Michael: Welcome to this week's episode of HaBO Village Podcast, where we talk about management.
Michael: This show is dedicated to helping business leaders like you grow Passion and Provision companies. That's where companies and the people in them thrive and experience life to the fullest together. Every week, we'll talk about key ingredients to growing a thriving company that involve competence, character and the skill development needed to grow a Passion and Provision business. I'm Michael Redman.
Kathryn: I'm Kathryn Redman.
Michael: We want to thank you very much for taking a few minutes out of your day and life to listen to us. We hope we're going to be helpful today. Today, we're going to talk about management. Now where's so many different areas of management and there's so many different philosophies right now going around on and discussions about how management is a bad thing, leadership is the good thing, so you should only have leaders in your company and you should never have managers because managers lead to people not doing anything well and they just listens to drown, drone, drone, drone, drone, drone.
Michael: If you can tell in the tone of my voice, I don't agree with that. I think there is a place for management and some of the phenomenal work done in the 1900s, management actually became a science, something that was studied and looked at. I think the reason it got a bum rap is because it just was ignored. It was the discipline of management was not understood or it was ignored and people became lethargic and there were several things missing in the management process. I will say right up front, a good manager is a great leader.
Kathryn: Absolutely.
Michael: Companies are full them. Depending on what's happening, you look at the actual word, management, management means that you have several different things, resources and in this case, we're not trying to make people impersonal, but even the staff you have. You have all these things that you have to manage. You've got to manage making sure that these kids are fed enough and that kid's fed enough and management is a huge part, especially the way we're going to talk about it today. I think you're going to really find it valuable in the midst of how do you look at managing people in your organization. Specifically people and how they work with projects.
Michael: There's two aspects of management. We'll give the high level of what we think about and the first is there's managing human beings, people and the projects they work on and everything else. Then, there's actually the management of impersonal things, numbers, accounts, inventory in the warehouse. You name it. Whatever has to happen, you have the to manage these impersonal things. Then, there's people.
Michael: In the midst of that, we're going to talk more about people today, but I just want you to know that we realized that there are lots of things that are managed that aren't people-based and we have some really great insights that have been given to us from psychologists and successful business people around the world. Some of them we know, some of them we've just learned through books and great training that are important. We'll talk about those and we really love how personality tests affect that and allow you to find the right people to do the right projects, so that it's managed well.
Michael: But today, I want to talk to you about the core pieces and there's five core pieces that we talk about when we talk about good management and good leadership of folks in an organization, so that you can have a Passion and Provision company, that company that's really continuing to grow and thrive financially, that you are seeing growth in your efficiencies at work, you're seeing growth in the amount of people that are sticking around in your company, so you don't have to the turn over the amount of sales that are going on. All that's happening. The fulfillment level, the engagement level of going at work. Good management can actually propel both of those numbers up.
Michael: It's really, really significant.
Kathryn: I would imagine that most of you in your work history or work life can probably think of examples where you had a really bad manager, somebody who just didn't let you live up to your potential, somebody who held you back, somebody who micromanaged, perhaps or just somebody who didn't care.
Kathryn: I mean, there's a ton of examples in life of bad management. I remember being in a company once-
Michael: Tons.
Kathryn: Lots. I remember being in a company once where I was working... I had graduated a degree, I was working hard, doing really good work for them. Then, I had to get a part-time because of personal reasons and they basically put me back to filing and not using any of my gifts, not using any of my talents, just basically-
Michael: You were actually really engaged in doing a lot of work for that-
Kathryn: Doing a ton of work and got lots of kudos for doing it well, but then, because I wasn't full-time, then I was not valued at all. No slam on that company, but that was bad management. It should've just been like-
Michael: No slam, but [crosstalk 00:05:15].
Kathryn: It was wrong. They should've either said, "We don't have any meaningful work for you if you're going to be part-time," or allowed me to continue to contribute in a different capacity. That's just a simple example.
Michael: Sometimes, what happens with bad management is its passive aggressive behavior, right?
Kathryn: Being punished.
Michael: People don't know how to actually confront in a healthy way. One of the things we'll talk about in the future episode is conflict resolution. Got some great, great stuff and resources in conflict resolution because in life, there's conflict and if you're going to do anything, there are going to be messes if you're going to do anything of value.
Michael: Let's talk about what those four, no actually, five things are that are really important. If you're in our conference room, doing consulting, this is one of those things we work through. What I'm amazed at is that they actually are incredibly enlightening. Light bulbs go off for people who've been managing for a very long time, in business a long time and two things happen. They go, "Oh yeah, that's great. That codifies it well. That puts names and labels to it." Second, invariably, leaders sit there, who've been around for 20, 30 years and go, "I didn't have that grid and now that I have that grid, I'm evaluating how I was doing and wow, I'm not as good in some of those areas as I thought I was because now, you have something tangible. We've given it a name.
Michael: Let's walk through this. I'm going to give you the top five first and then, we'll go back through them. The first one is goals. You've got to have goals, clear goals. Second is good communication. The third is accountability. The fourth is trust and those four go together as a group and then you add a fifth, called public recognition.
Michael: Now, there's some folks who did some phenomenal work to a large, tenure-based study, worked with several large corporations and stuff and they wrote book, some consultants wrote a book called-
Kathryn: The Carrot Principle.
Michael: Thank you very much. The Carrot Principle. The authors on that, Kathryn, are, for everybody?
Kathryn: Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton.
Michael: We'll have that on the resource page for you.
Kathryn: Absolutely.
Michael: Because we believe that. That's in our library and most of the time, we try really hard to recommend books that are in our library that have just really been valuable. I won't recommend the ones in our library that aren't valuable.
Kathryn: That's kind of [crosstalk 00:07:39].
Michael: But Carrot-
Kathryn: I'm not telling you to avoid them, but-
Michael: But The Carrot Principle... Yeah, we might. But The Carrot Principle actually is one of those books that they're good, they did a good job writing it and the whole book is about the fifth piece, public recognition. We start with that, going public recognition. They articulate as a catalyst. A catalyst is a chemical award in chemistry and it means, when you throw a catalyst and it creates a multiplying effect, not just an addition effect. It doesn't add, "Wow, I had one plus one plus one." No. You have one plus one and you throw in the catalyst and you get five. It's that kind of effect and you see it in chemistry. If you've ever done the Mentos commercial or the Mentos test. If you haven't, you have to go to YouTube and type in Mentos, diet coke.
Michael: You've seen this, right, Kathryn?
Kathryn: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.
Michael: Okay. You take a bottle of Coke, usually a two-liter bottle and you drop a Mentos in. What happens?
Kathryn: It explodes, basically. It [crosstalk 00:08:49] all over.
Michael: Yeah. What it does is the bottle doesn't explode [crosstalk 00:08:50].
Kathryn: Does it matter if it's Diet Coke or Coke because you said Diet?
Michael: No. I did say Diet Coke. I think it's supposed to be Diet Coke, but I'm not sure. You'll have to look on the video first because it's online.
Kathryn: Fair enough.
Michael: But what happens is it shoots. It actually causes a chemical reaction, which causes so much pressure to build up in the bottle. It launches the soda through the top of the bottle. It can launch 10, 15, in some cases, 20 feet in the air.
Kathryn: Do not try this in your living room.
Michael: Don't try this in the house. This has got to be done outside if you're going to do it. It's really cool. But the Mentos, you can do stuff, it's similar to, except way more dramatic, that experiment you did as a kid or somebody you knew this kid where they made a-
Kathryn: Made a volcano.
Michael: Right, with bake-
Kathryn: I love that experiment.
Michael: Baking soda and vinegar.
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: Right?
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: All of a sudden you put those two together and you get this lava effect. Right? But what happens is you have soda and you throw the Mentos in, the soda has all these different chemicals. It's a chemical makeup. Right?
Michael: There's all these different stuff on the soda and those are the different pieces and parts that are one plus one plus one and you get Coke or Diet Coke. Then, on top of that, you throw the Mentos in and the Mentos causes this chemical reaction that creates more than anything else, way more than shaking that up and then, letting it spray.
Michael: Well, that's a catalyst and you want to have a catalyst like that in your business and what they did is they discovered that the business that it drove numbers, the financial numbers in a company.
Kathryn: The other word they used for catalyst is accelerant.
Michael: Accelerant.
Kathryn: Which automatically makes you think of what it looks like when you throw gasoline on a fire, right?
Michael: Boom.
Kathryn: It just takes a controlled fire and makes it much, much bigger.
Michael: It's really useful unless you're too close and it burns your eyebrows off.
Kathryn: Then, it's not a good day.
Michael: Then, our friend, Michael Vote, when he and I were kids, he found that out. He burned his eyebrows in the midst of everything. Michael, if you're listening, I still remember.
Michael: Michael's a friend of ours and he teaches at the local high school. Every time I meet one of his students, I tell them about the time we were 13 or 14 and Michael decided to play with fire and burn his hair and burn his eyebrows off.
Kathryn: There you go.
Michael: Now that I've told that again publicly just to shame him in a loving sort of way, what these guys did in this book was they just all those research that basically said, if you have a healthy, basically a healthy company and you use public recognition, you tell people in front of their peers they're doing a good job. Now, it's going to be honest, it's got to be sincere, it's got to be something specific and the general rule of thumb is people want to be... First of all, people want recognition for what they're doing right. They want to know what they're doing is correct, that it's making a difference, that the leadership around them sees that as a value and a contribution because we all desire to make contribution. Then on top of that, the idea that we would be recognized in front of our peers.
Michael: Now, there are some exceptions to this and I've heard some good stories where some people don't want to be recognized in certain ways. It's actually counterproductive to recognizing that because it makes them feel uncomfortable, it doesn't yield the results, so you have to use some judgment when you're encouraging people. But this whole book is about, really basically saying to people, being intentional and going, "I'm watching you and I noticed when you're doing well."
Kathryn: Yeah. What that does is it leads to super high productivity and trust and all of those things that allow for the kind of engagement that we care about when we're talking about Passion and Provision.
Kathryn: Why is this management topic so important? Well, it's because we want to make sure that we're talking about the areas in your business where you can most help your employees become engaged and help them know that they're making a contribution and that you notice that and that it matters. This issue of public recognition in your management style is one of those pieces that if you read the Carrot Principle, you're just going to see they've done incredible studies over a 10-year period and then, they did more validation to really prove that you have better engagement, better productivity and a lot more trust among teams and among groups of people when public recognition is part of your management style.
Michael: Absolutely. Yeah. Well said and that said, you look at the financial impacts. If you have people that are more engaged, first of all, the tension, the social tension is low. Right? It's much less stressful. If you have people that are more engaged in paying attention to their work, there's less error. That means that you have to correct them less as leader. That means you have the ability to trust them more. If you have greater engagement at work with your staff, that means that you have less turnover.
Michael: Turnover is incredibly expensive. We all know it, but there's so many hidden costs. They say that to lose a mid-level position in a company or higher, you can take their annual revenue, not annual revenue, annual salary, multiple that somewhere between one and a half and three times depending on the position. That's how much it cost.
Michael: If you're paying somebody $50,000 a year, I think it's going to cost you $75 to $100,000 to replace that person and get them up to speed in your company. That's how much it cost. It really does, because sometimes it takes two or three years. If you're losing people every two years, that's not helpful. All of us need to look at those kind of things, plus the fact is that they're more productive and they're more engaged. You're saving more money because of less mistakes and they're actually creating more great products, great services and doing great customer service and helping with customer retention.
Kathryn: If you think that this is kind of... Like we're talking and you're going, "Well, of course. No, of course, that's super important. You need to understand that in the recent study that the folks who wrote this book did, it showed that there was 74% of leaders worldwide who still don't practice recognition. Whether they are vehemently against it, that which there's a percentage of those who think it's just a ripping waste of time, there's some who are scared or nervous about it because they're afraid that if I recognize this person, it's going to create jealousy, there's going to be inequity in my employees, how do I do that. There's others who think, if I recognize people publicly, then they're going to think that they've arrived and they're not going to work harder.
Kathryn: It's amazing. As much as we can logically and even emotionally say, "Of course, people are going to do better work and be happier in it," if they are recognized and if they know that it's working and that they're contributing, very few leaders do it. We're talking one quarter of leaders worldwide actually practice public recognition. It's not something that is a no brainer. It's actually something that 75% of the leaders in the world don't do. They actually don't think it's valuable.
Michael: Now, think about this. We've talked about this in past episodes. I think episode one and two. Gallup did a survey, has regularly doing surveys and basically, the disengagement or engagement level of people working in America. Now, this is an American stat and I think it has relevancy throughout the West, but in America, 75%, 74% of workers, people working are disengaged. Gallup defines that as sleepwalking through the day.
Michael: Well, it's interesting that these numbers-
Kathryn: That an equal percent of leaders worldwide don't practice recognition.
Michael: How about that?
Kathryn: How about that?
Michael: That's interesting. I wanted to talk about that fifth one first because it's important, it's significant and being able to learn to be a good encourager. They say that great leaders, one of the characteristics of great leaders, when you look at the material is that they catch people doing things right and they spot it and they say something about it.
Michael: Bad leaders, often, what their characteristic is, is they're known for figuring out what people are doing wrong and spotting that and calling to the attention.
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: That has to happen. I'm not saying it doesn't. What were you going to say, Kathryn?
Kathryn: I'm thinking about just different experiences because we all have them. Right? I talked about the management experience I had that wasn't good. Probably one of the best managers I ever had really did recognition well, but he did it privately. He didn't do it publicly. He was phenomenal at writing notes to just stick in your box to just go, "I noticed you did this. It was amazing. It was wonderful." I wonder how much more his management would've grown, had he done that publicly and not just privately?
Kathryn: Because privately, it felt really good. But there's something very different about being recognized in front of your peers as opposed to just being pulled by...
Michael: Absolutely.
Kathryn: Instead of being one-on-one.
Michael: Well, and here's what you're doing-
Kathryn: Which is a good thing too by the way.
Michael: Without creating favorites or hierarchies, the positive attributes of status get kicked in. What you're doing when you're encouraging and managing and motivating people, what you're looking for is performance that's what you're trying to achieve, optimal performance. It starts with hiring the right person and then, it goes from did you equip them, did you train them, did you give them the resources they need, did you give them the equipment they need, whatever and it moves through. But this aspect of when I tell you that you're doing well for a specific reason in front of everybody, a couple of things happen. I raise your status. I let people know that the leadership of this organization values that person and values that behavior, which also allows everybody to go from a... The way we're wired, the old mentoring model of business, the way that you had a... What's the word, Kathryn? That when somebody was... I was a master at ironwork and I had an apprentice, an apprentice.
Kathryn: You walked right into it.
Michael: [crosstalk 00:19:06].
Kathryn: Well done. I was about to say but you got there.
Michael: The old apprentice model, right? Well, that whole idea was we're wired to watch and to see and when the leaders say that this is really good and we all want to encourage and let's all encourage Jane or John for doing this thing, two things happen. We allow everybody to appreciate them and second, we allow everybody to see the mimicking. It's like the apprentice. We watch and we catch and more is caught than taught. It allows you to do that.
Michael: Okay. That's really important. These guys did a phenomenal job and this entire book is about that and we just want to recommend that because if you want to dig into this more, we'll continue to talk about this kind of stuff because we believe, philosophically, it lands in so many different places. These guys did a good job talking about it.
Michael: There's one chapter in the book that extremely caught my attention years ago when it came out and they talked about the fact of here's the place where public recognition doesn't work. It actually fails and can cause negative repercussions. I like the way they put this. They said there's a core health to a business that has to exist and they defined it in this chapter basically, with goals, communication, accountability, trust. You may use different words, it may be different things, but to say that when you're managing people and they call that leadership and I use it and I call it management. In these core areas of managing people and leading people, you need those four pieces. Goals, communication, accountability and trust. If you don't have those first four, then what happens and they were very clear about it, the public recognition falls apart.
Michael: When we talk about goals, there are great ways to creating clear goals. There's whole academic text, there's lots of research, lots of work, think about a SMART goal. Right? A SMART goal, it's an acronym and it allows you to define out how do you craft a really good goal. There's other types of goals but there was great tools in the midst of it. Go Google SMART. See what that acronym is. It's a SMART goal. Then, communications. There's tons of stuff you can learn to do to be a better communicator. In an organization, here's where if you're managing and leading your organization, you want to make sure that first of all, that you have clear goals for the company and for yourself and for your employees.
Michael: What is that you want them to do? What is it that you want them to accomplish? How do they evaluate the timeline on that? How do they know whether they did a good job or not? Did they accomplish that goal properly? A minimum level of competency. Then, you can evaluate that and move that out. They can self-evaluate when a goal is clear and they know the timing. Going through and saying, this is what we're doing and defining the goal in the SMART context, then what that starts to become is really good communication.
Kathryn: I feel the need to tell them what the acronym means.
Michael: Okay, do it.
Kathryn: Okay. SMART, it means specific, measurable, attainable, I want to say realistic, then that there's a time-
Michael: Yes. Correct.
Kathryn: Associated with this. There's actually, you have to complete by a deadline.
Michael: There's a couple people that might-
Kathryn: There's a couple of different ways of doing it.
Michael: There's a couple of different variations of that acronym that basically mean the same thing. A realistic goal is a goal that is actually possible to accomplish. It's not something like I need you to bring in $3 million end of campaign in the next 60 days and they'd barely graduated from high school and you don't sell anything that's worth $3 million. That's an unrealistic goal.
Michael: When you create a SMART goal, it actually helps you focus your attention. It helps you focus your staff's attention and when you communicate it like that, especially in writing, communication is increased because you can go back and you can go, did you understand this? Yes, you understood this. There's really good techniques to have good communication. Then, when you do that, you have to hold accountability. There are so many leaders that don't know how to themselves accountable and don't want to be held accountable to their own actions and that's going to be a problem in creating a Passion and Provision company because you are short-circuiting the process and you will see short-term gain if you don't hold yourself accountable and you don't hold your staff accountable, but you will see long-term problems from this.
Michael: In the midst of it, you have these goals, you're communicating well. You are holding people accountable. If you did not achieve the goal, what's the accountability structure? What happens? How do I articulate that? First of all, I need to communicate, come back and communicate well. I need to communicate in a respectful way. One that allows you to keep dignity. People want to maintain their dignity and bad leadership, bad communication can lead to tearing down that because all of a sudden, you get into these problems of stress and you pull them apart, pull the people apart. You just come at it and there's no respect and dignity and honor in the midst of that.
Michael: In the midst of that, because you committed, you articulated clear goals and you communicated well and kept open lines of communication and then, you had a process of accountability so people knew in the company that A, they were accountable and that the leadership would hold their team accountable and that it was okay for them to hold their teammates accountable. Because we all know that accountability creates a higher performance.
Michael: Look on the football field, look in the basketball court. In any kind of sport, there's an accountability structure built in and to some extent, it's you don't win enough games, you don't make it to the playoffs. You don't make it to playoffs, you don't make it to the Superbowl or whatever. You're never going to go home with a Stanley Cup if you don't make it to the playoffs. They make it the playoffs. There's a certain amount accountability that's inherent in that. But what happens at work when you give somebody a task and they don't meet the goals? Here's the goals, this is what happened. Sales people have quotas. If they don't meet their quota, what's happened? Or can I miss my quota every month and nothing happens? Well, that sends a message throughout the company and it doesn't help you create a profitable company and a company that's growing and accountability's hard. It's just one of those things.
Michael: There are rules to accountability that over time, we'll talk about, you can do some research on and look at that entity per level and go, "Okay. How do I talk about accountability and then, trust?" If you set goals, communication, accountability, you will build trust.
Kathryn: Definitely.
Michael: Now, I would recommend The Speed of Trust, we always do. We talk about it a lot. Trust is, these all could be fuzzy terms, meaning you ask 10 people to define them and they come up with 10 different definitions, but there's actually benchmark definitions and ways of designing or becoming good at all these things. Goals, communication, accountability and trust. Speed of Trust is probably one of the best works on trust.
Kathryn: I think we've mentioned it before.
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: Stephen M. R. Covey breaks trust up into competence and character and under that, there's 13 behaviors.
Michael: 13 behaviors. I think that's going to be most important right here.
Kathryn: Yeah, definitely.
Michael: Because the behaviors allow you to start seeing what kind of behaviors build trust and what kind take it away.
Kathryn: Well, and I think the important part and one of the most powerful pieces of his book is the idea that people have this assumption that once trust is broken, it can't be restored and that's just absolutely not true. It's just one of the behaviors that lead to rebuilding trust and he would argue that trust can actually be built pretty quickly, even when it's been broken. If you're in a company where maybe you haven't done a good job of this and maybe you're staff doesn't really trust your intentions or doesn't understand what you're going for and you're really trying to figure out how to turn the corner on that-
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: Then, The Speed of Trust and really digging into what these behaviors trust are would be very helpful for you.
Michael: Yeah. What's really nice about the 13 behaviors is there are certain things you can... The 13 behaviors allow you to see. I align myself with these 13 behaviors, if I commit myself to these 13 behaviors, then I will build trust in all of my relationships. If I violate any of these behaviors or I come at it in a negative fashion, I'm going to tear down. It allows you to identify, where was trust broken really quickly. That's why.
Michael: To rebuild trust quickly, you need to know what things, where trust was broken, what types of behaviors need to be taken care of and actually built up and strengthened and in what sequence. Because if you take trust building in the wrong sequence, it can take forever, and even quite frankly, sometimes never be rebuilt. But you have an incredible chance if you put the right behaviors in the right sequence. The first sequence is always acknowledging that you broke trust and that you're sorry for that. You may not say, "I'm guilty." You may not be guilty, but in the midst of it, you broke somebody's trust, so you have to acknowledge that that's how they feel and that, you're not okay with the fact that you live in a place where they feel like there was trust broken.
Michael: If you think about it, goals, communication, accountability, you practice those three things, you are going to be building into trust. If you don't, if you leave anyone of those off, it's not going to work. If you work on those, how good are you in your company right now setting goals? For yourself, how good are you at setting goals for your employees, so they have an idea of on a daily, a weekly or a monthly basis, what are they supposed to be focusing on and how do they know when they've accomplished it and what kind of timeline do they know. Are you communicating right yearly with them? Are you using good communication techniques? Then, are you holding yourself accountable but are you holding them accountable in a very healthy way that honors people and helps them maintain their dignity?
Michael: If you're not doing those things, then I encourage you to do those because those are the core pieces. Goals, communication, accountability, trust. Core pieces of managing folks. Your management, the chore of management will stop being a chore. It may take you awhile to learn some skills. It may be uncomfortable to do this. You may be saying, "You know what? I'm not going to do this crap." Or sometimes, you just go, "Yeah, that's valuable, but I don't have time for that." Or, "I have time for it," and then, you allow just a very small amount of time because you want change to happen overnight.
Michael: So often, when we run into companies that aren't growing in a healthy fashion or struggling with their growth and they come to us a lot, that's one of the reasons people walk in the door is so that we can work on that. We look at these companies and we realize that they're in a hurry to do certain things and they don't have time to do other things. Usually, what they're working on, they're in a hurry to do are things that they see as urgent, but they're not always important. Sometimes they're important.
Michael: The goal is to get to the place where you're working on important things that aren't urgent, because then, you don't have a timeline breathing down your neck and you have the ability to manage a little bit more and plan a little bit. This kind of management stuff can help you get out of the urgent category in a way you're dealing with your business. Only the mandatory things that are urgent are urgent.
Kathryn: Yup.
Michael: Kathryn, as we're wrapping up, do you want to add anything to this?
Kathryn: I think that just to go back to where we started, which is with public recognition, there are a lot of reasons why people don't want to recognize. For example, I don't want to recognize an employee in one area of performance because they're not living up to my expectations in other areas. If I praise them, then they're going to think everything's fine. The reality is that, what you end up with is being in a place where you only point out what they're doing wrong. You never point out what they're doing right and that's actually a worse scenario for you. If it occurs to you that, that's one of the things where you're like, I don't want to recognize someone because they're not doing well everywhere, actually you do, because the odds that they're going to improve in the other areas actually go up when you're willing to recognize the things that they're doing well.
Michael: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Kathryn: I am, I think by nature, a critical person. I see what is wrong long before what I see is right. If you were to look over my shoulder and watch my write emails, you would see me writing the meat of what I want to say in the email and then, having to go back to the beginning and structure the intro kind words to position the emails well. That's my nature. That's my bent. I have to really work at the recognition piece. Not because I don't value my people but because it just isn't something that comes naturally.
Kathryn: For Michael, it comes more naturally. It's something I have to really work on. We don't say that we really rock at this and we've done things in the past where from a management perspective, we have frustrated people. We go down one path and then suddenly, we need to change directions and they don't have enough information to know why we changed directions and they feel like they invested all their time and energy in one project and then, we just ditched it and moved on. There's ways that we have learned just through hard knocks. How not to manage people well.
Kathryn: As we continue to want to march forward and create a place where people enjoy coming to work and when they come across the threshold on Monday morning, they come to life and at the end of the day, they don't feel like they've had it all taken out of them, that's part of what we're really pushing towards and continuing to have to work on. For me, this piece of public recognition is something I have to consistently work on. I just wanted to own that and say that out loud.
Michael: No. I can get super focused. I can get hyper focused on what we're doing in tasks and everything else and forget to encourage people just because I have expectations that they're going to perform.
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: I get it into that. I want to say this as we're wrapping up because we're wrapping this. We didn't always do this well. Now, Kathryn and I have had a lot of great leadership training and everything else and we actually do, I think, we do a pretty good job, but there have been times in our company where we have not done a good job. Also, what we've created is a company that there's a lot of tension in place where we didn't always want to go to work. It was very stressful and having employees was stressful and not all of them but it was just, we created an environment that wasn't a Passion and Provision environment and it wasn't one of fulfillment and engagement and it was one of a lot of negativity and lack of trust and frustration because poor communication and poor goals and everything else.
Michael: But we have also grown our company through that and if you're in a place where you're struggling and saying, "Yeah, I want this. I want more of this kind of passion and provision in my life. I want the effects of being a good manager. I want to see the smoothness of relationships and I want to see my staff being more productive and more engaged and all of those factors," then these five areas are important and you can do it. We've done it. It's possible to do. These things can be learned. You can grow.
Michael: It may not change overnight, especially if this is counter to the way you were taught or trained or raised, but you can do it. We did it. We have an incredibly engaged, positive culture in Half a Bubble Out and here on the HaBO Village Podcast, our goal is to share those things with you because we really want to make sure that you have access to what you need to be either learning for the first time or reminded of something you've learned a long time ago to say, "Yes, this is still important," and if it's something that you have known for a long time, this is a truth that you agree with, but it's time to go back and dust some of those tools off out of your toolbox and tune them up again and reengage, we just want to hope this is encouraging to you and helpful to you.
Kathryn: Absolutely.
Michael: As we say around the office, "Help isn't help unless it's perceived as help."
Kathryn: Easy for you to say.
Michael: Yeah, I know. That was tough. But we hope that this was helpful today, that you perceived as help, and we really appreciate you giving us your time and listening and if you value this, we would love it if you would put a review on iTunes, and you would tell your friends about us on social media or anywhere else and recommend us. For the resources today, they're going to be on our page, on the blog for the podcast at halfabubbleout.com.
Michael: Have a wonderful day, have a wonderful week and we hope that your company is growing in passion and provision and that you and everyone in it thrive.
Kathryn: [crosstalk 00:36:33].
Michael: Thrive, thrive.
Kathryn: Thrive, thrive and thrive.
Michael: Thrive. Okay. Have a great week everyone.
Kathryn: Thanks.