Shaan's 9 Unorthodox Management Tips

what's up y'all sean here sam is in europe traveling around with the fam and so i'm on my own today i wanted to do something cool and i think i got a great idea so i believe here's my guess i think this pod is gonna be one that people really really like because i know i would have wanted to hear this at some point in time and the reason why is because most of the people who listen to as podcasts are some form of right you might have started your own company or your own business you might be kind of an exact somewhere or a manager somewhere or you wanna be a leader right so most people who don't wanna be leaders are not listening to a podcast like this so the problem is me and everybody else sucks you know everybody sucks the first time that they are managing people and and this isn't like you know how to manage people one zero one there's a lot of books that are written about this there's some best practices there's common sense but i wanted to share some of the unorthodox some of the weird things that i do that i have found work for me and they might not work for everybody but they work for me and not all of these people are gonna agree with not all these will work for you but again they all work for me nobody i couldn't find any of this stuff in a book i heard about these either from somebody or i just kinda made it up on on my own and so i think i have five maybe six different things that i do that are unorthodox but work okay so let me start with number one and this is called doctor house so it's inspired by doctor house so if anybody watches the tv show house he always does this thing it the show is like there's this genius doctor but he's kind of like a and all the other doctors really respect him because he's amazing but he's kinda hard to work with and one of the things he does that's amazing but hard to work with is yes he's like three junior doctors who were kinda like he's i don't know advising them or whatever they work under him and when a patient comes in and they run a test to try to figure out what's wrong with the person he doesn't just look at it and say here's what's wrong with the person right first of all it's usually not that straightforward second of all even if he kinda has an idea he doesn't spoon feed it to his to his team instead he will usually slap the the the the the like maybe the scan or the data or the the x ray or whenever up on a screen and he'll say what do you see here or he'll say what's weird about this or he'll say what's interesting about this and then the team has to start thinking and getting curious and looking at the thing and saying well there must be something there what do i see and this is really effective i do this all the time i will take let's say some data i'm looking at when i'm curious about some messy something that makes me go and what i used to do is i used to just like share that with the team hey guys here's what i found look at this data this data shows that a is b and c right i like give them a conclusion i'm basically sp spoon feeding them an answer they'll read it they'd say yeah that makes sense and then they would go on with their day right because they didn't have to struggle to understand it they didn't have to be curious enough to go find it they just got a spoon fed and answer and they say yeah yeah i'm not surprised about that i'm gonna move on or oh that's weird okay sounds like you got to answer i'm gonna again move on so i do it the other way which does three things one it trains the team to be curious and clever right because you're not looking for some look i'm not telling you to go do ten more analysis i'm saying there's something in this what is it so a little bit of a riddle the second is it's not a gotcha right like i'm at genuinely asking because they will see things that you don't see so even if you saw one interesting thing that they might find two others that you didn't really appreciate and the last is it trains everybody on how to because you know maybe one person out of the group will see the interesting thing but the other four will say why didn't i see that and that trial in error that like guess and check is how people get better at stuff so you'll train a team of curious clever people who get good at finding insights in data and so that's the doctor house technique i i recommend you try it rather than spoon feeding your team answers okay the second one i learned from my wife my wife was a consultant and she used to go to these companies and i was like it was always like i'm getting alignment right she'll go it'd be a board meeting of like you know yahoo board meeting it's like you have ten executives at yahoo and they cannot you know they all think they're on the same page and then only when you ask them certain questions do you realize that like everybody has like a different you know game plan vision of what we're trying to do here etcetera etcetera so she got good at assessing that out but people are a little bit not defensive but they're a little bit limited when you just ask them very literal logical questions that tap into only the analytical part of their brain like if you say what are our three key objectives for the year they sort of feels like they're taking a math test and so she does this thing that was called the holiday party the holiday party tactic is she had me go she had to go to a whiteboard and she goes alright let's fast forward it's christmas eve of this year and we're at the company holiday party i want you to start drawing what's at that company holiday party i'm like what do you mean like just draw things that would make it an awesome company holiday party so i'm like okay so all of a sudden i'm having kind of fun i'm something creative i'm drawing i'm just thinking of cool shit that could be at a party right so my guard is down and so you i'll draw like whatever there's a dj and i we kinda laugh because the dj booth is like you know my drawing is bad and then i'll draw the next thing and then she'll say okay what's on the what are you celebrating and that question what are we celebrating is like that's kinda like what are we trying to do this year right what's the milestone that we hit and instead of saying what are we trying to do it's assuming it's already done that we're already celebrating we're popping bottles because we hit one million users or ten million downloads or hundred million in revenue or whatever it is and so it's you know we'd say our our big north star goal because it's like that screen could only have one big thing on it that we're all choosing our our glass to so what is that north star metric and then she would say cool let's walk around like you know who's who's at this party and you know there's a little exercise and as she unfolded this party it kind of at first it got me in the mood for winning right because it's like i'm already working backwards from the assumption that we've won then i identify the north star goal and then after we do that little game it only takes two minutes then we would say alright so how are we gonna get there right well what would be the things that we would need to do now so that that party happens and all of a sudden we're we're talking and brainstorming from a place of certainty and confidence rather than fear and doubt about not being able to pull it off and stress right because when you're in fight flight your brain only works in a very limited capacity compared to when you are you know add ease relax which is why you know great ideas come to you in the shower because you're you're relaxed you have warm water pouring on top of your head and so your brain kinda melts away and can start to you know put together different data points that that are are not there when you're tense and so i love this tactic of the holiday party drawing game it really loosen people up it gets some thinking focuses them on the north star goal and then when you make a plan after that they go into that plan from in a state of mind of we already won okay now here's the opposite this is called the the misery misery loves company tactic okay so whenever we're making a plan at the beginning of any plan everything seems achievable and up everyone's optimistic and it's hard to is one thing to ask somebody what are the key risks in this and then people you know again they get a little defensive using are the logical party brain so a better question is you know if i was to let's say you know we you go do this i go do my thing and we get busy and you know six months from now twelve months from now we we catch back up we're we're getting a beer here at the local pub in the afternoon it's four in the afternoon we go grab a beer and we say man that idea was so cool let's assume it went wrong right so man that idea was so cool can't believe it didn't work out and what happened what is the what is the most likely reason we would give that things went south and this is a way to identify the core risk the chief assumption the risk proposition in your plan is to sort of work backwards from we're getting a beer we're hanging out it's already failed and we say man that thing had so much potential what what went wrong what what do you think is the number one reason it might go wrong and then because you're identifying that up upfront you can now like work against that you can get you can game plan around that okay here's another one i find that people get very defensive about the status quo especially the leaders because as a leader you're sort of responsible for the way that the company works right you're like you're responsible for how many people work at your company right if i said did you hire too many people most people don't wanna say yes and the reality is that certainly i don't know twenty thirty forty percent of the time the answer truly is yes you've hired too many people but if you ask ceos they'll rarely ever say yes and in the same way you'll say are you working on a bunch of useless stuff or are you working on a bunch of extraneous things they wouldn't say no i mean these are all important or they're valuable right so people get defensive about their current plan and so how do you get how do get people to to identify the fat in their their plan right be able to trim the fat without the pressure and the stress of them feeling like they're wrong or they're being blamed or that gonna have to make some tough decisions to have some hard conversations and because of that they just wanna avoid it so here's what i do we play a game it's sort like that you know that f murder mary game right or you decide you know if out of these three choices who who would you who would you murder who would you marry who would you have so similarly let's just focus on the murder part which is like if i asked you right so i could sit down with with any manager in my company i could say in your team if you i know you love your team and i know they're they're they're all great they're all great in their own ways but if you had to do it what would be the three who would be the three people that you would cut if you had to cut not saying you will where you're not gonna cut anybody but who would those three people be similarly like out of all the projects and initiatives are doing what are the three that you would cut if you had to cut three initiatives off which one would go and if you could do this with anything right customers of all your customers on the roster your clients who are the three that you would cut were they're just a pain in the ass it's not worth the juice is not worth the squeeze and if you can create a safe a safe space basically where somebody can freely identify what they would cut if they were gonna cut but don't worry we're not asking you to cut anything and you do it yourself right you're not just asking others to do this but you do it yourself and you think aloud maybe do it as a group like hey what would we what projects would we cut you know which team members are really not you know are at the bottom there certainly is a top and the bottom who who is that right which customers are the top and the bottom and if you can identify those it plants a seed and people once they've set it out loud they've heard a truth it's very hard to un see a truth and it might be a month later or two months later or three months later but eventually they will decide to trim some of the fat either on their team the projects or the client list that will help the team grow so that's the ef murder mary tactic okay i think i've done what is that four tactics okay let's do another one this is the super superpower one so this is a way to build people up so i did this at my my last startup up and people really resonate with this which is i made a presentation about each person of the team i did this on a friday afternoon and i hey guys let's go do it a little happy hour and i said i got a presentation for you guys i said you know i've learned that in it in any team you can you can look for two types of people you can look for people who lack weaknesses meaning they're pretty well rounded they have no fatal flaws but they may not be great at anything right they're they're just good they're they're at least good at everything or you can have some people that are amazing at some things and kind of weak in other areas and i've learned that the the the best performing teams are filled with people who are amazing in at least one area so you're hiring for an extreme strength not a lack of weakness right that's a ci h framework that i really love and so i said i'd like to you know i said but the funny thing is for most people they don't they're not even aware of what their extreme strength is and because you're too close to it it's so normal for you to be great at it you don't even really realize you're great at it at at at some point it's other people who pointed it out so i'd like to point out for you the super superpower that i've seen each of you have and then i would give and so i would put each person's face on a slide and i would say hey this is like for example hey this is derek derek our designer derek what i've noticed is your superpower i don't know if you're aware of this but most designers that i've worked with they're creative types they're sort of like you know messy desk procrastinate types they pull all night when they get creative inspiration and they do amazing work sometimes and other times you know they get stuck with sort of a creative writer's block of sorts i said derek your superpower is that you're a great designer but you're like the mailman you deliver every day at the same time right like i give you the the the brief i scribble a a scribble a poorly written address of where we're where i'm trying to get this package you're able to interpret it like a mailman and say i know where this is trying to go and then you deliver it every day five pm before you leap and i said i i you're like the mailman i said and you know you don't work on the weekends i know that you're not the type of guy that i should be hitting up for that like that crazy project we're gonna do the weekend so you're like the mailman you deliver every day of the week except for sundays and so i gave them basically a superpower which is you have this amazing ability to consistently take a loose set of instructions and deliver on it and i gave him a nickname that goes with it that's why i call you the mailman and then you yeah that's your super and i gave it a little symbol and then i like you know then went to the next person i said oh this is fe fe is you know he's not gonna win any awards for for being the most eli speaker or the the most politically you know polished kinda guy but man when i when you talk to fe it's almost like he's allergic to bullshit like you know when someone's allergic to peanuts you can't even have a peanut dish are you you feel uncomfortable taking peanuts around them because you might kill them i said that's what it's like when i bring bullshit around you i don't even feel comfortable saying bullshit around you because you're so good at seeing through bullshit and saying that doesn't make sense or wait i thought you said this other thing so how how could both of those be true right and so i you know you are like you're allergic to bullshit that is your superpower you just can't stand it and that because of that it makes the rest of us up our game and not bring that bring half baked plans or inc congruent illogical plans to you because you'll sniff it out in a second and the beautiful thing is these things are both true and aspirational meaning they are this way but by giving it their superpower they then wanna live up to that identity you've given them and so you can kind of architect the type of team you want by calling out areas they're good but they not may not be the best at it or they may not be doing it all the time but by giving them their super superpower they will start to do it more often okay so that's the super superpower technique okay i'm gonna give you three quick ones the tesla master plan if you've never read it elon musk wrote a master plan for tesla you know back when it started so he wrote the master plan v one like ten years ago and then he wrote v two and basically he said master plan v one basically was like and you should go read it i've handwritten his many times and then wrote ours wrote my own plan for my own business after writing his and so his plan basically says tesla's job is to accelerate you know the the society's move off of fossil fuels onto sustainable energy to do that we need to create a car that's high performance and high efficiency and so we're gonna start with the roadster steer the expensive car then we're gonna make the next car then we're gonna make the the mass market model three car blah blah blah he's like you know so in summary here's the master plan build an expensive car to demo to build the brand build a less expensive car to get more people on it then build the you use the economies of scale and the and the learnings from production to build a mass market car they'll get to everybody right that's the master plan and then he wrote a master v two but it is very powerful if you can write the master plan for your company right it's basically and and it doesn't have to be right right but it's you putting it out there what are we here to do how do we plan to do it and like you know here's the takeaway and if you look at his writing style it's a very empowering style and so i like to take his master plan and then write my own alright the next one comes from the ceo coach called matt macquarie or something like that so has is this technique called the calendar audit it was very simple imagine you to print out your calendar from the last week and you look at every every meeting that was scheduled every kind of block of time that you used and you take three highlighter you take a green highlighter that says that was something that i enjoyed that gave me energy and you highlight those in green and you take a red highlighter you say these ones that i highlighted in red are the ones that i felt like my soul is being sucked out of my body right like these are the soul crushing energy draining things that i read parts things of my day that i don't look forward to you put those in red and then you have the yellow that are like neutral and you look at that and then you say okay this is an audit i now need to take these red things and i need to figure out over time how i'm gonna get more green than red right i'm gonna phase all the red away and get to only green and that might be hiring somebody who does it who likes doing that thing because what's read for you might be green for them or just getting rid of it or minimizing the time you do it in segment do you really need three meetings for this could we not just do it in one could this meeting be an email right or whatever so calendar audit is a very valuable technique okay so that was so so far we've had number one the doctor house screenshot technique number two my wife's holiday party work backwards question number three the if we got a beer saying you know saying man it's a bummer that thing failed why did it fail right that's number three number four is creating a safe space for the f murder mary game right who who are the three that you would double down on who are the three that you would cut three is just a magic number it might be three thousand you i don't know whatever does the number doesn't matter same idea one of the bottom twenty percent of things what are the top twenty percent of things so what you're trying to identify and with the promise of we're not taking an action on this right now so that's what for yeah that's forward number five was tell each person their superpower and give it to your team as a presentation they will live up to that reputation number six is the tesla master plan number seven is the calendar audit okay i'm gonna do two more maybe three number eight is peer groups so anytime i have an objective like let's say i wanna become you know a great poker player or i wanna get to a hundred thousand twitter followers or i wanna build a d brand that does fifty million dollars a year i will create a a text chat group of five other people who have are in the same kind of ballpark as me of where they're at now and have that same ambition as their top ambition mentors and advisors overrated peer group underrated and so that's what i would do and i would start by texting them and then i would do like a once a month kinda call where we spend three hours on the phone or in person hanging out shooting the shit together sharing tactics and strategies what's working for them in trying to achieve your mutually shared goal okay last one is the kickoff document i think this is number nine a kickoff document is a template that i have and i could share this but if you subscribe to my newsletter i think you get it so just go to sean por dot com and and i think you can get it or if not just email me at sean at s dot com okay so the kickoff document is basically something i do before i start a project because i believe that clarity is power i think too often people go into doing something without actually being clear of what are we trying to do here why are we trying to do it how will we measure success and what's the first thing that we should really do and that's what a kickoff document does so the kickoff dock has three sections the first is what are we trying to do it's one liner the next is what's a win look like and i define a win in two ways i say what's the floor of this win meaning what is the minimum that i would consider like a successful good outcome like what's achievable thing and then what's the yeah win which is the like the the result that would make me safe yeah and that really worked and so now i kind of like a range i have like the bottom goal my flu goal and then i have my my my stretch goal and and then i also do an anti goal meaning what are some traps that i could fall into along the way that would like make this whole thing even if i hit my goals i would feel bad at the end of it because i like did this other thing right like for example we all have these in life like you know i would love to be successful but i don't wanna you know screw over people along the way and carry that guilt with me right so that that's like being successful financially would be your goal i mean you put some numbers around it but then your high goal would be i don't want to do this in a way that makes me feel unethical or shamed in any way of what i did i'd like to feel proud of it right so those become your ent goals or like know i'd like to be successful but i wanna be able to make sure i'm home with my kids every day at five because that's really important to me so an anti goal would be yeah i made it happen but i've never home right so my anti goal would be you know never getting home before you know x time and so it's important to identify your anti goals they're very clarifying for you and the kick dock ends with one hour oh your power hour basically like what's something i can do in the next hour that would just get like create like momentum get me to a win and so this is not like do some research or make a list it's like give momentum towards the actual so if i wanna you know increase sales that's like make a sale make one sale or like if i wanted to grow my list my email list it's like i don't know post a thread on twitter in the next hour that will get some subscribers to my list just something to get the ball rolling that's action oriented so you're not just always in planning mode so those are nine different little tips and tricks that really work for me that's i don't think you'll learn most of those and i don't know business school or you know at your job that peep you know even if people try to do management training it's usually not things like this these are my kind of like you know an unorthodox pet tricks that i like to do that helped me you know with my companies and so i hope that's helpful for you if it is let me know you could tweet it at me at s p if it's not helpful tweet it at me saying hey you know wasn't that helpful on a i love on a so either way works for me i'm at sean vp which is s h a a n vp on twitter alright mountain here