Episode 95: "There's Really Only Three Options"

The point is, you know we can help you, we can allow you to help yourself, we can replace you. We have an investment in you from time, money, resources, training. So in a way, us helping you is protecting our investment, which makes good business sense. But like those are kind of the three options, and I was I was laughing, you know, thinking about that, I was like man, if that just isn't every like work environment on the planet, everybody, it really comes down to those options Like we can help you. If I have a staff person with a problem, he's like we can help you. We can allow you to just help yourself and figure it out yourself. Or you know we can replace you If you're not performing. You know in your, in your role, or you have people on your teams who aren't performing. You know how are these conversations going with them? Are you really setting out realistic expectations about how to work through their troubles? What's going on everybody?

Welcome back to the Big Dog podcast with a little dog. Yo, what's going on? Not much. Little dog, six foot three. Big dog five, 11 and a half. Yo, it's six foot. Yeah, what? Look, don't like height shaming. I'm not, I wasn't height shaming, you know, I mean, I think, when you laugh, when you start with, when I say, when I open with here with the little dog, little dog, six foot three, like I'm hyping you up, and then you're like huh, huh, the big dog, five foot 11 and a half, I'm six foot son. I thought we were just saying stats, six foot son. Yeah, but like when I was six foot the important thing about stats are accurate is accuracy, okay, all right.

Five foot 11 and a half. Don't height, shame me. Okay, five 12. That's six foot Height, shaming man. Look, I got short ass legs. I have a tall torso. I have a small torso and long legs. That is true. That is true. You get that from your mama. Your mama's got the long ass legs. Yeah, so it's Kiki. Everybody's got long legs but me. But I am six foot. Yeah, don't ever height, shame me again, particularly on the interwebs.

I didn't know anything was wrong with under six foot. Whoa, whoa, maybe for most, but I am who I am and I am six foot tall. Okay, that's what the license says, what the doctor stuff say. What is the government been wrong? Anyway, wow, I didn't know this was going to jump off in that style. So you doing all right though. Yeah, I'm good. Yeah, it's nice to be in the studio. Yep, we haven't been in here in a minute. Got some big changes coming to the studio in the coming weeks and month probably, so that'll be pretty fun. You guys will see some differences if you're watching on video. The sound hopefully doesn't change too much, but video will look differently If you'd like to watch us on YouTube. Thanks, mamu, always good looking out, keeping our views high. We love it. What's going on with you? Nothing Just working. Yeah, got to see Jenna last weekend Nice. It's a good time Up at James.

Madison. Yep you, that's cool. Yeah, kiki has been on her college tours lately and she just went and did the tour up at JMU, the official tour. She did the tour of the self-guided tour, homecoming, and then we did UVA. We did when else did we go? Oh, mary Washington. I don't think I've talked about that on here, have I? No, I don't think so. So we went to we're going to do a little tour week in college tour week, and it's that time of year for for high school juniors, I guess. So we roll up on Mary Washington, which is in Fredericksburg. Kiki didn't even want to get out of the car. She's like, yeah, I can't see myself being friends with any of these people. I mean, I appreciate that. She just called it like she saw it, and we didn't waste any time. It was, I think it was too small. So we just rolled on down the road. We went to UVA.

I'm not really going to jump into that here on the show, so, but there were some alarming things that were were said during that presentation. It got weird. It got really, really weird. I'll only go into it a little bit. I won't go into it like like super heavy because I don't like to bring politics and stuff into the show. That's not what the show is for.

But it was surprising to me this one little piece when we were at the the UVA tour founded by, designed by former president Thomas Jefferson, founder of the United States of America, tj, heavily involved in the creation of the University of Virginia. Y'all they could not during this tour all right for prospective students and families they could not get Thomas Jefferson disassociated with that university fast enough during these tours and presentations. They're like we'll let it be known that Thomas Jefferson didn't lay a single brick here and when the university opened he died a year later. He really has nothing to do with who we are and what we're about. And of course that's because you know back in the day, you know he was a slave owner and stuff like that which obviously you know. Not cool, that was how stuff was done back in the day. That's what, what. There was a lot of history stuff you can erase and change. But because of that dark past, as they call it they are, it seems like the University of Virginia founded by Thomas Jefferson like they're trying to cancel TJ. That was surprising to me, a little surprising. And it was fine. Uva is beautiful. It's gorgeous. We love Charlottesville as a family. It was a very interesting tour though Interesting students. I wouldn't do good in college now I don't. I mean I didn't do good in college back then. So if I'm being totally honest but you know so that that tour took place, devon went with Kiki to go tour JMU, do the formal, you know, the official tour or whatever, and so they had a great time, loved it.

She's got a list of other schools. I mean I guess we're going to go see Virginia Tech. She has mentioned Arizona. She has mentioned San Diego State. She has mentioned just think of a college she's mentioned. She's mentioned a lot. You know, when you ask her what's your main. You know priority for decision, you know the school you want to go to and I do appreciate this. She's like I want it to be pretty. I mean, yeah right, pretty's nice. A lot of colleges are pretty, but I think it really depends on what your perspective of of pretty is. A lot of people think like rural is pretty. A lot of people think a urban, like in city Campus is pretty. It's a truly about perspective. So she's checking out places and I'm excited for her. But I mean we know your sister she's gonna do what she's gonna do what she wants to do, so we'll see how that kind of plays out. But nonetheless, uva, they hit me with the ringer during the tour, so it's a little interesting. It's a little interesting, to say the least, but anyway, this isn't about college tours and stuff like that today.

Um, there was a movie from late 90s and it was called payback. It had Mel Gibson and I don't know if you've ever seen this movie or anything. There's a line in the movie that basically, mel Gibson he's not a good guy in the movie and they, they him and a crew, basically they go and steal money. Well, he gets betrayed by his partner, gets left for dead Recovers and now he's trying to get his money, his portion of the, the money they stole, right, and so payback and Anyway, the people who have now have the money, is like a crime organization and it's a mess and it's not good people. There's no good people really involved in here.

Well, one of the lines from one of the bad guys with the, the crime organization, you know he he said something like hey, there's, there's three ways we can handle this right, and he's talking to Gibson's character I think it's Porter or whatever in the movie. He's like look, there's three ways we can handle this situation. One, we can help you To, we can allow you to help yourself. Or three, we can have you replaced. Right, and you know the the the point is he's making is you know we can help you, we can allow you to help yourself, we can replace you. We have an investment in you from time, money, resources, training, so in a way, us helping you is protecting our investment, which makes good business sense. But like those are kind of the three options and I was, I was laughing, you know, thinking about that, I was like man. If that just isn't every like work environment on the planet. This just happened to be like a crime syndicate where this dude's about to get killed. But Everybody, it really comes down to those options. Like we can help you. If I have a staff person with a problem, he's like we can help you, we can allow you to just help yourself and figure it out yourself. Or you know we can replace you If you're not performing.

You know in your, in your role. Or you have people on your teams who aren't performing. You know how are these conversations going with them. Are you really setting out realistic expectations about how to work through their troubles? If they're, if they're, their performance is lacking, they're underperforming. Okay, what's that conversation? Are you coaching, are you developing them? Do they understand the seriousness of the failures? We can help you fix this problem, logan. We can help you work through it. We can allow you to fix it yourself.

If you're telling me you understand where you're falling short, you know where your energy and efforts need to be and your focus needs to be increased. You're telling me you can handle it All right. Well, we as an organization are gonna allow you to handle it, or we can replace you. We can replace you now or we can replace you down the road. If you prove to not be able to Handle it yourself and that's what we choose to allow you to do we replace you. But the best thing to do is try to save that relationship, that employer employee relationship that you know Contract e contractor relationship, because there's already resources Invested there the training, the money, the time. It is so much More cost-friendly to keep someone most the time.

Then it is to try to replace them, because now you have to go back through and what Train develop culture, make sure they understand the resources that are at their disposal, make sure they're actually good at the job, and sometimes you know the the best devil to deal with is a devil.

You know that's not great, but if there's nothing's ever perfect, there's always gonna be Delta, there's always gonna be problems and like what's the unknown of who you're replacing. So three options again we can help you, we can allow you to help yourself or we can replace you. I always try to lean heavily in grace and time for people to right whatever the wrong is, and there's a handful of things that are completely non-negotiable. Where there is no grace, there is zero tolerance. But short of those handful of items and everybody knows what those items are who are in our organization there's gonna be a lot of grace. There's gonna be a lot of opportunity to develop, to get up to speed. If you show the ability to be coachable, if you show great work ethic, if you show open-mindedness, we're gonna work with you to get you where you need to be. Now. If you're missing the mark and you don't show any of those traits, we're gonna have those conversations and again it comes back to one of three things we can help you. That's what you need to do. We can allow you to help yourself or we gotta replace you. That's it A lot of times with newer hires.

If you, as an employer, see enough red flags early on and you're probably not coaching through a lot of those things, because early on I tend to believe people are at their best Like they're not gonna get better than who they are those first couple months. They might get more efficient, they might get more well-versed in their jobs, their roles and tasks, but if there's character traits that come into question, those red flags that early on, those are probably gonna even come to more fruition as time goes on, because most people present their best in the beginning. Most people present their best in interviews. Someone shows up late for an interview. We're not doing a second interview, we're not rescheduling that interview. If you showed up late doing the interview barring, really, you know, extenuating circumstances you just didn't prioritize it. You're late, that's character. That ain't gonna work.

Or you're wondering why everybody's always late to everything that you do and that's because you allow a culture, you created a culture that allows people to just be late without consequence. So how do you help people through that? We can help you. We can allow you to help yourself, or we can replace you, and that applies to everything, every role, every situation. That applies. We can help you Now.

If you're not equipped to help your staff or your contractors, your kids, whatever it may be, that's a bigger problem. If you don't have the resources to help them, the knowledge to help them, the SOPs, the KPIs, the processes to lay out in front of them so that they have clarity on what's expected, that's a you problem. You can't help them. The only chance these poor people have is to figure it out for themselves, to which you have to allow them to fix the problem, because you're ill-equipped to fix the problem, and I would say you shouldn't be hiring people If you're holding someone accountable to something that you have not shown them how to execute or laid out clearly what those expectations are, but then you're holding them accountable for falling short.

Well, that's some bullshit. No one's excited about showing up to work for you, cause all I do is get beat up for missing a mark that was never established in the first place. That's like telling me I'm going to go like you got to go run this race, all right, cool, how? How far is it? What we'll tell you when you're done? Huh, what? How do you strategize? How do you determine your, your output, your effort output? How do you figure? How do you determine how hard you're going to go out the gate? How do you determine when you're going to stop to catch your breath? How do you, if you don't know where you're headed? How do you put strategy in place?

Leader has to be the one to do that. If you're not capable of doing that, you can't help them get there. It's crap that you're forcing them to have to be the only ones to help themselves and they should replace you rather than you replace them. They should replace you by going someplace where they have a strong leader, where they have clear expectations on where the direction they're heading, where they know what they need to do to execute on a daily basis to hit those weekly and monthly and annual goals, so that the company can thrive, so that they can grow professionally within your organization. So maybe you've got to be the one who's replaced.

We've had to replace me in a lot of areas within the business because I was the roadblock, I was the holdup, maybe stretched too thin, maybe not my skill set, maybe something I wasn't passionate about. So put someone in that place who is those things and can be those things to the staff, that they have reporting to them. You got to understand that, you got to be self-aware of it, you got to pay attention to it. But it all comes back to kind of those three questions when there's a problem with an employee, when there's a problem with a contractor, when there's constant frustration, it doesn't get much clear communication beyond. I can help you, I can allow you to help yourself, or I've got to replace you. That's very clear. And if I'm being told that here are the steps you got to take X, y and Z, you take them or you don't.

And sometimes it's really easy to plug in, take next steps and make it happen right away. Sometimes you've got to kind of gradually increase this stuff and build it in. You've got to communicate with your leadership, with the staff. But everything has to be clearly, clearly, clearly, clearly laid out as far as the expectations go. Don't leave it to gray, don't leave it to chance. Be clear on it.

So just something that popped up to me that I recognized. I said, man, this has a lot of for a pretty crappy movie. This actually has a lot of practical kind of lessons in it. I was like you know this would be good to share, you know, on the show and talk to people about. So when you're dealing with troubled staff, troubled contractors, anybody really in a relationship that you're having problems with, it can be that convo and kind of run those questions towards yourself too.

We can help you, we can allow you to help yourself, or we can replace you. We can help you, and if I'm helping you, that's because I don't feel like I have put the resources in place for you to thrive the way you need to. So by me helping you, that's me making sure your resource, your trained, your positioned to excel we allow you to help yourself. You can. Actually. All the tools and resources you need are in place. You just need to go make use of them. So I'm going to allow you to help yourself by making use of all the resources I've already had in front of you this whole time that, for whatever reason, you've ignored. Now, if I do that, if I've done number one, I've done number two and we're still not getting where we need to be. Now we're at number three and you got to go like I do now. That's it.

Catch you next time on the big dog podcast. Share the show. Hopefully it helped. Hopefully you got a little entertainment and a laugh and yeah, go. Who's that what they say at UVA? Yeah, cool Thanks.