One Change Will Make Your Company World Class
The speaker argues that leaders teach people how to treat them through what they accept, and that most team disappointments stem from insufficient training rather than employee inadequacy. The solution is implementing structured "leadership training" sessions where leaders identify and teach the most impactful behaviors rather than simply telling people what went wrong.
Summary
The transcript addresses a common management frustration: team members repeatedly making small mistakes despite repeated reminders. The speaker counters this with a fundamental principle: "You teach people how to treat you" based on what you accept from others. When a leader simply corrects a mistake in the moment ("tell" approach), they solve the immediate problem but create dependency—the employee expects the leader to catch mistakes, reducing their own accountability.
The speaker illustrates this with a client example where a frustrated executive quickly listed 14 things that frustrated him about his team. When asked to show where he formally trained employees on these behaviors, the client realized most issues were never formally taught. The speaker emphasizes that leaders often forget their own learning journey—reading books like "Getting Things Done," attending seminars, gaining years of experience—and unfairly expect employees with only a few years experience to perform at the same level.
The core solution presented is "leadership training," a structured weekly session (recommended Monday 4-5 PM) where leaders prioritize and teach the behaviors that would have the highest financial impact if everyone mastered them. Leaders should maintain a running list of observed issues, prioritize them, then create training (recorded for consistency and reuse). After training, employees submit their top three takeaways. If the behavior still doesn't improve after formal training, the leader knows it's a people problem—not a process problem—requiring reassignment or termination rather than more correction.
The speaker also connects this to personal accountability, suggesting that frustrations with others often reflect gaps in one's own behavior, and that leaders should use others' shortcomings as mirrors for self-improvement.
Key Insights
- When leaders tell employees what to do after a mistake, they solve the problem once but teach employees to expect the leader to catch errors, reducing employee accountability and creating ongoing dependency.
- Most perceived employee performance problems are actually process/training problems rather than people problems, because leaders rarely formally teach employees the behaviors they expect despite having learned these behaviors themselves through books, mentors, and years of experience.
- The speaker uses a principle of 'train don't tell' where instead of correcting mistakes verbally, leaders create recorded training sessions that can be reused during onboarding and when mistakes recur, shifting from reactive correction to proactive education.
- Leaders should prioritize which behaviors to train based on a dual criterion: which issues are personal pet peeves and which behaviors would generate the most revenue if everyone mastered them, focusing teaching efforts on high-impact areas.
- After formal training with documented takeaways, if a behavior still doesn't improve, the problem is definitively a people problem requiring reassignment or termination rather than additional training or correction attempts.
Topics
Transcript
[0:00] We have amazing people on our team, but they they unfortunately disappoint us often. And they're little little baby things, but those are the things that seem to drag us down on a daily basis, like not submitting a receipt or forgetting to pick something up. And it's little baby things. And as much as we repeat and try to get them to do these things, the behavior is still there. What do you recommend? Because we don't want to lose them. They're awesome. But how how do we get it to a [0:30] point where they understand the urgency of it? >> Has anybody on your team ever disappointed you? Show hands. Hold them up high. All right.…
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