[Music] what's up y'all sean here sam is in europe traveling around with the fam and uh so i'm on my own today and i wanted to do something cool and i think i got a great idea so i believe here's my guess i think this pod is going to be one that people really really like because i know i would have wanted to hear this at some point in time and the reason why is because most
of the people who listen to this podcast are some form of leadership right you might have started your own company or your own business uh you might be kind of an exact somewhere or a manager somewhere or you want to be a leader right so most people who don't want to be leaders are not listening to a podcast like this so the problem is me and everybody else sucks you know everybody sucks the first time that they
are managing people and um and this isn't like you know how to manage people 101 there's a lot of books that are written about this there's some best practices there's common sense but i wanted to share some of the unorthodox some of the weird things that i do that i have found work for me and they might not work for everybody but they work for me and not all of these people are going to
agree with not all of these will work for you but again they all work for me nobody i couldn't find any of this stuff in a book i heard about these either from somebody or i just kind of made it up on my own and so i think i have five maybe six different things that i do that are unorthodox but work okay so let me start with number one and this is called dr house or it's inspired by dr house so if
anybody watches the tv show house he always does this thing the show is like there's this genius doctor uh but he's kind of like a curmudgeon and um all the other doctors really respect him because he's amazing but uh he's kind of hard to work with one of the things he does that's amazing but hard to work with is he has these like three junior doctors who are kind of like he's
i don't know advising them or whatever they work under him and when a patient comes in and they run a test to try to figure out what's wrong with the person he doesn't just look at it and say here's what's wrong with the person right first of all it's usually not that straightforward second of all even if he kind of has an idea he doesn't spoon feed it to his um to his team instead he will usually slap
the the res the the like maybe the scan or the data or the the x-ray or whatever up on a screen and he'll say what do you see here or he'll say what's weird about this or he'll say what's interesting about this and then the team has to start thinking and getting curious and looking at the thing and saying well there must be something there what do i see and this is really effective i do this
all the time i will take let's say some data i'm looking at when i'm curious about something i see something that makes me go hmm and what i used to do is i used to just like share that with the team hey guys here's what i found look at this data this data shows that a is b and c right i would like give them a conclusion i'm basically spoon feeding them an answer they'd read it they'd say yeah that makes sense and
then they would go on with their day right because they didn't have to struggle to understand it they didn't have to be curious enough to go find it they just got spoon-fed an answer and they say yeah yeah i'm not surprised by that all right i'm gonna move on or oh that's weird okay sounds like you got to answer i'm gonna again move on so i do it the other way which does three things
one it trains the team to be curious and clever right because you're not looking for some luck i'm not telling you to go do ten more analyses i'm saying there's something in this what is it it's a little bit of a riddle the second is it's not a gotcha right like i'm genuinely asking because they will see things that you don't see so even if you saw one interesting thing they might find two others that you didn't really
appreciate and the last is it trains everybody on how to because you know maybe one person out of the group will see the interesting thing but the other four will say why didn't i see that and that trial and error that like guess and check is how people get better at stuff so you'll train a team of curious clever people who get good at finding insights in data and so that's the dr house technique i
recommend you try it rather than spoon feeding your team answers okay the second one i learned from my wife my wife was a consultant and she used to go to these companies and i was like it was always like i'm getting alignment right she would go it would be a board meeting of like you know yahoo's board meeting it's like you have 10 executives at yahoo and they cannot you know they all think they're
on the same page and then only when you ask them certain questions do you realize that like everybody has like a different you know game plan vision of what we're trying to do here et cetera et cetera so she got good at sussing that out but people are a little bit um not defensive but they're a little bit limited when you just ask them very literal logical questions that tap into
only the analytical part of their brain like if you say what are our three key objectives for the year they sort of feels like they're taking a math test and so she does this thing that was called the holiday party the holiday party tactic is she had me go she had to go to a whiteboard and she goes all right let's fast forward it's christmas eve um of this year and we're at the company holiday party i
want you to start drawing what's at the company holiday party i'm like what do you mean she's like just draw things that would make it an awesome company holiday party so i'm like okay so all of a sudden i'm having kind of fun i'm something creative i'm drawing i'm just thinking of cool that could be at a party right so my guard is down and so you know i'll draw like whatever there's
a dj and i we kind of laugh because the dj booth is like you know my drawing is bad and then i'll draw the next thing and then she'll say okay what's on the screen what are you celebrating and that question what are we celebrating is like that's kind of like what are we trying to do this year right what's the milestone that we hit and instead of saying what are we trying to do it's assuming it's already done that
we're already celebrating we're popping bottles because we hit 1 million users or 10 million downloads or 100 million in revenue whatever it is and so it's you know we'd say our big north star goal because it's like that screen can only have one big thing on it that we're all cheering our glass to so what is that north star metric and then she would say cool let's walk around like you know who's at this party
and you know there's a little exercise and as she unfolded this party it kind of rev at first it got me in the mood for winning right because it's like i'm already working backwards from the assumption that we've won then i identify the north star goal and then after we do that little game it only takes two minutes then we would say all right uh so how are we going to get there
right what would be the things that we would need to do now so that that party happens and all of a sudden we're we're talking and brainstorming from a place of certainty and confidence rather than fear and doubt about not being able to pull it off and the stress right because when you're in fight fight-or-flight your brain only works in a very limited capacity compared to when you are you
know at ease relaxed which is why you know great ideas come to you in the shower because you're you're relaxed you have warm water pouring on top of your head and so your brain kind of melts away and can start to you know put together different data points that uh that are not there when you're tense and so i love this tactic of the holiday party drawing game it really loosens people up it gets them thinking it
focuses them on the north star goal and then when you make a plan after that they go into that plan from in a state of mind of we already won okay now here's the opposite this is called the um the misery misery loves company tactic okay so whenever we're making a plan at the beginning of any plan everything seems achievable and um everyone's optimistic and it's hard to say it's one thing to
ask somebody what are the key risks in this and then people you know again they get a little defensive they use the logical part of your brain so a better question is you know if i was to um let's say you know we you go do this i go do my thing and we get busy and you know six months from now 12 months from now we we catch back up we're getting a beer here at the local pub in the afternoon it's four in the
afternoon we go grab a beer and we say man that idea was so cool let's assume it went wrong right so man that idea was so cool i can't believe it didn't work out now what happened what is the what is the most likely reason we would give that things went south and this is a way to identify the core risk the chief assumption the riskiest proposition in your plan is to sort of work
backwards from we're getting a beer we're hanging out it's already failed and we say man that thing had so much potential what went wrong what do you think is the number one reason it might go wrong and then because you're identifying that up front you can now like work against that you can get you can game plan around that okay here's another one i find that people get very defensive about
the status quo especially the leaders because as a leader you're sort of responsible for the way that the company works right you're responding like uh you're responsible for how many people work at your company right uh if i said did you hire too many people most people don't want to say yes and the reality is that certainly i don't know 20 30 40 of the time the answer truly is yes you've
hired too many people but if you ask ceos they'll rarely ever say yes and in the same way you'll say are you working on a bunch of useless stuff or are you working on a bunch of extraneous things they would say no i mean these are all important they're valuable right so people get defensive about their current plan and so how do you get how do you get people to uh to identify the fat in their their plan right be
able to trim the fat without the pressure and the stress of them feeling like they're wrong or they're being blamed or that they're gonna have to make some tough decisions have some hard conversations and because of that they just want to avoid it so here's what i do we play a game it's sort of like that you know that f murder mary game right where you decide you know if out of these three choices who would you who
would you murder who would you marry who would you have so um similarly let's just focus on the murder part which is like if i asked you right so i could sit down with with any manager in my company i could say in your team if you i know you love your team and i know they're they're all great they're all great in their own ways but if you had to do it what would be the three who would be the
three people that you would cut if you had to cut i'm not saying you will where you're not going to cut anybody but who would those three people be similarly like out of all the projects that initiatives are doing what are the three that you would cut if you had to cut three initiatives off which ones would go um you could do this with anything right customers of all your customers on the
roster your clients who are the three that you would cut where they're just a pain in the ass it's not worth the juice is not worth the squeeze and if you can create a safe a safe space basically where somebody can freely identify what they would cut if they were gonna cut but don't worry we're not asking you to cut anything uh and you do it yourself right you're not just asking others to do this but
you do it yourself and you think aloud maybe do it as a group like hey what would we what projects would we cut you know which team members are really not you know are at the bottom right there certainly is a top at the bottom who is that right which customers are the top and the bottom and if you can identify those it plants a seed and people once they've said it out loud they've heard a truth it's very
hard to unsee a truth and it might be a month later or two months later or three months later but eventually they will decide to trim some of the fat either on their team their projects or their client list that will help the team grow so that's the f murder mary tactic okay i think i've done what is that uh four tactics okay let's do another one this is the superpower one so this is a
way to build people up so i did this at my last startup and people really resonated with this which is i made a presentation about each person in the team i did this on a friday afternoon i said hey guys let's go do a little happy hour and i said i got a presentation for you guys i said you know i've learned that in any team you can you can look for two types of people you can look for people who
lack weaknesses meaning they're pretty well-rounded they have no fatal flaws but they may not be great at anything right they're they're just good they're at least good at everything or you can have some people that are amazing at some things and kind of weak in other areas and i've learned that the the best performing teams are filled with people who are amazing in at least
one area so you're hiring for an extreme strength not a lack of weakness right that's an andreessen horowitz uh framework that i really loved and so i said i'd like to you know i said but the funny thing is for most people they don't they're not even aware of what their extreme strength is and um because you're too close too it's so normal for you to be great at it you don't even really realize you're great
at it at some point it's other people who point it out so i'd like to point out for you the superpower that i've seen each of you have and then i would give and so i put each person's uh face on a slide i would say hey this is like for example hey this is derek derek's our designer derek what i've noticed is your superpower i don't know if you're aware of this but most designers that i've worked with
they're creative types they're sort of like you know messy desk procrastinator types they pull all-nighters when they get creative inspiration and they do amazing work sometimes and other times you know they get stuck with sort of a creative writer's block of sorts i said derek your superpower is that you're a great designer but you're like the mailman you deliver every day at the same time right like i
give you the the brief i scribble a um a scribble a poorly written address of where where i'm trying to get this package and you're able to interpret it like a mailman and say oh i know where this is trying to go and then you deliver it every day at 5 00 pm before you leave and i said i you're like the mailman i said and you know you don't work on the weekends i know that you're not the type
of guy that i should be hitting up for that like that crazy project we're gonna do on the weekend so you're like the mailman you deliver every day of the week except for sundays and so i gave them basically a superpower which is you have this amazing ability to consistently take a loose set of instructions and deliver on it and i gave him a nickname that goes with it that's why i call you the mailman
and then yeah that's your superpower and i gave it a little symbol and then i like you know then went to the next person i said oh this is fur con vercon is uh you know he's not gonna win any awards for for being the most eloquent speaker or the the most politically um you know polished kind of guy but man when i when you talk to fur khan it's almost like he's allergic to like you know when someone's
allergic to peanuts you can't even have a peanut dish you feel uncomfortable taking peanuts around them because you might kill them i said that's what it's like when i bring around you i don't even feel comfortable saying around you because you're so good at seeing through and saying that doesn't make sense or wait i thought you said this other thing so how how could both of those be true
right and so i you know you were like um you're allergic to that is your superpower you just can't stand it and that because of that it makes the rest of us up our game and not bring that bring half-baked plans or incongruent illogical plans to you because you'll sniff it out in a second and the beautiful thing is these things are both true and aspirational meaning they are this way but by giving it their
superpower they then want to live up to that identity you've given them and so you can kind of architect the type of team you want by calling out areas they're good but they not may not be the best at it or they may not be doing it all the time but by giving them their superpower they will start to do it more often okay so that's the superpower technique um okay i'm gonna give you three quick ones
the tesla master plan if you've never read it elon musk wrote a master plan for tesla um you know back when it started so he wrote the master plan v1 like 10 years ago and then he wrote v2 and basically he said master plan v1 basically was like you should go read it i've hand written his many times and then wrote ours wrote my own plan for my own business after writing his and so his plan basically says tesla's
job is to accelerate you know the um the society's move off of fossil fuels onto sustainable energy to do that we need to create a car that's high performance and high efficiency and so we're going to start with the roadster the expensive car then we're going to make the next car then we're going to make the the mass market model 3 car blah blah blah and he's like you know so
in summary here's the master plan build an expensive car to build the brand build a less expensive car to get more people on it then build the use the economies of scale and the learnings from production to build a mass-market car that will get to everybody right that's the master plan um and then he wrote a mastermind v2 but it is very powerful if you can write the master plan for your company all right it's
basically any and it doesn't have to be right right but it's you putting it out there what are we here to do how do we plan to do it and like you know here's the takeaway and if you look at his writing style it's very empowering style and so i like to take his master plan and then write my own all right the next one uh comes from the ceo coach called matt makari or something like that he has this
technique called the calendar audit which is very simple imagine you print out your calendar from the last week and you look at every every meeting that was scheduled every kind of block of time that you used and you take three highlighters you take a green highlighter that says that was something that i enjoyed that gave me energy you highlight those in green then you take a red highlighter
you say these ones that i highlight in red are the ones that i felt like my soul was being sucked out of my body right like these are the soul crushing energy draining things that i dread parts things of my day that i don't look forward to you put those in red and then you have the yellow that are like neutral and you look at that and then you say okay this is an audit i now need to take
these red things and i need to figure out over time how i'm going to get more green than red right how i'm going to phase all the red away and get to only green and that might be hiring somebody who doesn't who likes doing that thing because what's red for you might be green for them or just getting rid of it or minimizing the time you do it and saying do we really need three meetings for this
could we not just do it in one could this meeting be an email right or whatever so a calendar audit is a very valuable technique okay so that was so so far we've had number one the doctor house screenshot technique number two my wife's holiday party work backwards question number three the if we got a beer saying you know saying man it's a bummer that thing failed why did it fail right
that's number three number four is creating a safe space for the f murder mary game right who who are the three that you would double down on who are the three that you would cut three is just a magic number it might be three thousand for you i don't know whatever it doesn't the number doesn't matter same idea what are the bottom 20 of things what are the top 20 of things is what you're trying to identify and
with the promise of we're not taking an action on this right now uh so that's what four yeah that's four number five was tell each person their superpower and give it to your team as a presentation they will live up to that reputation number six is the tesla master plan number seven is the calendar audit okay i'm gonna do two more maybe three um number eight is peer groups so anytime i
have an objective like let's say i wanna become uh you know a great poker player or i want to get to 100 000 twitter followers or i want to build a dvc brand that does 50 million dollars a year i will create a text chat group of five other people who have were in the same kind of ballpark as me of where they're at now and have that same ambition as their top ambition uh mentors and advisors overrated peer
group underrated and so that's what i would do and i would start by texting them and then i would do like a once a month kind of call where we could spend three hours on the phone or in person hanging out shooting the together sharing tactics and strategies what's working for them and trying to achieve your mutually shared goal okay last one is the kickoff document i think this is number nine
a kickoff document is a template that i have and i could share this but uh if you subscribe to my newsletter i think you get it so just go to seanpuri.com and um and i think you can get it uh or if not just email me at sean shampoo.com okay so the kickoff document is basically something i do before i start a project because i believe that clarity is power and i think too often people go into
doing something without actually being clear of what are we trying to do here why are we trying to do it how will we measure success and what's the first thing that we should really do and that's what a kickoff document does so the kickoff dock has three sections the first is what are we trying to do it's one liner the next is what's a win look like and i define a win in two ways i say what's
the floor of this win meaning what is the minimum that i would consider like a successful good outcome like what's an achievable thing and then what's the f yeah win which is the like the the result that would make me safe f yeah then that really worked and so now i get kind of like a range i have like the bottom goal my floor goal and then i have my my stretch goal and um and then i also do an anti-goal meaning
what are some traps that i could fall into along the way that would like make this whole thing even if i hit my goals i would feel bad at the end of it because i like did this other thing right like for example we all have these in life like uh you know i would love to um be successful but i don't want to you know screw over people along the way and carry that guilt with me right so that's
a like being successful financially would be your goal i mean you'd put some numbers around it but then your anti goal would be i don't want to do this in a way that makes me feel unethical or ashamed in any way of what i did i'd like to feel proud of it right so those become your anti-goals or like you know i'd like to be successful but i want to be able to make sure i'm home with my kids every
day at five because that's really important to me so an anti-goal would be yeah i made it happen but i'm never home right so my anti goal would be you know never getting home before you know next time and so it's important to identify your anti-goals they're very clarifying for you um and the kickoff doc ends with one hour or your power hour basically like what's something i could do in the next hour
that would just get like create like momentum uh get me to a win and so this is not like do some research or make a list it's like get momentum towards the actual outcome so if i want to you know increase sales that's like make a sale make one sale or like if i wanted to grow my list my email list it's like i don't know post a thread on twitter in the next hour that will get some
subscribers to my list just something to get the ball rolling that's action oriented so you're not just always in planning mode so those are nine different little tips and tricks that uh really work for me that i don't think you'll learn most of those and i don't know business school or you know at your job that peop you know even if people try to do management training it's usually not things like this
uh these are my kind of like you know unorthodox pet tricks that i like to do that help me you know with my companies and so i hope that's helpful for you if it is let me know you can tweet it at me at shaun vp if it's not helpful tweeted me saying hey you know wasn't that helpful honest feedback i love honest feedback so either way works for me i'm at seanvp which is s-h-a-a-n-v-p on twitter all right [Music] you