Podcast Transcript

[00:00:00] Sean Steele: G’day everyone, and welcome to the ScaleUps Podcast where we help first time Founders learn the secrets of scaling so they can fulfill the potential of their businesses. Essentially, we want them to make bigger decisions with greater confidence and maximise the impact that they can have in the world. I am your host, Sean Steele. I'm a not a guest. I was about to call myself a guest. I'm the host today, and you are the guest, John.

[00:00:19] John Spence: Yes. Guest on your own show, how do you like that.

[00:00:22] Sean Steele: Welcome, John Spence. How are you today, mate?

[00:00:25] John Spence: I'm excellent, man. And you?

[00:00:27] Sean Steele: I'm fabulous, really thrilled to have you. For people who may not have come across your work before, John, you are a global top Hunt 100 Business Thinker. I saw you in the growth faculty, and you're doing a workshop there. You are a top 500 Leadership Development Expert. You're a Consultant, an Educator, a Coach, a Speaker. You've got five books; five Business and Life Success books, including - Awesomely Simple Essential Business Strategies for Turning Ideas into Action, which I have gone and looked at some of the excellent toolbox stuff that you've got on your website, which I absolutely loved. I know you're guest lecturing at more than 90 colleges around the world, including like MIT and Stanford and Wharton, who clearly have high standards. And most importantly for this podcast, you've owned or been the CEO of at least six companies. And so, we know your insights come from experience, which of course is really important to this kind of audience. So, thank you so much for being with us. Maybe a little bit of context for today, you built this career around, I guess on a sort of foundation of making the very complex, awesomely simple, and our audience is typically in that sort of 1 to 20 mill revenue range, and so that's what they like, right? They're super practical. They're not into lots of complexity. And you've been looking at, you know, you've been sort of distilling, you've had the opportunity to distil your own successes, but also the success of lots of other CEOs and Founders that you've worked with. And from a timing perspective, by the time this goes live, we're going to be in the beginning of 2023, and I know what happens when you get, you know, I just released a podcast a few days ago, which had some questions for Founders to reflect on. And I know what happens in holidays. Sometimes you're either keep working all the way through and you do no reflecting, or it's the last thing that you want to do and you actually just need to completely decompress. But what I would really love to get out of today is, sometimes people hit February and realise they actually haven't taken a step back and thought about 2023 yet and how they're going to really optimise that year. And they're just stuck in the doing, and they've got all the tasks and they're just executing, but they haven't thought about; have I really taken a step back and thought about my strategy? Have I thought about what I might need to prioritise to make my execution in my team better? And then what about how I lead my people? How do I help them be better this year? So that's really where I wanted to go today. How does that sound to you?

[00:02:37] John Spence: Excellent. Sounds great.

[00:02:38] Sean Steele: Beautiful. Well, it's a bit of a broad landscape I painted, but maybe we start on strategy and some of your sort of frameworks and principles around that. I know you've got the five levels, or five pillars of strategic thinking, but how did you think about strategy that's effective in some of the ingredients that get you there?

[00:02:53] John Spence: Well, I'll give this a two-part answer. One will just talk about reflecting. One of the keys to being a good strategic thinker is you have to set time aside to read, study, learn, look at the industry. There's a great saying, a computer saying “Garbage in equals garbage out.” I think it's the same thing with strategy. If you haven't taken the time to study, at other companies, read things on strategy and business. You're not getting enough new information in to create something positive on the other side. From a strategy standpoint, I want to make things simple. I think there's just one equation that really sums up the core of strategy and that all strategy is just valued differentiation, multiplied by disciplined execution. And let me explain that, there are four elements to this. So, you know, I challenge everyone I work with; If we can figure out how your meets these four elements, you're going to crush it. Number one, you must bring something that is unique and compelling to the marketplace. That doesn't mean it has to have a hundred bells and whistles because the next one is that your target market will be happy to pay for, pay any reasonable price. So, I don't have to have the best thing in the world, I just have something that my customers go, I don't care if it's $5 or 50,000 or 50 million, happy to write a check for that. Number three, this one's tough. That is difficult, if not impossible to copy. And then number four is that I can execute with excellence consistently. So, let me do those again real quick. Bring something that's unique and compelling that your target customer's happy to pay for that is difficult, if not impossible to copy and that you can consistently execute it with excellence. If you can create a strategy that meets those four criteria, you will stand out dramatically from your competition.

[00:04:40] Sean Steele: Oh, I love that. John, you're speaking my language. You know, when I think about the sort of strategy roadmap that I take clients through, and I'm currently building course around, all of those four ingredients are core and central to the way that we take people through it. So, I'm really excited that you didn't give me something that I hadn't even thought of. But you've articulated in a much more simple way than I probably knew, which I loved.

[00:05:00] John Spence: … Talk about most people don't know. It's just applying it.

[00:05:04] Sean Steele: But that's the thing, right?

[00:05:05] John Spence: You said it. Right now, I don't know if we're going to be in a recession in the United States when this airs in February 23, somewhere in there, but when I went through the global financial crisis, the last time we called it the Great Recession, there was three things I noticed where companies struggled. And I see this all the time with my clients, but during that time, it was especially critical. Number one was the lack of a vivid, compelling and well-communicated vision and strategy for growth. Maybe the senior team thought about it, maybe they didn't even have that clear, and when I say senior team, this is a million-dollar company to a billion-dollar company. It's all basically the same. The way I look at it is just more zeros, but the fundamentals of doing a company really, really well don't change dramatically with scale, the fundamentals are still there. So, number one was lack of a vivid, compelling, and well communicated, underlining that eight times, vision and strategy for growth. Number two was lack of courageous communication. People knew there were issues, they were going to probably lose some customers, might have to lay somebody off, but they were afraid to sit down and talk openly and honestly. There was a lack of psychological safety, so people were just quiet and hoped that things got better. Hope is not a strategy. And then the last one, which is the second most important thing that I see in businesses, communication is always the biggest issue. No matter what company, even if there's only one person, going to have a hard time communicating with your customers. But it's lack of disciplined execution and accountability. It's one thing to have a great strategy, it's completely different thing to execute it consistently again with excellence.

[00:06:45] Sean Steele: I couldn't agree more. Yeah, I think about, you know, one of the, had a really interesting guest this year, and we spent the majority of the time talking about the …they had a great strategy. They'd worked with a consultant. We actually interviewed the consultant who helped them build the strategy, and then we interviewed the CEO who deployed the strategy, and they'd taken that company from 25 to 50 million over a few years. But what was really interesting was the execution components and how they actually created cross-functional teams, really clear metrics, absolute transparency and visibility. Like people were engaged, they felt like they owned the strategy, they were accountable to it. Each of the big initiatives, to your point, like there's usually a couple of big initiatives that fall out of a strategy that are going to make you, get you to that sort of, you know, super valuable and compelling offer that people are willing to pay for and how do you bring visibility and accountability to those Otherwise everyone just gets busy doing, and doing the stuff right. Like you can have a very busy year but that doesn't mean you're actually advancing the company. It doesn't mean you're going to be a better company in four or five years. You might be a bigger company, but you may not be a better one. Which I always think is a really key part. And actually, one of the things that you said there is the courage. What do you find, do you find it challenging with some Founders to have them let go of some stuff? Because sometimes when you go through a strategy process, you think…I heard from a guy called Jamie Christofferson, who was that consultant, he runs this, what he calls the three Gods test, which is the three Hindu Gods. One, which is about essentially the things that are new. One God is about the things that are to be maintained, the things that are working, the things that are special, the secret sauce. And one is actually about the things that you have to let go to create space for the other two.
And I find that's really difficult for Founders to do because to your point, it takes courage. You might have started a whole bunch of things. But it's really hard to let go of them because there could be jobs that go with it, there could be teams that go with it. It could be a whole bunch of things. What's your experience and how do you help people get to the letting go part, John?

[00:08:34] John Spence: Yeah. I teach them a new word, “No”. No, we're not going to do that. We're not going to invest in that. You know, because strategy basically, it gets down to the allocation of scarce resources. And if you try to be all things to all people, you're nothing to anybody. If you try to implement 27 strategies, you have no strategy. And years ago, when I was getting ready to teach at one of the top universities, I went back and revisited this, and a couple things that I took away that were sort of epiphanies back then is, one of the most important things a great strategic thinker can do is figure out what to say no for. That we're not going to do that anymore. Another one is realising that even if you're great at it, still a guess. It's a thoughtful, well-reasoned guess, but nobody knows the future. So, you're trying to take those scarce resources and create the best perception of what you believe the future's going to look like, and then be very, very focused about where you spend your time, money, and people, have a lot of discipline around that. And then take massive execution, massive action around that clear direction. It's really hard for Founders, especially, as the company starts to grow and they have to start delegating things away, you know, I've started a couple companies, it's like your baby. You know, you want to go here look after this for me? No, no. I'm the one that knows how to do this. That’s another stage where you have to say, no, that's not my area of expertise. That's why I hired you. You're fantastic at that, John. You handled that, and I have to trust that because you're great and I've hired the best talent I can. You are going to run out and do a fantastic job on behalf of the company.

[00:10:13] Sean Steele: Hmm. Yeah, that's really interesting. And so then, and because I think also sometimes when they're smaller, sometimes the big challenge is they can't afford anybody who probably is maybe thinking at a higher level in a certain functional area than them. But there's always an opportunity to add advisors, right? Like, you can always get fractional CMOs and CEOs and CFOs and whatever. It's like they don't have to cost a lot of money, but elevating your thinking with somebody who's actually going to bring something to the table so all that weight is not on you, is a big part of it. But then when you can afford one, the worst thing you could do is to micromanage them and go, okay, let me tell you how we're can do this strategy. You're thinking you just hired somebody who's got all the juice right there, you give him some room.

[00:10:52] John Spence: Well, it's fascinating. I went to one of my friends' houses last night for dinner. A whole bunch of us, they're all business owners catching up, I asked them a really interesting question, which I'll ask to you, and you can, I know you're supposed to ask the questions on this.

[00:11:05] Sean Steele: No, that's fine.

[00:11:06] John Spence: But I’ll ask you and I’ll tell you what I said, then you can tell me. What's been great about the Pandemic? Everybody had different answers. A couple of them said, now I realised I'm getting more sleep. I'm more effective than I was. I get to spend time with my family. Mine was, much like our call, I've increased my network worldwide that now that I can get on Zoom as somebody, I have advisors and a network and helpers that can give advice from anywhere on the globe, just as easily as walking next door and talking to my next-door neighbour. The other thing is, this is a big realisation for me. For employers, the world is your talent pool now, it used to be, you hired somebody that came into the office every day. I've got one client who's in Vancouver, their team is spread out all over the world, the Philippines, Egypt, everything. They hired a team of developers in Egypt for what it would've cost to hire one developer in Vancouver. The other side of that coin is for talented people. The world is now your employer. If I don't like where I am and I'm not being treated well and I'm being. I can go anywhere I want to go. So, what's your answer to that? I'm throwing it back. What was great about the pandemic for you? That's a hard way to say it, but…

[00:12:18] Sean Steele: Yeah. Two things for me. One from a personal perspective and one from a business perspective. From a personal perspective, like you all of a sudden it, for myself and my family actually created complete location independence. All the work that I do is location independent, and as a result, I'm actually moving to Europe in 11 months’ time with my family. We've like sold the house. The kids are going to be in like boarding school and university in Europe, and so we're changing our world, but I'm still going to be running this business as I do it today. I'm just going to be doing it from a different country. So, that's been for me, but what I've loved about what it's done for Founders is, it has changed, it's like it's disrupted some really normalised mindsets, so it's started to make people a bit more open because they've been through something that was so unpredictable. They're like, huh? Like, it feels like it's been a while. Okay. Yes, it's been some recession, and people who've been around for long enough have seen some disruption, but not many people have seen…I had an experience where like, it's not even close to being predictable. Like you have absolutely no idea how this is going to play out. And that has, I think, helped people shift some of those really stuck mindsets. Like, where is my talent pool? Like, what's my business model? Like, okay, how do I understand my industry and where we can play? I think it's really thrown up a lot of balls in the air and people have the opportunity to catch them in different ways.

[00:13:32] John Spence: Yeah, I've been focusing a lot lately. I teach a class on the future of leadership and we talk about three quotient that I believe it takes to be a great leader of the future - IQ, EQ and AQ. IQ is not the number, it's competence. Are you really good at what you do? EQ obviously is your Emotional Quotient, your ability to get along with other people to collaborate, which we've now figured out through research and it's pretty just stands to reason. If you can't get along with other people, no matter how bright you are, it doesn't really matter. So, EQ is actually more important than IQ. If I'm pretty competent and I get along well with people, I go a lot further. But the last one is AQ, your Adaptability or Agility Quotient. And we just hit on a little bit in strategy. Does first step in at agility or adaptability or AQ is voracious learning. Constantly trying to spend more time, get more things, learn more things. But number two is voracious unlearning. Is what doesn't work anymore. Changing that mental, you know, this might have worked before, but now things have completely changed in the marketplace or with my customer or something. And you have to have the, again, the courage to say, even though that's worked for years, it's not going to work anymore.

[00:14:40] Sean Steele: Yeah, that's so true. And I think it's very easy. The bigger business scales. I noticed one of the things that seems to be one of the biggest gaps is often leaders get further away from their customers and they haven't got into their execution rhythms built a good feedback mechanism where the leaders are required to chat to a customer every week or have got the right kinds of feedback loops coming back from their team. And so you lose strategic agility super fast when something's going on with your customer base, the decisions they've made are changing, the industry's changing, the drivers are changing, and you're still doing the same old thing and all of a sudden you're a year and a half down the line and everybody else has taken your customers and you're wondering why no one's talking to them.

[00:15:16] John Spence: You’ve just hit one of the things that I jump up and down with, I do a pretty fair amount of executive coaching, and one of the first things I want to ask is, how often do you go out to your stores or how often you go actually talk to a customer? And I've had a lot of CEOs; I don't have time. Like, if you don't have time to talk to them, you're going to have time for bankruptcy. How's that sound, champ? I have a question that; I don't have time. Well, you're going to have plenty of time on your hands soon.

[00:15:40] Sean Steele: Yeah.

[00:15:41] John Spence: There's a question I've taught a lot of my clients, I think it's super easy, but it's incredibly powerful and it’s changed many of their companies is, go to a group of your top customers, the ones you'd like to have lots more of, and then ask them this simple question, why specifically do you do business with us? What are the top three or four reasons? If you ask enough of your A clients that a pattern will emerge, that pattern is basically your brand. And that pattern is what your unique selling proposition is in the marketplace. And when I've had folks that have done that, they look at it and they go, okay, there's four things that all of our clients mostly spend money on this for. I'm betting that if your best clients are spending on these four things, all your potential clients will likely spend money on the same three or four things. The ones that have embraced that, here's the interesting thing, Sean, is a lot of them don't go out now. Don't want to go out now and talk to their customers. I'm like, what do you mean? And they're like, oh, we don't have time. Well, that's not going to work so good.

[00:16:40] Sean Steele: Yeah. Wow. That's so true. So, let's say, okay, we've got a Founder here, they've gone, you know, John, that's incredibly simple. Okay. I've come up with a reasonable strategy, I think for the growth of the business. Now I need to execute it, so we're not quite yet at team, but we're thinking about how am I going to sort of plan this execution? What should I be prioritising? How do I build the right kind of rhythms of accountability? How do I get the system of executing in place? How do you think about that?

[00:17:07] John Spence: I have another word I use, there is accountability. Basically, we're going to execute this, so I'm going to take accountability for getting this part of it done. I look at a couple things. The first thing to me is extreme clarity about what we're trying to achieve. There are actually five things I think that it takes to create a culture of accountability or disciplined execution. Number one is 100% clarity. If I'm going to hold you accountable for something, I need to sit down and in as much detail as possible tell you, this is what success looks like. Here's how we're going to measure it. This is the due date. Here's your budget, here's your decision making authority. So, you've got to get 100% clarity plus appropriate authority and resources. That's step one. Step two then is 100% agreement. I need the person I’m going to hold accountable to explain back to me, this is what I have to do, this is when it's due, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I usually have them write a memo so we can sit down and look at it together. And then now we've got a hundred percent agreement. You know what you're supposed to do. I agree with it. And then I always have them put a sentence or two at the bottom. I believe this is a reasonable goal. I accept 100% accountability. And then we both sign it. It's calling an accountability agreement. Number three then is track and post. And part of that …

[00:18:25] Sean Steele: John, would that be like typically a once a year activity you would do with…?

[00:18:31] John Spence: Oh, the track and post?

[00:18:32] Sean Steele: Yeah. The accountability agreement in terms of the clarity around their goals and what they need to get done and by when?

[00:18:39] John Spence: Well, I do it until they've got that project done. So, on every project, I'm going to hold somebody accountable, we're going to sit down and then we're going to get together on one-on-one, I would hope weekly, to say, how are you doing? Let's check this off. Do you need more resources? Do we have enough people on your team? How can I help you? Well, I'll get to this in a second. So, let me see if I answer that. If not, we can come back. So, step three then is track and post, and that is your rhythm and using a dashboard or whatever it might be. Most of my clients use red, yellow, green. you know, green - I'm doing great, I'm meeting all my goals, deadlines. Yellow - I'm shaky. Red - I'm in trouble. Just get together every week, say, how you doing? What's going on here? And which comes to level four, which is the big one is, when someone slips from Green to Yellow, you don't yell at them, you go help them. Because most people think tracking is going to be punishment. They're tracking because I'm going to miss this or I'll get in trouble, withhold bonus, or I won't get a raise or whatever it might be. What you need to teach people is, no, we're all on the same team. We all want to be Green, so I want to check in with you constantly so that the minute something slips, we can work together to get you back in Green, keep the whole company in Green. So, it's when they start to struggle. Step four is coach, mentor, train, support. Be there on their team, get shoulder to shoulder with them, help them. Then the last one, or actually two, I'll go at now, it's six, seven levels. I just make this stuff up so I change numbers all the time. It is, celebrate success, deal decisively with mediocrity. If someone is delivering, make a positive reinforcement, make an example. This is what we're looking for. Bob or Sue has been Green all year. You know, doing all that stuff. If the person can't make it, at least everybody knows you tried that you were coaching and helping and supporting, and you couldn't get them back at a Yellow or Green. They just stayed in Red. Then when they leave the company, people at least know, I mean, I've got a favourite Jack Welsh quote. “I never fired anybody who was surprised.” So, the idea is, if there's constant communication about it. You said something, is it once a year? For me, it's every time a project gets going, then it's constant check-ins. And from a standpoint, to me it's a weekly check-in on strategy. A quarterly, at least a half a day where you're going over it. And then I'm a big fan for making your as possible. Years ago when I ran a large company, got it down to about eight pages and we bounded in a red binder, we called it the Red Book, and said, every meeting you come to that we're going to make any decisions, bring the red book. before we allocate resources or decide to do something, we're going to go through that and say, does it match our strategy? Does it match our values? Does it align with our purpose? If it doesn't, we're not doing it, or we have to take the thing apart and build a new one, new red book. I really don't, I mean, it's got to be a pretty big deal for us to rip that thing up and start again. And that was that thing that kept consistency throughout the entire year.

[00:21:39] Sean Steele: I love that. I think that visibility is being able to communicate it simply is so critical. You know, one of the things I do at the end of my process with clients when I'm taking through the strategy process is I give them, two documents. One, which is a PowerPoint version because they often are doing virtual meetings and whatever, I need to explain it to people and it might be seven, eight slides, tops. But I also give them a desktop background that people can put on their background. So, every single person in the company who's all, you know, most of them are working virtually anyway. They can see that entire picture. So, from purpose to the brand promises, the brand guarantees the differentiators, the big bets, the key initiatives, the success metrics of those initiatives, the financial goals, the priorities for this year. Like all of that is in one page. So, they're always having to come back to that doc, all that. Someone just goes, hang on a second, I'm just going to share screen here. This is what we said we were going to do, and that's not what we're talking about. So, it kind of brings that conciseness like that.

[00:22:31] John Spence: That’s a genius idea.

[00:22:33] Sean Steele: Yeah. It's been great. They  seem to really love it. So, what about, that's awesome. And I think, execution is hard, right? Like this is where…I don't feel like there's enough kind of courses on execution. Like there's plenty of stuff on strategy and there's lots of stuff around vision and it's like, that's great, but you and I both know that when you're a CEO, the money is made and the value is created in execution. Like, assuming that you've got a great team and you know how to lead them, then actually those rhythms make all the difference. That visibility, that transparency, that accountability without, and I love that you are saying one of the most important things is to teach people that actually, they're going to feel like someone's got their back. They're going to know that because we've been clear about the 'What’, the 'Why’, the 'When’, upfront. And you are responsible for the How that when, if the ‘How’ is not quite delivering, I'm going to be in your corner because I'm not going to be trying to micromanage you on the other stuff. Right? Because I was clear about it up front. We both agreed it.

[00:23:28] John Spence: Yeah, I think a lot of people have a hard time with accountability and execution because they don't want to be mean, you know, they don't want to be seen as “you get this done or…”, you know, micromanaging or pushing people. I think when you sit down and get the real clear expectations before there's any problems or anything, sit down, that means what we can do is have a conversation, says, I think you're a great person. I like you a lot. You're a valuable team member. However, you're not meeting your goals right now, we all need to meet our goals. So, what can I do to help you? How can we get you back in Green? Because everybody wants the entire company to be in Green. So, it's not you, it's your behaviour. You’re okay, what you're delivering is not okay. It's not an attack. It's a team. We’re partners to get this to happen.

[00:24:10] Sean Steele: Yeah, separate the person from the behaviour. Yeah, absolutely. And so, what about then individuals? How do you think about leadership in the context of how do you help people? I mean, that's obviously one big part of helping people succeed is helping them understand what success looks like, which lots of people don't do. You know, like you get job descriptions, which is some gigantic list of tasks. I'm like, that's not what success looks like. That's a list of task. How many people have looked at that document since you put it together? No one, Nobody looked at that document until you asked them to do something that's outside the task list that you just gave them. They're like, oh, it's not in my task list. It's like, gimme a break. I only ever built best profiles. You know, they're like three pages, one like what does success look like for the individual? The purpose of the role, the character, you know, how do we want this person to show up and who we are looking for? Two, is all their leading lag metrics on a what does success look like on a weekly or monthly basis. And then the third one is the key projects, the key deliverables for that year where it's absolutely all that stuff's being made really clear. So, to your point, the whole thing is called a success profile. That's what it's about. It's about how you succeed and then how I help you succeed. But what about from an individual perspective? I know you've got a lot of tools in your toolbox, but how do you think about helping people then get the most out to themselves in the way that you provide support to them?

[00:25:27] John Spence: Well, a couple of things. Number one is, I'm a fanatic for lifelong learning. I think if you're going to grow and get better, you got to constantly be learning everything you can. So, I'll throw an interesting statistic at you. The average college graduate reads about a half a book a year for business or personal improvement. 0.5.

[00:25:48] Sean Steele: Wow.

[00:25:49] John Spence: To get better sales or conflict resolution or better communications, whatever it might be, what I would call a skills Facebook or the equivalent thereof, videos, YouTubes, podcasts, whatever it might be, half a book. If you were to read one every other month, six a year, you're in the top 1% of whatever country you live in. If you read 12 a year, you're in the top 1% on the face of the earth. So, one of the things is you have to invest in yourself, whether that's listening to podcasts, audiobooks, watching videos. Setting aside, and I think a minimum of 15 minutes a day, I set aside an hour a day. And you can probably see behind me, I've been reading an average of a hundred business books a year since 1989. Doesn't make me a genius, it just means I have access to more information. So, step one is, approaching your job is not a job, but is a craft, and you are a crafts person and you're constantly trying to get better. Number two, from a leadership standpoint, again, I think reading, studying, watching, looking at leaders that you admire, and then I'm a huge fan for creating your own personal leadership philosophy. To sit down and list out, if I could be the kind of leader I would want to work. If I could really be a leader that people willingly follow, what would I do? In creating that list, and then here's what I, with the executives I work with. I say, put that on your desk or put it on your… look at it every morning before you start work. Say, this is who I'm supposed to be today. This is the kind of leader I want to be. Then at the end of the day, before you leave, score yourself on a scale of one to 10 for each one of the. 10 as ‘I crushed it today. I was very kind. I showed a lot of appreciation. I was very thoughtful. I didn't cut people off, whatever it might be.’ And then if you drop below and I used to hand it out to my staff when I had a large company, my entire executive team, and if I dropped below a seven, I would hand it out once a quarter and let them all write one to 10 or actually circle it so I couldn't see anybody's handwriting. And anywhere I dropped below a seven, I went to the team and apologised and said, this is who I said I'd be. I hold you accountable, responsible for you doing your job. You got to hold me accountable for doing the job, the leadership job. And I fell down on this and I apologise, and I'm sorry and I'll get better. But it's just like the rhythm, it's that constant in your face of this is who you're supposed to be today and every day to lead this company well.

[00:28:04] Sean Steele: Can I ask you a question about the first one? Because I've always found this really challenging. Like you, I'm a voracious learner and that's how you get to being a young CEO, right? Like, because you're always willing to take risks. You've got a super wide reference points, I always think, you know, like if you're a super deep technical specialist, but you are only like in one lane, your reference points and your ability to think kind of laterally or get perspective is much more limited. And if you're in a leadership role, that's problematic, right? If you're in a technical specialist role, maybe it's not a problem. So, how did you think about, I guess, bringing people on that journey? You know, because sometimes you might, let's say you take a role as a CEO and it's not your business and you've inherited a whole bunch of people and there is sort of tension between you wanting to, I guess live and breathe what you believe is really important in terms of lifelong learning, but how much can you sort of impose it on others? Like, you know, how have you thought about trying to get people on that journey? Because some people are naturally already there and they're doing it. Some people can be inspired by seeing somebody else do it and seeing, you know, what they're getting out of it and benefits and then some people just don't want to be on that journey and they don't want to do that learning. How do you think about that in terms of trying to create a culture of self-development and personal?

[00:29:19] John Spence: You're not going to like my answer, I don't let them stay in the company anymore.

[00:29:24] Sean Steele: Yeah. Right.

[00:29:25] John Spence: Yeah. I just got a small boutique consultancy now, I’ve got a couple of employees too. And they're both voracious learners, constantly doing stuff. But back in the old days when I ran one of the Rockefeller foundations, I gave everybody on my staff a thousand dollars a year and said, I don't care what you spend this on, just something you learn. I don't care what you learn, I just want you to invest in yourself something. And we were sending in my training courses, if someone didn't spend that money, they likely weren't going to come back the next year. I get a lot of people that ask, I'll give you a great example as quickly. I get a lot of people that ask me to mentor them. Not executive coaching, but students and things like that; Hey, will you help me out? I go, I'm happy to, love to do that. What are you interested in learn about? Let's say they say leadership. I go; ‘Great. I need you to read the Leadership Challenge. I need you to read this. I need you to read that. You read three books, make a book report on each, come back and report to me, and if I feel like you got the book, I will absolutely. Got the books and nailed them. I will absolutely be your mentor’. How many people in my life have ever done?

[00:30:29] Sean Steele: So few.

[00:30:30] John Spence: Or out of hundreds of people, they won't do the work. Years ago, someone said, you know, your business is kind of like a cult. And I said, yeah, it's a cult of excellence. You have a problem with that? The only reason we're successful is kind of a lot of people that are much smarter, much better than I am. And I just try to keep them learning and growing and get the hell out of their way.

[00:30:53] Sean Steele: Yeah. Geez, that's so interesting. And you know, a note to Founders out there, because I know lots of Founders and I've fall, I've fallen to this trap myself when I thought, because the natural inclination's, like, well, they need to make learning available to people, right? So, they get a LinkedIn learning subscription or a Plural site subscription, or a Skillsoft subscription or something like that, right? It's just dense gazillions of sort of items. But that's kind of like giving people Spotify with no playlists and no recommendations and saying, go. There are like 3 billion songs in there just go and they're like, huh? Like they're so overwhelmed by the amount of learning. Like if you don't link that to quality conversations. Like I've always built a rhythm of monthly meetings with each person that we call Zone ins. And the Zone ins are three things, you're talking about their objectives and you know, how they're going in Green, Yellow, Red in terms of on track for their goals and their projects. Two, we're talking about the values of the organisation and I guess how the kind of behaviours where the opportunities might be to live and breathe them differently. And three, we're talking about their learning and where their professional development gaps are, so that, in every single month, there is a plan for something that's structured that's going to happen, that's going to help them grow professionally on two levels. One, in order to help them be more successful in the stuff that we've agreed that they're going to do, and two, to help them. facilitate towards whatever their career ambition might look like. And I always want to see both of those things because now the reality is sometimes their career ambition is to stay exactly where they are. Great. No problem. Cool. Well, let's just make sure a learning suits that, we'll just be awesome at doing what you are doing in this job. Let's look at those things that can help you stay there. I think there's this almost, as a society, we've sort of inflated this role of the leader, whether like that's the most important thing. Everyone needs to be a leader. We all need to be a leader. It's like, I'm pretty sure there's no leader who's ever got anything done without a very wide group of people actually doing the real work. And plenty of people don't want to be the leader. And so, let's not put that on a pedestal, but let's still help people be the best they can be with whatever context of their goals are available so that learning becomes relevant and it doesn't become overwhelming and it doesn't not get done at all because it's too easy, I think, to feel like you can tick the box. I've given them LinkedIn learning. That's not professional development. That's not real learning.

[00:33:13] John Spence: Now, we're lucky we live at an age now where there's more information available for free than ever before in human history. And I'm 58, I've learned that if I can't run something, I just go on YouTube and there's a 12-year-old kid that's going to teach me how to fix my phone or whatever. I mean, I literally, if I'm doing something, I don't know, I'm just like, put up YouTube it real quick, so we have access. But as you said, it can be overwhelming. So, part of, there's a great company that, oh man, better Book Club. A friend of mine, Arnie runs it.

[00:33:44] Sean Steele: I've heard of it.

[00:33:44] John Spence: And what they do is they have a bookshelf of books virtually. You read them and do whatever you want to do, but you pay..

[00:33:50] Sean Steele: It's like a subscription.

[00:33:51] John Spence: Your employees to finish a book and you assign books that you think will be helpful. And if someone recommends it. The key here, and I learned this from one of my very first mentors, which is another important part of lifelong learning and career development, a guy named Charlie Owen. And it's when I took over a company as CEO, I was 26. I was in way over my head. And he would walk into my office every Monday and give me a business book and he'd say, Friday, I'll see you for lunch and you got to get me a report. So, for six years, every Monday I got a book report. Every Friday I got a book. Every Friday I had to make a book report. But here's the interesting thing he did that changed everything. I would give the report, talk to him, then he'd ask this question, all right, what are three things you're going to apply? And then he would write those down and say, you'll now be held responsive in your job for doing those three things, here is another book. And it was one thing to read it. It's a whole another thing to read it with the idea that I have to implement this and will be held accountable for implementing the ideas.

[00:34:49] Sean Steele: It's transformational. And if you think about the number of, I always think… I think back to the days that I learned speed reading, and I remember that the most important principle in speed reading is, all of the value in this book is in 2% of the words, and the other 98% is examples. So, you need to train your brain to look for the 2% of the words, and then you need to do something with it, because it's the only way that two percent's actually going to make a difference. Like don't be John Spence, read a hundred books if you're not going to do anything with it. If you're going to read a hundred books and do something with it, fantastic. Unbelievable. That's amazing. But don't get yourself caught up in the reading without the applying, because you're going to get obviously far more value. I wonder though, John, whether like, I don't know, I've got a 17 and a 14 year old and, you know, of course you want everything that you've learned, you want to sort of stick it in their brains and so on. And I found it really difficult to get them to want to do any personal development style work. So, they're quite capable kids and all the rest, but they don't lean towards books in the same way as I did. But I wonder whether when you and I were growing up, whether there was a, I mean, we didn't have the internet, right? And so there was like all of the wisdom was sitting there in these books and now they've grown up in this world where there's books are like, oh, like some old thing that's sort of out there and there's so much free content and all the rest, but the quality of content, therefore goes down and your ability to falter it becomes way more important. Like, how do I find good content? Because what does it take to create a book? You know, someone's really had to think about their method and the stories and how like there's so much that gets concentrated into a book, but on the internet it's just so cheap and easy to just throw out anything. And now we've got Chat GPT, and people are just chucking out content that AI's producing for them, it's like that may not have been super well thought about and sort of distilled or much have much innovation. How do you think about, do you think that's an issue for the current generation in trying to get them hooked into kind of their own learning?

[00:36:41] John Spence: Yeah, there's two things and now I'm going to, so I hope no one under the age of 50 is listening to this because I don't want to get in trouble, but I think one thing it's done, it's created impatience. I want the answer now. I just want to be able to Google get the answer and go do it. I don't need to go through the thinking process. I don't need to understand, I just need that, the answer. I see that with some of the folks that have interned with me, and I'll say, well, look into this. They come back up 10 minutes later, I got them. No, no, no, no, no, no. That should take at least a full day of research. Oh no, I went to TikTok, even the answer is not necessarily on TikTok. It might be there. But… people, you don't have to read a hundred books like I do. It's my Job. But people go, don't they get redundant? And I go, yeah, they get really redundant. And it's great because that's the pattern. If I read a hundred books on leadership, and you know, that's 10,000 pages or whatever, something more than that, well a lot more. And it's all says roughly the same thing. Then I can get a pretty good feel that I probably understand the thread that runs through all this. I think that's one of the things that we've lost is people going to 8 or 10 or 15 sources, and saying, all right…and not only just sources, but people that are well regarded, well respected, there's the big idea now, thought leaders, I think you need to look at an industry and figure out who are the three or four people that are really the true thought leaders and then follow those folks. And another thing I like to do is, when they recommend somebody, when somebody who I really look up to; Jim Collins or Tom Peters or whatever it might be, says, “I read this book and it's fantastic. Or I saw this TED talk.” I'm on it in two seconds. I'm like, well, if that person who I think is brilliant, thinks this is brilliant, I'm headed that way.

[00:38:26] Sean Steele: Absolutely. John, you have, I mean you had this experience as a CEO. I'm wondering what the biggest challenges were that you, did you have challenges that you faced as a CEO that, where the principles that you hold true now were sort of informed by that time, like sort of experiences where you're like, geez, if I'd actually known this at that time, I would've been able to resolve that more easily, or that actually really gave me something that sort of drove my whole thinking pattern around the principles that I've learned? I mean, obviously you're getting a lot of, you're doing this, you know, sort of pattern curation almost from all of these sources, but what about your experience as a CEO and how did that link to some of the principles that you hold dear now?

[00:39:06] John Spence: Well, there's something that I was able to change dramatically between when I was a younger CEO and where I am now. When I was in mid-20s running a company with doing projects in 20 countries around the world. I had a great team, but at the beginning I was way over micromanaging. I did not know how to delegate, and I remembered that one day when I looked up and I saw a line of people waiting in the hallway to come to me, for me to give the decision. And I realised I was the bottleneck in the whole organisation. So, I brought my team together, our team together and I said, from now on, there's four levels of decision making in the organisation. Level one, your decision, you own it. Positive, you get all the benefits. Negative, you take accountability. But don't talk to me, don't talk to anybody else. Level one, you make the decision. Level two, you make the decision, but you might want to get some input, advice, maybe not for me as the CEO, maybe the marketing or sales or finance or something. Get some input. Then you make the decision and you own the outcome, positive or negative. And if you have to do that a couple times, it should become a level one decision. Level three decision is we're going to make this as a team. We're going to sit, get the appropriate people, we're going to sit down, we're going to talk this through, and then me as a CEO, whatever you all decide, that's what we're going to do. Unless it's something I think will blow up the company. Even if I think we should go this way, and you all say that way, I'm going to say, great, I'm going to back you. And if it goes great, you guys get all the credit. And if it goes poorly, I take all the accountability. But I trust you. You're smart people. And if that's what all of you think, I'm on your team. Level four is, this is my decision, and I may get feedback from you all, but I may not, I may just make the decision. I might have a different view than you do. And if you do enough level threes where you trust them, when you pull a level four and say, this is mine. They go, okay, you've trusted us 20 times. We can trust you. And here's what I found out. This is the big learning thing is, probably 70% of the decisions I was making, I shouldn't have been involved in at all. Probably, 55-60% were level one. All the rest were level two. Rarely did I have to make a level four decision. So, what that taught me to do now is, when I hand something away to someone, it ceases to exist in my life. I'm not going to worry about it. I've delegated it. I know they're bright. If they want advice or input, I'm happy to give it to them. But I literally, like you and I were kidding today because I didn't realise I have another appointment this afternoon to be interviewed for a book, and this isn't, I just don't worry about my schedule. I’ll focus on growing the business, doing things that'll help my clients, things like that. So, there's a couple things. I just don't look at it, pull up like, oh, that's what I'm supposed to do today. I mean, I literally have gone to the airport and gone, all right, where am I flying today? Oh, Philadelphia! That should be good, I trust that all that stuff's been done well by people who do it very, very well.

[00:42:03] Sean Steele: Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, mate really made me laugh, because that level four decision, it took me a while to realise that I was sort of stuck in this model of trying to consult everybody on everything when I was a sort of young executive, and I remember we had this team one day, and everyone was, had to give each other like a start, stop, continue, on post-it notes. And so everybody had to do it for everybody. And then they basically went into the, like, you'd put the person's name on it, but you didn't know who it'd come from and like, go into the hat and you had to read out yours, and so you'd get this. It was like really interesting. You know, quit confronting for many people. But one of the things was my basic team in a nutshell said; Sean, we love that you want our opinion and we love that you trust us and that you want us to make the decisions. And sometimes we know that you really want to make a decision, but you're still trying to consult us. And so, we're going to give you like six or seven JFDIs a year. And I was like, what's a JFDI? And they're like, Just Frigging Do It. And that's like Sean, full permission to just tell us what to do and we will back you and we will follow you. But don't waste three days trying to bring us along and trying to coach us. And like, if you know what you really want to get done, just make the call, we'll be there because, and to your point, because there was trust and that they were getting enough level threes, level twos.

[00:43:18] John Spence: Yeah.

[00:43:20] Sean Steele: Ah, that's awesome. John, we're almost out of time, but I'd love to just ask you one final question. Is there anything that I haven't asked you today that you think is in the conversation that we've had, is a real kind of missing piece that maybe glues things together or things that, something you want to get across?

[00:43:33] John Spence: So, there's two things when I'm asked that question in an interview, there's two things. One is, with all the stress and anxiety and uncertainty and everything, a lot of the folks that I work with are under a lot of pressure and they're burned out. And it's my plea always to ask for help. Is, if you're in over your head, you don't have to do it alone. If you're facing depression or you know, a lot of difficulties, being the leader doesn't mean you're alone and you don't have to carry the load by yourself. So, be courageous enough to be vulnerable and say, I need some help. I don't understand. And if it's bad enough, go get professional help. And I say that because I'm coaching a lot of executives who were under a tremendous amount of pressure. And I really want to send that message out of it's okay to ask for help. Number two, I'd like to pass along the most important thing I've ever learned in my life. That's pretty cool, isn't it?

[00:44:24] Sean Steele: Yeah.

[00:44:25] John Spence: It's this, you become what you focus on and like the people you surround yourself with. Whatever you think about, whatever you read, you study, learn, whatever you fill your brain with, and whoever you choose to surround yourself with and spend your time with will determine your life a decade from now. The exact same thing with your business. What your business focuses on, your values, your purpose, and the people you surround yourself with in your business will directly determine whether it's successful or not.

[00:44:52] Sean Steele: That is a hundred percent true. And you know what's so interesting about that, John? Is, you know, people often can almost accept that separately. Like, you know, they accept it in their personal life. Like, yeah, I get what I focus on and I know that I might need to upgrade my neighbourhood and I'm going to be the company of the average of the five people around me or like kind of model and understand that in, but may not apply that to business. And think about actually the direct connection between the fact that your ability to communicate, get clear on that strategy is you telling everybody what to focus on. It's what you are personally focused on and in your neighbourhood or your peers are the people that are in your business. So yeah, I really love the connection between those two things. I think that's so true. Thank you for sharing that.

[00:45:28] John Spence: Oh, my honour. My pleasure. I'm happy to.

[00:45:30] Sean Steele: Well, John, you have really distilled a lot of wisdom. I mean, we didn't have a lot of time today, but you distilled a lot of wisdom for us today, and I really acknowledge you and thank you for the work that you've done. And I thank you for all of the dedication you've put in into reading you a hundred books every year, because clearly it's given you a significant reference set to be able to then try to make things simple is actually not all that easy because you're looking at so much data and so much input. So, I really appreciate the way that you're able to do that because it really helps people to get their heads around it. For people who'd love to hear more or see you more or experience more of you, where would you direct them to?

[00:46:04] John Spence: My website, johnspence.com. And then if anybody has a question, and I say this every time, if you got a question or you want some feedback, you want a book recommendation or something like that, my personal email is [email protected], and I answer all my own email. And I'm very serious about this too. If you really want some feedback or something, put urgent or important in all caps at the top of the email, and I will stop what I'm doing and read it. And if I don't have the answer, I will find somebody who does. And it may be sending them to you, and say Sean knows this a lot better than I do. So, you know, you know this as well, our job as leaders is to be of service.

[00:46:42] Sean Steele: Absolutely.

[00:46:42] John Spence: And there's an old Zig Ziglar quote, “If you just help enough other people get what they need, you'll get everything you need.” I'm a huge proponent of an abundance mentality. Help, help, help, and everything will be fine.

[00:46:53] Sean Steele: I'm with you. Thank you very much John, and thank you for sharing that. Folks, I really hope you enjoyed the show today. If you got value from John's wisdom today, you could help others gain access to it by subscribing and leaving us a review, because that just helps the podcast get into more hands of more people. Hopefully we'll be just like you and needing to hear it, or hit your share button on your phone and send this specific episode to a friend or a colleague who you know who'd also love it. I don't know you whether you realise this, because this only was notified to me by my team about a week ago, in the last 12 months, we actually became one of the top 15%, most shared podcasts in the world. Yeah. So that was super exciting. And to me it's like that's the most important metric is the sharing, because to me, I mean, our purpose is to help Founders fulfill the potential of their businesses so they can maximise the impact they can have in the world and the value they can create in the world. And that only happens if we get into the hands and more Founders. So, thank you everybody who's really, audience, for your listening, for your sharing, and that'll be an incredible way for you to share John's message. Thank you for your support. You've been listening to the ScaleUps Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Steele, and I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Thank you so much, John. Really enjoyed the conversation.

[00:47:59] John Spence: My pleasure.