What's up y'all Sean here Sam is in Europe traveling around at the fam and so I'm on my own today And I wanted to do something cool, and I think I got a great idea So I believe here's my guess I think this pod is gonna be one that people really really like because I know I would have wanted to hear this at some point in time And the reason why is because most people who listen to the podcast are some form of leadership, right? You might have started your own company or your own business You might be kind of an exec somewhere or a manager somewhere or you want to be a leader, right? So most people who don't want to be leaders are not listening to a podcast like this. So the problem is me and everybody else sucks, you know, everybody sucks the first time that they are managing people and And this isn't like, you know, how to manage people one-on-one.
There's a lot of books that are written about this There's some best practices There's common sense But I wanted to share some of the unorthodox some of the weird things that I do that I have found work for me and they might not work for everybody, but they work for me and Not all of these people are gonna agree with not all these will work for you, but again They all work for me. Nobody I couldn't find any of this stuff in a book I heard about these either from somebody or I just kind of made it up on my own And so I think I have five maybe six different things that I do that are unorthodox, but work Okay, so let me start with number one and this is called Dr. House It's inspired by Dr. House.
So if anybody watches the TV show house, he always does this thing the show's like there's this genius doctor but he's kind of like a curmudgeon and All the other doctors really respect him because he's amazing, but he's kind of hard to work with one of the things he does That's amazing but hard to work with is he has these like three junior doctors were kind of like he's advising them or whatever They work under him and when a patient comes in and they run a test to try to figure out what's wrong with the person He doesn't just look at it and say here's what's wrong with the person, right? First of all, it's usually not that straightforward Second of all, even if he kind of has an idea, he doesn't spoon feed it to his To his team instead He will usually slap the the like maybe the scan or the data or the x-ray or whenever up on a screen and he'll say What do you see here? or he'll say what's weird about this or he'll say what's interesting about this and Then the team has to start thinking and getting curious and looking at the thing and saying well There must be something there. What do I see and this is really effective.
I do this all the time I will take let's say some data. I'm looking at when I'm curious about something that makes me go hmm and What I used to do is I used to just like share that with the team. Hey guys, here's what I found Look at this data. This data shows that A is B and C, right?
I was like give them a conclusion I'm basically spoon feeding them an answer they'll read it they'd say yeah that makes sense and then they would go on with their day Right because they didn't have to struggle to understand it. They didn't have to be curious enough to go find it They just got spoon fed an answer and they say yeah, yeah, I'm not surprised by that. All right I'm gonna move on or oh that's weird. Okay, sounds like you got an answer I'm gonna again move on so I do the other way which does three things one it trains the team to be curious and clever Right because you're not looking for some luck.
I'm not telling you to go do 10 more analyses I'm saying there's something in this what is it a little bit of a riddle the second is it's not a gotcha right? Like I'm at genuinely asking because they will see things that you don't see so even if you saw one interesting thing They might find two others that you didn't really Appreciate and the last is it trains everybody on how to because you know, maybe one person out of the group will see the interesting thing But the other four will say why didn't I see that and that trial and error that like guess and check is how people get better at stuff? So you'll train a team of curious clever people who get good at finding insights and data and so that's the doctor How's technique? I recommend you try it rather than spoon feeding your team answers.
Okay, the second one I learned from my wife my wife was a consultant and she used to go to these companies and it's like it was always like I'm getting alignment, right? You go it would be a board meeting of like Yahoo's board meeting It's like you have 10 executives at Yahoo and they cannot they all think they're on the same page And then only when you ask them certain questions do you realize that like everybody has a different? You know game plan vision of what we're trying to do here, etc. So she got good assessing that out.
But people are a little bit Not defensive, but they're a little bit limited when you just ask them very literal logical questions that tap into only the analytical part of the brain Like we say what are our three key objectives for the year? They sort of feels like they're taking a math test and so she does this thing that was called the holiday party The holiday party tactic is she had me go she had to go to a whiteboard and she goes alright. Let's fast forward It's Christmas Eve of this year and we're at the company holiday party. I want you to start drawing What's at that company holiday party?
I'm like, what do you mean? Just like just draw things that would make it an awesome company holiday party. So I'm like, okay So all of a sudden I'm having kind of fun. I'm something creative.
I'm drawing I'm just thinking of cool shit that could be in a party right? So my guard is down and so you know I'll draw like whatever there's a DJ and I kind of laugh because the DJ booth is like, you know My drawing is bad and then I'll draw the next thing and then she'll say okay. What's on this group? What are you celebrating and that question?
What are we celebrating? It's like that's kind of like what are we trying to do this year, right? What's the milestone that we hit and instead of saying what are we trying to do? It's assuming it's already done that we're already celebrating We're popping bottles because we hit 1 million users or 10 million downloads or 100 million revenue whatever it is And so it's you know We'd say our big North star goal because it's like that screen can only have one big thing on it That we're all cheers in our glass to you.
So what is that North star metric? And then she would say cool. Let's walk around like you know who's that's party And you know there's a little exercise and as she unfolded this party it kind of First it got me in the mood for winning right because it's like I'm already working backwards from the assumption that we've won Then I identify the North star goal and then after we do that little game it only takes two minutes Then we would say all right So how are we gonna get there right? What would be the things that we would need to do now so that that party happens and all of a sudden we're we're talking and brainstorming from a Place of certainty and confidence rather than fear and doubt about not being able to pull it off in the stress Right because when you're in fight or flight your brain only works in a very limited capacity compared to when you are you know Addies relax, which is why you know great ideas come to you in the shower because you're you're relaxed You have warm water pouring on top of your head as your brain kind of melts away and can start to you know put together different Data points that that are not there when you're tense And so I love this tactic of the holiday party drawing game It really loosens people up it gets them thinking it focuses them on the North star goal And then when you make a plan after that they go into that plan from in a state of mind of we already want Okay, now here's the opposite.
This is called the The misery misery loves company tactic. Okay, so whenever we're making a plan at the beginning of any plan everything seems achievable and Everyone's optimistic And it's hard to say it's one thing to ask somebody what are the key risks in this and then people you know again They get a little defensive using the logical party brain. So a better question is you know if I was to Let's say, you know, we you go do this I go do my thing and we get busy and you know six months from now 12 months from now we catch back up or getting a beer here at the local pub in the afternoon It's for in the afternoon. We go grab a beer and we say man that idea was so cool Let's assume it went wrong, right?
So man that idea was so cool Can't believe it and work out and what happened what is the what is the most likely reason we would give that things went south? And this is a way to identify the core risk the chief assumption the riskiest proposition in your plan is to sort of work backwards from We're getting a beer. We're hanging out. It's already failed and we say man that thing had so much potential What went wrong?
What do you think is the number one reason it might go wrong? And then because you're identifying that up front you can now like work against that you can get you can plan around that Okay, here's another one. I find that people get very defensive about The status quo especially the leaders because as a leader you're sort of responsible for the way that the company works, right? You're responsible for how many people work at your company, right?
If I said did you hire too many people most people don't want to say yes and the reality is that certainly I don't know 20 30 40% of the time answer truly is yes You've hired too many people but if you ask CEOs they'll rarely ever say yes And in the same way you'll say are you working on a bunch of useful stuff or are you working on a bunch of extraneous things? They would say no I mean these are all important are valuable right? So people get defensive about their current plan and so how do you get how do you get people to To identify the fat in their their plan right be able to trim the fat without the pressure the stress of them feeling like they're wrong Or they're being blamed or that they're gonna have to make some tough decisions have some hard conversations and because of that they just want to avoid it So here's what I do we play a game. It's sort of like that You know that F murder mary game right where you decide you know if out of these three choices Who would you who would you marry who would you marry who would you have so similarly?
Let's just focus on the murder part which is like if I asked you right? So I get sit down with any manager in my company I could say in your team I know you love your team and I know they're all great girl great in their own ways But if you had to do it What would be the three who would be the three people that you would cut if you had to cut not saying you well We're not gonna cut anybody but who would those three people be? Similarly like out of all the projects and initiatives are doing what are the three that you would cut if you had to cut three initiatives off And you can do this with anything customers all your customers on the roster your clients Who are the three that you would cut where they're just a pain in the ass? It's not worth the juices not worth the squeeze and if you can create a safe safe space basically where somebody can freely identify What they would cut if they were gonna cut but don't worry We're not asking you to cut anything and you do it yourself right?
You're not just asking others to do this but you do it yourself and you think aloud and you do it as a group like hey What would we what projects would we cut you know which team members really not you know are at the bottom right? There certainly is a top of the bottom who is that right? Which customers at the top in the bottom and if you can identify those it plants a seed and people once they've said it out loud They've heard a truth. It's very hard to unsee a truth And it might be a month later or two months later But eventually they will decide to trim some of the fat either on their team the projects of the client list that will help the team Bro, so that's the effort of Mary tactic.
Okay, I think I've done what is that for tactics? Okay, let's do another one This is the superpower one. So this is a way to build people up So I did this at my last startup and people really resonate with this which is I made a presentation about each person of the team I did this on a Friday afternoon I said hey guys, let's go do a little happy hour and I said I got a presentation for you guys I said, you know, I've learned that in any team you can you can look for two types of people you can look for people who lack weaknesses meaning they're pretty well rounded they have no fatal flaws, but they may not be great at anything, right? They're just good.
They're at least good at everything or you can have some people that are amazing at some things and kind of weak in other areas And I've learned that the best performing teams are filled with people who are amazing in at least one area So you're hiring for an extreme strength not a lack of weakness, right? That's an Andreessen Horwitz framework that I really love and so I said I'd like to you know I said but the funny thing is for most people they don't they're not even aware of what their extreme strength is and Because you're too close to it so normal for you to be great at it You don't really realize you're great at it at some point. It's other people who pointed out So I'd like to point out for you this superpower that I've seen each of you have and then I would give and so I put each person's face on A slide I would say hey, this is like for example. Hey, this is Derek Derek's our designer Derek What I've noticed is your superpower I don't know if you're aware of this but most designers that I've worked with they're creative types They're sort of like you know, messy desk procrastinator types They pull all nighters when they get creative inspiration that do amazing work sometimes and other times You know they get stuck with sort of a creative writer's block of sorts I said Derek your superpower is that you're a great designer, but you're like the mailman you deliver every day at the same time Right, like I give you the the brief I scribble a scribble a poorly written address of where where I'm trying to get this package And you're able to interpret it like a mailman and say oh, I know where this is trying to go And then you deliver it every day at 5 p.m.
Before you leave and I said I you're like the man I said and you know you don't work on the weekend I know that you're not the type of guy that I should be hitting up for that like crazy project We're gonna do it again So you're like the mailman you deliver every day of the week except for Sundays And so I gave him basically a superpower Which is you have this amazing ability to consistently take a loose set of instructions and deliver on it and I give him a nickname That goes with it That's why I call you the mailman and then that's your super I gave a little symbol and then I like you know Then went to the next person I said oh, this is furcon furcon is You know he's not gonna win any awards for for being the most eloquent speaker or the most politically polished kind of guy But man when you talk to furcon, it's almost like he's allergic to bullshit like you know when someone's allergic to peanuts You can't even have a peanut dish or you feel uncomfortable taking peanuts around them You might kill them I said that's what it's like when I bring bullshit around you I don't even feel comfortable saying bullshit around you because you're so good at seeing through bullshit and saying that doesn't make sense or Wait, I thought you said this other thing so how can both of those be true, right? And so you know you were like you were allergic to bullshit That is your superpower You just can't stand it and that because of that it makes the rest of us up our game and not bring that bring half-baked plans or Incongruent illogical plans to you because you'll sniff it out in a second and the beautiful thing is these things are both true and Aspirational meaning they are this way, but by giving it their superpower They then want to live up to that identity you've given them and so you can kind of architect the type of team you want by calling out Areas, they're good, but they not be the best at it or they may not be doing it all the time But by giving them their superpower, they will start to do it more often. Okay, so that's a super power technique Okay, I'm gonna give you three quick ones the Tesla master plan if you've never read it people must wrote a master plan for Tesla You know back when it started so he wrote the master plan v1 like ten years ago and then v2 and basically said master plan v1 Basically was like you should go read it I've handwritten his many times and then wrote ours wrote my own plan for my own business after writing his and so his plan Basically says Tesla's job is to accelerate, you know the the society's move off of fossil fuels on to sustainable energy to do that We need to create a car that's high performance and high efficiency and So we're gonna start with the roadster the expensive car then we're gonna make the next car then we're gonna make the mass market model 3 car blah blah blah he's like you know So in summary here's the master plan build an expensive car to build a brand build a less expensive car to get more people on it Then build it use the economies of scale and the learnings from production to build a mass market car They'll get to everybody right that's the master plan And then he wrote a mass might be to but it is very powerful if you can write the master plan for your company All right, it's basically and it doesn't have to be right, right But it's you putting it out there. What are we here to do?
How do we plan to do it? And like you know, here's the takeaway and if you look at his writing style It's a very empowering style and so I like to take his master plan and then write my own All right, the next one is come from the CEO coach called Matt's my car years and like that There's this technique called the calendar audit. It was very simple imagine you to print out your calendar from the last week and you look at every every meeting that was scheduled every Kind of block of time that you used and you take three highlighters You take a green highlighter that says that was something that I enjoyed that gave me energy You highlight those in green and you take a red highlighter You say these ones that I highlighted in red are the ones that I felt like my soul was being sucked out of my body Right, like these are the soul crushing energy draining things that I dread parts of things of my day that I don't look forward You put those in red and then you have the yellow that are like neutral and you look at that and you say okay This is about it I now need to take these red things and I need to figure out over time how I'm gonna get more green than red right how I'm gonna phase all the red away and get to only green and That might be hiring somebody who doesn't like doing that thing because what's red for you might be green for them or just Getting rid of it or minimizing the time you do it and say Do we really need three meetings for this? Could we not just do it in one could this meeting be an email right or whatever so calendar audit is a very valuable technique Okay, so that was so so far.
We've had number one the dr. House screenshot technique number two my wife's holiday party work backwards question Number three the if we got a beer saying you know saying man It's a bar that thing failed why did it fail right? That's number three number four is creating a safe space for the ef murder Mary game, right? Who are the three that you would double down on who are the three that you would cut three is just a magic number?
It might be three thousand for you I don't know whatever doesn't the number doesn't matter same idea what the bottom 20% of things what are the top 20% So what you're trying to identify and with the promise of we're not taking an action on this right now So that's what for yeah, that's for number five was tell each person Superpower and give it to your team as a presentation. They will live up to that reputation number six is the Tesla master plan Number seven is the calendar audit. Okay, I'm gonna do two or maybe three Number eight is peer groups. So anytime I have an objective like let's say I want to become you know a great poker player I want to get to a hundred thousand Twitter followers or I want to build a DC brand that does fifty million dollars a year I will create a text chat group of five other people who are in the same kind of ballpark as me of where they're at now And have that same ambition as their top ambition Mentors and advisors overrated peer group underrated and so that's what I would do and I would start by texting them And I would do like a once a month kind of call where we spent three hours on the phone or in person hanging out shooting the shit together It's sharing tactics and strategies what's working for them and trying to achieve you're mutually shared goal Okay, last one is the kickoff document This is number nine a kickoff document is a template that I have and I can share this but if you subscribe my newsletter I think you get it so just go to Sean Porey calm and And I think you can get it or if not just email me at Sean at Sean Porey calm Okay, so the kickoff document is basically something I do before I start a project because I believe that clarity is power I think too often people go into doing something without actually being clear of what are we trying to do here?
Why are we trying to do it? How will we measure success? And what's the first thing that we should really do and that's what kickoff document does So the kickoff doc has three sections the first is what are we trying to do one minor the next is what's a win look like? And I define a win in two ways I say what's the floor of this win meaning what is the minimum that I would consider like a successful good outcome?
Like what's achievable thing and then what's the F. Yeah, when which is the like the result that would make me safe F. Yeah, then that really worked And so now I got kind of like a range I have like the bottom goal my floor goal and then I have my stretch goal and And then I also do an anti goal meaning what are some traps that I could fall into along the way That would like make this whole thing even if I hit my goals I would feel bad at the end of it because I like did something right like for example We all have these in life like a you know, I would love to Be successful, but I don't want to you know screw over people along the way and carry that guilt with me, right? So that's like being successful financially would be your goal I mean you put some numbers around it, but then your anti goal would be I don't want to do this in a way that makes me feel Unethical or ashamed in any way of what I did I'd like to feel proud of it, right?
So those become your anti goals or like you know, I'd like to be successful But I want to be able to make sure I'm home with my kids every day at five because that's really important to me So an anti goal would be yeah, I made it happen, but I'm never home Right, so my anti goal would be you know, never getting home before, you know, next time and so it's important to identify your Anti goals they're very clarifying for you And the kickoff ends with one hour or your power hour basically like what's something I can do in the next hour? That would just get like create like momentum get me to a win And so this is not like do some research or make a list it's like give momentum towards the actual outcome So if I want to you know increase sales, that's like make a sale make one sale or like if I wanted to grow my list Am I email list? It's like I don't know post a thread on Twitter in the next hour that will get some subscribers to my list Just something to get the ball rolling. That's action oriented.
So you're not just always in planning them So those are nine different little tips and tricks that really work for me That's I don't think you'll learn most of those and I don't know business school or you know at your job That you know, even if people try to do management training, it's usually not things like this These are my kind of like you know unorthodox pet tricks that I like to do that help me, you know with my companies And so I hope that's helpful for you if it is let me know you can tweet it at me at Sean vp If it's not helpful to that be saying hey, you know wasn't that helpful honestly back? I love honestly back So either way works for me. I'm at Sean vp, which is S H A N V P on Twitter. All right