Podcast Transcript

[00:00:47] Sean: G’day everybody, and welcome to the ScaleUps Podcast, where we help first time Founders learn the secrets of scaling so they can fundamentally fulfill the potential of their businesses, make bigger decisions with greater confidence and maximise the value and impact they can create in the world. I'm your host Sean Steele and today I am joined by incredibly special guest. The one and only Stephen M R Covey. Global practice leader at Franklin Covey for the Speed of Trust , CEO of CoveyLink, Chairman of the Stephen Covey Leadership Center at Jon M Huntsman school of business in Utah, Director at the Pennant Group. And the list goes on and on and on. This is probably Stephen, I'm assuming not a lot of sleep going on, but somehow you seem bright and well given all the stuff that you're doing. How are you today?

[00:01:30] Stephen: Hey, Sean, I'm doing great. It's so wonderful to be with you and yeah, it's an exciting time to be alive with all that's going on in our world. And I'm happy to be involved with this and thrilled to be on your podcast.

[00:01:43] Sean: Beautiful, mate. Well, thank you, I'm thrilled to have you here and I can't wait to get stuck into our conversation today. What might help is that maybe I paint a little bit of a picture of your background because it really informs, I guess, your global thought leader position on the issue of trust in organisations and why it matters so much for Founders who are actually trying to scale their businesses over and above just the strategies and the business models to do that. So here we go. So, you are New York Time’s a Wall Street Journal bestselling author of “Speed of Trust”, 22 languages now, more than 2 million copies worldwide, you co-authored “Smart Trust” with Greg Link. And you're about to release “Trust and Inspire”, which Amazon annoyingly will not let me have until April 5th this year. But we just going to talk to the future of leadership and how we need to shift from sort of command-and-control culture, which amazingly still pervades lots of our society today in leadership and move to a trust and inspire leadership approach. But you are not just an author, right? You're a practitioner. You are the Former President and CEO of the Covey Leadership Center where you increase shareholder value by 67 times to become the largest leadership development firm in the world. So, you know, I know sometimes Founders can hear experts on topics and they kind of go, “yeah, but are they just, are they just authors or are they actually kind of know how to do this stuff, have they done it in practice?” And you're speaking from a lot of experience there. I know you've won multiple awards. You're on the government's leadership advisory council. You've got a recent lifetime achievement award. You've taught this stuff in 56 countries now, and of course, in relation to your personal history, you're one of the nine Covey children from your beautiful mom, Sandra, who I believe passed sadly two years ago. Was it two years ago, at 83? Yep. And your dad, Stephen Richards Covey who passed 10 years ago. I guess he would've been what, 79 or 80. And he was the author of the original “Seven habits of highly effective people” and the eighth habit and many more, which were seminal books in my personal and professional development and pretty much every other CEO and Founder I know around my age just knows the name instantly, right? I was saying to you offline, more recently, my 14 year old son when he was 14, he is 16 now, that was the first actual personal development book I gave him was the “Seven habits of highly effective teens” that your brother, Sean, who spells his name correctly. Thank you very much, Sean. He authored and my son's been actioning that, and I got a huge amount of value out of your Speed of Trust in 2012. And really, it kind of set me into some deep reflection about where as a CEO, I was trusting my teams and where maybe I was holding things a little too tightly, because I thought I was sort of Superman and had all the answers. And so, I kind of feel like your family and my family have been part of a thing together for a really long time. So, I know that's a long intro, but I'm just thrilled to have you here, Stephen and I look forward to getting stuck in today. Maybe I guess, as a bit of a setup for us, we were chatting offline about the fact that, Founders who are building a business, if they're first time Founders they've often never built a business bigger than the one they're building today. And in my experience, Founders who find a kind of product market fit for their product or service have got a good business model that makes money, you know, cash flow is fine, the marketing and sales are kind of working well, but many of them can get, if let's assume we've got past the start-ups, right? We're not talking about start-up talking about scale-up. So, they've got product market fit. They get to a couple million dollars. Most of them can get from that maybe 2 mil to maybe 10 to 20 mil relatively comfortably, because they still kind of can control everything. They can manage everybody's priorities. They don't usually have much management layer. They might get to 20 or 30 people depending on whether it's a Founder or a co-Founder. But if they haven't led teams bigger than that before, and they haven't been in businesses where they've maybe had a great leader to model, they often get really stuck, because there's this big issue where all of us and you are about to get further away from the people, they're about to get further away from you. And there's no frameworks and there's no systems and there's no processes, but the relationship and the way they lead sometimes, really needs a lot of work. So, I'd love to, maybe for us to start a bit in the context of the new book that you're about to bring out and that sort of shift from command and control to trust and inspire. How are you thinking about that link between trust and inspiration and what it takes to scale a business through trust, rather than through sort of business model alone?

[00:06:13] Stephen: Yeah. Well, Sean, I love the question because you know, as Founders, as entrepreneurs, we're always trying to grow this business and we're focusing on a variety of different ways that we can scale it. And we're learning that we can scale it through process and we can scale it through systems and structures, and we can scale it also through strategy and a number of different ways we can do that. And I'm here to say, that we can also scale it through trust because what that will do is enable us to scale the organisation and our leadership and our influence in the organisation to grow and expand, to make sure that we can continue to attract and retain and engage and inspire the best people. And also, to bring out the best in people. And that's increasingly is a challenge for entrepreneurial companies today is keeping the best people, you know, winning the war for talent. There's so many choices and options that people have. And if we don't build a high trust culture that inspires people, we'll have a harder time keeping them, retaining them. They'll go elsewhere too often and find a place that does inspire them or where they feel trusted. But if, instead, we are part of that as a Founder, as an entrepreneur, if part of our leadership style includes that as we scale our businesses, that we're building trust in the culture, we're building a high trust culture that enables people to feel inspired by what we're doing and why we're doing it. Having purpose and connecting to people through caring and belonging, but also connecting people to purpose and demean and to contribution our ability to grow will go up and our ability to keep the people will go up, our ability to collaborate innovate will go up and all those things are going to be vital to scaling our business. And so, it's not an either or all the other things we talk about in scale-ups, you got to do those things and I'm just adding to it that leadership is part of the equation here, and it's hard to scale command and control style leadership. That's more literally, it's kind of top down and, and it's the boss and it's pretty common in scale-ups because the Founder is so good at what they do, and they're so passionate, they believe in it. And they bring in people that also can catch that vision but sometimes they have a hard time letting go and a hard time, really building the culture and building a complimentary team so that they're not just bringing in people that are just like them, but building people that have seen the world differently so they can collaborate and innovate through differences. That's all part of it. And I think that this kind of leadership is more relevant in our world today than it maybe 10 years ago was needed.

[00:09:15] Sean: Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you. It feels to me like the expectations of the workforce, of talent, have changed considerably in the last 10 years in terms of their expectation of a leader being not only bringing purpose and bringing inspiration and bringing something that's of meaning that they can contribute to like the kind of days of, “well, I just need a job and it's just money” that absolutely still exists. So, I'm not saying it doesn't exist. However, top talent to your point, you want to attract the best people. That's not enough for them, because they've got options, right? That's really interesting. What do you think has driven that? What do you think has driven that change? 

[00:09:56] Stephen: Whole variety of what I call these emerging forces of change. The first is just technology and all the changes of the pace of change, the amount of change, disruptive technologies. You know, here's an example, human knowledge today doubles every 12 hours and it was in 1982, they estimated it doubled every 13 months. And at the turn of the century in 1900, it doubled every century. So now we're doubling every 12 hours, so nobody can know everything, we don't need ‘know it all’s’, we need to ‘learn it all’s’. And so, technology has changed everything. The nature of the work itself is changing. It's more collaborative, more interdependent, more service based. It's a knowledge economy and interaction economy, versus, just the old traditional industrial age work. Now there's still some of that, but even then when we have industrial age work, it's usually augment by a lot of human knowledge and knowledge work into it. So, that's changed. The nature of the workplace has changed. And in the last couple years, you know, with this pandemic, work from home, work from anywhere, remote work, hybrid work combinations and intentionally flexible work is going up and that's true for large organisations, but it's even true for entrepreneurs and smaller businesses because the workforce has got these options and choices to look around. The nature of the workforce has changed. We have more generations than ever before with completely different expectations. I mean, gen-Z and millennials have a different psychological social contract of what they want and expect. And they want meaning and purpose, you know, they say millennials is called the purpose generation, but also the gen Zs, they want to be trusted. People don't want to be managed. They want to be led, trusted and inspired. So, all these forces have changed combined with the fact that there's more choice options today than ever before. I like to say we've gone from multiple choice to infinite choice. So now people can choose. And so, all of that is just saying, the war for talent never been more significant, never been greater, people have options and choices. And so, we've got to compete on that basis. And keep the best people and bring out the best in people. And you won't do that with command and control. You've got to do that only with trust and inspire, new way to lead in a new world. So, all those forces have kind of brought about these imperatives, they have a great culture to compete and that's going to be how we scale our business going forward in the culture with, you got to have the right people and trust and inspires a better way to get the right people.

[00:12:47] Sean: And when Founders are building, when you're thinking about how they're going to build their culture, some do it very consciously. You know, we interviewed recently Pete Cleary, who'd built a 200 million plus marketing services company. And he said, when he sat down and did their business plan, it was like 16 years ago or something. And I think it was, you know, six pages long or something, but four of those pages was actually culture. And he sort of really consciously designed the kinds of people they want to be interacting with and what their relationship would be like and how they'd be treated and all this sort of stuff. And that's on one end of the spectrum and on the other end of the spectrum, there are entrepreneurs that just kind of let it flow organically, but it kind of feels like that the dialogue around trust is maybe not in people's consciousness. When they're thinking about building culture, they're often thinking about a whole bunch of other things, but maybe trust is not a central theme. They might be thinking about transparency. Okay. Maybe that's important, maybe a bit about purpose, maybe about a little bit about contribution, but not the glue. It feels like kind of trust is the glue holding these things together. 

[00:13:50] Stephen: Yeah, I think you're right, Sean. I think it's both the glue. It holds everything together, but I think it's also a performance multiplayer. It makes everything else you're trying to do better. And so, I mean, you take anything you're trying to do, building a team, try to build a team without trust. You know, what happens is you end up with a group of individuals working on a project that people don't trust each other. So, it's trust that turns a group into a team, try to collaborate in an environment of distrust. What will happen is people will hold things close to the vest. They won't volunteer it, they'll not be open and authentic and real, they won't take risk, try to innovate in a culture of low trust. You know, it is people are afraid to, they're afraid to make a mistake but so, try to engage your people if in a culture of low trust, see all these, everything we're trying to do. We can do better when we start with trust. So, it is both a glue that holds it together, but it's a multiplier, it's an accelerator and it's an energiser for the culture and for the people. And you can do it first with your own people. And second with your customers, how trust will really energise everything and accelerate everything and multiply it. So, I can just give you one example of …

[00:15:13] Sean: Yeah, please. 

[00:15:13] Stephen: This was an entrepreneur, he still is, he's still an entrepreneur. But his company has become big now only because he has succeeded as an entrepreneur and it's Eric, Eric Yuan of Zoom. He's the Founder of Zoom. And Eric, you know, he left the company because he had this idea and, and the company he was with didn't believe his idea. So, he said, well, I'll do it myself. So, he left and he founded Zoom, you know, Zoom video communications. We've all been using the last couple years and his whole premise of building this company, whereas not only did he want to have a great product, but he also wanted to build a high trust culture. Because he said, “when you have trust, then you can move fast.” And he said, “as an entrepreneurial company, speed is the primary weapon we have.” But without trust, there is no speed because we hold things up, but when I trust you, I know your intentions are good, so I can move fast. And so the whole premise is to focus on building trust, deliberately, intentionally in the culture. And if you build the trust first internally with your own people becomes a lot easier to build trust externally with your customers and your partners. And when you do that inside out with your own people, first customers and partners second, and you're able to kind of really leverage and multiply your business through trust as a multiplier, as an accelerator, as an energiser. So, it's really an extraordinary thing. It goes beyond glue. I love the glue analogy, so I'm not discounting that, it together, but it multiplies it and accelerates it. And that's exciting. That's why Eric Yuan founded Zoom.

[00:17:02] Sean: And know what's really jumping out at me as you say, that was a metaphor that, early on in the podcast series, I don’t know the podcast number in front of me, but people can go back and listen to Narelle Anderson who built a very big sort of environmental recycling business. And the metaphor she used for the way that she engaged people was that ‘the journey of her business was a journey of sort of bus making stops,’ you know, stops A and B and C and D. And she would say to everybody right up front, right up in the very in the interview process and all the way through not everybody's going to be on the bus for every one of these stops and we're going to get to different stops and then we're going to have a different next stop that we can see. New people are going to get on. Some people will choose to get off and that's totally fine. So, our job as a business is about how do we maximise the ability? How do we create the environment such that people can contribute to their fullest potential whilst they're on those bus stops, and if they choose to get off at the next bus stop, no problem. Like, we're totally cool that we'll be excited for them that they're moving on to a new journey, but we know that rather than the fear that comes with, I've got somebody great, but I know there's something in my culture that's not going to get the best out to this person. That's when you end up, I think as a CEO, thinking about ‘retention is our priority’, as opposed to ‘engagement and contribution is our priority.’ Because to me, retention is a natural consequence. As far as it's appropriate for the individual, you don't want people to stay longer than they should stay. If they're starting to get stale and they're not able to contribute, well, they're better off in a different organisation. You're better off having somebody new, but if you focus on engagement and contribution which is going to require this glue and this accelerant of trust, it reduces the fear as an entrepreneur. It allows you then, as you said, to move faster, because people will take more risks. They'll feel less fearful. You'll feel less fearful. It really is an incredibly important ingredient. So, Stephen then what are some of the practical, sorry…

[00:18:57] Stephen: I just want to say, Sean, I love that metaphor of what you just described, you know, because if the focus is on engagement and contribution and I'll go one step further and say, and on inspiration on where you inspire people by what you're all about. And also, you can inspire both with purpose, but also with connecting with people through caring and belonging, that also will inspire. And when people feel inspired, that's even another level beyond engagement. And I love how you said contribution as well. That's the purpose and meaning, but there's a next frontier of engagement. That's inspiration. And to inspire me is come from the Latin term ‘inspiratory’, to breathe life into. So, I breathe life into something and you know, versus ‘expire’ as the suffocate to, you know, where something dies and inspire is to breathe life into. So, that's exciting. And there is other level of both performance and contribution that comes from that, but when that's the mindset. I love how you just said it. Then my focus goes away from just engagement or, excuse me, from just retention. It is nice to retain people. We want to do that, but that's a natural by-product of people feeling like they're operating on eight out of eight cylinders and that they're on fire and that they're making a difference, and what they're doing is mattering. And when you approach that, that way, including that there might be times and seasons. And some of them may choose to get off and that's okay. Then they see that your focus as a leader is on unleashing their potential, their greatness. And when people feel that, they give more, they love being part of it. And they have another level of contribution that they can make. That's the idea of trust and inspire. The subtitle is “how truly great leaders unleash greatness in others.” But that greatness is that engagement, that contribution that you're mentioning.

[00:20:53] Sean: And do you think Stephen, it would be fair to say that when you say inspiration, I'm thinking about, you know, interactions that I've had with people where I know that they have come away from that, you know, that time under my leadership as something that was inspiring for them, because they come back and tell me and we stay connected and so on, but I've always thought there's two kinds of inspiration. As a leader, there's the inspiration, that's okay. So, the purpose that gives it meaning. The vision that you create for the whole organisation is something that can create real inspiration for people because they know what they're moving towards and they're excited about what the potential is and how big the impact can be and so on and so on. But then there's also inspiration at an individual level, which really comes from helping people see beyond perhaps their own perspective of what they're capable of and helping them see that perhaps there's another level and then encouraging and supporting them to go after that. So, there's the personal inspiration. Like one is kind of rallying the team. The other one is helping the individual go, “you know, actually that there's another level here and I think you can do this” and sometimes, you know, therefore they get to exceed their own expectations of themselves if you like, is that a fair comment? 

[00:21:59] Stephen: It's a not just a fair comment. It's a beautiful comment. It's right on. There's really those two different levels or types of inspiration, the broader one based upon the purpose that could include the vision and you know, the contribution you're making at large, meaning purpose contribution, and that's the broader vision. And that's tapping into that, tying into that is critical, but I love this personal one you're refer into where you really are connecting with a person. Helping identify, helping them identify their ‘why’, what's important to them, what matters, but also seeing in them, their potential and their talent, their greatness, seeing it, communicating it to them, developing it, and allowing them to unleash it so that, you know, the whole idea is that you see it in a way that they come to see it in themselves and maybe they didn't before, but your leadership helped them see it, that inspires someone because they say, “you know what? Sean believed in me more than I even believed in myself. And I found something in me. I didn't even know I had.” And that is that's inspiration. 

[00:23:13] Sean: And that comes full circle to trust. Right?

[00:23:17] Stephen: Absolutely.

[00:23:18] Sean: Well, that comes for a rightful circle, because if they're going well, you know, my boss thinks I can get to this or, you know, like they've kind of called. It's like, wow. I wonder if I could actually do that. the next question's going to be, what's going to happen if I fail, how am I going to be treated if I fail? What are the examples in this company of how my boss interacts with people when there's a failure, like exposed am I, how much is It celebrated? How much learning happens? Is it, you know, do I kind of get crucified silently or publicly? Like all of that, that's going to be their very next question is, “Do I have trust?” “And can I trust that if I go for this, that I'm going to be all right.” 

[00:23:53] Stephen: Yep, absolutely. And that's why the trust is so vital for someone to be able to take a risk, because if they take a risk and fail, in a low trust culture that can be career ending or at least limiting. 

[00:24:06] Sean: Yeah. 

[00:24:07] Stephen: But, and they won't do it. And if people see that, gosh, this person tried it and got canned or now out of… 

[00:24:18] Sean: They’re shamed somehow. 

[00:24:19] Stephen: Yeah. They're shamed somehow, or they're not in the key contributors group. They been put in the pasture, so to speak, then someone's not going to do it. So let me give you a little example of this with a entrepreneurial company. This is a diamond jewellery store. It's got six different stores, this in the United States and this leader is a trust and inspire leader and he tells his people “look, I trust you to do the right thing and to use your best judgment.” And then he adds to it, “and you'll probably make some mistakes along the way in using your best judgment that, but that's okay as long as we learn from it and get better and you needed to know something, when you make a mistake, I forgive you in advance.” But the people, they feel so empowered. They feel so trusted. Now, look, he's not doing this in a vacuum. He's still trying to kind of attract and retain good people and instil the idea of what good judgment looks like, training them around business and the different things. But his focus is on building a high trust culture, where people are empowered and trusted to exercise their good judgment and in doing the right thing. And then the second thing, he does the same thing with his customers, where they have a warranty for life with the customers on diamonds and then there's no discounting of everything. That's just, you know, the prices, and he wants lifelong customers where they come back again and again and again, but the fact that he builds trust first with his own people enables him to build trust with his customers, because it would be incongruent to ask people who you don't trust to now go out and build trust with customers. It’s natural and abundant to ask people who you trust to go build trust with customers. So, he's built a culture and the culture is a high trust culture. People feel inspired and their sales go up, their shrinkage, you know, where people where they're losing diamonds or what have you is 100th their industry average. So, rather than people taking advantage of the trust being given, they are inspired by it. They're protecting everything better. And it's just a phenomenal story of building trust from the inside out intentionally with your own people first, it inspires them and then they build it with the customers. So, that's the whole idea, but there's so much inside of our people that this is another whole area of the skill, our people and their capabilities, their talents, and in entrepreneurs, you know, look at what's inside of our Founders and the entrepreneurs. They have so much inside of them. So, they having that same mindset that our people also have a lot inside of them. Let's try to bring that out too, for the good of our business and for our customers. That's the idea of trust and inspire.

[00:27:23] Sean: I love that. And I think it's very easy to thinking about this as only in the context of your team and your culture. But when you think about the extension to customers, I can only… you can just imagine an interaction where a customer is kind of looking at the way that the individual who's part of the team is talking about the business or the role of the eyes, or, you know they use the words, “they”, and it's not, “we”, and like the giveaways are really obvious when somebody is incongruent and it's not authentic. And so, yeah, that would be a dangerous situation. Stephen, I'm conscious of how much time we've got today. And what I'd love to do is, and I mean, you've got so many, you obviously got the new book and you've got a whole bunch of works that you've done. I'd be really interested to know what are three or four things that you think Founders should really practically do to help them build a trusting organisation. And maybe it might also be worth thinking about, or three or four things that actually they shouldn't do, or that are the kind of the killers of trust that maybe they're not thinking about, maybe is kind of in their blind spot, it's not in their consciousness and the behaviours that they're actually doing right now. Let's get practical. How can we help these Founders optimise the opportunity to do this? 

[00:28:39] Stephen: Yeah, I think that there are three critical things that Founders can do to build this kind of culture. It's very simple, but it's not easy. And I see these as not only actions, but really as stewardships, as responsibilities of a leader of a Founder to grow the business, but also not just to grow the business, but to grow the people with the business and so that you can continue to grow the business. And you're going to be able to scale your business because you're scaling your people. You're growing them as well as the business itself. And so, here's what they are. The first is the model, to be a model of the kind of behaviour that you're seeking. So, if you have values. model the values. If you're looking for behaviour from your people, model that behaviour to them. Don't expect them to do something you're not willing to do, but you need to go first as a Founder. Leaders go first. And too often, the Founders are almost because again, in some situations, because they're so unique, they started the company, they're the Founder, they're the visionary behind it. Sometimes, they're like given a pass to be able to be as eccentric or to be different and not always model the behaviour. But again, all of us are models. Whether we know it or not, the question is what are we modelling? And so, if collaboration matters to us, let's model being collaborative. If showing respect is important to us in our culture, let’s model being respectful. If talking straight, and having straight talk and confronting reality, taking things head on then let's model doing that, leaders go first. Model the behaviour. And I think in particular, if as a leader, you model humility and courage, that paradoxical combination and then even authenticity and vulnerability. And that's hard sometimes for a Founder because Founders are so bright, so talented and so capable that the idea of being vulnerable is, that seems out of, you know, boy, is that really a good thing? But the very act of being vulnerable as Reene Brown says builds trust because you're authentic, you're real. And look at it this way. Authenticity means real. That you're real. You are who you say you are. You're real. Vulnerability means you let people see into how real you are. I love the word intimacy. We want to have intimacy and separate that apart and look at it this way, Into Me See, you're letting your people see inside of you, into you. And the point is you're not perfect, but you're authentic, you're real, you're transparent. You're not trying to put on front or errors of something that you're not, that builds trust. So, you got to model first. That's the first thing. The second then is, become more trusting deliberately, intentionally. And here's the idea, Sean, you could have two trustworthy people working together, both trustworthy and yet no trust between them, even though they're both trustworthy. If neither person is willing to extend trust to the other. So, to have trust. Yes, you need to be trustworthy, but you also need to be trusting. And I find this for leaders, anywhere, entrepreneurs and leaders in big corporations. This tends to be the biggest gap that is missing. That people leaders are not trusting enough. They find all the reasons why they can't trust their people, and not enough reasons why they can and should and want to, but find the ways to extend more trust to your people. And here's what will happen. They'll respond to it. They'll be inspired by it. They'll rise to the occasion. They'll perform better and they'll give it back to you. But when you withhold it, they tend to withhold it too. 

[00:32:49] Sean: Yeah. 

[00:32:49] Stephen: I'm not asking you to blindly trust, you know, don't blindly trust anyone and everyone always use good judgment. Look at context, always have expectations and accountability, the trust being given, but find the ways to become more trusting as a leader, to ignite your people. And the third… 

[00:33:07] Sean: I think it's no different to the concept of love to be frank. It's like, you know, you can't walk around waiting for people to give you love, you need to give love first, and we have this conversation with our kids all the time. If you want trust, you got to go first. Like you have to go first in the same ways you said leaders go first, that in between leaders now and their team, they still need to go first, and between people if you've got a stand-off between two, but someone's got to go first. Like be the person that goes first. 

[00:33:34] Stephen: Someone has got to go first. Yeah, absolutely. And I love your metaphor with love because love is both, a noun and a verb, but love the noun, the feeling is a fruit of love the verb. What we do, you love someone, you demonstrate love, you show love, you sacrifice, you love the verb, loving someone creates love the noun, the feeling. Same with trust. Trust the outcome comes from trust the verb that someone's trusting me. And so yes, you need trustworthiness, but you also need to be trusting to create trust and that's trust the verb trust. That's the entrust and inspire, the trust is not the noun trust. Trust is the verb trust, be trusting and be inspiring. So, that's the idea. So, yes. Beautiful. So, model, trust, and then the third is inspire. And the idea of inspire is that it's not just for the charismatic. Everyone can inspire, it's learnable and we've already talked about it. In fact, you're already halfway home when you begin by modelling inspires. Overwhelming data that a model inspires other people, trusting inspires people, to be trusted in fact, is the most inspiring form of motivation, brings out the best in all of us. And then when you do the two things we talked about, when you connect with people through caring, through empathy, through understanding, that personal connection that there's, you know, it's like the expression goes; people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. When you demonstrate that care, that concern, that empathy, that understanding, and you communicate also to them, their potential that you see it, you see something in them that maybe they don't even see yet, but you see them and you communicate that to them. And they come to see it themselves, that inspires them. And then when you also now connect them to purpose, to meaning, to contribution, what you've been talking about, Sean, that it's not just about the outcome. We want the outcome, but we also want to contribute and make a difference and matter. It's not either or. It's and. And the younger generations in particular want to be explicit and deliberate about making a difference in this world, but you know what I've learned, it's not just the younger generations, every generation truly does. And so, you can learn to get good at this, connect with people personally, what you described, the personal connection, and then connect the purpose to meaning, to contribution. Both those things will inspire people. And in that sense, inspiring others is a learnable skill for an entrepreneur. So, those are three key things; modelling, trusting, and inspiring. Modelling is who you are. Trusting is how you lead. Inspiring is connecting to why it matters at the personal level and at the work level, that the work that we do matters, both. And if you do those three things, you'll begin to scale the culture into a trust and inspire culture that was going to win the war for talent, and you'll attract the best people and you'll bring out the best in people. And you'll also be able to collaborate and innovate better together, so that you stay relevant in a changing world. And so, you'll grow your business and you'll grow your people, both.

[00:37:09] Sean: And Stephen, I think that's wonderful and it is actually incredibly practical. And when you, you know, it can be scary for a leader who's never really had to do much leading before, might be a first time Founder, maybe haven't run big teams. And so, when they hear about something like inspiring, they immediately have this kind of internal seizure where they're thinking, “well, I don't know how to be inspiring. What do I have to be like one of those big vision, I'm not really a big visionary person. I might be a real introvert.” And actually, but to your point, it's not about being big and flashy and incredible PowerPoints and being charismatic. It's actually about the level of care. It's about the level of engagement. It's the way that you are treating people in that process. It's the way that you bring out the best in them that everybody else talks about with each other, by the way. So, when you are the leader and you think that you are, you are containing your interaction with one individual, you're absolutely not. The way you've treated them, the way, you know, the person that you just help see that they're capable of more, has actually just talked about that in the next 20 minutes or the next day with one of their colleagues. And that is actually how your culture is being built around inspiration, almost kind of from the bottom up. So, if you are one of those leaders, who's a bit kind of nervous about that concept. Think about this more as a bottom-up kind of build than a top-down build. And one other thing I would say what really jumped out to me there was, we had a guest not long ago called Maryanne Moony. And she's a sort of coach to CEOs and does a lot of work with CEOs individually as kind of human. She's not interested in the strategy and the business stuff. She's always focused on the relationship, the drivers, the motivations, and so on. And one of the questions that she asked, which I thought was so great was, do you actually have a culture that you'd really want to scale? Like is your culture, are you proud of what it is now, because if you keep scaling the business without addressing the culture, the level of trust, the way how empowered people are, is that healthy? Is that healthy for them? Is it healthy for the world to be trying to scale something like that? She's like, it's going to be pretty ugly. It's going to be broken. It's going to create all sorts of unintended consequences and your life as a leader is going to be much harder then you expect it to be because you are essentially multiplying problems and multiplying things that don't work. So, if you don't get these ingredients kind of happening in a smaller microcosm when it's kind of containable, when it's designable, when it's influenceable, it's much easier to do it when the business is smaller than to transform it overnight when the business is already large, so great opportunity I think, you know what wonderful. 

[00:39:42] Stephen: That's beautiful. That's great advice. Yeah. She is brilliant to say all that. That's exactly right. You want to build the culture intentionally in the way that you would want to scale it, a high trust culture that inspires. And that doesn't mean you're perfect. It just means that you have the ability as a team, as a culture to address tough issues, to talk about things, to focus on the purpose behind the work, to tap into the greatness of people. And I love your idea Sean of rather than being a little bit overwhelmed, that I've got to be this charismatic leader to do it, view it as “if I just focus on the one, how I treat the one affects the many.” If I could build trust and inspiration in the one and show a belief and confidence in the one that will impact the many and you begin to ripple out and it becomes a bottom up and an inside out a ripple effect. And it doesn't require the outgoing, extroverted, charismatic, visionary, because some entrepreneurs, some Founders are that.

[00:40:52] Sean: Yeah, absolutely. 

[00:40:53] Stephen: But others aren't. And especially as you scale it, the main learn insight is separate charisma from inspiration. I know a lot of people who are charismatic, but who are not inspiring. And I know many other people who are extraordinarily inspiring, and they're not charismatic at all, but they were very inspiring because they care and they helped me see something in me that I never saw without them that inspires. So, it's learnable and leaders, they're the cattle. They go first, they model, they model, they trust, they inspire. That’s the kind of leadership that's needed in our world today. That's a trust and inspire leader.

[00:41:32] Sean: Yeah. And to be honest, that's a kind of business that's going to continue to give you energy. And one of the biggest issues for Founders is actually, you stop enjoying your business because you're either having to do things that you're not good at, or that take energy away from you. And one of those things for most leaders is dealing with problems that, you know, are actually of kind of your own creation and not kind of knowing how to get out of them because they are absolutely draining. And so, this is a great, great opportunity to take a step back today and reflect on what you've heard from Stephen and think about, “Where is my culture at now?” A) would I be proud to scale it? B) If maybe there's some opportunity for improvement and there's always opportunity for improvement, how can I think about modelling, giving trust so that I can receive trust and it starts to grow the organisation and inspiring from kind of inside out, if that's a better way for you, such that over time, I actually will enjoy this business more and more, because I'll see people succeeding. I'll be rewarding. I'll be recognizing for this, like the whole business will feel like it's energy giving as opposed to energy taking, which can make me run out of steam at some point. Well, Stephen I'm so sad to say that we're starting to run out to time because it's been an absolutely joyful conversation for me and I really appreciate it and I think it's been great to be able to unpack some of the concepts as well as be get into real simplicity because it's not rocket science, as you said, it's simple, but it's hard. It's simple, but it takes work. It takes consciousness. It takes effort. You have to stick at it, which is not unlike the tenacity you've probably already built for scaling your business. Like, okay, you've got a goal and you know, you want to go after it. Well, you have to develop that same level of resilience and tenacity to build a culture that you can really be proud of, and that they're going to get the most, allow the greatest contribution and inspiration for your teams. Stephen, how can people follow along with what you're doing? You've got a book that's coming out. Tell us a bit about how people connect with you. 

[00:43:35] Stephen: Yeah. Connect with me through social media. I'm on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Instagram also, we have a website www.trustandinspire.com.  We have tools and videos and things that you can access and look at and gain insight and knowledge and understanding of, to become better at these skills as an entrepreneur, as a Founder to really kind of lead in this way, that is really so relevant in our world today. And so, www.trustandinspire.com. I'd love if you felt inspired by any of this, I think you'll love the book. Because trust and inspire because it's really on how to unleash that greatness in people, but it starts with seeing it. So, a trust and inspire leader sees the greatness. They see the potential, they communicate the potential, they develop it, then they unleash it and they're always looking at getting the result in a way that grows the people, then you can get the result again and again and again, that is something you want to scale. That's a better culture. And so, if I could maybe conclude by, you did ask about what's getting in the way, you know, the danger is something not to do is distinguish between management and leadership, and manage things but lead people. The danger comes when we start to manage people as if they were things. And if you try to manage people like things you'll end up with no people and just a lot of things, because people will leave. They'll go find a better place. So that's a watch out. Don't manage people the same way you manage things, distinguish. Manage things, lead people. 

[00:45:19] Sean: Yeah. 

[00:45:20] Stephen: And don't treat them the same. Another is simply this don't focus merely on motivation, People are whole people, body, heart, mind, spirit, motivation is kind of an extra carrot and stick, command and control approach. Nothing wrong with motivation, with rewards, carrot and stick, but it's insufficient in our world today because people not only have a body and economic need, they have a heart, a socially emotional need, a mind, a desire for contribution, a spirit, meaning purpose, and meaning to matter and contribution. And so, you're trying to inspire, not merely motivate. And the danger if we only focus on motivation and not inspiration, and we manage people like their things, those are two key watch outs. And so that's why trust and inspire leadership is more relevant for our times because it shifts and crosses the chasm from the old command and control model into a whole new way of thinking about people and leadership. And that is something you want to scale. And when we scale this as entrepreneurs. We'll succeed, first with our people then in the market, inside out. That's the message. Thanks so much for this chance to be with you, Sean, with your audience. And I'm an entrepreneur at heart. Having built our business, running it and I come from that. Those are my roots and I know this works at a practical, personal level. Having done it. Having coached others in doing this. And I'd love to see all of our viewers and listeners have so much success, not only in scaling the business, but scaling the culture so that you can continue to do this as you move forward.

[00:46:58] Sean: Absolutely, wonderfully said. Thank you so much, Stephen for your time. Folks, I'm sure you've enjoyed the show today and a couple of things before you, go. Of course, if you've liked it, please jump on Apple Podcast or your favourite platform, find a way to review or like it, or share it with somebody else so they get the opportunity to hear from Stephen’s wisdom. You can of course go to the website, www.scaleuppodcast.com. You can drop your email there and we'll let you know when tools are coming out from guests. And when new episodes are about to be released. You can find us on all the socials. The handle is @scaleuppodcast. But remember, in the context of your ambitions to scale, there's times where it gets really, really hard. It absolutely does. And so, this is a great opportunity for you to, number one, always remain committed to, and just unshakable in your faith that you're going to succeed. And two, as we always say at the end of every episode, you have to stay flexible in your behaviour to get there. And this is a great opportunity to take a step back today and just think consciously about the culture you've got, the culture you want, a culture that would make you excited to come to work every day as the Founder and a culture that really will help get the most out to people and give them a great place to do their best work. Thank you very much, Stephen. You've been listening to the ScaleUps Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Steele. Look forward to speaking with you again next week. Thank you very much. Stephen M R Covey.

[00:48:16] Stephen: Thank you, Sean. Thank you everyone.

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