Welcome everyone, I'm your host Greg McEwan and I am here with you on this journey to
learn how to make our highest contribution. Have you ever felt working with people in
the workplace is harder than it needs to be? It's long been thought that it's faster
and easier to just do things yourself but this can be such a false economy. What we know
now is that the right person makes everything faster, easier and better than if you try
to do it yourself. By the end of this, part four in the series of four parts about how
to make work life more effortless, you will be able to select people who make getting
the right things done faster and comparatively more effortless. Let's get to it.
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Steve Hall is a friend of mine and a highly successful entrepreneur. And he told me about
a controller he once hired to help manage the finances for his automotive company. It wasn't
until the controller had been with the company for five years that Steve stumbled on a $300,000
accounting discrepancy. When he questioned the controller, she was apologetic. She made it seem
like a well-intentioned mistake, but Steve and his CFO had their doubts. They were no longer sure
that they could trust her in that position and decided to find a replacement. However,
this all came at a time when the business was growing rapidly and they didn't want to deal
with the potential disruption. So instead of firing her, they decided to build support around her.
Five years later, they discovered that the $300,000 mistake had turned into $1.6 million
stolen from the business. When she learned that she'd been caught, she resigned via text message
and left town. No one at the company ever heard from her again. In hindsight, Steve admits,
my mistake was even worse than hiring someone I didn't trust. I hired her, she lost my trust,
and I continued to have her stay on long after she'd lost that trust. Last week, in episode three of
this four-part series, I shared research that illustrates that if you can eliminate four out of
five meetings, you will increase your productivity in your organization. Go back and listen to episode
192 to understand that research and why that is the case. But I reference it now because it raises a
question. How can you accomplish more with less meetings, less management effort? If you're not
going to meet with people in meetings, how do you make sure that the work gets done?
And of course, there's more than one answer to this. But one answer is you hire people you trust,
and then you trust them completely. Being able to do that, and I'm reading now from chapter 14,
trust the engine of high leverage teams in F-less from F-less, page 189. Hiring someone trustworthy
starts a simple and obvious step, but one that many routinely overlook. Making sure you are hiring
someone honest and honorable, someone you can trust to uphold a high standard when nobody's looking.
But hiring someone who is trustworthy is also about hiring someone conscientious,
someone you can trust to uphold their responsibilities, to use good judgment, to do what they say they're
going to do when they say they're going to do it, and to do it well. It's someone you don't have to
supervise or micromanage, or I should add, have meetings with all the time, someone who understands
the team's goals, and who cares as much as you do about the quality of the essential work to be done.
Warren Buffett, who of course is someone who has demonstrated an extraordinary ability to gain high
ROI, return on investment, but also someone who has achieved spectacular return on effort,
or ROI. And one of the ways he does that is by using three criteria for determining who is trustworthy
enough for him to hire or to do business with. He looks for people with high integrity,
intelligence, and initiative that we had is that without the first, the other two combat fire.
I like to think about this as the three eyes rule. So coming back to Steve Hall, after this
disaster with his controller, he had to find a replacement. And rather than blaming the whole
thing on just one bad apple, he and the CFO looked long and hard for any ways in which they might
have unwittingly enabled the problem to occur. This honest self-assessment helped them to see how
they needed to improve their hiring process. They had hired the most recent control haphazardly,
by way of an off-the-cuff suggestion from a supplier. Going forward, they committed to a new process.
It involved more time and effort upfront. But Steve now understood that investing wisely
in recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding once could reduce his risk many, many times over.
His new hiring criteria mirrored the three eyes rule. In the end, they hired a man who had no
experience in the automotive industry at all. He'd run accounting for a law firm, but he was a
complete fit on integrity, intelligence, and initiative, a self-starter with an unimpeachable
ethic, and the ability to figure out problems on the fly, or put more simply, they really trusted him.
Austin has been a valued member of the company for years now, even after the business was sold
to a Fortune 500 company he was kept on. He's been promoted three times since. The high trust
hire turned out to be one of the company's highest performers. When you can say, these four little
words, I trust your judgment. And mean them. It's like magic. Team members feel empowered.
They take a risk. They grow. Trust is strengthened. And then it tends to spread. As executive coach
Kim Scott writes in her best-selling book, Radical Candor, when people trust you and believe you
care about them, they are more likely to engage in this same behavior with one another, meaning
less pushing the rock up the hill again and again. Hiring someone is, of course, a single decision
that produces effortless results. You get it right once. And this is exactly the thing of it.
Trust is the engine oil for high performing teams. We all know that you need to add oil to a car
engine in order to keep it operating. But not everyone understands exactly why. It's because
inside the engine, the many fast-moving parts can create friction when they rub up against each
other. The oil is the lubricant that keeps those parts sliding smoothly instead of wearing each
other down. So this is why if the engine runs out of oil, your car will stall or even grind
completely to a halt. And that sounds a lot like what happens in low trust relationships,
on low trust teams. Doesn't it? Inside every team, many people with interrelated roles and
responsibilities moving at, you hope, at least high speed and without trust, conflicting goals,
priorities and agendas rub up against each other, creating friction and wearing everyone down.
If the team runs out of trust, it is likely to stall or sputter out. Trust is like the engine oil
for the team. It's the lubricant that keeps these people working together smoothly so that the team
can continue to function. The key, therefore, to getting effortless results in and across teams
is to have systems in place to ensure that the engine is constantly well-oiled.
And the best way I know how to leverage trust in order to get residual results is simply to select
trustworthy people to be around in the first place. Hiring someone is a single decision that
produces effortless results. You get it right once and that person adds value hundreds of times over.
You get it wrong once and it can cost you repeatedly. It's like skimping on a shoddy oil filter.
It might keep the engine running smoothly in the short term, but the moment that filter starts
leaking, it will cause problems throughout the entire system. Who we hire is a disproportionately
important decision that makes a thousand other decisions. Each new hire may well influence future
hires, gradually shifting the norms and the culture over time. Often, there will be a pressure to
fill a role immediately as the vacancy creates a short-term headache. But while hiring quickly,
may lighten the load at first, hiring well, will lighten the load consistently and repeatedly
saving you many more headaches in the long run. Indeed, I addressed this in essentialism as well,
where I talked about how important it is to be ridiculously selective in hiring people.
A non-essentialist tends to hire people frenatically, impulsively even, then gets too busy or distracted
to either dismiss or reskill the people keeping the team back. At first, the hiring bonanza seems
justified because of the pace of growth that must be sustained. But in reality, one wrong hire is
far costlier than being one person short. And one wrong hire often leads to multiple wrong hires
because the wrong person will tend to attract more wrong people is what Guy Kawasaki called
a bozo explosion. A term he used to describe what happens when a formerly great team or company
descends into mediocrity. He was referencing, by the way, what happened to Apple in those middle
days when that company went from having produced great products and great results and fell almost
into bankruptcy. An essentialist, on the other hand, is ridiculously selective on talent.
She has the discipline to hold out for the right hire, no matter how many resumes she has to read
or interview she has to conduct or talent searches she has to make and doesn't hesitate to remove
people who hold the team back. The result is a team full of all star performers whose collective
efforts add up to more than the sum of their parts. And that's what you want, is to surround
yourself with high trust people and then to trust them completely.
Thank you, really, thank you for listening. This was part four in a four part series in how to apply
effortless thinking to the world of work. A place we all know is often anything but effortless.
What is one idea that stood out to you in today's episode and what is one thing you can do
in one minute or less to apply what you have learned and who is one person who you can share
your insight with? For the first five people who write a review of this episode on Apple podcasts,
you'll receive free access to the Essentialism Academy. Just go to gregmikyuan.com
forward slash podcast promo and I'll see you next time.
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