How I Manage 500 Employees (My System)

the single most valuable skill set you can have is getting other people to do things for you because fundamentally if you know how to do that then you can get somebody else to do every other portion of the business and they can build it on your behalf and so in this video I'll walk through an in-depth process of how I think about managing people to get the desired outcome on a consistent basis and how to have some of the hardest conversations you have to have and make it feel easy so let me show you something

that I haven't done in any other school days but I'll I'll walk you through it so I just call this like my Management Diamond so fundamentally if you ask someone to do something you want them to do it if they're not doing it then comes the problem solving right which is what how when oops okay so if someone doesn't do what you want them to do the first and obvious reason they didn't know what you wanted them to do and so you fix this one communication this is by the way a really good framework for

having hard conversations when someone's not doing a good job so you say hey Carly I wanted you to do this and you haven't done it so I just want to figure out what the reason was so we can solve it or make it less likely to happen in the future so I figured the first was that you didn't know that I wanted you to do that did you know that I wanted you to do that if they say no I didn't know then you're like great now you know right now if they're like I did

know that you wanted me to do that then you're like oh did you not know how to do it which you solve with training which we'll dovetail into the whole teaching thing in a second but okay yes I did know that you wanted me to do it and I know how to do it but I didn't know you wanted it by now or by tomorrow and so I didn't have a deadline here so we assign deadlines when we tell people to do things and that's just again to hold them responsible now if someone knows what

you want them to do they know how to do it and there's a deadline associate and they still don't do it then the question is do they need some sort of incentive were they not motivated to do it or was something blocking them I could have the best chef in the world who's the most motivated know that I want to make an omelet knows how to do it knows I want it in the next five minutes he's like bro I don't have eggs doesn't matter how much I do like sometimes people don't have like we

actually had this issue with my editing team was I was like why don't you all edit in the building and they're like the upload speed they're like my upload speed at home is faster than here and so it actually just takes me more time and so we paid Google Fiber to drill a hole into the wall and here we are now they can up it's faster here now right but it's fundamentally like if there are blockers then it's like okay well can I just solve whatever that blocker is can I remove that impediment and so

walking through this has helped me have a lot of hard conversations with people and not make them hard it's like there's five reasons that you didn't do it you didn't know what it was how to do it when I wanted it you were't incentivize or something's blocking you any of these sound familiar and if there's more than one then you got to fix more than one and often times if you delegate if you basically you hand something off to somebody and it gets worse after you hand it off it's because you didn't delegate it advocated

it you just said here you go good luck and so that's a very easy litmus test if you hand it off and it gets better or it's neutral then you actually delegated it and so what happens is most entrepreneurs just find a human being that has a pulse say they have a meeting like this and just say a lot of things at them expect the person to have 100% retention and know exactly what to do when they want to do it how they want it done with no blockages the person's not aware of and then

be done be like oh yeah I already I told him once it's like yeah once not in a written format in no structured form like and then you're just yelling at them on a zoom call and then two weeks later you're surprised that they're not doing as well as you after having done it for years you know what I mean so we we think through this and this is how I think through um trying to figure out um employee issues so this one's fairly straightforward I my opinion this one's fairly straightforward the two hard ones

are these guys so from a training perspective I'll give you I'll give you an example I had to do recently with um a teammate or an employee here um I'll just give a so let's say there's somebody on your team who's a dick right you're like hey Caroline you're being a dick um the thing is is that stop being a dick is actually a pretty terrible directive and the reason is because they don't know what they're doing because they're dicks they're like you just want me to not be me and you're like kind of and

so what we have to do is so I call it bundling and un bundling terms and this is fundamentally why I think my content does better than most people's is that like you've heard me to find terms it's like okay patience is figuring out what to do in the meantime so if I told someone be patient it doesn't mean anything if I say be charismatic how do I be charismatic it's like okay I need you to have more uh vocal ranges when you're talking I need you to pause for emphasis I need you to say

people's name I need you to look them in the eyes I need you to nod when they're talking like these are a series of activities that when someone does all of them we bundle them together and say this person's charismatic and so rather than saying be charismatic say I need you do these six things or stop doing these six things that you are doing and by doing that then people will stop describing you as a dick and so we had um so a teammate who's really high potential like really smart hardworking did all that stuff

but something started happening and it started acting a little bit dickish and we had four leaders in my company have like sit down talks which normally wouldn't do but the person was really good at their job like I don't really want to lose the productivity and so I was the last stop I was like it's me or you're out so we got to figure something out here and he'd already been given a lot of instruction a lot of don't be a dick be nicer things like that but that doesn't help anyone change their behavior and

so fundamentally giving someone a frame of what I want to have happen as a result of this conversation helps fil or what you're actually talking to them about and so like me insulting them or making them feel bad doesn't actually do anything for increasing the likelihood that they behave in a certain way most of the time it's just Clarity just like when you hop on the call and you tell people to do this stuff immediately they will not like you and if they don't like you they'll complain more which makes it more like you get

fired you don't want to get fired great so all you have to do is not do that at the beginning of the calls people stop describing you that way he's like this is so eye opening I didn't even know and there was like four or five other items that I'd asked for specific examples so that I could say like stop doing these things and people stop calling you a dick and within a month people were people were like dude he's completely turned around it's like he just actually had Specific Instructions and so most of us

aren't willing to do the hard work of saying like what is this person doing or what does this person need to do which is why I'm a big fan of checklist because it's like this is what you have to do when you onboard someone like check your hair make sure that there's not a bed in the background like I'm like yeah you're onboarding a customer and it's got like you know a pink bunny poster behind you and it's like that's probably not the first impression I'm really looking for right so it's like these are the

checklists that you go through it's like first you greet them by name second you look at the notes and you tell them about the goal and then when you took a recording of the onboarding call it's like why does Sarah suck and Caroline's great just say well Sarah here's the checklist you did three there's 11 items Sarah consistently or Caroline does you know nine out of 11 and hers consistently get higher scores now if she if Sarah follows the checklist and she does all 11 and her scores are way below the other girls then it

means the checklist is wrong which means that's on you not on her and so it means that you're incomplete in terms of what you're trying to train them on and so sometimes it's useful to know that so if both people do the checklist and they objectively meet the things then there's other things that you don't know about and so fundamentally soft skills and hard skills are all just skills it's just that soft skills people just have a harder time teaching because it's bundled language and I think that's why so many people struggle teaching them so

in training the team to loop back to your question I want to figure out what the problem is with the person so I can try and loop to these things if it's a training issue I try and break it down as much as I humanly can if it's a motivation issue um it really comes down to reinforcing stimuli so either people do things that uh because they get stuff that they like or they avoid things they hate getting fired is usually a pretty aversive stimulus so a lot of people will do things to just not

get fired so it's fairly strong um but the best performers do it do things because they just like doing them like the best employees the best teammates they just work all the time because the actual conditions of work are more reinforcing than any boss can be right which is why a lot of people like on my team for example with like a lot of editors and whatnot they just edit in their free time they picked up editing because editing itself is a reinforcing thing no one call cold calls in their free time oh yeah I

just picked up cold calling on the side yeah I just cold call like on my days off just because I just like it like no one says that uh but the thing is is that sales and editing have very fast feedback loops and so you can immediately get off the call and get a reward you immediately get you see an edit and or you catch a moment and there's there's this F A lot of feedback loops that are really tight and good other roles have slower and longer feedback cycles and so as a manager you

have to basically artificially input more feedback loops into longer project timelines or jobs that require more complex tasks um that motivate people through reinforcement and so a lot of people I think in culture say oh someone did something crazy and so what we do is we say what happened that caused them to do it but we actually invert how Behavior Works which is people do things because of what happens after they do them not because what happened before and so that's like what happens after you do stuff is the latency of training and that's how

you train people and so anyways I I I ge out on human behavior stuff a lot but um motivation fundamentally comes from deprivation which is what are you most deprived of so if someone who's very deprived of Praise which many people are giving praise motivates them if someone gets praise all the time praise might not motivate them just depends on the person and so this is figuring out what are the reinforcing stimuli from someone's past that's getting to know your employees better so you can do the things that motivate them money by the way has

been conditioned as a universal uh reinforcer we've learned at an early age that this thing equals whatever we want so it's just a generalized reinforcer but there are more specific reinforc that you can give to individual people so yeah that's that's that and then block you just unblock the thing if you can afford it whatever the problem is so um that's my little Manifesto on management if that helped out okay cool oh great Where do you um where do you find like more information to better understand these Concepts because we're in a very in like

human capital intensive industry management is the the big piece that's missing for like every company and that's why so many people fail where would I find like this in more depth and in more volume so that I can understand these Concepts better so I've got a special CTA for you today uh this exerpt was from a school day so this is from the school winners who came out they were the top 10 and they asked me about managing team and so I answered that question but if you don't have a business then none of that

matters and so to start a business you can go to school.com we run the school games it's for people who are just getting started in business and that's what that's for if you already have a business and you have a big team and you want to scale your team we run workshops occasionally at acquisition. at our headquarters here in Vegas and so if you'd like to partake in one of our workshops you can go there and click the scale button and uh hopefully we'll see you soon so most of these Concepts were derived from the

ground up from just like rat studies with Dr cashy Who Sam Sam knows my my good buddy and so um I think most people just do a lot of things and just like see what happens like it's very halfhazard I think almost no one knows how to train period I feel I feel like understanding human psychology like that was always my found even ignore psychology really I completely ignore it I I would say that you talk a lot about it like you probably never heard me say the word psychology not the word psychology but what

you're maybe I'm blanking it right so so to get no I don't want to get too far into that because I will go there but um so this is this is like for everyone like if you want to basically have your ometer always turned on it's separating out when people give reasons because statements or just blank statements of like the other day somebody was like there's only three ways that you can you know make a customer worth more and then they and then they continue the sentence I was like that's just false they just started

the statement that way and a lot of people make statements that are just false they have no idea what they're saying and so we walk through a framework when we're trying to basically detect which is logic evidence utility which is what does this mean how do you know and then so what so I'll give you an example so I had um I had someone the other day say I'm stressed because I'm lonely and I was like okay I was like what does lonely mean to you it's a bucketed term right it's a bundled term he

was like well I was like that on Friday night you have known to text or that people don't respond back to you or like what what is the what what does that mean to you because it's there's a thing there's an activity that occurred and then they described it they chunk it up as loneliness but when you get two steps below that of to like what occurred what was the action that got stunted or something that you wanted that you didn't get then you can get a lot more specific we're like okay so then I

say all right so that was the lonely occurrence now have you been stressed before when that wasn't happening yes okay so then how do you know that that thing has anything to do with your stress they're completely decoupled right it's like all right and who cares you're stressed have you been stressed when things are going well yes have you been stressed when things are not going well yes so in general you're stressed when you're alive noted what's your point right and so we like breaking this down allows you to just be less confused about what

other people say and so the reason I'm going here is because most people are full of not purposefully not maliciously they just don't know any better and so they just like paired out other things they talk about pop psychology whatever and I for the most part have just erased feelings intentions beliefs all of these words from my vocabulary in terms of what influenc his behavior because I just only focus on what can we observe because if I were to say this guy is really motivated I'd say how do you know what does motivation mean to

you I said can you motivate me I was like Define motivation and she just like stood there and melted and I was like right so you want me to answer a question that you can't Define the word for so what's the likely that you get what you want really low and so the thing is is we ask questions about stuff all the time we can't Define which means maybe we need to ask better questions or at least know what the we're talking about and so anyways I bring this up because if you going back to

the motivation thing if I say this person's really motivated you'd say how do you know it's like well they do all the stuff it's like great then forget about concept or label of motivation and just say this person does these things great and so I don't care if you feel motivated or not if you do these activities people describe you that way and if you do these activities when I had the conversation with the the dick in particular right I said I want to be clear I don't care if you're a dick I don't care

if you hate everyone as long as you behave this way doesn't matter to me and so a lot of people spend all this time trying to be like there's these seven stages of awareness I'm like how do you know how do you know that what's your evidence for that and so what like what are the activities someone has to do okay they have to see your ad great then they have to interact with it in some way they have to take an action so if you go through the leads book I walk through the lead

stages in the book and it's only based on the observable they took a step then they give you their information they give you means to contact them then after you have means to contact like you these are the things that like no one can like fight me like these are the things that have to occur and so if you if you reason up from what can I observe with with my eyes it makes life a lot easier even when you're talking to like a spouse you're like okay I'm really upset like okay what does that

mean right now how do you know you're upset and so what what do you want me to do about it and so then you say like when you say this what do you want me to do when you say like if someone says like you should know it's like oh I'll play that game I'm hungry either means you would like me to go get you food you would like us to go get food together it could mean that you want space it could mean you're in a bad mood I was like but I won't take

one Q for six behaviors pick and then it makes things a lot easier and so you can start training real realistically like anyone in your company to behave a certain way by just saying when you say this what do you want to have happen and also when you're having the conversation with staff or employees or whatever like sometimes we in in the moment like someone disrespects you you want to like immediately insult them or whatever right but you're like okay well what do I want to have happen well if I insult them they're going to

be more resistant to me in the future but I need to have more influence over them not less so me counter punishing to prevent their their thing in the future it's probably going to be counterproductive and so what can I say that increases the likelihood that what I want to have happen happens and so it's like taking a second step forward and me back to think what's two the second order of magnitude effect on their behavior rather than what I feel like doing in the moment um and so when you're trying to look for okay

how do I manage people better or how do I train people better most training is just not chunk down far enough and so the people who are successful in whatever your education thing is come in more qualified than other people like have you ever had a student or a customer who you're like this guy's going to win no matter what right it's not you it's because of them because they have a history of skill they have a larger skill set um that they bring to the table and so fundamental the people who are successful with

your program are lacking the things you teach the people who are not successful lack those things and other things and so to have the most comprehensive training you would have to start with here's how you write words here's how you type here's how the internet works of course you're not going to do that because there's a base assumption which is what qualifies someone to be a customer of a certain level of skills it also works the same way with an employee there's certain level of skills that are required to work for this role and so

if someone does have a deficiency then the question is what's the return on effort I think I could teach someone who has Down syndrome to be a neuros a neurosurgeon well I could but somebody could right it just might take 30 years it's probably not worth it because for the same resources we get 2,000 other neurosurgeons who don't have Down syndrome right and so if you think about your customers that way it's like and simply thinking about like take out character traits take out beliefs whatever it's just I need them to behave this way that's

it just break it down to the activities and it makes a lot easier and so fundamentally it's like I wish I were more charismatic I wish more patient I wish I were more confident if you just debundled those things and just say how do I break this down to the smallest level and how do I just do those activities it makes it a lot easier and so usually when training does not work it's because we made an assumption of a skill set that they didn't have and so the more advanced someone is the vager the

instruction can be so I can say or Sam can say hey man you think you just Market school I say sure that's it that's the directive it's not like okay do you think you can make this many pieces of content you think you could run this many pieces of AD or like whatever it is right and if I'm like hey think you make an amazing product keep making he's like sure like it's not like do you think you'd have an activation sequence an onboarding are we're going to do these things I like I trust that

he's to do it because he has the skill set you trust that I can do it because I have the skill set and so fundamentally the more skilled the person is the bigger the instruction can be and so if you have lowl people you don't have a lot of room for vagueness so you have to be more specifically your instruction as people get higher and higher up in your organization you can be vager and vager with the instruction because they have more skills and so experts fundamentally just have more ways to be rewarded within the

same context like if you're really good at editing video then you have many things that reward you because you have more skills if you're really bad at it there's very few things that reward you and so that's what Mastery development is