#540 - This Boss Hates Water Coolers

Speaker A: Good Advice podcast. Today we're going to talk about some of the worst of the worst managers or examples of bad management. Uh, which you may be thinking, hey, we don't need examples. You just got to call my boss. You might have a boss like that. We're going to talk about it. We're going to talk about what you need to know as a leader, as a boss, and get, uh, into it today on the show. Hey, my name is Blake Benz. I'm the host of the Good Advice Podcast. Thanks for tuning in today to another show. Before we jump in, we have a quick advertisement from one of the businesses who sponsored today's episode. Don't forget, you can always reach out blakeoodadvicemarketing.com or you can support the Patreon. Patreon.com Good advice. All that to say. We'll be right back. There's one single piece of advice that I give to business owners who are ready to scale their business drastically, and that's knowing exactly what you need to hand off so that you can continue focusing on what you're an expert in. And it amazes me when I talk to business owners who are doing their own bookkeeping and tax prep and worse, that they're going through all this paperwork at 10 o', clock, 11 o', clock, even midnight, slaving away, trying to make sense of all of the numbers for their business. Business owners who are making it happen have already figured out that you can't do it all yourself. That's why I recommend Steve lay with Equity Business Solutions. Not only is he an expert in bookkeeping and tax prep, but. But what I love about Steve is that he'll sit down with you and help you make sense of the value of your business beyond just reading a spreadsheet, you'll be able to make better decisions. And more importantly, you're going to save yourself the crucial time you would have spent going through QuickBooks or an Excel spreadsheet or whatever it is that keeps us up late at night. So save yourself some time and some money by giving Steve lay a call at Equity Business Solutions and he'll show you the value beyond your numbers. Go to Equity Business Solutions llc.com to find out more. All right, so I don't got too much time today, so we're not gonna, um, we're not gonna wax poetic about the theories of good leadership. I'll just say very quickly, you know, we all know a good boss. I think, I think it's just very interesting. If you get a bunch of people in a room and you ask them about who their favorite boss was, who was the best boss they ever had, uh, you get some very consistent things. You get things like, they believed in me, they motivated me, um, they saw the best in me, um, they let me do my job. Which I personally think is a, um, underestimated quality of a great boss. You don't ever really hear about, um, they gave great speeches, they were extremely charismatic, you know, and I think that should be encouraging for those of us who manage people that, you know, you don't have to be this motivational speaker or this incredible personality or, uh, you know, you can just be your average self, your average personality. And caring about your people often goes a pretty long way. On the flip side, if you ask people what are some of the worst of the worst qualities that they've had that they've seen in a boss, again, you hear some very common things. Now, back in the day when, before the years of good advice, when I worked for a local leadership consulting company, I mean we would do meetings like this all the time. Uh, I've been in rooms like this dozens of times of asking these kinds of questions, uh, asking these questions to middle managers, to, uh, people who are about to be first time managers, to senior leaders, to business owners. And interestingly, you get similar answers regardless of the, um, position someone's in. And these answers are almost always related to the personality of the person. They say things like, they were rude, they were micromanaging, uh, they didn't let me do my job. Um, they thought they knew how to do the job. When they really didn't, they would call me at 12 o' clock at night. In fact, I had someone who shared a story about, um, their boss was so critical that literally the boss would call them at 11, 12 o' clock at night to complain about decisions that they had made. And this person felt stuck because they felt like, you know, what am I, I really need this job, I don't know what to do. Like, it's a really intense job and it's part of my career pathway. Like, I can't just leave, you know, what am I going to do with this? Now I will say, like, candidly, my bias is life is very short. I tend to be a bit more open handed in the sense of it's all going to work out. If you hate that job, you'll find another one. I've mentioned this before. I was being interviewed on a leadership podcast or maybe it was like uh, a live show on LinkedIn. I think now that I think about it, and the question was, what do you do when you have a boss like this? And I think the question was, what's the advice to lead up? Which is, this is like a very, uh, common. It's a very common type of question in the world of leadership of, like, you know, you're leading the people who report to you, but then also, how do you sort of lead and manage the people above you? So the question was, like, intentioned around that. But the person said, you know what. What advice do you have to people who have bosses like this? And I said, uh, I would quit. And she was like, oh, oh, well, okay, but hang on. But what can they do? And I was like, no, seriously, quit. Like, I would never work for someone like that. I would never work. I mean, I have worked for someone like that, and I never will again. So, you know, wherever you are in your career, you know, whatever you're doing, um, I will say that sometimes we work for people like this and we kind of convince ourselves to, you know, do our tour of duty. Um, I have a friend of mine who had a really kind of just not great corporate scenario. They finally left and started their own business, which, you know, those of you who I mean, m. It's the majority of the podcast listeners, you know, that running a business has its own slew of joys and problems that show up on a daily basis. But I did ask him. We were talking about pains in business, and I said, you know, do you ever miss it? Do you ever miss the corporate world? Do you ever think you'd go back? And he was like, heck, no. No way. Absolutely not. So sometimes when you get on the other side of it, you realize, you know what? Uh, I think actually I was fooling myself to think that I should work for someone like that, but it's really neither here nor there. I want to talk about this specific example of bad leadership that I saw on social media. I posted about this last week. Um, and this was a picture from someone's corporate office, and it's a picture of a water cooler. And, uh, essentially what happened was a manager or maybe the business owner, I don't know. They put a sticker up on the water cooler, and in all caps on the water cooler, it says, this is not free. It's 25 cents for every eight ounces. Thank you. Now, typically, these things have, like, the little solo cup things, the little plastic. Um, I guess it's not solo cup, but you know what I'm talking about. The little paper cups and Those are about 8 ounces. So what this person is saying is, if you're gonna come get a glass of water, if you're going to, I, uh, mean take a break. How dare you to get a cup of water. Please put 25 cents into, you know, whatever bin is nearby. Now if you don't think that companies would actually do this, they would. In fact, I worked for a company that did this. Um, in our case, it was like the small sodas, uh, like soda cans. And it was something like, I don't know, maybe 50 cents or 75 cents per can. And it was like, if you're going to take a can, please pay for it. Which I get a little bit. In that case, I do. I mean, they, they paid for the soda. It's really not a big deal. Um, it's not the hill that I would die on. But I will say, when a new CEO took over, one of the first things that I noticed was that she got rid of the fee for cans. She was like, guys, uh, we're all adults. If you want to grab a soda, can, grab a soda. You know, we're a million dollar business. Like, if, if we need to, I mean, for real, if somebody wants to grab a soda for their lunch, surely we can afford it. Surely we can make it happen. And I appreciated that. I thought, okay, that's, I'm glad we're seeing some value in our culture, which I think a lot of times people think culture is just like politeness or vibes around the office. Culture is very much the full package of what I get here. Not just in terms of compensation, but like, what can I expect in terms of the work environment, how I'm treated, how I'm talked about, um, how does, how do my managers talk about people in my position? But this specific example just goes beyond the pale. Here you have someone charging for water. Water. It's insane. And what I will tell you is something that I have noticed in working with business owners and leaders over the past decade plus, I mean, uh, decade plus, easily, probably 15 years. People in leadership genuinely struggle to focus on the right things. People in leadership genuinely have a hard time understanding what is truly important in their business and what is not. I've seen it time and again. I could think about this. For example, for the water, this water jug here. Somebody. And uh, somebody in leadership who was able to make this decision. Somebody was making an observation on the amount of water jugs that are being spent in the office. Clearly there is some issue around cash flow or funding or what have you and for whatever reason they lasered in on the water jugs. Now this is pretty funny to me because there, there is likely no statistic out there publicly accessible about the employee to water jug ratio. Like if, uh, my employee is going to buy coffee for the team and at the end of the month I'm looking at the spending and let's just say it's a million dollars. Okay, I have bought coffee before. I have bought coffee for a team before. I have some insight on um, what it should probably cost. I'm going to guess there's not a manual out there on water jug to employee ratio. So this would not be something I would assume is immediately clear. This would be someone who for whatever reason has hyper fixated and focused on the amount of water jugs they're buying per month. And rather than think about how to genuinely grow the business, how to develop new paths for meaningful cash flow, to um, find what, you know, what cash is strapped. But I care about our team members. I want to show them we value them, we want to reward them. What are some ways I can do that that doesn't require me spending money? Instead of doing that, this person chose the angle of the water jug charging 25 cents per 8 ounces. Business leaders, for whatever reason they get, they're getting pulled lots of different directions and they tend to focus on things that either don't matter in their business or they are not. Priority one. Let's unpack this a little bit. Let's think about this. If your business is struggling to make ends meet, would you A reward your products and services and what they're selling for in which ones are having meaningful momentum? B talk to your customers and potentially uh, customers that you haven't had buy from you in some time and try to understand why they're no longer buying from you and perhaps even like reignite some relationships or C start charging your employees for drinking water. Years ago I was talking to a gentleman who ran a business and we were talking about the dynamics of his business and um, he was kind of commiserating about how he was going to be out of the office for the next two weeks. And I said, okay, well what's going on? Why are you going to be out of the office? And he explained that he was about to begin a two week intensive of this was a guy who ran a, basically a local business, but all of his employees were remote. Um, and they were remote like within, within the city. They just didn't have like a corporate office. So they would meet for like Team meetings at somewhere local. But then otherwise people had like their own work, um, like home offices. And the business was doing well, by the way. It had grown a lot. And I'll come back to that in a second. So he basically says, I'm about to spend two weeks and what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be going around to all my team members homes and I'm going to be inspecting their workplaces, which immediately I'm like, that doesn't feel good. I could tell you, um, the people I would not want in my home, one of them is like a salesperson and the other one's probably like a boss. So we talk more about it. I'm like, and uh, you know, sometimes people, they throw things at me and I try to be kind and not like, I mean, let's be real. If sometimes people say things and I could just always know someone's throne when their polite answer is, that's interesting, you know, and you just know they're thinking, that's crazy. So I'm like, yeah, that's really interesting. Tell me more like, why are you doing that? And he says, well, because we're remote. We have some, I put together some standards for remote work. Uh, this was actually funny enough pre Covid. Actually it's a bit surprising, I think to people to hear that there was remote work before COVID In fact, there were large billion dollar businesses before COVID just FYI. So anyway, um, he was like, well, you know, I have these remote employees. So we've developed kind of like a, um, employee handbook that includes, um, expectations around remote work. And I said, okay. And then I candidly, I don't remember the exact part of the conversation, uh, because this was literally years ago, several years ago. But I said, so, so what's got you like inspecting your people? And he makes a comment that's like I. He says something like, I heard like kids in the background of like one of my employees call or something to that effect. And um, it's an expectation that, you know, you're not, when you're working from home, you're working full time, you're not also parenting or you know, what have you. So he's like, so I'm going to be going around and inspecting. Oh, actually, no, no, no, actually, I do remember what it was. He was on a call with someone and realized the person like, wasn't in. I, uh, don't want to say like inappropriate like clothing, but like, wasn't in, like the full. We'll Just call it uniform. Like the expectation for what needed to be worn. So, and the reason I remember this is I'll. As we're talking about this, I say, well, tell me about, like, revenue. How's revenue? And he says, oh, man, revenue is incredible. We've tripled. We've tripled our numbers. Our revenue has tripled in the last year. And I'm just waiting for this guy to ask me, like, what do I think? So finally I go, do. Do you want to know what I think? And he goes, yeah, sure, like what? And I think he thinks I'm about to give him some advice on, like, how to do these inspections the right way. But instead I go, here's the deal, man. Your revenue has tripled in the last year. I, um, would tell my employees to wear whatever they want. I mean, if they're wearing, like, gym shorts and a T shirt, whatever they're wearing is working. Like, let's not rock the boat. And, uh, more importantly, I, I, the what this led to was a conversation about, hey, man, you know, why would you, of all the things, you as the boss, the owner of all the things, think about how precious your time is as the owner of a meaningfully large corporation? Shouldn't say corporation, meaningfully large business. Um, because he had something like eight or nine employees. What do you think's more valuable? We have 52 weeks in a year. Two of them are for sure probably going to go to vacation. You have 50 weeks. Do you think it's most valuable to spend two weeks inspecting employee homes when revenue has tripled, or do you think there are other things more valuable to spend your time on? And I think what's interesting about this conversation is whenever I get into this with people, there's so much resistance. It's like, well, I got to do this. We got to do this. We got to get everybody on the team on the same page. Why do you have to do it? Who says you have to do it? Why is this so important? You know, and I think it's a reminder to all of us to be cognizant of, like, our tendencies and biases and things we hyper fixate on. Uh, but more importantly, making sure that the things we are fixating on are actually important for the brand. They're actually important for the business. You know, a business owner who's the king or queen of the strategy of that business. Where am I taking it? Who am I selling it to? How am I going to. Okay, we've tripled revenue. Like, what doors does that now open? For me, you know, where can we spend to, uh, inject money and grow the business in a way that we couldn't have done it before? Maybe there's an ad budget that we've never had. Maybe there's external marketing we can pay for that we weren't able to do before. Maybe there's certain markets or industries that we've been averse to getting involved in. But now that we have more meaningful cash flow, we're, we're willing to engage in some of that risk. We're willing to play out there and see what's working and what's not. Like, these are the kinds of things that a business leader needs to concern themselves with. And unfortunately, what I have found is that business owners instead get incredibly, incredibly fixated on small, meaningless things. So for your own business, ask yourself, what am I focused on? And sometimes, by the way, I think I've been a little bit unfair. You know, I think, I think this water cooler guy, this person's crazy. Let's just be real. Here's what I'll also say. Sometimes it is not your fault. The world is loud and full of greedy people and salespeople. And that, uh, which, let me correct, not every salesperson is a greedy person. I apologize. I sell, I coach people on how to sell. Um, we do sell a little bit differently than how most people sell, but absolutely, you know, your salesperson's not a greedy person. But the world is full of opportunistic people who are looking for the next deal. And so when they go call or knock on your door or come to your office and they say, hey, tell me about, um, when's the last time you did? And I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna pick a buzzword for the sake of the example. When's the last time you did an AI? An AI optimization of your business? Oh, I, I, I've never done that. You've never done an AI? Well, we have to do that. I mean, man, if you're not doing that, you're gonna fall behind. And so now because of the voices around you, you're hyper fixated on this thing that's very much in the buzz and in the news and part of conversation. So just, just know that if you've ever found yourself distracted, it's, it's really not your fault. The world is full of very loud people. It's even like for my consulting practice, when someone comes to me and they say, hey, I need to do this, uh, usually my answer is like, okay, wait, yeah, tell me why doesn't mean you shouldn't do that. But, like, help me understand why. Like, why is this important? What does that lead to? Where's that going to go? If accomplishing X is critical, what does it lead to? What's the why? What doors does that open? But most importantly, y', all, we got to take care of our people. Seriously. No one builds a business by themselves. And over the years, I've had phenomenal employees. I've had terrible ones. I will say candidly. The ones that I would look back and say weren't great, were. It was probably my fault. I asked someone to do something that they were not equipped to do, or I didn't have the patience to train them or teach them. I would say most of the time it was my own fault. Otherwise. Sometimes you have people that they're just not a great fit, and that's okay. But regardless, treating people with respect, with dignity, coaching them, teaching them, believing them, all those qualities we talked about at the start of the episode, that's what demonstrates what you think of your people. And I'll leave with this one last story. I have a friend of mine who runs a marketing agency. We were talking about job applicants and paying people for job applications, meaning, uh, like, projects. Like, someone applies for a job, then giving them a project. And there's this really terrible stigma of, um, people who will ask applicants to do a job, like put together a slide deck or what have you, and then they will take that work and use it with their customers, and they won't compensate the person applying. So I was talking to someone about this who runs a really great marketing agency. And I, uh, said, hey, give me advice. I feel like I should be paying people, but, like, is that weird? And she said, yeah, you absolutely should pay people who are applying for a job, and you ask them to do work. And you know what? Even if it doesn't go anywhere, doesn't that say something about the way you think about your people? And that's always stuck with me. I mean, really, it has. Um, we have always, always, always paid. And what's crazy about this? As I think about this, anytime we've done, I'm thinking about, like, the major job applications I've had in the last two, three, four years. Anytime there's been any kind of work, we've always paid for it. Every single time. I mean, I just hired someone, uh, a month ago, and same deal it was. Yep. In fact, in this case, they put together some work for me on the front end to demonstrate. Demonstrate their proficiency And I even said, hey, you know what? Tell me how much I owe you for this, because that wasn't something you needed to do. I can tell you put a lot of work into it, and this was someone I was hiring also. But. And that's not to say, you know, great job, Blake. It's just the way you do business has to matter from the first touch point, not just, you know, the annual. It's your anniversary at work. Congratulations. Here's a cupcake. So, anyway, I've blabbered about this too much. I think you guys get it. Be a good boss, you know, take care of your people. Hey, thanks for tuning into the show today. I so appreciate you. Uh, if you have any questions or comments, you can always drop them in my email. And of course, you can always check out our Patreon. Patreon.com Good advice and everything else. I really appreciate you. Uh, those of you who've tuned in long term, um, and that's today's good advice. We'll see ya.