Shawn Promotes a COO

This is the last of the cherry-picked episodes. Scott asks a question and Shawn wants to know why.

What is 2 Parachutes Podcast?

The Two Parachutes Podcast is a collaboration, well, more like a conversation, between a CEO and an FBI Agent. Shawn Baker-Garcia and Scott Olson first met when they were working at US Embassy Baghdad; Scott for the FBI and Shawn for the US State Department. Over the years they’ve worked together, given advice and assistance to each other, and now see that the synergy which comes from open, civil, and thoughtful discussion is very much needed in the modern discourse. Join them as they dive into everything interesting to humanity. The goal of 2PP is to recreate the experience most people have had when they stumble into an insightful conversation with a new acquaintance at a conference or a dinner party. The kind of conversation that makes the rest of the room stop talking and listen. The kind of conversation that gets your mind working as new thoughts tumble out. Let the 2 Parachutes Podcast drop into your world!

Scott: 00:04

Hey, Shawn.

Shawn: 00:05

Hi, Scott. How are you?

Scott: 00:06

I'm doing pretty good. It's Thursday.

Shawn: 00:08

It is. It is. It's well, the week's going quickly as I'm sure you're probably feeling that as well. Yeah.

Scott: 00:17

I don't know. Maybe not as quickly as it is for you.

Shawn: 00:19

Yeah. Yeah.

Scott: 00:21

Those short weeks, you

Shawn: 00:22

know, for the nonprofit, we're just like, it feels like you have to do triple the work and then you have half the time in some sense to kind of get through your week. But we're in a good spot, actually. Everybody's in a real good mood and there's an uptempo, which I am enjoying. So yeah.

Scott: 00:42

Excellent. Excellent. I'm curious if you're talking about you as the CEO, if you've done any more work on figuring out the stuff that you're good at and the stuff that you don't like and pulling somebody in to do the stuff that you're not quite as good at at the CEO level, like operating officer level. Give me

Shawn: 01:09

What made you ask that? No. A minute. Like, am getting like spooky chill. Like what made you specifically ask that today?

Scott: 01:20

This is all instinct for me. This is just what came to the top of my brain when

Shawn: 01:28

I don't know. Started talking. We we might have some situation here. I'm not even kidding you. I literally just basically promoted my really good friend who's been working with me as, you know, kind of part time because he has a real day job at Northrop Grumman.

Shawn: 01:45

He's been like a a senior program manager because what he'll do is go in and work on the projects with the juniors and he'll, you know, because show them the ropes and everything. But we literally had a conversation today where I I offered him, I said, I think you need to be my COO.

Scott: 02:02

Very

Shawn: 02:02

nice. So like, I feel like you like volleyball set that. And I'm like, well, how did you know? Like, yeah, so that's really weird. It's a big deal.

Shawn: 02:15

And he has been, since he has sort of taken more of a role in the operations side of things rather than just the sort of projects and programs, it has been a tremendous reliever for me, not only of kind of sharing that administrative burden that I'm not crazy about to begin with, not because I don't like opera. I actually really enjoy operations oddly enough. Like to me, because if that was, if I was COO, I'd just be like, bam, bam, bam. But it's all that umbrella sort of like being that bridge between the board of directors as the executive advisory body and then you know, trying to do one part subject matter expert in our, you know, capacity building engagements and one part, you know, manager, right, which is just personnel, HR, one yeah, it's just it gets a little muddy and murky. But but Terry is a natural at operations, and he's one of the most phenomenal trainers of humans that I have ever seen in the sense that he's he's not always, like, you know, perfectly spot on with certain things or anything like that, but he gets the people part of this so so well.

Shawn: 03:29

And and I tend to get really I'm I'm a good team builder. I'm a good team player. But if if I'm distracted and I've got too many other things to do, as we've experienced on this show, my efficiency kicks in, instinct kicks in, and I can quickly become, like, all business. I'm just like, okay. We gotta run through you know?

Shawn: 03:51

Whereas he is always able, regardless of how busy or swamped he is, he always has this really, it's a very southern, like, vibe, you know, where it's just like, you know, he's got the accent and he's talking in a slightly slower manner and he's very affable, joking, laughing, he's boisterous, but he gets down to business. And that's the kind of bridge I needed to kind of make the hard admin y stuff. For me, like it's managing me up. You know what I mean? And and me being able to enjoy it rather than just be overwhelmed and consumed by what I have to do and feeling like I'm the only one on this sinking ship because everybody else is in a raft lifeboat.

Shawn: 04:36

You know what I mean? And I'm like, I'm responsible for saving the Titanic singularly, and I it's just insane. So it's it's great. Like, I this last couple weeks, I'm in a much better, like, headspace. I am enjoying my job again for the first time in probably years, honestly.

Shawn: 04:54

And it was as simple as getting a co pilot, somebody who who can do the stuff that that I need to be done so that I could get back to enjoying the stuff that I have to do and giving me a little more freedom to do the things that are really at the core of what my interests and skill set are so that I'm not fully burdened down by just administrative like, you know, red tape and, you know, kind of the mire of, you know, spreadsheets and you know what I mean? Just the stuff that it's yeah, I just that's not my primary. This is this is the thing that motivates me and gets me up in the morning. It probably doesn't really motivate many people, to be honest. Even people who do it, I'm sure, you know, their eyes get tired after a while.

Shawn: 05:38

Yeah, so it's been a great few weeks. And so, that's a great question and it was good timing.

Scott: 05:44

Yeah, it's an interesting thing. As people grow and develop, we see that, you you get into this, place where you have more to do than one person can possibly do. And a lot of people, their initial instinct is, well, I'm just gonna work longer and harder because I wanna show that example to my team. And it's a bad example. And then when you're looking at, okay, where do I need help?

Scott: 06:17

Your instinct is to get help and give the jobs that you love and that you're good at to other people because those jobs make you feel good and you don't wanna feel like you're giving the garbage y jobs to other people. And that's another trip up because you wanna put your people where they're strong. You people to do difficult things. And the only way you can do that is that if you give them difficult jobs that they're actually good at. And it's the same for you.

Scott: 06:57

What you wanna do is to keep the work that makes sense to you. It's work that only you as the CEO can do, but it's also the stuff that you're good at because that keeps you efficient and keeps you productive and keeps you knocking it out of the park. And it's that challenging feeling where you're looking at the stuff that you actually don't wanna do and getting stuck in this, well, I don't wanna do this. And then the hidden conclusion is therefore nobody wants to do this. And yeah, the person who loves spreadsheets and loves data and loves all the things that are a real challenge for you, sure their eyes get tired.

Scott: 07:36

Sure, they need a rest at the end of the day, but it actually doesn't mean that they're suffering.

Shawn: 07:43

Right,

Scott: 07:43

And recognizing that, recognizing that it's not a matter of finding somebody to do the bad jobs, it's recognizing that there are a lot of people out there for whom jobs that are bad or frustrating for you are actually really good for them. And it's like last week. And my mom and the way she cuts horse tails, right? I can't do that, but she can't do it any other way. And so something that's tedium for me is not tedium for her, it's actually freedom for her.

Shawn: 08:21

And think we'd Resatisfaction, to she might get satisfied out of that too, right?

Scott: 08:26

Exactly, it's satisfaction and fulfillment. And so the human part of this, which really is what 2 Parachutes Podcast is all about, is finding all the different ways that we can recognize humanity in everybody who's not me. And from recognizing that humanity, understanding without agreement, I don't have to cut horse tails the way my mom does. Clipping everyone and painting the little weed killer down each severed root ball. I don't have to love that to understand that she does and to respect that she does it that way.

Scott: 09:13

It's the same way for your COO. And I hope that you take every job that you just hate doing and make a decision about whether he would love it. And he loves it, let him figure it out. And if he doesn't love it, then that's part of your work.

Shawn: 09:31

Figure it out together.

Scott: 09:33

It's- Fighting somebody who loves it and giving it to them.

Shawn: 09:36

It's true. And one of the most valuable things that I have recently just, that has manifested for me as sort of like a key takeaway of the last few years is, you know, I think it's been so important to realize that it's also not just question of, you know, is being able to assess maybe you don't like a certain thing or maybe something you're not suited to it and so you're just not as good at it, which makes it feel very difficult and time consuming and unsatisfying. But a lot of the time, I think too, now that Teri's been on the last few weeks, is me just realizing and I always knew this on some level because I've had to unpack these layers with partners around the world for almost two decades now. So it's funny how it's easier for you to do outward than it is for you to do inward. Think that's a kind of a life maxim.

Shawn: 10:30

It's a truth that we all sort of fall victim to from time to time, if not frequently. But I just realized that, you know, it's not that any of this stuff was hard or even unpleasant because I am very satisfied by productivity of outcome, right? So if I can check a list off, then it doesn't matter what I'm doing. If it's inputting payroll or if it's, I don't know, reconciling an invoice or something, as long as it's materially obvious that like I started the day here and now I'm here at the end of the day. Is a lot of what I was struggling with was simply because it was kind of garbage in garbage out as like I didn't understand the platform functionalities like for QuickBooks Online or something or certain systems that we're working within.

Shawn: 11:19

But neither did many other people who I was actually asking to become literate on this platform in the absence of knowing, in the absence of my being able to actually cultivate that mastery in you. It's like kind of like we because we've been in this all hands on deck, everybody's wearing 10 hats mode for so long that we just had to kind of quickly assess who's the best at approximately which of these tasks didn't mean they were masters at it. It just means they demonstrated the highest aptitude or willingness to do it and learn it. So a lot of the problems that I've been suffering from and by extension, the organization because it all trickles, you know, is just simply realizing that those situations helped us to stay afloat and kept us going. But it really mucked up the system because the people doing the things that we had doing those things were not super like literate on what they were doing either.

Shawn: 12:21

And so now we're sort of cleaning house and seeing, oh, there's where the pipes got gunked up here. And this is why that made this so difficult. So it's like layers of sort of issues that are created. And maybe that's like a startup epiphany or something, depending on the type of startup you are and how fast you scale, is just realizing that it's so essential to make sure that as early as you can possibly do it, to get the right people to do the right things in the organization, especially those that those duties or responsibilities. And I'll specifically say finances is one of them.

Shawn: 12:59

Your accounting has to be pristine and it has to be done by people who are trained and educated and know how to do it. You kind of wing it for a while, but after about a year, if you've got a steady revenue or increase of revenue to the scale that we did rapidly, it's going to get real ugly later down the line because here comes an audit and now you're realizing all of these things were not done in such a way. It's not that you necessarily did anything illegal or super unethical. And we didn't do anything illegal or unethical, but there's so many inefficiencies that produce suboptimal outcomes from our processes that now we're having to go back and clean it all up. It's just four years worth of data.

Shawn: 13:45

Cleanup is, as I'm sure you can appreciate, it's a lot. It's really a lot, and it causes a lot of heartache for a lot of us.

Scott: 13:52

Yeah. And think, you know, I come from government and not business, and so it's easy for me to think I'm an expert in this, because it's not that common in government. But I think, as I've been retired from the FBI for eight years now, and continue to interact in non government, if you look at successful businesses, I think what you see is the cycle of that. And sure it's for startups, because you need to get something out of the ground quickly and you need it. You know, there's a huge difference between having nothing and having something, but you also need to refine.

Scott: 14:39

And once you have something, you need to go back through that cycle, whether you're just taking the cobbled together solution and making it a refined, more highly functioning solution, or you're scaling. You have to continually look at processes. And I think businesses that fail, and I think what government struggles with is that once you have something working, you think you're fine. And you're actually not. And that's where people get burned out and where, you know, line level and mid level people go, you know, why is our system like this?

Scott: 15:19

And in government, what you get is, well, this is the way we've always done it. I don't think you see that as much in business because businesses who have the, this is the way we've always done it, at some point they struggle and a lot of them fail. And so they disappear. Government might fail, but it never disappears. Right.

Shawn: 15:38

Until recently. Yeah.

Scott: 15:40

Well, I mean, and even still, I mean, you can, you know, make your list of top five things that are happening in government right now that are, you know, in your opinion, new and outrageous, and then give them to a historian. And I would be shocked if a US history major couldn't find very closely aligned examples of those five things having previously. My People point was are people.

Shawn: 16:20

Yeah, no, my point was just the shrinkage. Because government, the thing it typically doesn't like to do or doesn't do naturally on its own is shrink. It typically expands, you know? And so that was just a nod out to the fact that like in some cases it is actually shrinking, which again, I don't actually think is a bad thing at all. I think that's actually a really important necessary thing.

Shawn: 16:46

Yeah, so and that's in a way, that's what we did, right? We actually had to shrink. And then because of that shrinkage, it forced fewer of us to be more cognizant of what was actually happening and then realizing, oh, damn, like this, this is a problem. We got to go fix that or, you know, and it's so it's been a great journey for me. At the end of all of this, I don't know what I'm going to have to show for the effort or anything other than I know that we touched a lot of people and made a lot of change around the world while we were doing this.

Shawn: 17:25

But one thing I know for myself as a personal point of growth is going to be that, well, I'll tell you what, I could put up a two page checklist of, hey, I'm thinking about starting a nonprofit or, I'm thinking about starting a for profit in the government contracting space. Boom. I'm going to tell you like that now. I can walk away from this. And I would be a wonderful sounding board for anybody who's interested to do that because the lessons that I feel like I've taken from this were painful and they were arduous.

Shawn: 17:56

But the clarity I have right now after having survived through it all and now seeing what life looks like on the other side of, you know, kind of having our workforce downsized due to an external, you know, sort of trigger is is just really relieving because now I can kind of see when I was in the middle of the war, it's like that fog of war thing I didn't know why things were tough and weird. You know what I mean? And I just chalked it up to I'm just not cut out to be CEO. That may still be true. But now I at least know, well, this is where the problems were occurring, whether it's a systems problem or whether it's how we were training and engaging with our sort of mid level management staff and then the juniors.

Shawn: 18:48

And so that is really extremely exciting for me because now I can look back and say, Okay, like we had really capable people. If I could do it all over again, here are the things that I would pay more attention to. Out the gate, I can say the first thing is I went too wide, too fast, and there was not enough depth to cover down on everything that I was trying to accomplish. In my mind, it all had to be done simultaneously. In retrospect, I would have moved far slower.

Shawn: 19:19

I would have consolidated a capability within the organization in the system and then expanded out and then done the same thing in a very measured, slower progression. And I don't know if that'll help anybody listening to this, but, you know, if you're for whatever reason, you find yourself as a startup leader and you have the benefit of riches and, you know, you have the luxury of having a lot of work thrown at you, just just watch the speed at with which you scale. Be careful what you ask for because, the weight of of all of that success, it it will certainly be a potential vulnerability. You know? Yeah.

Scott: 19:59

I love that so much and it reminds me of one of my favorite stories out of sports, because as listening to you, I'm hearing you say, I've been in this CEO role and I don't know if I'm any good at it or not. I'm sure when you launched, you were, I have the skill to do this. I'm gonna be a great CEO. And once you've gotten knocked down and gotten up a couple of times, it's not humbleness, it's just reality. The more you know, the more you see.

Scott: 20:31

If you don't see that much, you can control everything. When you see what's actually out there, you can really see things. But I'm sort of drawing a long connection, but I think it's an important one because you've been a CEO and now you're on the cusp of, you can still play the game, you can still be a CEO, but you're starting to see so many things and you're transitioning from being the player on the field to being the coach on the sidelines. And what's fascinating about coaches is some of them were average players, not great players. Some of them never played the game they coached at all, but they just learned how to be a coach.

Scott: 21:20

And the skill set of a coach is fundamentally different than the skill set of a player. And the idea that you have to have played the game to be a good coach, think is demonstrably not true because there are very few, pick a sport, there are very few top level star players who then become coaches. And in my opinion, it's because the personality that it takes, the competitiveness it takes to be an athlete is a very different skill than the coaching and the getting other people to do this stuff. Because what's really fascinating about, coaches in athletics is their job is to win a championship, but they actually can't play. In business, you can be the CEO.

Scott: 22:13

Your job is to use that company to make money, and you can still go on sales calls. You can still do the accounting. You can still play. And so you think that you need to play and you don't. And so this now I hope everybody's prepared for the the story, and it's about Nick Saban who is, you know, the I think he's still the winningest coach in college football.

Scott: 22:40

And college football is really interesting because you get players for two to four years and then they're gone, even if they're great. And I heard this story told by Saban himself and he said when he first became a coach, he was very focused on how he knew how to run offenses and defenses and he knew how to put these strategies together for scoring points and for keeping the other, team from scoring points. And his 100 focus was he developed this play strategy and then he needed to find players and train them in his strategy. And so his focus every single year was, I need this kind of person, this kind of person, this kind of person. And his success was limited because every year he didn't always have those people.

Scott: 23:34

And if he found good players, they were there for two or three or four years, and then they were gone and he needed to find new players. And he said what took him to the next level is when he reversed everything. And instead of saying, here's my strategy and I'm gonna train people to do this. He said, okay, I'm gonna start my year this year and I'm gonna look at the players I have. I'm gonna do recruiting and I'm gonna get the best players for my strategy that I can, but he actually took time to look at who he actually had and then instead of trying to change them to fit his system, he would change his system to fit them and his performance leapt from pretty good to best ever and it's because he was focused on people and I'm listening to you talking about, know, here's what you know how to do, here's how you know how things focus and I'm hearing you start to talk that language of, okay, the next group of CEOs, if you're on a board, you're gonna be talking to that CEO about not only how to execute, but how to find people and change the execution model based on who you have, because the turnover in business is similar, it's not identical.

Scott: 25:04

And I don't know what the statistics are because I don't keep particulars like that in my brain. But even though we're starting to see people stay at jobs longer because job hunting is really hard and there aren't as many jobs, we're in that part of the cycle where people don't move their careers by hopping from job to job to job. It gives you something different when you're the CEO, as you're looking at your people and you're utilizing the resources you have instead of trying to take the resources you have and cram them into your framework. And I think that that takes a certain level of maybe maturity, maybe understanding, maybe getting beaten up a bunch of times. Yeah, absolutely.

Scott: 25:55

I don't know if any of that resonates with you, but I love that story. If you can find that interview online, every Oh

Shawn: 26:04

I will look for it.

Scott: 26:04

Find that Nick Saban interview, watch his face when he's talking about this transition. And it's just, it's a moment of wonderment for him, but the outcome is huge. You know me, I'm always looking for the lesson that's different to shed light on the thing we're talking about. But I think it's instructive. I don't

Shawn: 26:33

I think love it.

Scott: 26:34

At all. I mean, I saw when I said Nick Saban, you got all happy.

Shawn: 26:38

Oh, yeah. Love a good sport I love a good sports story. I love a good you know, it was funny. In my 2024, it's online actually, open source. Anybody could go download it from the coalition.org website.

Shawn: 26:50

But it I I actually I've spent a fair amount of time in my CEO letter, which I always put at the at the front of it, referencing Coach Walsh, Bill Walsh of the San Francisco And the thing about Bill Walsh that I always loved is his concept of the score takes care of itself, meaning, and this is particularly true. I've worked in some other like for profit sales context where I think this is true. But in other words, it's like, don't chase your numbers, don't chase your outcome. Like the outcomes and the success will manifest as long as you're paying attention sort of the setting fundamentals that everybody can agree on and setting a standard of excellence. So there's a little bit of structure there because you have to come in and you have to be prepared to tell your team like, who is this organization and what is the expectation for how we conduct ourselves and pursue our mission?

Shawn: 27:52

But within that, rather than sort of fix ate on micromanaging individual productivity rates and all of those sort of micromanaging elements of a day to day job, it's really just instilling a strong culture and mindset that this is who we are, this is what that means. And so that's how this should be expressed in how we do our work. And each person is going to have a slightly different way that they achieve that, which is what I think you're very astutely pointing to, which is that we're going to always have individuals that we're dealing with. Each individual is going to bring their own unique sort of combination of skills and capabilities to the fight. And so, you know, in that sense, it makes sense that Sabin would say, I can't force circles into these square pegs here because, you know, we're not fighting a battle with a bunch of squares, they're circles.

Shawn: 28:51

So we need to adjust and now we need to adjust what winning looks like for this particular group, And I think that's awesome. I think it's compatible with Coach Walsh, which is simply that you have to establish a strong organizational culture and expectations for what excellence, You have to all be in consensus about what you think success looks like. And then from there, focus on doing all the little things really, really well. Then all of a sudden, and then watch the winds pile up, which I just think is super cool. I will say this as my next point, then I'll turn it back over to you.

Shawn: 29:31

Coach that I'm waiting for the book to come out is actually, just retired last season, is the Nebraska Cornhusker women's volleyball coach, John Cook. Coach Cook. For twenty five years, he coached those women. And I have never seen a more phenomenal coach, you know, just from watching him on the sideline and how he coaches those women's, you know, that team, all of those different teams every year. I'd be so curious.

Shawn: 30:07

I would love it. And I hope and I pray he comes out with a book because he had, I don't know if he was the winningest coach in Nebraska history. Well, I'm sure in Nebraska history he probably was. Now, I don't know how he ranks against the other university, you know, kind of records, but Nebraska women's volleyball is consistently one of the highest performing, highest winningest sort of like sports enterprises within the University of Nebraska system. And, he he just deserves all the accolades.

Shawn: 30:35

He handpicked his successor. She is now going into what we it would appear to be another winning season. But the truth the real story will come next year Now when she's had to deal with some change of right now, think she's probably still dealing with a fair amount of his legacy and residue residual. But man, I'm so excited for hope so Coach Cook, if you ever see this, you know, I hope you come out with that book because I know we have a lot to learn. So yeah.

Scott: 31:04

That's really cool. I mean, and I actually feel a little bad that I don't know anything about Cornhusker Volley because my oldest daughter played volleyball at the college level. Mean, was at SUNY Purchase, but volleyball was her thing. And it's a great sport and there's more sort of technical work that leads to success there than a lot of people I think who don't know much about volleyball realize. And so that's, I mean, consistent high level performance is always impressive.

Scott: 31:45

But I wanna sort of pull back to the middle of what you were saying, particularly about coach Walsh, because I've actually seen this before. And it's, I don't know how easy or difficult this is for you to deal with when a a senior person comes in and says, we're gonna focus on how we do this and we're not gonna be as concerned about our number, whether it's points on the board or points stopped or sales or intelligence reports or whatever it is, there is, in my experience at least, there's always that group of people that goes, Oh, there's no more pressure about the number, so there's no more pressure. And I'm just gonna sort of run these plays and I'm really not gonna worry about producing a number. And I think that that's a fundamental miss of what the CEO is trying to say. And it's a fundamental lack of understanding of the realignment.

Scott: 32:49

But I wonder if you have any thoughts on how to address that.

Shawn: 32:54

Yeah. I think part of that is going back to building a organization or organizational culture that I think is consistent with what the CEO and the board of directors, if you have such a thing, the vision is. And in picking people, this is when the recruiting process becomes essential because what you want are people who are, it's fine to have people who are motivated by quantifiable success. I mean, at the end of the day, even a squishy nonprofit like Coalition has, you know, very clear measurable, you know, deliverables and outputs that we are assessed by. Maybe, you know, it's not for me, it's a little different because each project team is kind of its own thing.

Shawn: 33:37

It's a little bit of an outlier in the sense that you were given a certain set amount of money to do a project to achieve an outcome. Right? That, okay, these 25 Iraqis learned how to secure their chemicals in their laboratories or these 20 Ukrainians learned how to protect their communications and dual use information when they're doing research with international collaborators. So those are all very tangible, measurable outcomes that, you know, would be our checklist for were you successful or were you not? Although the real actual determinant of that success would really be two, three years down the line.

Shawn: 34:15

Are they doing that thing? You know what I mean? Just because they came and consumed the information and exhibited some ability to kind of regurgitate it back to you, you, that there is a comprehension there doesn't mean that that's actual operationalizing of that thing they learned. So that's actually something that we were very explicitly focused on when we started coalition is that sort of longer term end state outcome because that's the thing that success is is, I think, contingent upon if you're going to claim success. It wasn't that I went and conducted a two day training for 20 people somewhere in the world.

Shawn: 34:53

Those are just sort of data points. That's not analysis, right, of outcome. And then I think that there's for profit environments where, so for the nonprofit environment, in our case, it just depends on how you measure what success looks like. That's where the culture piece comes in. We could be lazy and complacent and satisfied with, well, they gave us the money to do the two day event and then we did it and that's success.

Shawn: 35:23

Okay. For me, it's going to be like, is there sustainability of outcome? Was something operationalized? And so we'll hold ourselves to a slightly different standard. And then it's up to me to make sure that anybody who comes into the organization understands that this is the standard.

Shawn: 35:40

This is what success looks like for us, not for others. You may have worked in other organizations where, sorry, I'm going take this out. Wasn't thinking before I got online, couldn't do it anymore, Scott. Couldn't do it anymore. Know, other organizations may be happy with like, no, we came, we saw, we conquered.

Shawn: 36:03

They gave us the money. We implemented the thing. It's the subject matter who did the training. That's their problem if they did a good job training those people or not. Right.

Shawn: 36:12

And so if that's your standard, again, all you need to do is recruit to that standard, you know, and then you're going to get what you get. In a for profit context, because I work sales as well in my career, it's hard to not have a quantifiable. You know, it's rare. I don't know a company on Earth that I've ever been in sales where it's like they don't have that sort of clear metric for you need to hit this number target, you know, whether it's widget sold or dollar value, right, in a quarter or, you know, and then, of course, throughout the year. But I think with Walsh, what he's trying to instill is, you know, it gets really easy as leaders to fixate on sort of, you know, the detailed like, you know, oh, but, you know, you didn't hit your number this quarter or you didn't hit it that, you know, and then to kind of, you know, really sort of like make success for those individuals contingent on just hitting those numbers?

Shawn: 37:08

It has to be a part of it. Absolutely. But the way that I think he sees getting toward to that is by creating conditions in which that person is operating to demonstrate how they're not an island unto themselves. You're part of a team and your success is one determinant of the success of the whole team. And so, you know, it's kind of up to you to like, you know, figure out what are the sort of things I need to do within that expectation of what success looks like to actually achieve it.

Shawn: 37:38

And rather than chase sort of the outcome, chase the process by which you get to the outcome or at least focus more rationally, ratio ly. I don't know if that's a word. Can I L Y that word? That? Yeah, like proportionately.

Scott: 37:56

You need AI. You need AI.

Shawn: 37:58

I a grammarian. Where's a grammarian when I need them? So, you know, you can just not to get bogged down and just like, you know, and again, not to bring back into a Cornhusker. You know, the football team, man, those guys are suffering. They've been suffering.

Shawn: 38:16

They've been in a famine for for more than a decade probably, you know, where they just they they had a really good run-in the I don't know. Definitely the nineties, maybe as early as the eighties. And, it's demoralizing, you know, or DC United. Take any team where it's like you just have this drought of wins, you know, and I don't know what these coaches, how they're coming in and what their styles are. But what I can tell you from an observer, fan's perspective, when I see the guys out there with a coach that feels like he's engaged and supportive and he's got a great culture that he's trying to build, those years they do better.

Shawn: 38:55

They may not win, but it feels like you can see some kind of a progress and who knows something goes wrong and they tank again. You know, so I think maybe what the idea is, is not that you don't incentivize people through sort of like carrots, you know, and incentive offers, but that you just make sure that that doesn't become the exclusive motivator for what success looks like in sales. It can get really cutthroat. So it's not always a whole of team approach, right? Because you're trying to outperform somebody because you're going to get a bigger bonus or you know what I mean?

Shawn: 39:32

So I also recognize this is very, very industry contingent, you know, advice because other environments are going to flourish in different ways. But where there's a collaborative, you know, environment, you know, I think that can help.

Scott: 39:46

Yeah, I'm seeing something more universal and my thoughts are really sort of gelling as I listen to you. So I wanna take a shot at describing what sort of forming in the back of my brain using the sports metaphor and then seeing if we can pull it across to the business metaphor because I think that if it's good, then it's gonna track regardless of competitiveness and regardless of industry. So if we do owe to American football and we look at at two things that football teams need to do to to win, which is run the ball and score a touchdown or pass the ball and score a touchdown. So in order to run the ball, you need tacklers that don't miss their tackles. And I'd never played organized football, but missing a tackle for somebody whose job is tackling is is is bad because it's And your so tacklers, the linemen and the other, people that tackle, their job is to open that lane for the guy to run through.

Scott: 41:00

And so success maybe is measured by, did you miss the tackle or did you make the tackle and what's your percentage miss or percentage not missing of a tackle. For passing, have the guy that's gonna catch the ball, the receiver or whoever it is. And his job is to run a route, but also to get separation from the pass coverage. So he can run that route and get separation and the ball gets thrown somewhere else. That shouldn't be a fail for him because he ran the route and got separation, but just didn't have the ball thrown to him.

Scott: 41:41

And so instead of going into that offense and saying, do whatever it takes, score points. We're saying, if you're a tackle, if you're a tackler, don't miss your tackles. You know, maybe the guy that's running is gonna go a different way. So you didn't support that particular score, but you're still doing your job. You're still being measured.

Scott: 42:08

You're just not being measured by the score. You're being measured by your role. Same thing for the, for the the pass receiver. If you always run your route and always get separation, you know, you're not gonna score a touchdown on every play. You're not gonna get a reception on every play, but we're not measuring points scored, we're measuring job done.

Scott: 42:32

And it seems to me that if we're doing that, we're not saying, you know, points don't matter. We're saying measuring just points doesn't keep us on track because if all you're saying is offense go out and score, now everybody's thinking, okay, how can I score? And that's when the temptation to cheat comes. That's when the temptation to say, well, you know, I want you to throw the ball to me every single time so that I can score instead of and that becomes selfish instead of team because if you run perfect routes, sometimes you should get that ball and you don't, but sometimes you shouldn't get the ball and it should go somewhere else and it's better for the team. And so if we focus not on the number, the points, and focus on everybody doing their job, everybody now has an incentive to support the team by doing their job.

Scott: 43:31

And maybe that's what Walsh is doing to produce a better collective outcome because nobody's focused on being the star salesman. Everybody's focused on doing what the team needs, and so the team has more success. I I'm reminding myself now of, that movie Remember the Titans, which if you've never seen, the movie

Shawn: 43:58

it's It's another one of amazing.

Scott: 44:00

Yeah, it's another one these movies and I'm remembering the scene where one of the players is talking about perfection and he's trying to hold the team accountable. He says something along the lines of, I know I'm holding everybody accountable and I'm not perfect. Nobody is perfect. No individual here is perfect, least of all me. But then he goes, but we're undefeated.

Scott: 44:31

So as a team, we are perfect. And if we can live with our individual imperfections while driving the team to continue to be perfect, then that's where our mindset needs to be. And I love that, and my description doesn't do it justice. And I don't memorize dialogue, and maybe I should try and do that. And the actor whose name I don't remember is a wonderful actor.

Scott: 45:02

But if you take that into the business world, particularly in sales, I mean, why is sales competitive? Sales is competitive because if we pit five salespeople against each other, the presumption is everyone's going to work really hard and our number will be bigger. But what if we take the approach of, you know, here in our industry is how we get our customers to buy and here in our industry is how we go about developing new customers. So if you go and do those things, if you run your route, then you're gonna be a success and then we as a team are gonna have our number. So it's not caring about the sales number.

Scott: 45:50

It is caring about whether you have an, you know, the phrase isn't politically correct these days, every man for himself, every person or herself, you know, if everyone is going about sales individually, then you don't have a team, you have individuals and everybody's going out hunting and they're bringing back whatever. But if everybody is going out hunting and here's the metaphor, right? Fair warning. If everybody's going out hunting individually, Every individual is coming back to jackrabbits and pheasants. But if you have five hunters go out together, then they're gonna bring down a hippopotamus or a dinosaur or whatever it is.

Scott: 46:35

And a lot more people get fed but you have to trade your arrogance of being a star for the arrogance of being a critical member of a team. And I think people get caught up because they say, well you need to be humble I don't agree Because with most humbleness is insincere because high performers aren't arrogant because they recognize they're high performers. Arrogance comes when you think you're a high performer and you're not, you're kidding yourself but when you are a member of a great team, it feels good and I don't think you need to be humble but you're trading the arrogance of individual I'm good to I'm actually a part of something great. And so that's my long winded summary of what coaches like Walsh are trying to do and what I see high performance teams doing. And this notion of individual competition, it works because it does produce outcomes.

Scott: 47:52

But I think the problem that you find is that people start lying and people start breaking the rules. We saw that with Wells Fargo, right?

Shawn: 48:00

Yeah.

Scott: 48:00

And at the bank where it was, you need to put big numbers. And so all of a sudden you have people under pressure to put up numbers, opening fake bank accounts and then closing them to inflate their numbers. You see it right now in cities across The United States, and this is true and blow me up on social media if you think I'm a dick for saying this, but it started in New York City with Compstat where we're gonna count everything and your job as a district commander is to bring those numbers down. Well, you look at if you look in the last year at any news story that says this level of crime or that level of crime has dropped to an all time low. If you dive under those numbers, you will see a management team that is under reporting what a crime is.

Scott: 48:57

A robbery becomes a theft. A theft becomes a lost article, and so the numbers aren't true. And why do you have that push? Because you're focused on the number instead of the process. I mean, is that?

Shawn: 49:16

Yeah, that's well, so you triggered about 40 things in me. I just like to say that what you're also describing, know, with that whole system that then sort encourages or incentivizes or leads to at least widespread fabrication or lying or exaggerating figures and stuff. There's a great example for that, change of total topic. We won't go on a side quest, but just so you know, in Mao's China, the great leap forward, which was like sometime in the late 50s, early 60s, and I only know this because I was a history major and Asia was one of my concentrations, is that, you know, his provincial and local officials were just lying to him because they were afraid to tell him the truth. You know, he was demanding this very rapid increase in, you know, steel and grain and other production that was just, you know, this is the problem of of being having yes men.

Shawn: 50:13

Right? Like, it's just that nobody wanted to face the, you know, the the struggle of telling their leader that, like, this is not possible or you were not

Scott: 50:22

Which leader was this in China?

Shawn: 50:23

Mao Zedong. Mao Yeah, yeah. So Chairman Mao. So anyway, so I just wanted to tell you, yeah, it's a whole thing. It's a whole thing.

Shawn: 50:31

And it was funny because you spoke about two things that immediately made me go to my early college years. One was that, and the second one was what you were describing, what we called in international relations, the stag hunt or security dilemma, right? Which is that a group of cavemen together can catch a bison or a stag, but on their own, now all of a sudden you have this social compact disagreement that you're going to work together to feed all your families, not just feed them, but feed them well, right? They can feed them for longer with a bigger catch. But then if even one of those guys, because they know how much manpower they need literally to kind of accomplish that goal, if one of you kind of spies a really big jackrabbit and is like, I can get it and I know I can get it, That's a 100% guarantee.

Shawn: 51:23

I can get it and 100% guarantee I can feed my family tonight versus the, I got to work with this group and hope somebody else doesn't see that jackrabbit. And then the whole thing, you see, so it's like weighing your options, making that sort of cost benefit analysis for not just your own interests, but then sort of understanding that you are also part of a collective, even if it's a small tribe. And that's really what it comes down to is the description in the sports analogy you used is very much like in a sports context. Is it the glory of the, you know, quarterback or of the wide receiver or the running back that has been charged with making those pass or, you know, rushing goals. Right?

Shawn: 52:07

Like, are you you know? And and I think, probably for coach Walsh because he he he was you know, he ruled the he ruled the NFL for, like, almost ten years, you know, from, like, 1981, you know, arguably till 1991, you know, or 1990. He retired actually before the the 49ers won their fourth Super Bowl, which I think was under coach Seaford in in '80, '89 or '90. Maybe it was ninety January, but the '89 season. The point being is he built an enterprise.

Shawn: 52:40

And and, Joe Montana as quarterback was part of that enterprise much the same way today. Our little Patrick May homies is part of the Chiefs enterprise. And, you know, the Chiefs may very well go on this year to break to become the only team in NFL history to do a three peat, which is back to back. You know? Now now, Coach Walsh had his three Super Bowls.

Shawn: 53:01

He just didn't have them back to back. They were spread out through the 80s. But he was also blessed with riches. At every single position in the 1981 to '89 lineup, he had stars. He had stars, you know, tight ends and passers and receivers and rush.

Shawn: 53:23

He just had everybody. He had everybody he could have possibly have wanted. He had a very deep bench. But the question remains like, do people and this is particularly, I think, can be true for salespeople. It's like, do you want all the are you is Travis Kelce, who's now kind of on the receiving end of Patrick Mahomes passes sometimes?

Shawn: 53:50

I heard a lot of commentary, I think it was last year maybe or the year before, I can't remember, where people were like, oh, you know, Mayhomes is making more of his own touchdowns. He's just running it in, or he's handing it off to somebody else. And so, you know, do you run the risk of Travis Kelce being like, hey. What about me? What about my stats?

Shawn: 54:07

What about my numbers? Like, I still have a career to think of. You know, it's great that the Chiefs are still winning, but they were ugly wins last year. You know what I mean? They, you know, they were almost wins of circumstance versus deliberateness.

Shawn: 54:22

You know what I mean? Some people would probably argue. Is it stealing the thunder of star players who in this day and age and there is a metaphor here, I think an analogy you can compare to, the workforce in years past, which is that the way that NFL, well, really many sports enterprises in today's age, they're much more likely to move. They're much more likely to hop around and go to different teams. Now, did happen in previous decades, but it was far less common.

Shawn: 54:54

Most people stuck to the end in a lot of cases. Montana ended up going to Kansas City for the last year or two, his experience. But you look at Tom Brady, he's stuck with the New England Patriots until the bloody end only kind of made the leap when he realized, no, I still think I have something in me. So it's like that in the workforce today. People don't feel like they're honored and cherished and elevated sometimes.

Shawn: 55:23

They may just say, I'm out. And then all of a sudden, then what do you do? Right? So it's going be interesting. I don't know what my point is on all this, but one, I recognize that there's a lot of similarities that go between the sports world and between the business world and leadership and team building.

Shawn: 55:41

And I also recognize that the world is changing, the environment is changing in which we operate, that the rules of the game are different, not the actual, well, yes, the actual game. But what I was referring to is just how long people stay in their tenure at these positions. Are they thinking in the old days, you probably could have relied on them to stay even if they felt like they were getting a little less airtime or less playtime. And in today's circumstances, I think there may be more of an incentive to actually just say, then I'm going to just go to another team where I can get the airtime.

Scott: 56:18

And there are complex things at work here, right? The tight end that makes the or the you know the wide receiver that makes the great catch is in the camera. The inside linebacker that makes the tackle is buried in the pile. The offensive guard that never misses a tackle allows the running back to run. Most people and I'm not a huge football fan, but most people don't know who the tackle is or guard is and everybody knows who the running back is and now that drives compensation and it very quickly becomes, well, I mean, yeah, anybody can be a tackle or there are lots of people that can be tackles but not everybody can be a good running back and look what happens to the team without me as the star.

Scott: 57:15

And I think for us, for the 2 Parachutes Podcast, as we're talking about the humanity of this, the question becomes, how does it feel for that potential star when they're talking about, if I go down this, I am special by myself, potentially that's good for negotiating my salary but how do you function with the team? Because the bottom line is if you put that wide receiver on the field and take the other 10 guys off, he loses the game. And so that's part of the impact too. But how do you find that sense of fulfillment as somebody who's making amazing catches and scoring touchdowns to find fulfillment as a member of that team rather than a star? And the truth I think is that both systems work.

Scott: 58:15

I mean, you're gonna find a lot of people who say the star needs to be the star because the fill in the blank team can't function without them. And you're gonna have the same number of people saying, yeah, but your star can't function, if you don't have blockers blocking that star quarterback can throw to that star wide receiver. And a lot of it has to do with revenue. Yeah. I think the number of people that walk into a football stadium wearing a quarterback or a wide receiver or running backs jersey is a lot higher than the number of people that walk in wearing an offensive guards jersey.

Scott: 58:54

And that's the nature of it too, but it's the humanity of it. What does it feel like to be these different types of people and how does it work? And then the sports metaphor I think functions well, but it only functions so far. I think one of the big things that we have to recognize in using that metaphor is sports teams get feedback immediately. Plan every week whether the coach is good or the players are good, you know every single week.

Scott: 59:30

In companies, you're not gonna see numbers until the end of the You're not going to see the number of intelligence reports. Like you say, in your world, you're not going to see if your training took until three years down the line. And maybe the people that were part of that team that gave that training aren't even with the company anymore. You know, where's the continuity and we're running into our hour.

Shawn: 59:56

This is so fun though.

Scott: 59:58

This is such a good conversation. I think that it's fantastic that you have your COO who actually lives in that world of people because that brings huge value to you. Because it's getting people focused on the measurable things that lead to the outcome you want because that keeps everybody focused on what matters instead of just saying, Hey, everybody produced this outcome in whatever way seems best to you. That's what leads to sketchy behavior, cheating. Yeah, the ref made a bad call, but we still won.

Scott: 01:00:47

And I'm definitely in the camp of, if the ref made a bad call and my team still won, it's still a W, but I don't feel good about that. Yeah. And guys who cheat, I used to play rugby, and rugby is a wonderful sport and it's a rough and tumble sport, but it's also an honorable sport. And I never really saw eye to eye with a lot of guys who played dirty and they could get away with it. Not that I have this moral high ground, but the reason for the structure in the game is to have ability drive the outcome instead of something else.

Scott: 01:01:29

And I couldn't feel as happy about putting something in the W column, if it was dishonest, because it's from a moral standpoint, but just from a way that I'm wired, it's just not as good. It reminds me of one of my favorite things from Jack Nicholson, the golfer. And you can find this too, and it's this attitude. He said that when he was shaking hands and getting ready to tee off, he never said good luck and it was intentional. He never said good luck.

Scott: 01:02:10

He always said play well. The reason he said is because he didn't wanna win from somebody else's misfortune. He wanted them to bring their very best game and then beat them so that he knew that day he was better. And that's what it is. And I love that.

Scott: 01:02:32

I'm getting goosebumps telling this story.

Shawn: 01:02:33

Awesome. Because

Scott: 01:02:37

if you can get away with something, it's not that you can get away with it. Demeans you. You're good enough to win, so you needed misfortune for your opponent in order for you to prevail. And I think Jack Nicklaus has it right. It's like, I want you to be your very best so that if I lose, I lost to you at your very best.

Scott: 01:03:00

And if I win, then I was better than you that day. And I just love that.

Shawn: 01:03:04

That's that's amazing. And yeah. And this whole conversation has been super exciting, and we could probably take a whole another part too to this at some point. But I'll just, you know, close with the comment on the COO. It's been a tremendous game changer for me.

Shawn: 01:03:18

And, you know, I don't know if you've ever watched the show Ted Lasso, about the American guy who goes to coach a British soccer team in in London. I

Scott: 01:03:29

I have to admit that I'm, like, one of three people that hasn't watched it.

Shawn: 01:03:32

Well, I I've only watched the first two seasons or something, or maybe I don't know how many there even are, but, you know, it's worth it. Even if you only ever watched the first season, it it's just so worth it because the best stuff is in the first season. And, you know, he's just just this really amiable, you know, guy, very sort of like got that American sort of just optimism about him. I see myself in a lot of ways as the British owner. Right?

Shawn: 01:03:57

And Terry is my Ted Lasso. So it's more owner to coach versus coach to second coach because there is also a second coach, Coach Beard. And I thought for a minute, am I Ted Lasso and he's Coach Beard? I'm like, You know what? No, I think I'm actually Hannah.

Shawn: 01:04:14

Not Hannah, that's the actress's name. I'm Rebecca and he's like Ted Lasso, you know? I think Ted Lasso's philosophy was very close to Coach Walsh's, which is, you know, the score, hey team, the score will take care of itself if we take care of each other. And I think that's an optimistic note to kind of end on, knowing there's so much more to talk about. But it's been a fun jump today, Scott.

Shawn: 01:04:40

Thank you.

Scott: 01:04:41

Awesome. Yeah, thank you. Can't wait to can't wait to see you again and do another one of these.

Shawn: 01:04:47

You betcha.

Scott: 01:04:47

Alright. Talk to you later.

Shawn: 01:04:49

Bye.