Lead Your Business with Clearly Defined Principles, with John Rossman.

Speaker 1:

If you’re going to take the risk of running an agency, shouldn’t you get the benefits too? Welcome to Agency Management Institute’s Build A Better Agency podcast presented by HubSpot. We’ll show you how to build an agency that can scale and grow, with better clients, invested employees and best of all, more money to the bottom line. Bringing his 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant to you, please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Drew McLellan:

Hey there everybody. Drew McLellan here. Welcome to another episode of Build A Better Agency. Today we’re going to talk about leadership and how that shows up in an organization. You’re going to love my guest today. Let me tell you a little bit about him. John Rossman is currently the managing director at Alvarez & Marsal, which is a global professional services firm that delivers performance improvement, turnaround management, and business advisory services. But John is also the author of a book called The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles of the World’s Most Disruptive Company. In the book, John explores the unique corporate culture of what we all know is the world’s largest internet retailer. He focuses on the 14 leadership principles that he believes have guided and shaped the organization’s decisions and it’s very distinctive leadership culture.

When he was at Amazon, John served as the director of enterprise services where he developed the merchant’s ad program, which is the B2B network that allows millions of sellers to offer products through Amazon. The program that John created now is responsible for over 40% of all the orders that go through Amazon. He also, as if that wasn’t enough ran, that relationships that Amazon had with enterprise clients like Target and Toys “R” Us, Sears and the NBA. I’m really excited to dig into this for you and for me. John, welcome to the podcast.

John Rossman:

Drew, thanks for having me. Great show. I really appreciate it.

Drew McLellan:

Thank you. Let’s dig right into the leadership principles. As you know agencies are in a very disruptive time in their history. I often say I’ve been in the business since I was in my 20s and I’m now in my 50s, and I often say I’ve never seen the rate of change or the pace or the vastness of change in our industry, as I have in the last five years. And if anything, it just seems like it’s going faster. If ever there was a call for leadership skills in a disruptive environment, I think for agency owners that is absolutely today. Your topic and your book is really spot on for our listeners.

As you look at, and I’m sure that you’re doing this too in your current role, as you’re looking at the evolution and change that’s happening in business, how are you helping business leaders and how do you think some of the leadership principles in the book helped business leaders keep up? Because I hear a lot of agency owners struggle with, everything is changing so fast, it’s hard to know what to pay attention to and what’s a fad. How are you helping them focus and keep up with the change?

John Rossman:

Yeah. Great question, and there’s no easy answer to that. I work with my clients, typically large enterprises that are trying to adjust to all sorts of changes also. The key thing that I try to help them with is, from the top level let’s get really clear on what we imagine the future to be or what the program is that we’re going to drive. All too often I find teams, and this can be within a team or with your clients that don’t have in-depth clarity as to exactly what you’re imagining is going to happen in all of the dependencies that are needed to make that change happen. So on one, from the top down, work with them on really getting the clarity on, what change are we going to drive?

And then from the bottom up, it’s really instrumenting and putting metrics in the conversation and ownership around those metrics to get the results that we want. I think there’s lots of other things that are built off those Amazon leadership principles, but those are two that I often find really help people move faster and get to better results.

Drew McLellan:

As you think about the principles that you identified in the book, is there one that pops out in your mind as, this is one regardless of business size, regardless of business focus or specifically when you think about how agencies function, because I’m sure that you’ve interacted with many of them, that really is like, okay, this is one of the principles that you have to absolutely be spot on focused on?

John Rossman:

Yeah, well, first I just want to clarify, these are Amazon’s leadership principles. These are published, they’re their principles. I just got to be there at a time when we were really working, like what are the right leadership principles for us and everything? I got to see how they were used-

Drew McLellan:

And how do we actually make them come to life, right?

John Rossman:

That’s right. And so I think the first lesson I’d say is, these principles aren’t to be put on a poster. They’re used in everyday meetings to help make better decisions, faster decisions, drive for better results. And so however you decide to leverage wisdom and common approaches, make sure they’re not inspirational posters, that they’re actually real things that help teams and leaders get to better results. But if I had to pick a couple that I think really impact, I would say leadership principle number three is simplify. Really that simplify aspect of it is the real brilliance of that leadership principle.

That is about, how do we get to the absolute consistent and bare minimum definition or requirement or articulation of what we are trying to accomplish or what it is that I have proposed? All too often it’s easy to talk about things and to write things that are obtuse and are too difficult to understand. Getting something to simple and clear is really, really hard work. It improves the work that we all do. I think that that is a big one on my list. Leadership principle number nine is have a bias for action.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, I definitely want to dig into that one.

John Rossman:

Yeah. I just think that it takes good judgment and wisdom to know, when is it time to stop analyzing and when is it time to start doing something and create quick feedback loops relative to the results of that. Agencies are in such a great business to create those feedback loops, and so it really is about defining that urgency to get action, but then make sure that you create the feedback loop so you can easily test and refine and make forward progress. I think maybe the last one on your question that I would talk about, is number 13, which is, have backbone disagree-

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. I was going to ask you about that. I think that’s a challenge for agencies. You’re in a creative environment, you’ve got a lot of people who are very invested in their ideas. How do you create a culture where it’s not only okay to disagree and commit, but that you have, I was going to say commitment, but you have the obligation and it’s understood in the culture that it’s your job to disagree on occasion?

John Rossman:

Well, I love that word obligation. That really is how it’s seen across all of these leadership principles. But I think it starts with just like… This is how I coach my clients and how I work with our teams and everything. Is like, I tell them upfront, “Hey, this is how we’re going to behave as a team.” And so when people start understanding the nature of how we’re going to work together and what the game is, that we are going to have robust conversations led with data and customer obsession. But at the end of the day, this is the decision that’s going to be made and this is the decision maker. Regardless of whatever decision they make we’re not just going to agree to it, but we are wholeheartedly going to commit to making it as successful as possible.

And then if we can do that and we create quick feedback loops, we know that moving forward is more important than just continuing to analyze. And so those go together, but what you see so much as the passive aggressive behavior of people don’t play their cards, they don’t really say what they think, and they don’t really buy into decisions. And so it’s much better-

Drew McLellan:

And then they undermine them after the decisions are made.

John Rossman:

And then they undermine it exactly. It’s so much better to have a proactive and honest… There’s a really good book out there right now called Radical Candor. It’s all about this notion of caring enough to be able to really get at the heart of the matter. That’s what it really is about. You have to do it in an empathetic way, but at the end of the day what happens is people prioritize getting along above getting to the right answer. You just have to switch those priorities of being right is more important, and being fast is more important than getting along. And so it’s just switching those priorities helps teams move faster.

Drew McLellan:

In a lot of agencies you’ve got multi-generations working together, and in many cases one of the things I hear a lot of agency owners talk about is that they struggle giving constructive feedback to their younger cohorts. It seems like that’s a super sensitive issue. When I’m looking at the principles and I read, they do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion, I think in a lot of cases that’s a very real struggle for agency owners to create a culture where everyone has, if you will, thick enough skin to take criticism of their ideas or take people pushing and pulling on their ideas. How do you create that or when you were at Amazon, how did you encourage and create that kind of an environment so that people’s feelings weren’t hurt or that people didn’t powder, as you said, do the passive aggressive thing when you’re having a discussion?

John Rossman:

Yeah. I think to some degree it’s testing people out and it’s setting expectations around this. Oe of the things I do is, when I’m interviewing somebody, I’ll give them critical feedback relative to the interview and everything. I oftentimes interview people multiple times and then the next time that I interview them, I see if they make an adjustment, and how did they feel relative to getting that type of direct, constructive feedback in an interview? It helps me really see like, “Hey, is this person truly here to grow and to improve? Or is that just they want that but they aren’t willing to hear the straightforward suggestions that are going to help them do that?

There’s a lot of techniques. I think asking questions is super important. Demonstrating things and practicing things together. Like, hey, this is how this conversation needs to go, let’s practice that conversation. I have a partner that I’ve worked with and we practice together when we’re going to be having high stress or high impact conversations with a client, we’ll practice that conversation together. And so he can give me feedback, I can give him feedback and that’s how we’ve gotten much better at it and stuff. And so there’s lots of different ways you got to get to it, but it starts with just like, are we committed to getting better? If we are, there’s only a couple of ways that it’s going to happen and that’s by getting real feedback and hearing it, reacting to it.

Drew McLellan:

Well, that’s a really great point. It’s not just that there’s an environment that is conducive to disagreement and really pushing each other to a better idea. But it’s also about everyone having the skills when they are the one doing the disagreeing or the correction, that they do it in a way that the recipient can receive it with some grace, right?

John Rossman:

Trying to do things one-on-one and not embarrassing. All those things are super, super important. But all too often things just get pushed to performance reviews and they never get addressed. You don’t hear about it until it blows up and stuff and that’s the worst possible outcome.

Drew McLellan:

Well, I think a lot of agency owners, I’m sure no one listening, but other agency owners, I think they struggle with having those tough conversations so they put them off, they put them off, they put them off and then something is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. And then again, back to our passive aggressive, they explode. And then they wonder why people don’t take that well.

John Rossman:

That’s exactly what happens.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. One of the other challenges inside agencies is, as agencies, the stuff that agencies make gets marginalized because in theory anybody can make the thing, whatever it is. Agencies are really trying to position themselves as strategic partners and thinking bigger. Talk about some of the ways that at Amazon, you guys, one of the principles is think big. I think agencies always have to be thinking big on both their own behalf, but certainly on their client’s behalf. How did you foster that and how did you encourage and teach that inside the organization?

John Rossman:

Well, it all starts with the customer at Amazon. I think that’s the simplest way to really evolve businesses is truly build customer empathy, understand much broader than just how you’re trying to serve them, what their challenges are, what their goals are and try to incorporate as much of that empathy into your work as possible. That will also give you ideas on how you can serve them in a broader way. And so it drives for both better delivery or operational improvement of what you’re doing, as well as will give you ideas and insights into how to serve them better. And then the think big is really about always having a vision, but how do you execute it on very short cycles? How do you increment your way to it, is really the skill set.

Although it’s super important to have a big vision and to articulate that and work at that, it’s really like, how do you approach that in an agile manner and undertake steps to get there and experiment what works and what doesn’t work? And so the think big is really about experimentation and not limiting what you might be in the future, but you have to take small steps to get there.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. One of the beliefs that I think is so challenging for agency owners right now in the current hiring environment, is that hire and develop the best. And so you had talked a little bit about that you do multiple interviews with folks. Are there some best practices that either you brought to Amazon or that you bring to your current job around this idea of attracting, hiring, and keeping the best talent? Because I think the principle is spot on. I think it’s pretty tough to have a world-class company or world-class agency without world-class employees.

John Rossman:

Yeah. Well, I think on the hiring front, the biggest mistakes get made when you’re hiring in a hurry. Like, oh, I got to get something done. I need somebody to do this and everything. And so I think realizing if you’re interviewing and if you’re hungry, you’re anxious to get somebody on board, you just need to realize that’s when you’re at the biggest risk in hiring mistake. And so I always ask myself in my consulting business now, which is very similar to an agency business, is if I didn’t have work for that person to do over the next whatever period, month or two months or whatever, if I was hiring to the bench, would I still want to hire them? If the answer’s yes, then I know, oh, this is a great person. But if I’m hiring because I’ve got a specific project in mind for them, that’s a warning sign that you’re hiring hungry and you might be acting short-sighted.

That’s, I think the thing to recognize in yourself when you’re hiring, is like, am I hiring in a rush, or am I hiring with the right patience. At Amazon, they have a role that really helps compensate for that and it’s called the bar raiser role. The bar raiser is somebody that’s outside the team and their primary evaluation criteria is, does this person raise the bar in this general job classification or skill category? And so they don’t have the pressure and they’re independent to the team and they can veto, their answer has to be, yes. It’s not a consensus thing. If the bar raiser says, no, the answer’s no, no matter what the hiring manager says. And so it really helps manage that issue around teams hiring because they’re hiring in a hurry versus hiring somebody that’s going to be great for this job and for the next 10 jobs.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. That’s an interesting concept. That would absolutely… I mean, talk about a different lens of looking at that perspective employee. I don’t have to work with them day to day. I don’t have a project that’s on the line if we hire or don’t hire them. Talk about purely being able to look at them from a cost benefit analysis, if you will, that’s a unique role to play.

John Rossman:

Yep. Absolutely.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. For agency owners, who obviously probably may or may not have the staff to do that or [inaudible 00:18:49] a lot of agencies, everybody’s work touches everybody’s work. They certainly could have a trusted advisor or someone else step in and play that role.

John Rossman:

Exactly. I’ve been asked by clients and by friends to interview people just to get an independent opinion on them and stuff. [crosstalk 00:19:07] you reach outside, get an independent opinion, is I think maybe the goal on hiring.

Drew McLellan:

When you serve in that role, what questions do you ask to decide if they can and will raise the bar?

John Rossman:

Oftentimes when I’m asked to do that, it’s for pretty senior role. With senior people, I think it’s one thing to go like, are they qualified? Do they have the skills? But what I usually end up focusing on is, what are your motivations? Motivation alignment is as important as skill alignment and things like that. And so I typically find myself when I’m being invited into a team that I don’t have all the detailed background on, and I’m not going to live with the decision per se, going forward, is I really try to understand what’s their motivation. Because oftentimes you’ll find a poor alignment to what this candidate’s motivation is versus where the hiring manager or what the role is going to take them towards. That’s where I help the situation.

Drew McLellan:

Well, the assumption is probably if they’re down to their last couple of candidates, probably both of them have the hard skills to do the job. It’s really more about you’re right, the soft skills.

John Rossman:

That’s right.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. I want to dig into… I want to go back to one of the very first principles that you mentioned, because I want to dig a little deeper into the invent and simplify. But first let’s take a quick break and then we’ll come back and talk about simplification.

If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, odds are you’ve heard me mention the AMI peer networks or the agency owner network. What that is really is it’s like a Vistage group or the EO group, only everybody around the table owns an agency in a non-competitive market. As a membership model, they come together twice a year for two days, two days in the spring and two days in the fall. They work together to share best practices. They show each other their full financial so there’s a lot of accountability. We bring speakers in and we spend a lot of time problem solving around the issues that agency owners are facing. If you’d like to learn more about it, go to agencymanagementinstitute.com/network. Okay, let’s get back to the show.

All right. I am back with our guest, John Rossman, and we are talking about John’s book that focused on Amazon’s leadership principles and how you apply those. Earlier in our conversation, we glossed over a little bit, the principle of invent and simplify. I think when I look across the board at agencies that are really bringing great strategy and they’re really communicating really complicated marketing messages or product messages down to its simplest form, that’s quite an art.

John Rossman:

It is for that type of business as it is for lots of other circumstances too. People, oftentimes they don’t want to really do the work at getting something to as simple as possible and as clear as possible.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. In the culture at Amazon, how did you help people recognize when maybe they were a step or two shy of truly simplifying something? Or how did you guys check and balance that? Because I think in a lot of agencies they’re moving so fast, they may think they’re distilling it down to its simplest form, but in reality they probably could go down a notch or two.

John Rossman:

Well, there’s lots of little things that you either recognize or that you’re looking for in the work. Oftentimes what I do is, I just read things out loud. It’s amazing when you read things out loud, how differently they come across than when you’re just reading it in silent. And so that’s one of the things, if I’m reading something and I’m like, okay, this isn’t quite, it’s like let’s just read it out loud. I’m typically dealing with longer narratives than short messaging and stuff like that. And so that is an important technique that helps recognize, when don’t I have alignment or things completely tied out relative to communications.

Drew McLellan:

When you do that, do you typically find that you’re crossing off sentences and paragraphs as not really absolutely necessary in this communication?

John Rossman:

Yeah. All of that. It’s extra, especially like extra words you find words like very are just completely non-value [inaudible 00:24:03] and they just add weight. And then oftentimes you just haven’t written it from the customer’s viewpoint. Like step me through this in a logical way. What people typically do is when they present it, they typically present in that right order. And so oftentimes I’ll read something and I don’t quite get it. It’s like, what are you trying to say there? And then they really get at what they’re trying to say. It’s like, well, that’s what we need to write here. In my business, oftentimes we’re working with clients on some type of improvement.

It’s amazing how bashful we get about writing out direct constructive criticism when our clients have hired us to give them constructive criticism. And so we dance around things. I was like, no, man, we got to go right at the heart of the issue and say things really simply because obviously if this was a simple situation or simple problem to address, they wouldn’t be hiring us to come in and help them fix it. And so we got to get right at it and be forthright and fact-based and honest about what we’re finding here.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. In the side of my business where I’m doing consulting and coaching of agency owners or agency teams, I’m a firm believer that they’re paying me for my candor. And so to sugar coat it doesn’t really help them because it’s hard for them. If they have to figure out the nuance of what I’m saying it’s hard for them. I always will say to them, “We have a tough conversation to have. We’re going to do it with love and respect, but I need you to be ready for some very candid feedback.” I think you’re right. I think we tend to, what I call weasel word, our stuff.

John Rossman:

That’s right.

Drew McLellan:

It’s interesting to me, and I see this in agencies work all the time, when they speak, whether it’s for themselves or for their clients, they’re able to really wrap themselves around the right voice and the right tone. But the minute they got to write it down, it gets more formal and a little more rigid oftentimes.

John Rossman:

That’s right. The other thing, if you’re going to write direct comments, is you’ve got to be right, you got to be able to support it. And so oftentimes people won’t want to go directly at it because they really haven’t done the diligence. They really don’t have the facts to be able to support it. And so, well, I’ll go like, “Well, what you’re really trying to say is XYZ. Do we have evidence to support that? Well, no, we don’t. Well, that’s what we have to do, is we have to have the right evidence to support that observation.” And so sometimes willingness not to make a direct observation or direct comment is evidence that we don’t have the facts to be able to support it. Okay. Well, we got to get to a few facts to be able to support that observation.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. We have to have the stories to tell or the antidotes or the data so that when they go, “I don’t think that’s true,” we are ready to go. “Well, here’s three ways I can show that to you.” Yeah.

John Rossman:

That’s exactly right. “How many times do you want to hear? How many ways do you want me to demonstrate this to you?” And stuff. And then they, “Okay. I got it.”

Drew McLellan:

Right. Yeah. If after a while you can’t deny it anymore, it is what it is. Yeah. One of the principles that I think is really applicable to agencies and agency owners, one of the, probably the most common phrases I hear from agency owners is, “I wish my employees behaved as if they own the joint.” One of the principles is ownership. That leaders are owners and the principal goes on and say, they think long-term, and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. How did you create… That says, they act on behalf of the entire company, not just on behalf of themselves with their own team. They never say that’s not my job. How did you create, or how did Amazon before you were there and while you were there, create a culture, because I expect the workforce there is incredibly diverse and I’m sure you had plenty of hourly people who were in the shipping departments and all the way up to the executives. How do you create that belief and attitude and commitment inside an organization?

John Rossman:

Well, lots of ways. But I think one way is by making sure that you’re having the right broad based conversations so that people are understanding the business or the circumstance or the project in a broader perspective than just their particular function to it. Oftentimes people don’t understand how their work connects to the greater project or to the greater good, to the mission that’s at hand. And so we would spend a lot of time talking about, what is the mission here and everything. And taking more time than you may think is necessary. But one of the things in that breeds is, okay, your job is this, but when we’re talking about it in a broad sense, everybody has the permission to make suggestions and to address things that they see.

And so when you consistently bring or build that independent attitude and that everybody has their job, but we’re all owners here and so we can all comment on things broader than just your job, that cycle starts to form and everything. It’s not an easy habit to build and it’s not a cheap one to build, it takes time and it takes effort. But if you do it, I think the dividends are huge because it invites people and it gives them context to play the game in a heads up manner.

Drew McLellan:

Well, the other thing I think it takes, is it takes a willingness to open the kimono. I think a lot of business owners, and I’m sure this is not just true of agencies, but a lot of business owners want their employees to care as deeply as they do, but they’re also not willing to let them see the realities of the business, whether it’s how close we are to hitting our projections or our costs are skyrocketing because of this, that, or the other thing. A lot of times they worry about, well, if I tell them that sales aren’t where they belong, they’re going to start looking for jobs or whatever. But they on the one hand want them to behave like grownups, but on the other hand they treat them like children.

John Rossman:

Well, I think transparency is a super important way to help build that sense of ownership. I completely understand all the sensitivities that you just described and everything. But as you’re just saying, it’s like, you got to pick one side or the other. Don’t expect both of those. Don’t expect to be able to hold it really tight, but ask them to act like owners, that’s likely an impossible situation.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Right. I think it’s setting yourself and them up to fail if you don’t give them the respect and the information they need to actually behave like owners, to understand, as you said, to connect the dots between my job and the bigger picture, then how in the world can I behave? How can I step up to what you’re expecting me to do?

John Rossman:

Right. It’s also through these types of broad-based conversations, it’s how you’re going to grow people too and where you’re going to really recognize untapped leadership potential. I think if you just keep people tied to their job too much, you’re not going to grow the talent to its upmost. I think that underserves your business and underserves talent.

Drew McLellan:

Well, and in today’s hiring environment, if you can’t grow and develop people that’s a very expensive problem to solve.

John Rossman:

That’s right. Your business growth should be in alignment with growing people and giving them accountability to grow the business. In our firm people understand like, hey, for careers to grow, the business has to grow. We have alignment in that. I think that’s one of the real powerful aspects of this agency based business model, is there is alignment between the goals of the business and the goals of people growing their careers, in that to grow careers the business has to grow. When both are happening, that’s when you’ve got a really virtuous cycle going on.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. It also ties to the other principle, this idea of insisting on the highest of standards and holding yourself to a high standard, but also holding your team to a really high standard in terms of whether it’s the product or services you produce, or the processes. That everyone actually honors the processes. That, again, it gets back to everyone having permission and the comfort to raise their hand when something isn’t as good as it should be, or the process is broken, or whatever that may be. All of these things seem to knit nicely together, that if you focus on any one of them, it raises the bar on the others as well.

John Rossman:

Yeah. As we’ve talked about, there’s lots of these little things, no one thing is going to create this high performance team. I think that’s why Amazon ended up with these 14 leadership principles and a lot of different tactics underneath those leadership principles. And so it is this multi-faceted playbook that you need to-

Drew McLellan:

How did you guys bring these to life? As you said in the beginning of our conversation, this is not something you put on a series of posters in the break room or hang around the office. How did you keep these front and center? How are they woven into team communications or evaluations? How did Amazon make it very clear to the team at Amazon that these were the standards that everyone was going to be judged against?

John Rossman:

Yeah, well, when I was there, I was there for four years, between early 2002 to late 2005. When I was there these principles weren’t written down, but yet you heard about them and you used them in all your processes. How you hire people, how you evaluate people, how you made decisions every single day. And the thing I’d say is that, at the S team level, at the senior team level, so much time was spent talking about, whatever the topic was on the table, how did this reflect on what our principles were and what our principals need to be? Because we were still developing them at that point. Sometime after I left, they codified these. They wrote them down and they do, they incorporate them throughout everything they do from hiring, to how they train leadership, how they evaluate people. People call each other out when you weren’t being tied to a leadership principle where you’re missing on one cylinder.

Drew McLellan:

So back when you were with the organization, they were really more tribal knowledge?

John Rossman:

Absolutely. Yes.

Drew McLellan:

But even then, in that big of an organization, they were commonly held and understood?

John Rossman:

Oh, yeah. It was used in conversations every single day, multiple times, every single day. We would wrestle with them. That’s the thing, is you don’t always find alignment between these until it forces you to struggle to get to a better answer that does accomplish things in line with as many principles as possible.

Drew McLellan:

I have to think that there were times when the principles were in conflict with one or the other. For example, let’s say you had a big, big idea, but you’re also wrestling with the frugality principle. How did you guys process through which principle won, if you will?

John Rossman:

Well, at the end of the day if it was a draw and everything, oftentimes it came down to doing what’s right for the customer first and foremost. That’s the first leadership principle, is customer obsession, and I would call it the first among equals. But it’s that conflict and where they aren’t in alignment that forces you to keep working to get at a better answer. If the challenge might be like, hey, we’ve got this big vision, but that’s a risky and expensive proposition, that might force you into like, well, how could I either create a smaller increment to test it? Or how can I leverage partners or other ecosystem partners to take on some of this so it de-risk it, but still allow me to test out the concept? And so it would force you into different problem solving areas.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Interesting. I’m guessing in your job now, although it sounds like the clients you work with are large and established, do you ever find yourself helping businesses actually identify what their principles are? If so, is there a process you take them through to distill down to the core or critical principles?

John Rossman:

Yeah, I have done that in a couple of circumstances where a function or a team was really trying to transform who they were, and oftentimes within IT organizations, they’re really trying to step up to be a critical business partner and a strategic business partner to the business as digital capabilities are so critical versus just being the backroom processing. I think first it’s really understanding, what is the business strategy and the business imperative? It’s understanding what seems to be the challenges in delivering relative to that. And then through a lot of different either facilitations or examples, and taking the pulse of where we’re at and what we’re working with, recommending and helping them write out what would be meaningful.

But the thing I hesitate to do, is A, I never say these are the right principles for anybody else. These are the right principles for Amazon. My only recommendation is, take the time to really think through what they are and make them real, make them so they can be actionable. I hesitate to ever write them for my clients. I’ll help them do that, but they need to be the ones who own and develop their own principles.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Right. They have to be born from inside the organization, right?

John Rossman:

That’s right.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. I mean, this is not something that you apply to someone, this has to be something that is innate in them, and your job and in some cases my job, is to help them discover and uncover and articulate them. But it’s not making something up out of thin air.

John Rossman:

That’s right. I just keep challenging them to make them real and make them impactful and how are we going to more or less like operationalize these? How are we going to make new habits based off of these principles?

Drew McLellan:

That’s where I was just going to ask you. I think it’s dandy to have them and I think many organizations have them, but I think a lot of organizations struggle with making them relevant and real. And so let’s assume that the listeners are saying, yeah, I’ve got four or five principles or values or whatever they want to call them, but you know what? I’m not sure if I walked through the organization and I said, “Hey, what are the five values that we’re founded on?” That everyone on my staff even could tell me what they are, let alone point to how we honor those. If you’re an agency owner and you’re in that position, just give everybody a couple of first steps of how to actually begin to bring these to life and to make them the cornerstone or the backbone of how people make decisions and behave inside the organization. How do you actually move from poster on the wall or document in a employee manual, to this is really the rules of the road for us?

John Rossman:

Yeah. Well, that’s a big question. And so here’s a couple of little ideas, but the answer is there’s a hundred different little things of course. But I think one thing is just, how do you run meetings? I talk about meeting hygiene. Before you have a meeting, make sure you understand is it a decision-making meeting or an informational meeting. If it’s a decision-making meeting, what decisions are going to be made and who’s the owner for that decision. And so what you’re doing is you’re trying to set up this whole notion of disagree but commit by understanding what decisions we’re going to make and who is the decision maker, but allowing for the right conversations with the right data and the right customer obsession to help drive that decision. That’s a tactic.

A lot of what Amazon does is, they are a great operational excellence organization and it’s really comes from how they use metrics in the business and how they use those metrics to drive everyday improvement. The whole rhythm of the business is set up around metrics meetings every single week between teams, and reviewing your metrics and then discussing where there’s shortcomings and where there’s failures. So think about how do you put the right metrics and then how do you assign ownership to those metrics? Even if the metric is broader than what your job is, don’t be bashful about assigning somebody. That helps break down the bureaucracy and the, not my job mentality there. Those are a couple of ideas of how to operationalize some of these things.

And then the other ones that we’ve talked about is just writing out narratives for your important initiatives and programs and work the wording. Make it the world’s best wording, super clear, super tight, super specific so that somebody can read it and they get it at the end of it.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. I suspect that the fact that you wrote a book about it is part of the answer, but in your opinion, with all the businesses that you’ve worked with, how critical is the idea of having principles or values that are shared and honored to an organization? How correlated is that to an organization success?

John Rossman:

Well, I think it’s highly correlated because it allows the organization to be less bureaucratic. If we all share the same values and we share a common decision making framework, then we don’t have to put in all the bureaucracy that manages decisions up and down the hierarchy. I think being lean and mean, and nimble is the key to competitive success. And so that’s my rationale for why having common ways and common… These are really decision-making approaches. That’s where these are principles, they’re not quite values and everything. They’re principles about how to make decisions-

Drew McLellan:

Almost like guiding rods. Yeah.

John Rossman:

That’s right. It really helps the organization to move faster and to push down decision-making to wherever the right level is.

Drew McLellan:

Which is what every agency wants to do. Every agency owner wants their people, their entire organization to be in alignment so that the owner isn’t the only one making big decisions and driving the strategy of the business, but that every owner wants that to be shared amongst the organization. So this has been a great conversation around how to get that done. Thank you very much for your time. Thanks for sharing your expertise. I’m grateful that you carved out some time to do this.

John Rossman:

Well, thanks for the invitation. I think it’s such a great opportunity to create teams that matter. I think that everybody to take the time to reconsider what you’re doing relative to how you make decisions and how do you create an environment of empowerment, is a big objective in today’s business.

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely. John, if folks want to track you down or read more of your thought leadership or learn more about you, where’s the best place for them to go to do all of that?

John Rossman:

Yeah, my blog is johnrossman.com. And so you can go to johnrossman.com and read about the things I’m interested in. I usually write about creating effective teams and creating digital cultures and you can read more about my books there.

Drew McLellan:

Awesome. Thanks so much for your time. I appreciate it.

John Rossman:

Have a great day.

Drew McLellan:

You too. Believe it or not, that wraps up another episode of Build a Better Agency. Man, the time goes by quick. Love sharing this content with you, and I love spending the time with you. Thanks so much for listening and sticking all the way to the very end. For those of you that did stick around to the end, I’ve got a special new twist for you. So many of our podcast guests have books or other things that really expand upon the information and knowledge that they share with us during the podcast. And so we’ve reached out to them and we’ve asked them if they would like to give away some of their books or whatever classes, whatever it may be.

We’re going to throw some AMI things in there as well. We’re going to have some AMI swag and we’re going to actually give away some workshops. All you have to do to be in all of the drawings, you only have to do this once, is go to agencymanagementinstitute.com/podcastgiveaway. Again, agencymanagementinstitute.com/podcastgiveaway. Give us your email address and your mailing address, and every week you will be eligible for whatever drawing we’re doing. We’re going to change it up every week si we’re going to have a lot of variety and we will pop an email to you if you are the lucky winner. You can also go back to that page and see who won last week and what they won so you can see what you’re in the run for. If you have any questions about that or anything agency related, you can reach me at [email protected]. I will talk to you next week. Thanks.

Speaker 1:

That’s all for this episode of AMI’s Build a Better Agency, brought to you by HubSpot. Be sure to visit agencymanagementinstitute.com to learn more about our workshops, online courses, and other ways we serve small to mid-size agencies. Don’t miss an episode as we help you build the agency you’ve always dreamed of owning.