402 | Stop Fixing Broken Employees - Hire Elite Talent Instead | Chris Hallberg

Speaker A: In business you can make that mistake again and again until someone either realizes or is going to do something about it. We have to have the ability to be accountable. But we also have to understand that we can't send the MPS to your employees house because they don't like coming in and everyone has a chronic sickness on Monday and Friday and they know you're shorthanded and can't hire people. So what are you going to do about it? Right, that's going back to that other example versus I'd rather gnaw my left arm off than come to this meeting not prepared and show everyone that I'm the weakest link on this chain. Because that is what elite units do is people hold themselves accountable because they don't want to be the reason why we fail.

Speaker B: The future doesn't wait for founders to feel ready. Markets shift. Technology accelerates. Teams evolve. The founders who win aren't the ones hoping for calm water. They're the ones who learn how to captain the ship no matter what the sea looks like. And that's exactly what we do here. Every week, without exception, we bring you the real conversations with founders who've been through the fire and the experts who know how to build what lasts. Founder stories every Tuesday. Expert strategy every Thursday. The intelligence you need to build bold, scale, smart and stay Future Proof. This is Future Proof Founder with your host, 5time M founder and globe trotting adventurer Jeff Mains.

Speaker C: Welcome back to the Future Proof founder podcast where the hardest person on the team to manage is almost always the one in the founder's chair. I'm um, Jeff Mains, five time founder and your guide for the messy, magnificent climb from startup to 30 million and beyond. And here's what I believe. You can build a company that lasts and live a life worth remembering. Anyone who tells you to sacrifice one or the other is selling something. Building a business of significance while living epic and adventurous life. That is the whole game. And a quick note, if you're new here, this used to be SaaS fuel 400 episodes and here we are with a new name, bigger mission and same Tuesday Thursday grind. So if you're one of the OGs, it is great to have you here. So now let's get into it. As we start, I have to say happy almost birthday America. You know, uh, 250 years old this weekend and let that sit for just a second and think about what it really means, you know, free enterprise, national freedom to start something, hire people, bet your own money on your own idea and sometimes raise Money from other people. And that isn't a given anywhere else on earth. I've been to 40 some odd countries now and America is so unique. Not only the business culture, but the people, the melting pot, the ideas, the innovation. And all of this came from who we are and are a part of that. And somebody bled for that. And so today, before we get into the tactics, uh, a little bit of gratitude for the country, for the military, for the framers of our constitution that set it up in a way that didn't just give them ultimate power, that there is balance. And sometimes that's incredibly helpful and sometimes incredibly frustrating, but it's also incredibly valuable to have that and all of this together and all of the people and all of you and uh, you know, again, all of the military and uh, historical people, uh, everybody who made build whatever you want possible, tremendously grateful. Let's dive into the trenches here. So think about the last time you let a performance issue slide too long. And I was thinking about this myself and uh, it was actually this last week. You know, you maybe told yourself that they were almost there, the timing wasn't right, that things would turn around next quarter. And meanwhile, your best people watched quietly, without saying a word. They recalibrated their own effort to match what you were tolerating. And as leaders, we get what we tolerate. And that's not a talent problem, it is a leadership problem. And that's a tough one to look in the mirror and go, oh, problem is right there. It's you, buddy. And most companies don't fail because they can't find great people. They fail because they can't let go of the wrong ones. And today we get into why one underperformer can quietly poison a whole high performing team. And why trying to fix a bad hire might be the most expensive mistake you make this year. And what actually separates founders who scale from founders who stay stuck managing chaos they built themselves? If you've ever suspected your team's capable of more, they probably are. So let's dive in. My guest today is Chris Hallberg, the business sergeant, a military veteran, entrepreneur and one of Inc magazine's top 10 leadership experts in the world. And in fact ranked ahead of Simon Sinek. How about that? Well, Chris built and sold a company at an 8x multiple during the Great Recession. He became Colorado's first EOS implementer and has guided 100 plus teams to to 90% and higher employee engagement rates, which is off the charts in today's environment. Welcome someone who takes battlefield discipline and turns it into business results. The Business Sergeant himself, Chris Hallberg. Hey, Chris. Welcome to Future Proof Founder.

Speaker A: Great to be here, Jeff. Thanks for having me on your program.

Speaker C: You've gone from military police to Corrections officer to EOS implementer, so quite the wide range of experience. And entrepreneur now. So software founder too. So when you look at leadership across all of those environments, what are some truths that never change human nature?

Speaker A: Right? Never, never miss an opportunity for smart people to make simple shit hard.

Speaker C: Love that.

Speaker A: And there was a bit of work between Corrections Officer and EOS Implementer, including sales rep, sales manager, sales executive, business owner several times over. So there, there was a bit of learning there. It'd be pretty tough to come right from the line to coaching business owners. So just I got out of all my uniforms in 1999 just to give you an idea of what I've been up to, and then I joined as an EOS implementer in early 2014. So that's a little bit more accurate timeline there.

Speaker C: That's great. Your nickname is the Business Sergeant, which I think that tells people a lot. Just instantly, what leadership principle from the military do businesses most desperately need today?

Speaker A: I think commitment is the big difference, right, between the military and the civilian business world. The military, you're signing a contract for many cases, uh, many years, and if you don't feel like coming into work, they would dispatch one of me, an mp, to come grab you and have you stand in front of your commander. In, uh, the civilian business world, your best operator can literally walk into your office and say, hey, thank you for everything, but I'm not feeling this anymore. And they could give you two weeks or no notice. So. So the difference is in the military, they assign you soldiers, and sometimes they're a four out of ten, and your job is to make them a, uh, seven out of ten, if that's possible. And in the civilian business world, you have access to literally free market economy, 7 billion humans. So it's a different dichotomy of commitment. But when we find and what the Business Sergeant is, right? When someone hires me, this is a lesson in personal branding and why your company name should say a lot about who you are or why you do what you do or what you do, any of those combinations are good to go. When you give somebody your company name and they're like, I have no clue that you're making people work hard. So maybe if you have one of those names, a tagline that kind of brings them in. So personally branded as the Business Sergeant, people don't hire Me to lightly review their issues or dance around their problems. They call me in there to call the balls and strikes, identify the wrong people in the wrong seats, gain that commitment and get really fired up. So we have a lot of fun working as the business sergeant. And that brand is now a veteran powered recruiting company. Because leadership, accountability, commitment, intestinal fortitude, these are things that are in shorter supply. No offense, but the kids popping out of high school today are above 44% less accountable than, than the last generation, which is already several. It's a different world we live in. So if you can. Even if your software company isn't a life or death thing, right? And there are many industries that are still life and death, healthcare, aviation, defense. It's very important. When we have a bad day, somebody might have a really bad day downstream. So we um, we gotta make sure we're creating products that, that, that do no harm. At the same time, if we could just commit to the vision of the company and really lean into a central shared vision and not make it about me, make it more about us. People don't join the military to get rich. They do it to serve their country, go to foreign lands, do interesting things there, and really be a part of a team. When people transition out of the military, the thing they miss the most are their teammates. And that kind of esprit de corps, which is a fancy word for culture in the military, is what people most remember. So if we can bring some of that hoorah into your civilian business and have a mission and our values and really get after it together. And being a part of an elite team is a special thing. And most people don't get a chance. They're in average teams, right? So if your company is solving big problems with a small group of really cool people, you are an elite unit and you should operate as an elite unit. So the way that happens is the leadership team, the management team and the greater team collaborate to create a Central Vision. Coaching EOS for over 12 years. Like I've seen it work too many times beautifully to not be a huge fan of that operating system specifically. But I know there's other ones, so I don't want to be pushy or salesy. What works for you, works for me. Ford, Chevy, Dodge, whatever, they're just cars, right? But they are a vehicle to help you to get more of what you want from your business. Because we work on this two page business document in eos that's a vision traction organizer. And it starts with, who are we? Your core values. If you value this kind of stuff. You're going to fit in here. If you run against this, hey, bless your heart, go find another team. You're not going to enjoy it here. And when we start to be too inclusive and less exclusive, now we got some. That guy's 100% in, he's about 40% in, they're about 60% in. When everyone's not 100% committed to the same vision, we end up going somewhere else. And that's obviously not great for the founder or the business as a whole. So it's very simple. Companies are buses. Don't let somebody get on your bus and hijack it and turn it into a car service or an Uber. You know what I mean? Buses have routes, they run on time, and Ubers and taxi cabs will take you anywhere you want to go individually. But an Uber XL I think is five or six people. That's it. A bus to put 100 people or a, ah, bus line to put thousands of people on. That's the bus driver is following a route, which is that vision. And we find people that not only want to be on the bus, they love to be on the bus. And it's not easy to stay on the bus. That these are now elite military mindsets that one can adopt in the civilian business world. And it's pretty awesome. If you've got some unicorns, the last thing you want to do is put a jackass or a donkey next to your unicorn, because they're just gonna. After they're done eating metal and leather and wood or whatever else they'll consume, they'll start nibbling on the skittle supply for your unicorns, because everybody knows unicorns like skittles and they like poop rainbows and chase rainbows and all those things as well. So if you want to have an environment that really operates well, we have a central vision and you opt 100% into it because it's rad and it's with really great people. And you probably won't be the smartest person in this room, which is the best room for anyone to be in. Or if you got some other ideas, bless your heart, you can go work for our competitor and distract them from their mission, but we won't allow that here. So just that commitment to being a great teammate is what separates the rock stars from the groupies. Certainly in the SaaS business, I have lots of SaaS companies and it's important to be collaborative, but not to the point where we water down our mission or our focus or we get feature bloat in our app and we become. It does 78 things. I only need three things. Okay, great, just talk about the three things. But we have to maintain the 73 things. There's a great example in the SaaS space where I look at an app like Calendly, it does one thing. A, uh, calendar. If you go to other programs, it does that in 70th. Why are they a billion dollar company if they only do one thing? It's because they do that one thing well. And quite frankly, they were first to market during the pandemic and they seized the high ground. So they own the high ground. And it's much easier, like three to one soldier wise to defend high ground than it is to take it.

Speaker C: Uh, you nailed it. Uh, there's definitely a difference in work ethic and culture from military to civilian. I love working with military people because they get it, they buy in. How do we build those people? And like you said in the military, you may get a team of fours and you've got to get them to sevens, eights, and maybe they'll never be tens, but you want to move in that direction. How do we take somebody in the organization and move them up? If there are four today, how do we get them to be a seven? If they're a seven, how do we make them a 10?

Speaker A: Yeah, I wouldn't try to make a four or seven in the civilian business world.

Speaker C: I'm with you.

Speaker A: I'd liberate them to the market and hire a seven to make them a nine. I think that's more realistic. People don't want to say that, but I see it all the time. Hanging on to the wrong people is probably the number one mistake all founders, leaders, managers in business make. I see it all the time and I can spot it pretty quickly because I'm a professional and I know what world class looks like and I know what they identify as world class looks like. And they're very different. To be self congratulatory, we're an amazing team. You guys are an average team, maybe a little bit below average. This would be my assessment. And people get big eyes when I say things like that. But if this is your tree, you know every, you know all the branches, all the leaves, all the bark, all the knots. I'm more of the forest ranger. I've seen a lot of trees, so I don't have that romance with the, the tree. Getting back to what separates the winners from the losers is understanding that humans are pretty much fully formed by 1718 years old. Your work ethic, your aptitude, your drive, like who you want to be in the world. It's pretty set a lot earlier than people would say. The way I try to explain it to people is what you're looking for is young people or people that have been in the market for a while that were raised. Right. You can't go back in a time machine. Uh, humans are usually a product of their environment. But also look at a family where we've got a superhuman and a felon all, all in the same group, right? It's not the parents fault. You are who you are, right? And there's def, uh, there's definitely some inputs. Your upbringing, your social situation, your schooling, your friend group, right. The five people you spend the most time with is who you are understanding that you can't fix humans, like you can try really hard. For years on end, I've seen people do it. They generally have a callus right here in the middle of their forehead from hitting the proverbial brick wall when it's not going well. So, hey, this guy's a 4, how do I make him an 8? You can't stop like you're OXO being unkind to this four, because they're not really in a space to become an 8 in most cases. So the idea is to liberate them to the marketplace so they can go find a place that would gladly use the services of that four and they might be a six at another organization.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: It's dynamic, right? But I think realistically our job isn't to take broken people and fix them, it's to, it's to identify unbroken people and then give them a position where we can get out of their way and allow them to contribute. So here's a Steve Jobs quote. We've probably heard this one before, being a technology program, but what he said is we don't find smart people and tell them what to do. We find brilliant people and, and they tell us what to do. So I'm, uh, a Steve Jobs fan when it comes to people, because an EOS tenant is structure first, people second. If you take Jeff Mains and say, okay, tell me everything you like to do and I'll create a role for that at some point you're going to get married, you're going to win the lottery, someone's going to move, you're going to have an opportunity at another organization. Not too many people are staying for 20, 30 years in a gold watch. I think that's pretty well established in the last 20 or 30 years. Like business is different. So like, the goal here is to find is to create positions within the company where there could be hundreds or thousands of people in a major market that have all the raw skills and training and upbringing to do that. And then you do training for nuance. Not if I create a role for you and you leave. There's only one of you, baby. I can't even replace you. There's only one Jeff Mains. And that's a good thing, Right? But, uh, I can't backfill that seat and hope to do it with one person. I might need two or three people to replace a very special person. So if I create a seat that a thousand people would have the raw fuel for, then I'm now picking the culture fit the vision of this person. How collaborative are what a great team, uh, do they hold themselves accountable? I can't hold you accountable. I can say this is the standard. Do you agree? An expectation is a resentment under construction. An agreement where you shake your hand and you're in for 87 lines of great code a week or whatever. I'm just grabbing a, uh, random from the sky. If you could only deliver 50 or 500 instead of 870. Let's just not how we run four or five minute miles at this firm. We don't run. This isn't a beer run. We don't wear fancy costumes. We train and we run professionally. If someone's in the slow group and you put them in the fast group, that's going to be a bad experience for the fast runners and that slow runner. That's why it's important to spell out what we expect. And if your candidates meet that great, come on in and then play the game. But square pegs into round holes don't work. You could shave off the corners, but it'll never be a square again.

Speaker C: Yeah, you're right. I think that's a really important thing. And just right people, right seats. And Jim Collins good to great. Uh, EOS emphasizes that as well. Why do leaders tolerate wrong people in those seats for much longer than they should? If you ask the team, everybody knows who the underperformers are.

Speaker A: Yeah. So we're either being nice and not kind to the business and each other. I'm from Minnesota, the land of passive aggressiveness. Oh, that's a wonderful idea. So did nice leave the room, moron? You know what I mean? Like, uh, so I think that's a big part of it. And the other part of it is that's if we Go to Jim Collins. Right, people, right? They share the core values. They, they, if you work hard and they work hard, coming in early, staying late, fixing the problem, then going home. That's innate to someone who's an artisan or a craftsperson, right? They put their name on it. When five o' clock hits and the beers come out and the ping pong starts right at 5:00'. Clock. That's more of an employee's factory mindset, right? There's a lot of TV shows about the office. The truth is, the root issue of your example is actually a recruiting issue. That's where I track it back to is we've under capitalized the human component. And when we're not meeting really bright people who are hungry and fit our profile, then you make do with what you have. So if you don't have access to a ten, ah, a six looks like an eight in a group of fours. So it's all relative. So I think if you spend enough time and money on recruiting and there's a waiting list to work at your company, malaise and misalignment, and that is not going to be tolerated. If I know you can't find my replacement and I'm not a really super solid human, this is where we play the watch the crazy shit I do at the office and still I got fired game and that again becomes an episode of your favorite office program. And yeah, that stuff's funny, but if you're one of the contestants or you're one of the characters, not so funny at all. So quick answer. It's a recruiting issue and we haven't capitalized the human component. And if you have a waiting list to work at your company, that means you get it. If you're having a hard time finding people so you're taking what you can get from the ones you have, I would point you right towards that's probably issue also because if we have pockets of awesome and pockets of not awesome, that's a leadership failure. Because here's a concept here. There was a study years ago called the bad apple effect. So anyone could just look that up later. And basically there are 80 some um, vignettes where they had these examples of teams of 4 or 5A players, like A unicorns, and they would enter a C player, a B player onto a team and in many cases within minutes of getting a C player, the A's adopted C behaviors. They didn't work well together, they missed deadlines, it was dysfunctional. One bad apple can spoil a whole bunch of good ones. And in my personal experience, which is pretty substantial in the right people, right seats game. Because new people are the byproduct of every one of my engagements. I don't think of a single team leadership, team management team that I've coached over a, uh, two year EOS implementation that we're all the same people at the end. Just there's movement in humans to begin with. But when I, when I identify and lobby to remove them, in many cases there isn't even a rehire because that wrong person. What's another way to say this? The boat goes faster without the £200 in the boat, even if it has an empty oar. But when we have the right people in the right seats and everyone is pulling their own weight on the oars, that's where the speed comes from. And if you've ever seen a professional crew race and someone gets an injury, they literally jump out of the boat, right? Because the boat will go faster with four, six rowers instead of seven or whatever it is. So I think that's a really big part, is just deciding who you want to be and then curating a team that agrees with that. So that bad apple. If I had all the stats, I blow your mind further. Let's just assume that the data is conclusive. And in every case, C players did not become B players in the presence of A players. A players became B minus players very quickly. And the presence of B and C players seen that in action. So I'm a big fan of the bad apple effect, of course, but only because when I read it, I was like, this is what I see. This is why I say Bob's okay. I'm like, this guy got pictures of you and Tijuana. Explain why this is. We say these are our core values, or this is how I see the rest of the team operate. This over here doesn't match that. What's going on? When we first started, we couldn't make payroll and he waited two weeks, and now we kind of owe him. Like, I get, I get there's a way to make that right, but that is not a lifelong diplomatic immunity pass passport that allows you to break laws and customs of your, uh, company without prosecution. The rules are the same for everybody. Jim Collins. Good to great, right? People share your core values. Right Seats. They, uh, are the best at what they do. They whistle while they do it. They enjoy it. It doesn't feel like work. It's an innate ability. In eos, we call it gwc. Get it, want it, have the capacity. So you got to live the core values and you have to GWC your seat. If any one of those are wrong, that's a deal breaker. So if theoretically, if 80% of the people at your company, the right people in the right seats, you got a pretty good business. What I found in my travels, about 135 implementations over 12 years with literally thousands of humans in the room that standards that aren't uniform are probably the second biggest thing having that pockets of greatness, pockets of not so much. So it's if I'm an A player and you put a C player next to me at a similar rate of pay A, it's offensive to me. I'm going to start backing off that because this is acceptable, I should be paid 20, 30% more to be a badass. And it's important if you have some high performing people that their compensation is just as special to the rest of the range as they are. And a lot of people try to get great humans at a discount. That's not a strategy that you can scale. Talent is expensive, but it's not. It's an investment in a brighter future and you can leverage that. So I'll take a small team of A players over a pretty good sized team of C and B players and they'll run circles around them. Yeah. And that's what Jobs or Jim Collins or then we talk about like Pat Lencioni. Five dysfunctions of team. Right. Lack of vulnerability based trust makes a resistance to healthy conflict. If we can't have healthy conflict, people aren't really committed. And if people aren't committed, you can't hold them accountable because they don't care. There's nothing to lose. And if they're not accountable, you don't get the results. So I always start with if we can't speak the truth because the boss is the reason why this sucks. And we can't say that in the meeting, we have to dance around it. Then that means you're not ready to be vulnerable and speak the truth. So we're gonna solve pretend issues. Let me know how that works for you. I already know it. It's not profitable and it's very frustrating. But if I can have healthy conflict, I'm like I can't believe you called me out in that meeting. I'm gonna find something sharp to put in your soft underbelly the first chance I get. Then we're no longer teammates. Right? We can, we're frenemies or fake friends, which is even worse than an actual enemy where you Understand where you both sit. And then once we're able to really be committed, so people call and say, I need you to help me with accountability. That's the fourth one out of the five things and the five dysfunctions of the team. Can we speak the truth without being transferred to the Anchorage field office? Can we engage in healthy conflict with no residue and, and the quote, unquote, um, loser of the argument gets side to side with the winner and we move forward as a united front. But you gave me space to dissent. You might even change your plan a little bit based on what I was squawking about. And that's a really healthy thing. And then once we're, once we can have that conflict, then the commitment comes in. And once we're committed, people hold themselves accountable because we understand that commitment is shared the same. And people bring me in for the accountability and they really go past the vulnerability based trust, the healthy conflict and really truly committed. And people will stay at a company up until about 20, 25% comp. That's enough to move somebody out of a great culture to a new culture. That's unproven. But people aren't leaving for 10, 15% more money if they're at a high performing team and they're respected and they're contributing and no one's lazy. And we try not to let the team down and we have that hoorah mentality. That's a retention mechanism. And retention, uh, is the hidden killer of ebitda. Constantly turning over positions versus letting someone grow some roots and have some real subject matter expertise, including the tribal knowledge that one gains by sticking around a minute.

Speaker C: I think a lot of founders confuse culture with perks or personality. Like you mentioned, ping Pong at 5 o' clock or beer tap in the office. How do you define culture in a way that actually drives execution?

Speaker A: Yeah, I've been into tech companies. Their office is a office space. There's golden retrievers everywhere. Right. We got kombucha and IPA and everyone hates each other and we're just burning through somebody's money until they tell us it's over. And then we'll go do that somewhere else until that's over. So I think that is the window dressing. That's the eye candy of uh, look at our amenities. I would rather see guys working on milk crates in a crappy concrete walls. A, uh, B or C, office space that are getting after it, that are competitive. We should have some healthy competition and some shared accountability. And that to me is a valuable team. If you can have a beautiful office and all the amenities and an award winning team. Bless your heart. Why not shoot for the moon? But I find a lot of people identify as having a great culture because everyone's quite comfortable. Why they continue to bullshit each other, why we're not successful.

Speaker C: You tend to blend military style accountability with entrepreneurial flexibility. Uh, how do you create discipline without creating fear or bureaucracy in that process?

Speaker A: Yeah. So think about an elite military unit, uh, big army, it's all about the collar, right? In the smaller units that do cooler things, the rank is less important and your ability to execute. Who's going on this mission? You can take six people. Since my life is on the line and I like my life back home and I want to see my people again, I'm going to pick five other people that I don't have to worry about napping on duty or not knowing their technical and tactical proficiencies. I'm taking the hardest ones out with me so I can come home. I'm not taking the shouldn't be here crowd and putting my life in their hands. So again, the military is a life or death thing. So making that decision once could be fatal. And the last time you do it in business, you can make that mistake again and again until someone either realizes or is going to do something about it. We have to have the ability to be accountable. But we also have to understand that we can't send the MPs to your employees house because they don't like coming in and everyone has a chronic sickness on Monday and Friday and they know you're shorthanded and can't hire people. So what are you going to do about it? Right, that's going back to that other example versus I'd rather gnaw my left arm off than come to this meeting not prepared. Uh, and show everyone that I'm the weakest link on this chain. Because that is what elite units do is people hold themselves accountable because, because they don't want to be the reason why we fail. An example, if you see an after action review, which is what happens after a military operation, whether it's in um, combat or training, what was supposed to happen? What actually happened? What was the gap? What did we learn from it? That's the hyper simplification of an aar. And when you see these big special forces superheroes literally getting to fisticuffs because they're fighting for the accountability of why the operation wasn't 100%, that's why they're the special forces. When you go to the big army in a big unit, and something breaks. Did anyone see you? Can you steal it from another unit? It's a completely different set of accountabilities, right? Deny, Deny. Wasn't there, didn't break it. You got to prove it. Versus that was me. My apologies. I'll make it right. So a elite unit with high accountability is because the bar is so high. Selection is every day not just to get a special hat or a tab or a badge, but to earn it, to be a standard bearer of that elite unit. Like when I was in the army, you'd see the Green Berets come in, and everyone would be quiet. Imagine if you're on a, uh, junior varsity football team and your favorite NFL players come in the room. That is the difference between the best of the best and the herd. And big units do big unit things, and special units do small, delicate, precise things. And there's a reason why, right? Because the training, the physical fitness is on another level. And a regular unit just simply could not execute even with four, five, six times the number of humans. Sometimes a smaller elite team, even in business, is the answer than trying to accommodate a large monolithic unit of C and B players.

Speaker C: Oh, that's really good. I like the perspective there of, uh, just the difference. And everybody wants to be elite until they really understand what it takes to be elite. And then they really either. Either want to be, and that just draws them in or pushes them away. I don't want to work that hard.

Speaker A: Everybody wants to be a gangster until it's time to do gangster shit. That is the same thing with elite units. And I think it's easy these days to identify as being something that you're not. The world has gotten very inclusive. There's examples where that's been successful, and there's, uh, a. There's examples where that's not. So I think you can't just give yourself a Green Beret. I think that's a couple years of the most grueling military education possible. And it has a failure rate of about 85% of people that were already in the top 10% to even be selected to go there. And that's why when you see someone with that funny green hat, you already know, like, this is beyond. I wonder if they're special. Yeah, it says it right there on their shoulder, dummy. But you, to keep that tab on your shoulder, you can never disappoint the regiment. And certainly not your group or your battalion or your company or your team. And my business partner and business sergeant, our Veteran powered recruiting company is exactly that. He's just got out of the special Force forces a year and a half ago and the guy's pretty spectacular in everything he does. And I don't have to train a Green Beret to think The army spent four or five million dollars in 20 years to, to build the gray matter between his ears. My job is just to turn him loose on the parameters of the business and stand back and be impressed with what happens. That's why our whole thesis, uh, why you'd want to hire a Green Beret. Your technology company is like, you've already got technical experts. If you have a leadership, management, planning, targeting, execution problem, hire an expert in that they can understand what your software tool does and quite a bit more after just being around meetings for a quarter or two. But your very best subject matter expert couldn't carry my guy's backpack for an afternoon. Like, it hurts. It's heavy, let alone carrying it for 20 miles and mountainous terrain, which is a hard pass for me, a, uh, former military police sergeant, which is a completely different job. Right? So like this is the whole point is leadership and management is not an innate skill. It's practiced and honed and opted in and opted out to for many years. So getting someone that has been to Helen back and has made it 500 times in a row, like I know what, everyone on this episode is listening, we're special. What we do is. No, you're not. Like, you're a bunch of humans like all the rest of them. So as soon as you realize that the subject matter expertise you seek is uncommon in your space, then this is where outsourcing the missing ingredient and supporting it with your expertise is actually the path to get past this current plateau. The plateau isn't your smarts, isn't your technical ability. It's your ability to put systems and process and discipline and accountability. Simple stuff is scalable. Complex stuff is frustrating. So again my earlier comment, I got a T shirt because I'm an enlisted guy that it says. And my, the guy at the end of my cul de sac is a retired Air Force colonel. So every time I see him out there I'm like, oh, I gotta put that shirt on. And it says officers making simple shit hard since 1775. And it's just a tongue in cheek thing.

Speaker C: And that's funny.

Speaker A: Hey, I got an mba. Hey, I've got this degree. Hey, I've got this certification. Let me flex my technical prowess upon the group. That's not really your problem. Knowing how to Relate to people and kind of get down to what's important to them and plugging that into what's important to us and selecting people that are accountable, that are elite, that, that don't want to be micromanaged. A players don't need any management, all, uh, virtually none. What they need is to be heard and supported. And you need to solve that. You need to unblock them. Right. And they need to play well with others. Usually the better you get. And I don't want to get lit on fire for what I'm going to say, but I'm going to go there. The most brilliant technical people usually don't have world class people skills. A lot of times they're uber introverts. They're like, please don't talk to me or make me disagree with anyone. I would just like to build this thing. And that's fine.

Speaker C: You're excited, uh, about making cool stuff.

Speaker A: Yeah. And there's nothing wrong with that. But once you've been here longer than the rest of the guys or gals who like to make cool stuff, you find yourself in a leadership position through attrition, longevity, continuity and taking your subject matter expert. Here's an example most people can wrap their head around for sure at first. Take taking your sales leader, your number one salesperson, and saying, boom, you're amazing. I want you to be the sales manager and teach everybody else to be this great. That almost never works. It does once in a while, but it's a 1 in 10 every 10 times you try it, it ends poorly 9, 90% of the time. Because the skills that make someone a great salesperson are uh, rarely so just real quick to finish the thought. A great sales leader is someone that was probably in the 65th percentile, but the operations people love them because their paperwork is clean. It's legible, it's complete. It's complete. It does everything it's supposed to do. Whereas your number one salesperson is so out there with their ability, they have no resistance to rejection. They, you know what I mean, they're superhuman because they, they believe they're the best salesperson in the world. And even if they're not, don't tell that person because you would ruin their whole aura, uh, and the confidence and why they're bringing in these big deals. The type of people that have those skills do not have the detail follow up. Right. This is why we talk about technologist. The senior person shouldn't be the senior developer, shouldn't be the manager, it shouldn't be the VP it's the person that actually has the skills to build a team, hold it accountable, swap out the C and B players and replace those with A players. Those are the skills that help software companies grow. And yeah, there's that whole respect thing. Oh, that guy. His code's trash. I wouldn't listen to anything he has to say. He might be, or she might be. A brilliant strategist, a great communicator, an extrovert, someone who likes other people. Imagine your manager doesn't even like people and you're one of the people they manage. Read that back to yourself a couple of times. And how many people are in that same situation? Let the people make cool stuff. But the same people that make the cool stuff aren't the same people to scale the school stuff, the cool stuff. In many cases it's true.

Speaker C: And your platform, Go Expand really takes the subjective parts of leadership and management and makes those much more objective. Why do you think performance management is still so emotionally inconsistent in a lot of companies?

Speaker A: Because all of our moms said we were the best and we believe her. And that's the quick answer. The long answer is a scatter plot, something Go Expand has because what do you mean Mary's not the right person if Justin is. The relativity is something that we miss. So subjectivity is everywhere, especially in humans. Objectivity, objective data. If I have alignment on the Y axis, north and south, and that's core value alignment, role alignment, and your last bunch of performance reviews all together, that gives you the Y. The X axis is performance. That is scorecarding, hitting your numbers, uh, skill activation, getting certifications, learning new things, knowing how to do it the right way. Rock or project completion. Things outside of the day to day that we build on the spaceship to go to further galaxies. And then task completion. When you make a promise this week and it's due next week, is that a promise, a reality, or is that just a false promise? Right, I promise. But I can break promises that I just shared the logic in both the X and the Y axis. So we have up and to the right is where the green is good and then everywhere else in the L shape is red. That's bad. Don't get caught in the red. My point is, when I have a conversation with someone many times it's a blind spot or there's a lack of clarity. And then in Go Expand, I can watch your dot head towards green. We're good to go. End of crisis. Even if it's going to be a little bit to get there. He's moving there. I'm, um, with it now. When someone pitches a tent in the red or they regress further, hey, it's time to call it. This is never going to happen. This is just not a fit. There's no reason to prolong the failure because people don't like to fail, right? They put off that wounded animal smell. It's not attractive to anyone else. But the real loser, when we hang on to the wrong people is we're stealing an opportunity for the right person who's stuck at another organization. Who would be the missing piece to the Rubik's Cube? We could whip it right up and solve it up if we had the algorithm that they bring. That is the big deal. Go Expand takes all of. So we don't just have scorecards. We have scorecards with visualizations. We don't just have right person, right seat. I could take every department, every person, the whole company, and I can put them on a scatter plot. And if you want to be more engaged, do these things. If you want to perform more, do those things. But you cannot identify as being the best developer on the team if you live in the red. That. That is where after installing Go Expand, a lot of times, like, whoa, we had some people kind of pretending to be. And, uh, other people were following their lead. They were taking the social capital and kind of hijacking the organization because they identified as the leader and a bunch of passive people just blindly followed. But upon further discussion, Jeremy is actually the big dog and Tony is actually the Chihuahua here. So I need you guys to do a little role reversal. And now we've decided this is what the cool kids are. The ones that move the needle on the business. Not the ones that complement your wonderful haircut. I like it, by the way. Or your wonderful shoe selection. Or. You see what I'm saying? Like the cool kids, after doing business operating system work like you do and I do, and then having a software tool that actually calls balls and strikes. Not. We'll call that on the line. No, it is red or it is green. It will. There is no yellow.

Speaker C: There's no yellow.

Speaker A: Yeah, there is no yellow. And people said, I've had a feature request. Can we put a yellow band? And I'm like, no, I'd really like to know. I said, are they. Can they see the red from their green? Yeah, that's yellow. Go ahead. You just call that yellow yourself. But I like the duality of green is good, red is bad. And if you don't want to be red, do these Things and be green if you cannot. Thanks. Here's a copy of the home game. Thanks for playing. We're now going to make room for someone who might be green in their first 30 days without a lot of management, retraining, frustration, difficult conversations, those types of things. So it really just like the whole system. It's not a commercial for go expand. Obviously I want everybody to go look at it. And tech companies tend to do very well because they use it as a dashboard. They poured in all their other stuff and we can embed web forms into the meetings. All of our tools are connected. We have an agentic AI agent, an OpenAI workspace. So, you know, we could put all your process in your playbooks. You don't have to knock Haga. Dumb question. Your third of the day, we just direct them to the bot and the bot gives them the one pager of what we want. And if you need to update the one pager, just pull the other one out, put the new one in. The next time somebody asks the question, the old answer isn't even available. So this is where we take like all the EOS tools, the business operating system tools, and then go expand ads, about seven or eight disparate people applications all in one login that work well together and then an agentic AI agent. So if you take a to do in a meeting, it hears you. You don't have to stop the meeting and tap out a uh to do at the end of the meeting. All your TO dos are right there for you. They're right there. So we can just have a deep discussion. We don't have to get into slowing down the meeting or if you want to ask it a question about policy procedure, you don't have to disturb anybody. So those three things together are basically the technology stacks of my most successful client. So what I did is I just paid attention and curated those tools and put them in one login. And it's not just about saving money of canceling eight other apps. It's about having someone be 94% engaged in one app versus 20% engaged in five apps. It is just a better experience. There's also reward and recognition communication. Atta boys, Atta girls, Feedback. Sometimes things aren't great. Here's a tool to say, not the best, but it's okay. But I just want to let you know that you weren't prepared for this meeting and it doesn't have to be a major affront because all I got to do is click a button and you can go look at your Feedback and say, um, I might see it differently. But especially very kind introverts will not tap somebody on a shoulder. They'll just internalize it. And then there's coats of that paint that eventually get to be too much. And that's when your unicorn just quits in a huff because this was the straw that broke the camel's back. So we want to make sure everyone is seen, heard, communicated to and respected. And we do that through a shared platform where the rules are the same for everybody.

Speaker C: That's good. And you mentioned the agentic AI like a company brain. How do you see AI changing management over the next few years without replacing human leadership entirely?

Speaker A: Humans that are refusing to use AI are being replaced with humans that are using the tool. I don't know who said this, but I heard something and I've glommed onto it. AI is just a way to add 50 IQ points. 5. 0. 50 IQ points to every one of your employees when utilized correctly. So think about AI helping people get rid of the TPS reports. If you're familiar office space reference mindless work that is part of your subject matter. Like everyone's got TPS reports. If you can automate the unfar. Excuse me. If you can automate the unfun parts of your business and have those supervised. So rather than writing the book, I'll edit the book. Rather than doing the TPS reports, I will edit the TPS reports. So I'm now spending 10% reviewing the agent's work versus 100% of creating it and then reviewing it. I then can vector all my passion, time, energy and needle moving impact to the things that bring me joy. When you are in your subject matter expertise, the clock just spins. You ever been in a meeting and an hour is like, that's an hour. That's a great meeting. You ever been in a meeting where it feels like, I don't know, the first three years of your life when you really like to speed things up? That's because you probably are in a meeting that could have been an email. Sharing information is for emails. Solving problems and gaining commitment is why we meet in person or on a technology platform. There's no reason to share information live. That's what reports are for. Has everyone reviewed the data? Okay, great. Now let's discuss what your exceptions are. What strikes you as odd or what we could be better at? Uh, and spending a whole meeting with people coming prepared with the facts would be a meeting that would be fun to attend. Spending 45 for that meeting. Have everyone report their things and then spend 15 minutes on how we're going to fix it. Unfortunately, that's how most people operate. And that's why death by meeting, death by PowerPoint are real things.

Speaker C: Yeah, without a doubt. If you could force every leadership team to master just one habit, that would dramatically improve execution, culture and growth. What would that be?

Speaker A: Authenticity.

Speaker C: Oh, that's good.

Speaker A: Yeah. Don't apologize for who we are, why we exist, and don't be over accommodating to people who aren't that. So I want you to be. There's plenty of places to be inclusive. Right. Including people that don't like what you like, that don't work like you work or don't care what your best people. You're literally aiming at your big toe for an hour, pulling the trigger and wondering why you're missing your big toe. So most of these things are self inflicted. And I just get to my founders and my leaders and say, listen, I need you to describe what the end state here looks like. I need you to tell me why you're not happy with your current state. I'd like you to visualize with me where you want to end up and what that looks like. Now. I need your daily habits to match the activities to get you there and not do the comfortable thing, which is whatever you think is great is fine. That is not a tenet of an elite team. High goals, impossible deadlines. I don't know how we're going to figure this out. I just puked in the bathroom before this meeting. I'm freaked out. That's where greatness lives. On the edges, not in the comfortable squishy middle where most people, you know, like to operate.

Speaker C: I uh, like that. Where can people learn more about you and about go expand online?

Speaker A: Yeah, they can go to go expand.com and we have a sandbox environment. So my techies are going to be like, you got a sandbox? I do. You can go play around our fictitious company called Figment and see what it's actually like with some data in there. My business Sergeant website is bizsgt.com if people want sales training, management training, or the best leaders on the planet that you can repurpose in your own design. And then lastly, if they want to hire me for EOS coaching, they can just search eos. Chris Hallberg. I'll pop right up. And then lastly, anyone who wants to connect with me on LinkedIn, I'll be putting this episode there. So if you want to follow me, I try to stay fairly active and if you liked what you heard. You'll hear more of that on my LinkedIn.

Speaker C: Fantastic. We'll make sure and link all of that in the show notes. Chris, it's been a great episode. Thanks for being on Future Proof Founder.

Speaker A: Thanks for having me. Jeff.

Speaker C: Thanks again Chris for coming on the show and sharing your insights and resources. Thanks for. You can learn more about Chris and Go expand@goxpand.com as always, all links, highlights, resources and full show notes are available at, uh, getfutureproof.com and SaaS fuel. That link still works as well and it just redirects so be sure to check out our channel on YouTube as well. It's still the same. It's ChampionLeadership and over there we still have full video episodes, training shorts, outtakes, lots more content. And Remember, that is ChampionLeadership on YouTube. Thought leaders share Share this episode with the founder doing the inner work, nobody puts in the pitch deck. And everyone who shares this week gets one reaction they caught before it became a regret. Here's my Future Proof takeaway from today's episode. The thing that nobody tells you when you're building something big is that keeping the wrong person to be nice isn't kindness. It's actually the least kind thing you can do. And it's very counterintuitive because you want to hang on to people, want to treat them really, really well. But to them, to your best people, to the mission you started this thing for. That is not the best thing to do. Uh, your job isn't to fix people. It's to build a team where the right people can do the best work of their lives and where the wrong seat gets cleared fast enough that everyone else doesn't have to suffer for it. An elite team isn't nicer, it's just more honest. Build that and you get the company and the life that you actually signed up for. Coming up on our next episode, the operations leader who stopped hiring to fix broken workflows and built a connected scalable system instead. Justin Watt on why more headcount was never the answer. And then, one week from today, what happens when the SaaS founder trades the Growth at All Cost playbook for technology built around human purpose and wins? Anyway, I'll see you next time. Build Bold, Scale Smart. Stay Future Proof. And as always, enjoy the journey.

Speaker B: Build Bold, Scale smart. Stay Future Proof. This is Future Proof Founder with gentlemen, Jeff Mains.