th in Orlando, Florida on beautiful Disney property. Here’s why I love teaching this workshop. It is all about money for two days. That’s all we talk about. And we talk about how you can make more money, how you can keep more oof the money you make, and how you can grow the agency’s bottom line and your own personal wealth. I love teaching this stuff.

There’s not a time I have taught this workshop that somebody doesn’t walk up to me and say, “You know what, Drew? I wish I had been here 20 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago. I could have made so much more money.” And what I say to them is, “I know, but you’re here now, so let’s put it into play.” But here’s what I’m going to say to you; don’t wait another five to attend this workshop. I promise you it is worth its weight in gold. And as always, we have a money-back guarantee. So come join me December 9th and 10th in Orlando for Money Matters. All right, let’s get back to the show.

All right, we’re back. And Jonathan had just walked us through the Accountability Dial and the five elements of that at a vert super high level. And so now, I think, let’s take a look at those a little differently. So the first one was the mention. So if I understand it right, that’s me just casually saying to you, “You know what? Hey…” And again, you said good or bad. So, “Hey, I noticed that the client just lit up when you shared this piece of information,” or whatever.” Or, “You know what? It seemed like we lost the client when we started going down that rabbit hole of,” whatever the conversation was.

So I think a lot of times managers and leaders see those things but they don’t have that conversation in real time. And it seems to me, and I’m curious how you feel about it, it seems to me that the power of that conversation has a time limit.

Jonathan Raymond:

Yes, it does. It’s the lowest-hanging fruit in culture, is those little more moments, those little mention moments that go… I’ve had multiple people, some became clients, some people just read the book and they said, “The mention changed our culture.” Just having those conversations in real time. The way that my expiration date is 5 o’clock. That’s when it expires. It doesn’t mean you can’t drink it the next day. It’s still edible for human consumption, but same day. And a lot of times, even if you don’t have time, you always have time to send a Slack or a note, but nobody is going to begrudge you for 10 o’clock you sending them an email saying, “Hey, I didn’t get a chance to say this this morning, but the client really lit up at that moment in the conversation. That was super cool. Great job.” No one’s going to complain about that after-hours email.

Drew McLellan:

That’s right.

Jonathan Raymond:

So a hundred percent, it is we say real time or near time. You don’t have to make a big deal of it. We get in a habit for the positives, for the reasons we’ve already described, but also for the negatives when there’re things that… Because people don’t have context for your feedback if it’s the next day. If it’s the next week, forget it. I don’t even know what I had for breakfast, the day that you were talking about, let alone the nine million things that were happening in my inboxes in that moment that you’re trying to get me feedback about. Forget it. Don’t even bother.

Drew McLellan:

And then the invitation is, feels to me like that’s connecting some dots. Like, “The thing that I mentioned, I’ve now seen three times. So it seems like perhaps this is a pattern or a problem.” Or, “Man, you’re good at this. I’ve seen this happen four times.” So what’s the context around that conversation? And does it always lead? So I guess, let me back up. Do you always have all five steps of the dial? Do you have to go from one through five?

Jonathan Raymond:

Right. So the way that I set it up was you exit it whenever the conversation’s done. So if you make that mention and you say, “Hey, that was really cool. I loved that on the client call.” And ideally, what’s the ideal response? You want that person to be like, “Yeah. I noticed that too. And as a result of that moment, I put a new note in the team documents around our process that we should always do that.” Boom. That’s what we want. It’s not even that we want them to recognize the moment, we want them to take the moment, document it, put it into system process, whatever, so that other people can benefit from it. Then we’re done. Accountability over. That’s it. Great.

Now the next step, so let’s say it’s a positive thing or a negative thing, it doesn’t matter, it’s that pattern recognition. And sometimes it’s three instances of the same thing. Let’s use a really obvious example like someone who’s late three times. Most businesses [inaudible 00:27:08], but agencies, it doesn’t really matter. You’re not punching a clock. But let’s take a silly example like [crosstalk 00:27:14]-

Drew McLellan:

[crosstalk 00:27:14] for a client meeting or keeping your coworkers waiting.

Jonathan Raymond:

Yeah. Always late for Zoom meetings or something like that or whatever tool people use. So sometimes it’s the same thing, but the context for that is ideally, I mentioned it. Like, “Hey it’s not the end of the world, but we really have a culture where we try to be on time for each other. Life happens. It’s not about going to jail, but whatever.” So I made my mention, and it’s like, “Okay, something’s going on here.” And we go into that conversation from positive intent, like, “Why is that happening?” It could be the fact that person is so buried in creative thought, they’re so focused that they lose track of time and they’re late to those. I don’t want to punish them for that, but I do you want to support them in making some different choices about how they structure their time.

So it’s not, they’re not being late to screw people over necessarily. Although sometimes people are reckless and some people don’t… Sometimes it’s that people don’t care about the people around them, but it’s not always the case. So I don’t go in to the mention or the invitation, I’m not ascribing motive. I’m just looking at data. “Hey, here’s what’s happening. Don’t know why it’s happening.” That’s why I’m making the invitation.

Drew McLellan:

And when you say that to somebody and it just hangs in the air, then what?

Jonathan Raymond:

So then when it hangs in the air, so we’re going to our next step. So let’s assume I make an invitation. I ask somebody, I highlight a pattern. I say, “Hey, this looks like something we’re thinking about. I don’t want to put you on the spot, but hey, let’s…” And let’s say I don’t get anything back from them. It feels like it gets dropped. Now I’m in the conversation. Those can be more sort of hallway things. Now I’m in the conversation and maybe that’s more in a one-on-one. Maybe it’s more if I have a weekly one-on-one or bi-weekly, whatever it is, or have some occasion to sit down with them and say, “Hey, I made this observation the other day and I haven’t heard anything back from you on it. And I’m just wondering about that. Maybe you feel like it was sort of a one-off, but it actually has an impact. When you’re late to meetings, that has an impact. Let’s talk about that.”

And the thing that… it may sound silly, but I promise you it’s not. People, all of us, Drew, Jonathan included, we are not good at understanding the impacts of our behavior on other people. It is not a strength of the human race at this point in our evolution. Just accept it, deal with it, it’s just how it is. We are in our own worlds a lot of the time. So having somebody else who cares about you, which is the job of the modern manager, is to care about the people on your team. If you have no other job, that’s the job, is a care about the people on your team. You should also know yourself. There’re some other things.

But that somebody else has the presence of mind and the investment to say, “Hey, there’s something that you’re doing that’s having an impact that you may not be realizing. Let’s talk about it. Let’s take five minutes. Let’s take 15 minutes. Let’s take three hours talking about the impacts.” How many teams have you been on where things like this destroy the morale of the entire team? All of them. Literally all of them. So is that not worth the three hour conversation to really get to, if you’ve got someone who’s a talented person on your team, to really get to the fundamental reason of why they’re showing up the way… the blind spot that they don’t realize, they don’t see, you’ll get to gold.

Drew McLellan:

So, is part of the trick of that though raising the issue and then shutting up?

Jonathan Raymond:

Yes. Well, so part of the magic of the mention is this is not the first time you’re bringing it, because if it’s the first, it’s what most managers and leaders do, and again, all levels, is we notice something, we don’t say something. We see the pattern emerging and we ignore it. We hope it’s going to change. We vent about it to others. We pray to our God of choice that it’s going to change, whatever the thing is. We vent to our spouse. But the one thing we don’t do is we don’t have a conversation with that person, right?

Drew McLellan:

Right, exactly.

Jonathan Raymond:

And then when we have the conversation, the conversation we’re describing, even if we use the right words, we don’t use the right tone, because we’ve let our frustration build. So it’s what I call spontaneous management combustion. It’s like, we let the thing build for way too long. So even if we use the right words, we don’t use the right words in the right way. And then we think, “Well, I had the conversation, I tried to give them feedback and they got defensive. See? They’re a big jerk.” Uh-uh (negative), sorry. That was all on you. A hundred percent on you.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. We wait too long. We wait too long until it’s like a mountain as opposed to let’s deal with it while it’s small.

Jonathan Raymond:

Yes.

Drew McLellan:

But back to the… So after you raise the conversation and you say, “Let’s talk about it,” I think this is one of the places where a lot of managers make the mistake, is they then feel the need to fill the space by continuing to talk, as opposed to just letting the silence be uncomfortable until the other person has something to say.

Jonathan Raymond:

Yeah. I had one leader who really struggled with this. It was like a watershed moment in his life. This guy’s been managing people for 30 years and he learned how to have the conversation. He sat there and he said… He called me afterwards, he said, “Jonathan, guess what I did?” I was like, “What?” He’s like, “Nothing.” He’s like, “I sat there and I said, ‘Hey, this is having an impact on our business and some other things. And I can see some things, but I don’t want to give you my… I want to hear from you how you think it’s impacting.’ And the person didn’t say anything and I didn’t fill in the space.”

Drew McLellan:

It’s hard.

Jonathan Raymond:

Yeah. “I waited. And then they said, ‘I don’t know.’ Well, I don’t know, can you tell me?’ And I said, ‘No, I can’t. I want you to reflect on it. I’m not mad, but I want you to reflect on it. Because if I tell you then it’s just my stuff. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.’”

Drew McLellan:

So it’s okay if they don’t have the answer to end that conversation knowing you’re going to come back to it.

Jonathan Raymond:

Yes.

Drew McLellan:

But again, with the expectation that they’re going to have something to say.

Jonathan Raymond:

Yes. And the expectation that they’re going to come back to you. I’m not going to go chase them.

Drew McLellan:

Okay. So the way you end that conversation is saying, “Let’s have a conversation tomorrow or when you have really thought this through. I’ll wait for you to come back to me.”

Jonathan Raymond:

Yeah. “I’ll follow your lead. You come back to me.” That’s the ideal. Now, if, again, we’re escalating only as necessary. The whole point of this, we didn’t say this in the beginning. We’re only using just as much and no more authority than we ever need. That’s the game. Just as much and only as much authority, structural authority as we need. And when we are living with the assumption that whatever we think about how much our authority makes an impact in a negative way, it’s 10 times worse than that.

Drew McLellan:

Right. And then so the fourth step is the boundary. So now they’ve come back and they’ve said, “Okay, I can see how this impacts X, Y, and Z.”

Jonathan Raymond:

Yes. Great. So then it’s, “Hey, thanks for owning that. I really appreciate that. I appreciate you doing some reflection. I know that wasn’t easy.” Whatever’s true for you in that moment. “So let’s talk about, what does change look like?” Now, what you will find, and this is the magic of the Accountability Dial, if I can say it that way, is when you do these conversations, they will come back to you and they will initiate what change looks like. You don’t have to worry, “Oh, I have to set a boundary.” It’s not about you setting a boundary. It’s, “Hey, I went home and I thought about it and I talked about it, and you know what? You’re right. And I realized that what I really need to do is this and this and this. And I started to make a system for myself.” They will do it. They will create the boundary for themselves, and it’ll be better, smarter and more impactful than any boundary you could come up with. So you don’t have to worry about that. You just have to follow the steps.

Drew McLellan:

And then in theory, if they do what they say they’re going to do, then we’re done.

Jonathan Raymond:

We’re done.

Drew McLellan:

And if they don’t do what they say they’re going to do, then we go to the limit.

Jonathan Raymond:

Yes.

Drew McLellan:

And the limit is coming back to them and saying, “Yeah, we talked about this and you were going to do these things, but that doesn’t seem to have happened.”

Jonathan Raymond:

Yes. And a lot of times I think what most people could relate to is it’s either, it’s usually that it’s not happening fast enough. It’s often the case that it’s like they’re making no progress. You can tell that there’s some energy being extended, but it’s not moving fast enough. And that’s where you have to… And so the there’s an exercise that we could do. We could do this out loud. So, Drew, give me an example of a piece of performance on a… somebody you managed, whenever, maybe not a current person where there was a behavior that you were seeing that wasn’t good, for them, for the team. What was the behavior?

Drew McLellan:

Dropping the ball and not raising a red flag so everybody knew that we had a problem. They were hiding that something was wrong.

Jonathan Raymond:

Okay. So I’m going to give you the opportunity to have this person behaving in that way, in exactly that way, and stay on your team, doing it exactly that way for the next 10 years. How does that feel?

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, it feels yucky.

Jonathan Raymond:

Not so good. How about five years?

Drew McLellan:

No. Bad.

Jonathan Raymond:

How about a year?

Drew McLellan:

No, but a lot of people do endure it for a year, right?

Jonathan Raymond:

How about 90 days?

Drew McLellan:

If we’re trying to correct it and we’re actively working on it, I could live with it for 90 days.

Jonathan Raymond:

I have asked that question at least a thousand times and I have gotten the exact answer that you’ve given every single time.

Drew McLellan:

Really? Okay.

Jonathan Raymond:

That’s how long. That is our threshold for how long we… And they answered it exactly the same way you did, which is, “I could live with that if, or and as long as we’re seeing progress.” That is the reasonable… If it is a thing to be worked on, it is not solvable in a day. If it’s a legit thing to be worked on, it’s not solvable in a day and it can’t take a year. 60 to 90 days; that’s where it is. And that’s when we develop programs for companies, we have people on not 90-day performance cycles, 90-day self-development.

“Hey, what do you want to work on over the next quarter? Let’s work on it together. Then let’s do a new thing next quarter. Or let’s do that same thing to the next level,” whatever it is. That’s the sweet spot. It’s in that 60 to 90 days territory.

Drew McLellan:

So we teach a one-on-one methodology. We have the exact same thing. It’s like a growth goal for every 90 days.

Jonathan Raymond:

Awesome.

Drew McLellan:

So one of the things that you talk about is this idea of personal versus professional development and how they actually aren’t different. So talk a little bit about that.

Jonathan Raymond:

So it’s funny, the things that people need to work on at work. So let’s take one of our examples, right? Like somebody who doesn’t show up on time for things. If somebody figures out how to show up on time for things and manage their calendar and learn how to organize their commitments, did they learn a personal skill or a professional skill?

Drew McLellan:

Both.

Jonathan Raymond:

Both. If we take your example of somebody who hides key information out of shame, or for whatever, fear or whatever [inaudible 00:38:22] thing, and they work on it and they learn how to do it, did they learn a professional skill or a personal skill?

Drew McLellan:

Right, absolutely, both.

Jonathan Raymond:

Both. Every single one of them. Now, if I’m learning how to code in a bizarre programming language, well, you could argue while I’m developing my whatever, that’s maybe a little bit pushing the boundaries.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, not as helpful at home.

Jonathan Raymond:

Yeah. But most of the stuff that people need to work on is both, because it’s about how we show up in the world. It’s about how we show up in relationships. Do we know how to listen? Are we collaborative? Do we know how to ask questions? Do we know how to assume positive intent? Do we know how to stand on stage and shine when we do something great? Do we know how to take ownership? And when we do something lousy, we screw it up? It’s all of that stuff. That’s all personal and professional at the same time.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, no doubt about it. The soft skills, but the important skills.

Jonathan Raymond:

Yes. The difficult skills.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. So in all of your self-reflection, and now that you’re teaching it to other people, because I’m thinking, why do you think this is so hard? Because we see it in other people and we go, “Well, he needs to be on time,” or, “She needs to do this,” but we just don’t see it in ourselves. So why do you think that is?

Jonathan Raymond:

Let’s pause at there’re at least three reasons. So one is we don’t reward it. We don’t reward the good. Mostly we only reward production. So we only reward like we won the pitch and that’s all that matters. Move on to the next thing. All the behavior, all the shitty behavior that happened while we were reading the pitch, there’s no consequences for that. So we don’t reward it, we don’t look at it, we don’t we don’t focus on it. That’s at least one reason.

The second reason is we want to be liked most of the time. So we work in close quarters in a modern organization where we know people, we often know their family. We, at least before COVID, we saw them outside of work. We learn, we connect with them in social media. So there’s a big understandable wanting to be liked.

And then the third to me is, and this is where we can actually… So those two, those are legit. The third is we don’t know what good looks like. And so that’s why I created Refound, is I wanted to show people what good looks like. And that’s why we don’t do lofty leadership ideas. We do implementation. We focus on, what does it sound like at 10:32 on a Tuesday? Because people don’t know what good looks like. And when they don’t know what good looks like, they ain’t going to do it.

Drew McLellan:

Right. So as I’m listening to you, I’m thinking, “I can totally see how leaders and managers can use these tools,” but I’m also thinking, “It’s myopic to think that I can use these tools with my team and yet I don’t really know how I’m showing up.” I can course-correct all of them to be a good manager or a leader, but who’s course-correcting me?

Jonathan Raymond:

So there’s a couple of ways to think about that. So I think that that’s spot on, right? First of all, if you’re at the top of the org chart and you don’t have somebody who’s hard on you, you’re crazy. You’re out to lunch on a deep level, and I’ve been there. I’ve been out to lunch on a deep level thinking that I wasn’t the problem. One of my old friends, so he starts his coaching relationships with, “What are we going to do when it turns out the problem is you?” So I think it’s a good place to start. And just with a little humility. Right?

So one is you got to have an accountability coach. You got to have somebody who is not afraid to tell you how it looks, how it sounds, and is not afraid to start with the assumption… Like I start with all my clients, I said, “Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but I know you’re lying to me. You don’t know the truth. You can’t tell me the truth about how your team feels about you because you don’t know the truth. You know the filtered version that they tell you. So if we’re going to engage in this relationship, I don’t do…” So part of the way I solve for that is I don’t do one-off coaching with a CEO or a executive without working with their team. My team works with their team. I’m just not going to do it. Nobody wins, right?

So, best case scenario is I give them a bunch of advice. They go do that advice but they don’t change their behavior. They don’t change who they are. So that’s part of it. And I think a lot of the success comes in knocking yourself down some pegs. Here’s what it sounds like to me: “Hey, I was listening to Drew’s podcast. You know, guys, I love Drew’s podcast. He had this guy on and they were talking about the Accountability Dial, and I think it’s super cool. Let’s learn it together. I’m sure they have some online course.” Spoiler alert: we do. We got all the things that you could do. You could do expensive, you could do a cheap, whatever. “Let’s do it together.” Because guess what? I need mentions and invitations and conversations and boundaries just as much, if not more so than you do.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Inviting that. And actually probably setting it up so they almost have to practice on you.

Jonathan Raymond:

Yes.

Drew McLellan:

This is fascinating. So I’m mindful of our time and so I want to wrap this up a little bit. But what if somebody has been listening to this and saying, “Okay, I’m doing this wrong,” or, “I could do this better,” or, “I really don’t know how I’m showing up.” What is the first step that the listeners can take to maybe be a little more self-aware, maybe be a little bit better at how they lead and manage? If you were going to say to them, “Look, here’s one or two things you can do on your own starting tomorrow that will have some impact,” what are those?

Jonathan Raymond:

Create a spreadsheet. If you’re a Google person, create a Google spreadsheet, if you’re a Excel… if you’re a Microsoft person, create an Excel spreadsheet. Put three columns in that spreadsheet. Put in the left-hand column, what did you say? In the middle column, who did you say at to? And in the third column, what was the results? Start to document the conversations that you have, five a day. What did you say? Who did you say it to? What was the results? Start to see yourself in the mirror by looking at the conversations that you’re actually having.

Drew McLellan:

And the outcomes.

Jonathan Raymond:

And the outcome.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. That’s great. Good homework.

Jonathan Raymond:

And then if you want to get into it, we have an assessment tool that we work with leaders, what we call the Good Authority Assessment, based on the ideas of the book. So you take it yourself and then we will ask your colleagues, “Hey, what do you think? How’s Drew doing relative to authority? How’s Drew doing relative to alignment? How’s Drew doing relative to accountability? We’ll give you some scores. We’ll give you some data and some things to actually look at. But we don’t have that as a public product. It’s only part of our coaching program. So that’s the spreadsheet. It’s free. You could do that yourself. If you want to do the assessment, all that, that’s our business.

Drew McLellan:

So if people are interested in doing the assessment or learning more about you, I know they’re going to go read the book. First of all, when are you expecting the new book to come out?

Jonathan Raymond:

May 2022, so in about six months it’ll be out.

Drew McLellan:

All right. So they can go find the Good Authority book now. And I know they’re going to do that. But if they want to learn more about you, if they want to check out the website, if they want to follow you on social, what’s the best way for people to track your work and keep learning from you?

Jonathan Raymond:

You bet. So refound.com, but like rebound but with an F. R-E-F-O-U-N-D. It’s got all of our stuff there. You’ll learn about the frameworks and see all the different offerings and things like that. Super easy to reach out to us. Or just subscribe to the newsletter. We put out twice a month, we put out the newsletter where there’s usually features like a short video with some advice and some other helpful resources. So you can do that. That’s the easiest way. You can always email [email protected]. That’s in there too. And then on social, I’m the worst on social. But the place where I put everything is LinkedIn. So you can follow me on LinkedIn. Everything that I do is always on LinkedIn. That’s probably the best place.

Drew McLellan:

Okay. And, Jonathan, for people who are looking, is obviously the O in Jonathan, but all A’s after that, and Raymond. So if you’re listening and you’re not looking at the show notes or anything like that, I just want you to be able to find him. Jonathan, this was fascinating. And what I love about it is so pragmatic, so actionable. So thank you for boiling it down to steps that we can all follow, because otherwise it’s theory and we talk about it but we don’t change anything.

Jonathan Raymond:

Absolutely. Yeah, that is my passion. I want people to actually do the thing, so [crosstalk 00:46:58] great conversation.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. This has been awesome. Thank you so much.

Jonathan Raymond:

You bet.

Drew McLellan:

All right, guys, so as I just said to Jonathan, as you know, I like episodes that give you homework. So you have homework. Go build your Excel spreadsheet, your Google Sheet, whatever it is, and start paying attention to the conversations you have and begin to see yourself in maybe a different perspective. But go and check out and think about trying the Accountability Dial. I think one of the things… If I talk to you about anything every day, it’s about, “How do I hold myself more accountable? How do I hold my team more accountable?” And Jonathan literally gave you the recipe. So start to apply that, start to practice it. And it’s okay to be not great at it for a while, but you’ll get better at it the more you do it.

And so, put it into play and see what happens. And I would love to hear from you, to hear if you’ve done that and the impact that it’s had, and I for sure will get back to Jonathan and let him know what I hear. So, you have homework, go do the homework. So before I let you go, a couple of quick things. First, a huge thank you to our friends at White Label IQ. As you know, they are the presenting sponsor of the podcast. And they do a white label design, dev and PPC. They help a ton of AMI agencies. So check them out at whitelabeliq.com/ami. They’ve got a special deal there for you as a podcast listener.

And as always, I just want to thank you for being here. I know how crazy busy you are and I am grateful that you spend some time with me. And I know I’m on a subway with some of you, and I know I’m on a golf course with others, and walking your dog. And somebody told me that they listen to the podcast while they put on makeup. I don’t care when you listen, I’m just really grateful that you do. Thanks for coming back. I’ll be back next week with another guest. And until then, you know how to track me down, through at agencymanagementinstitute.com. All right, I’ll see you next week. Thanks for listening.

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