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My guest for Episode #122 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Joel Trammell. He is CEO and Founder of Khorus Systems, a business management system that empowers CEOs to lead high-performance organizations.
Joel is the author of books including The CEO Tightrope: How to Master the Balancing Act of a Successful CEO and his latest, available in January, titled The Manager’s Playbook: Make Exceptional People Management Your Competitive Advantage.
In today's episode, Joel shares his “favorite mistake” story about having trouble, multiple times, finding the right VP of Marketing for a startup company. What happened, and what did Joel learn?
We talk about that story and other topics including:
- Steps to avoid making that mistake?
- What are some Mistakes CEOs make in evaluating the performance of other executives?
- As boss, do you have to more expert than your team?
- “Be an expert generalist”
- Being CEO at 2 companies at the same time?
- As a CEO, what’s your role in creating a culture of learning from mistakes?
- When do you have to bring in an outsider as CEO?
- Keep Austin weird? Is it a Mistake for companies to “hire for fit”??
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!["You want to be what I call an 'expert generalist' in that role [of CEO]."](https://www.markgraban.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Joel-Trammell-My-Favorite-Mistake-1.jpg)
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Automated Transcript (Likely Contains Mistakes)
Mark Graban:
Episode 122 Joel Trammell, CEO and founder of Khorus Systems, Author of the new book The Manager's Playbook.
Joel Trammell:
I got to take you back probably to the first venture-backed company I did. So we're going back to 1999 in Austin, Texas.
Mark Graban:
I'm Mark Graban. This is My Favorite Mistake. In this podcast, you'll hear business leaders and other really interesting people talking about their favorite mistakes. Because we all make mistakes, but what matters is learning from our mistakes instead of repeating them over and over again. So this is the place for honest reflection and conversation, personal growth, and professional success.
Mark Graban:
Visit our website at myfavoritemistakepodcast.com for links, show notes, and more. Go to markgraban.com/mistake122. Thanks for listening and now on with the show. And we are joined today by Joel Trammell. He is a management educator with 30 years of CEO experience. He is CEO and founder of Khorus Systems, a business management system that empowers CEOs to lead high-performance organizations.
Mark Graban:
You can learn more about him at his website, joeltrammell.com. So before I tell you a little bit more about him, Joel, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being here.
Joel Trammell:
Great to be with you, Mark.
Mark Graban:
So Joel is, he's got a long list of things that he does and maybe we will hear more about that today. He is the owner of Texas CEO Magazine and currently serves as the CEO and Chairman at iGrafx. Joel is more recently the author of the upcoming book titled The Manager's Playbook: Make Exceptional People Management Your Competitive Advantage. And that's due to be released January 2022.
Mark Graban:
Right, Joel?
Joel Trammell:
That's correct.
Mark Graban:
So Joel is based in Austin, a city that I've lived in that was going back 20 years ago. So first question, real quick. I don't know if it's a quick answer. Is it a mistake for people to move to Austin?
Joel Trammell:
Well, you know, you should have got here 20 years ago. We moved here in ‘92. And so certainly it was a very different town then. But you know, still, the things that attract people, I mean, the picture behind me shows you the view, which most people that haven't been to Texas think you're in California or something. And so the terrain's interesting, the weather's good, the people are great, the food's good.
Joel Trammell:
And other than house prices escalating 30 or 40% year over year, things are great.
Mark Graban:
And the traffic. And the traffic, yeah, the traffic was bad. When I moved there in 1999, for one, I was really struck by the hill country and the lakes and the rivers and there is a lot of natural beauty. But even then, I think the longer-term residents were saying, please, people stop moving here. But that wave didn't stop.
Joel Trammell:
Yeah, we should have built the wall. We just should have built it around Austin instead of the border.
Mark Graban:
You know, now that I'm in California, I thought you're going to say to keep the Californians out.
Joel Trammell:
Yes, yes. That's where a lot of them have come from for sure. Yeah.
Mark Graban:
So anyway, Austin is a great place and I'm glad you could join us here, Joel. We'll talk more about your book and your other work. But as we usually do here, thinking back at the different things that you've done, what would you say is your favorite mistake, Joel?
Joel Trammell:
Well, I got to take you back probably to the first venture-backed company I did. So we're going back to 1999 in Austin, Texas, when I would wake up every morning and read the Monday morning section of the paper was called Tech Monday. And so I'd read about all the tech companies that had gotten funded at the time. I'd run a small business, sold that business. And so starting a business was not something that was scary to me at all.
Joel Trammell:
But I'd never done something in a kind of a larger scale. And so my wife is a 4.0 PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Texas, had been working for a company called Schlumberger here in town, and she had become kind of an expert in network management and analyzing large-scale networks, which at the time there really wasn't a lot of expertise in how you ran a large network, especially from a performance perspective, which was kind of our expertise. And so I began to believe that there was an opportunity to build a business. And so we started out and got in touch with some venture capitalists and we had a product, what I would call a very alpha-type product running on Schlumberger's network. And we had myself and her and we managed to raise $11 million to start a business.
Joel Trammell:
Which it was kind of crazy at the time and looking back, you'd have to be much further along to raise that kind of money. But there was kind of a frenzy at that point in time. And so we raised $11 million and now you got to make it work. And so, you know, she had the technical end of the business, you know, tied up. She knew, she was the kind of the world expert in that area of the business.
Joel Trammell:
I felt like I knew kind of broadly how to run a business, knew a little bit about everything. But certainly I thought we needed marketing help to tell our story. And that's where my mistakes kind of start is how do you find a good marketing person? And so I started out, you know, you ask some people and you try to get some, some recommendations. And the first guy I talked to that was recommended to me had written a book and it was a real book.
Joel Trammell:
And you know, this is going back 20-something years ago now, everybody's got their book that they've published or at least e-book they've done. But at that time having a real book that was in bookstores was kind of a big deal, right? So I was very impressed that he had this book on marketing and so I hired him to run marketing for us. And of course, this is an early-stage startup and so there was a lot of work to do. But I found out that marketing VPs sometimes don't like doing work.
Joel Trammell:
They like hiring people to do work. And so the first thing he did is he came in and started hiring junior people. And I learned that, you know, that wasn't going to get the job done first and that the key part of marketing is market, that you have to actually understand the market. And we were in a very technical market of computer networking. And he, you know, understood zero about the typical customer in that market.
Joel Trammell:
And so, you know, it was pretty obvious. And so, you know, within about a quarter I had to go back and tell the board, “Hey, I hired this marketing exec. I told you how great he was. Now I got to fire him.” So that was marketing exec number one.
Joel Trammell:
So then I learned my lesson. I said, “Well, we got to have somebody who really understands the market. That's the mistake I made.” And so I went out and found somebody who had been an analyst in the market, so was very familiar, knew the market very well, but he lived in Denver. And so we had a very earnest conversation from the beginning that, “Hey, you're moving to Austin, right?”
Joel Trammell:
Because this is a startup, and my wife and I are working 80 hours a week on this thing, and, you know, we need somebody to dive in and get work done and make it happen. And he, of course, assured me, yeah, he was moving to Austin, Texas. Well, you know, first few weeks, he's flying in from Denver. He's showing up at 11 or 12 on Monday morning. He's, Thursday afternoon, you know, he's saying bye and getting on the airplane and going back, spending Friday, Saturday, Sunday in Denver, you know.
Joel Trammell:
So, of course, immediately I'm like, “Oh, but you're moving to Austin.” “Oh, yeah, moving to Austin,” you know. And of course, that went on for weeks, which turned into months and turned into me having to go to the board and tell them that the second marketing VP that I hired was not the right guy.
Mark Graban:
So just to jump in real quick, I mean, so I'm sure you were talking to VP number two. Was he just kicking the can down the road of like, “No, Joel, I'm working on it. I'm working on it.” But it didn't seem like it?
Joel Trammell:
Yeah, I mean, he was, you know, he wasn't sure. It was a startup. Right. He wasn't sure it was going to be successful. He wanted to, you know, maybe have more proof points before he made a commitment, you know, see that things were going to, you know, knock it out of the park, whatever. And of course, with every startup, things, you know, don't happen as quickly as you'd like.
Joel Trammell:
And so he just wasn't kind of really willing to jump in and sell the house in Denver and make the move to Austin and make that kind of commitment.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, because, I mean, sometimes people are in a position where they could get an apartment or be in a hotel to be there from Monday morning to Friday afternoon. But people aren't always in the circumstances because of family or finances to take that plunge. So it sounds like maybe that candidate, that executive, was that their first time with a startup?
Joel Trammell:
I wonder. That was their first time in a real executive role. And I think they didn't understand that. I mean, it was hard to ask the team to work 60 hours a week when they were checking in Monday at noon and leaving Thursday. And you know, and in those days, we, you know, remote work was much harder and we didn't have Zoom and everything to, you know, so people were kind of out of touch when they were out of the office and it just culturally didn't send the right message.
Joel Trammell:
And as well as just obvious, his buy-in was just not at the same level as the rest of the team.
Mark Graban:
So how'd it go? The third time was the third time the charm.
Joel Trammell:
Third time was the charm. I found somebody that was from Austin that was out of the industry. They actually, I actually proposed to the board that they could be CEO. They had, they were a pretty senior executive who had a lot of experience and went to the board and said, “Hey, I've got this guy, but he's kind of interested in the CEO role.” The board said, “No, we're not interested in him as CEO, but if he wants to come in as kind of an executive VP and run sales and marketing, you know, that's okay.”
Joel Trammell:
And so that's the deal we struck. And he was able to stay with the company for a period of years and well into our very successful run that we had with the organization. And so that worked. But it took me three tries to get a marketing VP and a couple of tries to get a sales VP as well. But that's probably a story for a different day.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, well, I'll tell you, I mean I worked for, I joined a startup in Austin in, we'll call it the beginning of 2001, venture-backed. They had also raised like 10 or 11 million in the first round. And like you said, very early stage and marketing and sales was the biggest department of turnover, area of turnover. A couple of different VPs, a couple of different sales VPs, lots of salespeople. So I'm curious, like what you were able to do as you were into other companies to avoid, the best you can, hiring mistakes or trying to reduce the churn.
Joel Trammell:
Yeah. So hiring for a startup particularly is the hardest thing, especially in those days. I had no reputation. It's a little easier for me today to point to successes and say, “Don't you want to learn from somebody who's been there and done that?” But you know, I was a 35-year-old kid basically who had, you know, just raised $11 million.
Joel Trammell:
But that was about the only credential I had to my name at that point. And so it's very tough and you know, I think most of the time startups hire too many executives and not enough, you know, “Indians” is the famous phrase, “too many chiefs, not enough Indians.” And that you need to hire people at the right stage and then the challenge you run into is a lot of those people. Some of those people may be able to grow into bigger roles as the company gets bigger, but some of those people don't. And you got to be careful you don't hire somebody to a VP position when they're really an individual contributor or maybe a first-level manager in their skillset and ability at that point in time.
Joel Trammell:
And so, yeah, so hiring at the early stage is very difficult. But I think, you know, stay away from hiring high-level execs more than, you know, you only need one or two of those until you're at 50 or 60 or something. And really, you know, you get traction and you get product-market fit and you think then you're really building a company. Okay, then you can bring some, some more of those people in. But you don't need a lot of those people in the early days.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, so it sounds like there was a reflection around hiring an executive versus somebody to roll up their sleeves and do the marketing.
Joel Trammell:
Exactly, exactly. And that's what you need in the early days of the company is somebody who's going to get in and do the work. And a lot of people think they can do that. But once you've reached a point in your career where you've spent most of your time managing, often that's very hard to get people to return to that.
Mark Graban:
And so with the 30 years of CEO experience, there are a lot of lessons that you've shared, a previous book and things that you talk about. I mean, can you tell us a little bit more generally, what are some of the mistakes that CEOs make? Maybe not just in hiring, but in evaluating the performance of the executives on their team?
Joel Trammell:
Yeah, I think there's a concept that people often think to be a manager, to be a coach, to be a leader of a group of people, you have to know more about how they do their job than they do. You have to be the expert because that's how most people get into management. You're very good as an individual contributor. And then somebody makes you a manager and you're hiring and you're managing junior people who you can instruct in how to do the job. And that's true through most of the roles in an organization until you get to this role as CEO, where it is impossible to be the expert.
Joel Trammell:
I tell people I'm unqualified to be the executive VP of any functional area of the business, even though I think I'm a pretty good CEO. And they say, “Well, wait a minute, how does that work?” And, you know, one of the analogies I use is the NFL often asked the question in training, of what position did Bill Belichick, arguably the greatest coach in NFL history, play in the NFL? And a few people often go, “Wait a minute. I don't think Bill Belichick played in the NFL.”
Joel Trammell:
And that's the correct answer. He didn't. How can you be the greatest coach in the history of the NFL if you never played? Because the head coach role is very much like a CEO role. You want to be what I call an expert generalist in that role, you need to know a little bit about everything.
Joel Trammell:
But you can't be an expert in any of the, in any more than maybe one of the areas. Right. Because you're going to have somebody working for you who spent their whole career being a salesperson and a sales manager and a sales executive.
Joel Trammell:
They're obviously, they're going to know more about sales. So then you have to think about, how do I guide somebody that's in that role? And so that, you know, that comes down to setting very clear objectives, having clear conversations, making sure that their view of their job aligns with your vision for where the organization's going, that their vision of how they do their job integrates with the other departments and works cohesively. Just like a football plan. You can have an offensive plan, you have a defensive plan, but it's a lot better if those work together and fit the type of player you can recruit into your organization.
Joel Trammell:
And so those are the kind of things that the CEO's dealing with. Yeah, you're not going to be able to tell them exactly how to close this deal or that deal. And you got to be comfortable with that by setting very clear objectives, though, and then you provide accountability by judging those objectives against what I call objective reality. People use the word accountability. I don't think they…
Joel Trammell:
Often people, when they use that word, just mean they want to fire somebody. I tell people, substitute accountability. Substitute the word objective reality. Your job is to provide objective reality to all your execs and say, you know, just like when Tom Brady throws a pass 10 yards over the receiver's head, you know, the natural human inclination is to say, “Well, that wasn't my fault. You know, the receiver ran the wrong route or he slipped or…”
Joel Trammell:
“…or the offensive lineman didn't block and the defender was in my face.” And the coach's job is to provide objective reality and say, “No, Tom, you overthrew, you threw a bad pass or you made the wrong read” or whatever the case may be. And so that's what you're trying to provide to your executive team.
Mark Graban:
I mean, it's interesting to think about Belichick for a minute. He has this reputation now. He will be going to the Hall of Fame. Some would call him the greatest coach ever. In his first stint as a coach in the Cleveland Browns…
Mark Graban:
My grandmother was still alive then. Northeastern Ohio would go on and on. She thought Bill Belichick was terrible.
Joel Trammell:
Right.
Mark Graban:
Playing the wrong quarterback and blah, blah, blah. And so then he gets the job with the Patriots and Drew Bledsoe gets hurt. He ends up with Tom Brady and what seems like a stroke of genius and years of genius. There's this debate now that Tom Brady's in Tampa Bay.
Joel Trammell:
Right.
Mark Graban:
How good is Belichick without Brady? So the question I wanted to throw to you, Joel, is, you know, if let's say you've got a CEO and a sales VP or a chief revenue officer who's been joined at the hip of the CEO, the company's doing great, growing for five or six or ten years, and then the sales VP leaves, does that sometime expose the CEO or raise questions of, well, for what it's worth, who gets credit for the success?
Joel Trammell:
Yeah. So, I mean, you know, ultimately the CEO is responsible for the team he puts on the field. And so, you know, just like deciding on going with Brady, a sixth-round draft pick who, you know, nobody else wanted because they could have had him much earlier, he was at least smart enough to pick him. Right. And then chose to go with him over a more experienced quarterback as soon as he showed promise.
Joel Trammell:
So you give the CEO credit for that because, you know, if he got the wrong quarterback, it was his fault as well. And so I think the same thing's true with CEOs. You know, your executive team is absolutely critical. Not just sales, but the whole executive team. But you're responsible for making it work.
Joel Trammell:
And if you don't have the right people, you know, many CEOs are very slow to move when they don't have the right executive in place. And I think that's critical because ultimately you're going to be judged on their performance. And so if they're not the right guy, you've got to move pretty quickly on those things.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. So I've got some other questions for you about your experience as CEO. But I do have to ask, how do you end up CEO of two companies at the same time? Elon Musk is, maybe he's your neighbor now, but he's the most famous example these days, I think of being CEO at Tesla and SpaceX. Steve Jobs, I think at one point was pulling that off between the company…
Mark Graban:
here I'm blanking out. The company he had with NeXT Computers and Apple when they brought him back. How did you end up in that situation, Joel? How do you manage that?
Joel Trammell:
Yeah, so as you get older and get on the investing side, often in board side, you often end up in CEO roles not through planning, but through happenstance. So my last two CEO roles have been because I was standing in the, at the right place or the wrong place at the right time. I'm not sure which. So I, you know, I was CEO of a public company called Black Box. And there that happened because I was on the board, the company was struggling.
Joel Trammell:
And so the board comes to a decision to fire the CEO, but the company's struggling and it's hard to find. You know, how are you going to find a CEO when the company owes the bank $165 million and you've got turnover and all these issues. And so, you know, you look around the boardroom and I was the only guy not collecting Social Security on the board. So I got voluntold that that was the, you know, that I could take it over. Right.
Joel Trammell:
You know, and then most recently iGrafx I took over and I've now, now left that position. We actually sold the company very recently. But, but I took over that company because my private equity firm that, that I ran and sat on the board of iGrafx, the CEO there decided to leave, told us he was leaving and we were kind of in the midst of this transaction process. We thought we were going to sell the business. And so again, bringing in a new CEO didn't make a lot of sense at that point in time.
Joel Trammell:
So I kind of jumped in and pinch-hit for six months to get the company through a transaction. So yeah, sometimes you find yourself in these roles and you kind of got to do double duty.
Mark Graban:
So and iGrafx, I back in the day in my engineering days, I used to use that software. So I looked at the website and you know, it said celebrating 30 years. And I think, well, I was probably using the software 20 years ago maybe when I was working in Austin.
Joel Trammell:
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Business. They've been in the business process management space for a long time. Yeah.
Mark Graban:
You know, so Joel wanted to ask, you know, thinking of your different CEO roles, you know, here on the podcast, the theme is, you know, learning from mistakes, not repeating mistakes, being open about mistakes. What are your thoughts about creating a culture, your role of creating a culture where people are learning from mistakes?
Joel Trammell:
Yeah. I think the two most powerful phrases that CEOs need to use is, “I don't know” and “I made a mistake.” And too many CEOs, you could spend a year with them and they'd never utter either one of those phrases. And that's a challenge, right? Because it's really hard to believe people, because none of us are right all the time.
Joel Trammell:
I mean, I used to try to tell my little… my kids when they were little that I knew daddy knows everything. And they believed that to about 6 years old. And then they started going, “Well, Google it, Daddy, I don't believe you.” And so that doesn't work.
Joel Trammell:
But a lot of CEOs think they have to have all the answers, and they are just unwilling to utter those words. “I don't know.” And then when they make a decision, they stick with it, and they're stubborn about it, and they're unwilling to reconsider, even though evidence has come about that shows you're wrong. And so they're not willing to say, “Hey, I missed that one. We're going to change direction.”
Joel Trammell:
And so those are the two most powerful phrases, because I wanted everybody in my organization to consider me. The two words I want people to use to describe me were authentic and transparent. And you can't be authentic and transparent if you're covering up your mistakes and if you're acting like you know everything when you know you don't. Wow.
Mark Graban:
So that's. Yeah. Thank you. I mean, that, that's, that's powerful. And, you know, I think we all wish we worked in a company where that was the case.
Mark Graban:
You know, I'm fortunate. You know, one software I'm in, company I'm involved with right now, I'm wearing their hat. KaiNexus has a CEO who believes and lives what you were saying there, Joel. He's not afraid to say, “I don't know.” He doesn't try to micromanage.
Mark Graban:
I've heard very similar things from him about how he's not an expert in any of the disciplines or the functions. As that company has grown to 30 people, he's got the humility to hire experts. And he had a good mentor who had stepped in as an interim CEO for the purpose of coaching him because he was a first-time entrepreneur.
Joel Trammell:
Sure, sure.
Mark Graban:
But I think that humility and that openness and creating a culture, you know, just the other thing I'll say about KaiNexus is, you know, a culture of not jumping to blame and punish people when a simple mistake is made. Because when you do that, it seems like you just drive people into hiding or covering up their mistakes, which isn't good.
Joel Trammell:
Right, right, absolutely. Yeah. There's, you know, there's a great story in the book American Icon about Ford and how Alan Mulally turned around Ford and without taking government money. And, you know, he goes into the executive meeting each week and, you know, he asks people to rate their projects, you know, kind of red, yellow, green. And the first week he goes in, everybody around, the whole boardroom's green, and Ford's going to lose three and a half billion dollars in that quarter alone.
Mark Graban:
Yeah.
Joel Trammell:
You know, and his response is, “Boy, that's interesting.” You know, and until he broke through and it took, you know, several weeks before somebody finally threw up a yellow and mentioned that they had a problem. And his first words out of his mouth were, “Thank you. Now we have something to work with.” And so that's what I coach CEOs, is anytime somebody brings a problem to you, the first words out of your mouth need to be, “Thank you.”
Joel Trammell:
Thank you for letting me know that we had a problem. Now let's talk about how we're going to solve it. Who's going to go solve it. But if you build that into your culture, that you thank people for bringing you problems, you'll find they start bringing you more and more problems.
Joel Trammell:
And they bring you problems when they're little problems, small fires, instead of after they've blown up. And there's really no way to solve the problem.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, it's better to be told we're behind schedule earlier when there's a chance to adjust and get back on schedule until waiting until it's late. “I told you it was on schedule. But now, oops.” Right?
Joel Trammell:
That's right. Exactly.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. I mean, I've heard that Mulally story, I believe. I'm pretty certain that the first executive to report yellow was Mark Fields, who then, I believe, ended up replacing Mulally as CEO, so.
Joel Trammell:
Exactly.
Mark Graban:
And ended up in Mulally's good graces for doing that.
Joel Trammell:
Yeah. And of course, everybody else was looking around the boardroom thinking there was an ejector button that Mulally was about to push, you know, because the culture was so toxic that you just didn't bring problems up. And that's how you get in a situation where you're losing three and a half billion dollars.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, well, and you know, Mulally was brought in, of course, from Boeing. And you know, so, question for you, Joel. I mean, generally speaking, when do you have to bring in an outsider to have a chance to shake up a culture?
Joel Trammell:
Yeah, that's, that's a great question. And the whole question of how to hire CEOs has not, not been that well explored in my opinion. Most boards don't do it very often, so not a lot of expertise around doing it. But I think, you know, in general, I would love to have somebody from internal take over and part of a good CEO job is preparing a transition plan and always having that in place because, you know, the proverbial bus can hit anybody. Anything can happen.
Joel Trammell:
They can get a better offer, they can have a health issue, whatever. So that, you know, that's a key board responsibility. Is there always should be discussions about, is there anyone internally, what do we need to do to make the internal candidates more qualified so that they'd be in a better position? So, you know, I much prefer doing internal because I know something. But a lot of times companies, especially the ones that aren't well run, get into trouble and there is no person because the CEO has not prepared a transition.
Joel Trammell:
And the CEO was not very transparent in the way they ran the business. And so nobody kind of knows. None of the internal people really have seen much of the business. And that's when you got to go outside. And then certainly there are times when you, you know, events happen and you just need to change the culture.
Joel Trammell:
You need to change, you know, you're needing to push a change, a significant change in the organization. And that's much more easily done from the outside than from the inside because it's very hard for an inside candidate to come in and, you know, try to, you ask them, you know, they need to fire half the executive team or something, that's very difficult because these were their peers and culturally that's very hard to gain that credibility and do that quickly. So, you know, it's kind of a general rule. If things are going well, I'd much prefer an inside candidate. If things are not going well, then I'm going to probably look more outside.
Mark Graban:
So one other question I want to ask this is sort of going back to hiring, whether it's hiring other executives or team members for a startup. You're in Austin and you made reference to the phrase of “Keep Austin weird.” Well, a lot of times companies might not want to be weird. Or there's this phrase that's used, they “hire for fit.” And does that exclude people?
Mark Graban:
Is it a mistake to maybe keep out those who are weird or different who are, quote-unquote, “not a fit?” What's your experience with this?
Joel Trammell:
Yeah, you have to be careful about what that means, what “fit” means. And if you build a very strong culture and you know, we can stay with the Bill Belichick analogy here. So, you know, the New England Patriots, very famous for taking players that fail on other teams that are the problem child, you know, or whatever, a troublemaker, whatever. And you know, New England brings them into their organization and they perform wonderfully. They, you know, become an all-pro, they win Super Bowls, whatever.
Joel Trammell:
And the reason that happens is because if you have a very strong culture, your culture impacts the person. If you have a weak culture, then these misfits impact your culture. And so you want to have a very strong culture which allows you to hire a lot wider array of people because you're going to influence them. Your strong culture is going to impact them more than their, you know, maybe lack of fit is going to impact you. And you know, the tendency, of course, for all of us is to hire people that are like ourselves.
Joel Trammell:
And that's, you know, that can be ethnically, that can be personality-wise. I mean, that's what I probably see in tech the most is the personality. A lot of us in tech are very, you know, tech entrepreneurs, very driven, very direct kind of people, Type A personalities. And so they tend to hire other Type A personalities. And it's not a case of they don't want diversity, they just don't understand.
Joel Trammell:
They think that's the reason they're successful is because of their personality. So everybody that's successful has their personality. And that's just a misnomer. And it takes kind of all types of personalities to make the world go around. And as you grow an organization, you're going to have to learn to deal with all types of personalities.
Joel Trammell:
So we spend a lot of time in our training talking about language to describe people so that you can even have this conversation about how to include all different personality types. And that somebody that may be perceived to push back in your organization may just be somebody who's more risk-averse than you are and you're very risk-tolerant. And you just need to understand they're going to need a week to get to that new idea and you got to it in five minutes. And we're willing to change the whole direction of the company. Some people aren't going to be comfortable with that.
Joel Trammell:
And if you know that ahead of time though, you can give them a heads-up a week ahead. Hey, we're going to go talk about this. Give them time to process and get there and you know, they can be just as productive as anybody else.
Mark Graban:
Back to Bill Belichick again. I forget if these were his comments. Somehow it's how I'm remembering it. But there's the idea of putting 11 Tom Bradys on the field would not be a winning football team because you need clearly like fit for a left tackle versus a running back. Tom Brady is not going to play either of those positions well, even though you might want players who have some of the characteristics or traits of Tom Brady or somebody who can fit into a system.
Mark Graban:
Seems to be important in business as well.
Joel Trammell:
Yeah, and I mean just different roles, right? I mean a customer support person by nature needs to be much more people-centric, a developer needs to be much more thing-centric. Right. I mean they're going to be and that's just natural personality traits. But to build a successful and balanced organization, you need all of those.
Joel Trammell:
And if you hire just a bunch of developers and you know, they have to do customer support, that doesn't work very well, you know, but that's what you see in a lot of tech companies. You see, you know, I've dealt with companies that have like 30 engineers and three other people. And I'm like, “Hey guys, you know, we might want to get some other types in here to kind of balance this out because our customers, you know, are going to be, are not going to all be engineers.” Or the people that are doing support need to be different. The HR people need to be different.
Joel Trammell:
The accounting people maybe need to be different. And so understanding that how you're different, how you're unique and then therefore what other types you need is very important.
Mark Graban:
Well, I think that's great advice, Joel. And again, our guest is Joel Trammell. He's got a new book coming out. As they say in Texas, this is not his first rodeo as an author. He's got a previous book from 2014, The CEO: How to Master the Balancing Act of a Successful CEO.
Mark Graban:
And the new book, it sounds like a broader focus. It's called The Manager's Playbook: Make Exceptional People Management Your Competitive Advantage. I mean, is the audience for this book managers at all levels, including a CEO?
Joel Trammell:
Yeah. Yes, there is absolutely, you know, a management role, you know, all the way up, including the CEO that I think has been neglected in many organizations, viewed as not important. A lot of the business literature really focuses on leadership, which is one component, I would say, of the management role. But it's not the only component. We talk about three distinct components.
Joel Trammell:
We talk about management, which is making decisions about those things you control because of your position. We talk about leadership, influencing others to willingly follow. And then we talk about coaching, a continuous process of making your team better. And all three of those tools need to be engaged to be successful. And so that's what we talk about in The Manager's Playbook, is you got to be careful.
Joel Trammell:
A lot of people only use one or more. They get into a management role and they think, “Well, I get to make all the decisions now.” And they just make decisions. Then they wonder why nobody's following them and nobody's getting any better, you know, and then some people are very leadership-oriented and everybody likes them, is excited, but they don't make good decisions and nobody knows where we're going and it doesn't work as well. And so we believe you need to be able to apply all three of those tools to be a successful manager in an organization.
Mark Graban:
So is the management piece the one that you think is most often missing? Is that why the focus on this book?
Joel Trammell:
Yeah, it is missing or overused. It often is either neglected. People just say, “I'm going to… you know, I don't run by consensus,” is kind of a common approach these days.
Joel Trammell:
Right. “I don't make these decisions. We build a consensus,” which to me is just the stupidest thing in the world. You know, like the quarterback going into the huddle and saying, “Okay, well, let's figure out what, offensive lineman, what play do you want to run? Okay, wide receiver.”
Joel Trammell:
Well, I mean, they don't have the view, you know, they're not the general on the field. They don't have the view of the whole situation.
Mark Graban:
And that takes time. The play clock would expire and now a delay of game penalty.
Joel Trammell:
Yes, exactly. And so, you know, somebody with a view of the overall field calls the play and then everybody executes accordingly.
Mark Graban:
And…
Joel Trammell:
And then the other thing I see, kind of the inverse of that is the person who gets made a manager and thinks, “Oh, yes, now I get to make all the decisions, but that's all I have to do is make a decision and everybody's just going to eagerly follow my direction.” And if you've had any experience in managing people, you know that that doesn't happen. They often will do what you ask them to do, but with far less enthusiasm than you need. And most of us managing people in knowledge worker categories, we need not just their physical engagement, but we need their mental and creative engagement. And the only way you get that is through exercising good leadership.
Mark Graban:
Well, Joel, you've shared a lot of really great insights and thought-provoking ideas here today, so I trust the book will be full of those as well. So I'll look forward to seeing the book when it comes out and I hope people will go check it out again. The Manager's Playbook: Make Exceptional People Management Your Competitive Advantage. I think I said it a little better that time.
Joel Trammell:
Yeah, I think you got it right.
Mark Graban:
I put “people management” on the same line this time. Try to avoid repeating that little mistake. But again, our guest has been Joel Trammell. Joel, you seem like a really busy guy, so thank you for making the time to be a guest here today.
Joel Trammell:
Great to be with you.
Mark Graban:
Well, thanks again to Joel for being our guest today. For a link to buy his book and more information about Joel and his work, you can go to markgraban.com/mistake122. As always, I want to thank you for listening. I hope this podcast inspires you to reflect on your own mistakes, how you can learn from them or turn them into a positive. I've had listeners tell me they started being more open and honest about mistakes in their work and they're trying to create a workplace culture where it's safe to speak up about problems because that leads to more improvement and better business results. If you have feedback or a story to share, you can email me myfavoritemistake@gmail.com and again, our website is myfavoritemistakepodcast.com. Hey podcast listeners.
Mark Graban:
I'm excited to announce the release of the audiobook version of my new book, The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation. Listen and dive into powerful insights on fostering growth through mistakes. Whether you're a leader, entrepreneur, or just trying to get better at learning from mistakes, this audiobook is for you. Get it now on Audible, Amazon, and Apple Books. Visit mistakesbook.com for more info.