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Andy Stanley - From the Vault Vision with Frank Blake Part 2 · Andy Stanley Sermons

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Hey, everybody, Welcome to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast, where we are
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committed to helping you go further and faster in your leadership. I'm Andy Stanley,
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and today I will be your host because once again I am joined by
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my good friend Frank Blake. Once again, Frank, thank you so much
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for joining us on the podcast. Thrilled, thrilled to be here, and
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we're thrilled thrilled to have you. Back. On last month's podcast, Frank
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and I begin a fascinating conversation around the idea of the inverted pyramid, which
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is essentially a different way of talking about servant leadership. But I think a
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better way is we're going to discover. We're going to pick up where we
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left off in just a minute. But for those of you who missed last
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month's podcast, let me just say you need to go ahead and hit the
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pause button, go back and listen to last month's podcast because it was extraordinary
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and it certainly was a setup for what we're going to talk about today.
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As some of you know, Frank just stepped down as the chairman and CEO
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of the Home Depot. He held that position since two thousand and seven,
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prior to that, he served as the executive vice president over business development and
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corporate operations at Home Depot. He's previously served as the Deputy secretary for the
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US Department of Energy. He served as general counsel for the EPA, the
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Environmental Protection Agency. He served as deputy council for Vice President George HW.
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Bush. He's worked with Jack Welts. They continue to maintain a relationship.
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A mutual friend connected us over lunch a few years back, and we have
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maintained that relationship and it has been super helpful to me. For the sake
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of context, we all know that the Home Depot is a large organization.
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But here's how large. Home Depot is an eighty three billion dollar business over
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twenty two hundred stores, and this is the most amazing part to me,
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over three hundred and fifty thousand employees or associates as they refer to them at
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the Home Depot. Frank, I appreciate so much you saying that about the
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Leadership podcast. And one of the reasons I gave you permission to brag about
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our content is I think sometimes marketplace leaders listen to the podcast and think,
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well, they me working a church or that that might work in a smaller
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context, but Andy, my organization is much more multifaceted, it's more complex,
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So I'll you know, I'll pick and choose, so in our relationship
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and in listening to you talk about what we talked about through the years,
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and in fact our audience should know you took a big risk you have.
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You invited me in to talk to both your management team. I got to
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sit in on an off site with home depot and address your your leadership team,
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and to invite a pastor into that that environment was kind of risky for
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you, and hopefully I was a good steward with that responsibility. But again,
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we've seen that these principles are transferable from smaller organizations to large for for
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profit to nonprofit. So having you here, I think it gives us credibility.
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So we appreciate that. So anyway, last month we talked about communicating
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through the inverted pyramid. Today we're going to talk about how to get things
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done great and and just the comment Andy spoke many times to our leadership team
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always uh, the most enthusiastic responses after Andy's talking with the team. And
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also I think my team just got sick of the amount of time. I
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quoted Andy, so in the inverted pyramid, again, the CEO is at
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the bottom, the customers are on the top, and you think about how
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do you get things done? Because just like communication, I think there's a
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myth that you issue orders, that your job is the CEO is to issue
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directives, and the more directives you make, the better job you're doing.
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The more decisions you make, the better job you're doing. I think that's
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a significant mistake. I think organizations can only handle so many decisions from the
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CEO. More importantly, the CEO can only handle so many decisions effectively.
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And Andy has a great phrase that leadership is not always about getting things done
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right. Leadership is about getting things done through other people. Simple concept,
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but it takes a lot of self discipline to realize the power of that concept
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as leaders or I should just say, for me, I would find myself
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obsessing on the right part of it. Is this exactly the right decision?
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Have we say, papered off all the rough edges of this decision? Is
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this the perfect decision? When the time would have been better spent making sure
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that other people in the organization would buy into the decision as their own and
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could lead that decision. And again a phrase from Andy, assign responsibilities and
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not tasks, so that you empower your team with the idea and you empower
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your team to implement the idea, rather then thinking you're standing over everything and
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micromanaging every part of the decision. And let me ask a question or comment
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about that this is such a big deal because I think many of us I
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know I do too. I fall into that same trap. I think if
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we come up with the perfect idea, when we announce the perfect idea and
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everybody recognizes, oh, this is the perfect idea, they will automatically get
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emotionally engaged with the idea, not because they were involved in the decision making
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process, but because the idea in and of itself is perfect. And that's
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a total fallacy. We've both seen great ideas never get off the launching pad,
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not because the idea was flawed, but because of exactly what you talked
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about. So much time was spent on crafting the idea. We thought,
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well, once we announce it, everybody will be in awe. They will
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change their schedules, that will change their job descriptions, that the organization will
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somehow reconfigure around the idea, and that is that never happens. So talk
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a little bit more about the whole idea of people having ownership around an idea
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that's eighty percent versus spending all the time getting a one hundred percent there and
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then helping people right like John. To me, this was one of the
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again concept that Andy laid out that when you think about the inverted pyramid,
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starts to make total sense because you understand that from the bottom of the pyramid
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that perfect idea is you're going to have a hard time moving it up through
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the organization. But if you get it accepted, if the idea is basically
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incorporated, and you're getting people to understand their responsibility and not focused on the
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perfect idea, you have a much better opportunity, much better chance of getting
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things effectively implemented. How how did you do that or what? Well,
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So, first off, it's there's a I'll just give a just because people
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like equations and or I like equations. So there's an interesting equation that Q
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times A equals E, where q is quality, a is acceptance, and
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E is effect. So the quality of an idea times the acceptance of the
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idea equals its effectiveness, and the point of that is to make us all
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stop as leaders and realize the other part of the equation of effectiveness is acceptance,
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so that if you don't have an idea that's accepted, it's not going
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to be very effective. And that takes time and patience sometimes. So there
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are some ideas that roll out and everybody immediately gets other ideas. You've got
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to work through the organization. You've got to spend time within the organization thinking
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about again, how you communicate it, how you take that idea. Sometimes
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the idea that eighty percent of the idea that isn't perfect is actually more easily
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comprehensible within the organization, and it's understanding. Again back to the phrase of
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Andy's that leadership is about getting things done through other people. Need to be
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spending your time on how those other people are coming on board with what you're
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setting out as a leader. And I think that's true in an organization of
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ten people, an organization of one hundred people, or an organization of one
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hundred thousand people. And it's not enough to simply say, since I'm the
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boss, and here's the idea, here's what you need to do you're talking
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about people literally owning it. So essentially to your equation, which I love,
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Q times A equals e Q doesn't equal e quality of an equality of
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an idea does not equal effectiveness. It's the A part. It's the acceptability,
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and with different personalities at different levels in the organization, that has to
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look different. I mean, you, as the CEO, weren't going to
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show up at every home depot store and convince the cashier that this is a
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good idea. So at some point your personal involvement in creating acceptability ends and
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somebody else has to pick that up and transfer it to the organization. Any
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insights or ideas or stories around where that work didn't work well, Again,
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it's it's the assigned responsibility. And as you start which is again I'm borrowing
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for Andy, as you think about assigning responsibilities and not tasks, one of
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the things that comes with that is when you give somebody responsibility, you have
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to stand to it. They may not exercise that responsibility one hundred percent of
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the time the same way you would have never right never, Fortunately, sometimes
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you have to and you have to live with that and accept that as effectively.
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This is the trade off for getting your idea accepted. So within Home
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Depot, as an example, we empower our frontline associates. We empower our
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frontline associates to give discounts up to a certain amount. There is no review
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process. Do our associates sometimes give discounts that, gee, they don't particularly
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make sense. They might go more than necessary to satisfy a customer, probably,
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But in the whole does that get us farther along on our objective of
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customer service? I think so because it empowers our associates and says you're It
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says to them, you've customer service isn't just a task for you, it's
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a responsibility, and we've given you a tool that's entirely within your discretion to
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exercise that responsibility. And going back to last month, the mission or the
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vision that that you you know that you're that the organization embraced while you were
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there, it was all about customer service. So once again, you've looked
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for a way to tie that theoretical vision to something specific and and I think
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this is important, and you know, comment or push back on this when
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when you think about all the associates at Home Depot store who have now been
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empowered to give these discounts. If the explanation for that discount was a twenty
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page memo that, you know, here's all the you know all the details,
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here's how far you can go, no one would read it, no
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one would use it. So this had to be so simple that they could
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both use it and potentially abuse it. That's the trade off. But you're
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saying it was worth the potential of people going outside the guardrails. Occasionally,
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it was worth the potential of people going outside the guardrails. And what you
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actually find, which is the other thing that's so powerful, is that when
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you assign the responsibility, the people overwhelmingly treat it with respect. Wow,
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they want the responsibility. We all want to be empowered in our jobs.
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And when you do empower people, they don't. I mean, you know,
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there's a lot of angst and you know, hair pulling when you do
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it, and then you're always shocked. This is what people want from their
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jobs. They want responsibility. The leader's job is to effectively assign responsibility.
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If signed as many responsibilities and as few tasks as you can. Now,
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is that easy for you? Are you a micromanager by nature? Not a
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micromanager by nature. But again, I'm I'm trained as a lawyer. My
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description of being a lawyer is you're you know, you're put through three years
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of training to worry about things that no human being on the earth would worry
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about. So that's your training. So I worry a lot. So there's
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a there's a you gotta you gotta get yourself over. For me, it
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was getting yourself over the worry. And uh again, part of why why
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I'm so thrilled to be here is this is a testimonial for you know,
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I put a lot of I put a lot of weight on listening to Andy's
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concepts and how you think about what you do as a leader and say,
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okay, I'm you know, in the absence of anything else, I'm gonna
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trust this. If it doesn't work out, I'll find out. So every
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day work. So everybody's gotten a on the spot discount should thank me.
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That's what interesting, that's it. In fact, I just thought, you
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know, you realize you just announced to a lot of people that that that
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the home Depot associates are empowered with that kind of power. So that may
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cost home, but you're there anymore, so you don't care. I do
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care because I have a lot of home depot stop and it is the Again,
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our associates are phenomenal and they will not they give discounts for when we
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as a company have done something wrong, like we're out of stock and a
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product, we're out of stock of one drill for the sake of discussion,
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and we'll give you the next drill up at the same price as the drill
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where we're out of stock or something happened. I mean this. Our associates
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are not out Again, they don't abuse the responsibility that we give them because
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and this is such a big deal because it is a responsibility. It's not
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a forty page memo, here's what you can do, can't do, can't
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do, can't do. It's not a series of mother may ies and and
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the truth. As again, I just people want to be empowered in their
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jobs. And when you think about an inverted pyramid, if you don't have
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a lot of empowered people, you're never going to be able to run your
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organization. And again, I think that's true regardless of the sides of the
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organization, because unless it's a single person, unless it's you, right and
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only you, you're always dependent on somebody else. You're always dependent on somebody
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else. And the more effectively you can empower them with your vision and reinforce
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that vision, I mean, the more effective you'll be in business. And
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part of that is the gratitude we talked about last month, and the other
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part is the actual empowering people with responsibility knowing that not everybody's going to do
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it the same way. That's that's huge. So the first two challenges of
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leading from the bottom of the inverted pyramid or how to communicate, how to
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get things done? In the third one, and this was a little bit
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unexpected. If if somebody were to say, hey, what are the top
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three challenges? You know, Communication, we get, how to get things
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done we get. But this third one is a surprise and I think perhaps
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the most powerful one, and it's how to listen. You were concerned,
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how do you and how does corporate you know, how to headquarters to create
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listening skills outside the city, outside the state, outside the nation, through
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multiple layers. How do you listen? So let's talk about that for a
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few minutes, because I think most leaders never even ask the question, how
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should I listen? So that's the other advantage of first the inverted pyramid and
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listening to Andy. So I'll tie those two things together. When you think
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about the inverted pyramid, you as the leader at the bottom of the inverted
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pyramid, you know the most important people are the customers and associates at the
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top of the pyramid. How do you listen to them? And any organization?
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And again, I believe this is regardless of size. People withhold.
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It's not withholding. People don't want to give you bad news. That's just
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a human instinct. If I early on learned if I asked anybody, an
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associate, anybody in the coming how are things going, the answer is always
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great, You're a great Frank, everything's great. Goalway, it's well,
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you know, I'm not bothering bothering me. And by the way, I'm
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smart enough to understand that nothing really good is going to happen to me by
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telling you you've got a problem, wow, because that's you're not going to
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be thrilled. So in an inverted pyramid world, you actually have to be
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aggressive about listening. And again I tie this to a comment from Andy that
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I would talk a lot about internally that if you're not listening to the people
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around, you don't be surprised if they stop having anything to say. And
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then if you translate that into an inverted pyramid and put yourself at the bottom
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of this, and you're frozen in terms of information, all you're getting is
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the information that's comfortable for people to tell you. You're going to make one
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bad call after another. You're going to set one bad decision on top of
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another because you're not effectively listening to what's above with your customers. And I'll
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make one other reference to an andy statement that I think is deeply true every
17:07
organization. I just believe this, Every organization, again, regardless of size,
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the organization starts because it was phenomenally effective at solving some problem, whatever
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that problem definition was. It doesn't take too long before the organization becomes more
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interested or as interested in itself as in the problem statement that it initially existed
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to solve. So if you're not constantly reconnecting yourself to the initial problem statement
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or the problem statement is it shifts, you're going to lose relevance as a
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business. So I think listening is listening is absolutely a critical part of being
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in business and being a leader. And one takeaway from What you just said
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is that the group that you were not interested in listening to it was not
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your direct reports. It's the customer that you weren't satisfied until you've until you
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knew that you and your direct reports and their direct reports were somehow listening not
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to each other, because that's that insider focus that every every organization gravitates that
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way. In fact, we were just discussing before the podcast. Churches are
18:19
notorious for this that churches become insider focused so quickly they turn their back to
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the out to outsiders, to people who aren't there. Because that happened so
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quickly, you set the tone to say, hey, we're going to listen
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to each other, but we better be listening to the customer, which means
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you had to implement some mechanisms by which you were able to listen to people
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that you never met in places that you never visited. So talk a little
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bit about how you arrived at that customer focus and how you kept that front
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center. The listening to the customer part was reasonably straightforward because I would start
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every day, truly every day would start with customer complain email from stores.
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Yeah, so customers, every customer early on, I sent out an email
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message or some sort of statement online. Was at an email message, but
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I made some sort of statement online about our objective of better customer service,
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and that included my email address. I can't remember whether that was intentional or
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no. Wow, But from that point on, everybody, all customers had
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my email address, and I would start every day with lots of customer comments,
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sometimes positive, often negative. And so the feedback from customers was pretty
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regular and straightforward, and we had lots of survey instruments and the like.
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The feedback from the front line associates was a little more difficult to get because
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organization worked for you, they were for me, and everybody wants to again,
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there's a there's a certain the ice freeomacy. Yeah, the ice preezes,
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and everybody says, you know, Frank, Frank doesn't really care.
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If he cared, he'd be doing something about this. So you need to
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be aggressively listening. You can't you can't ask just general questions on how things
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are going. You have to get really specific about how things are doing,
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and you have to have a feedback loop where if people tell you something's not
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working, you have to go and try to fix it, or you have
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to tell them I'm not going to fix it because honest communication and honest listening.
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Again, it's very much like the you know, making vision stick.
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You can't make your listening stick if you're not effectively responding to what you hear.
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And people have to have confidence that what they tell you isn't going to
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come back and hurt them. They have to have confidence that you'll actually do
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your best to solve it. The last thing I'd say is I mean,
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I would never say we were completely successful on this. I would say it
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was the number one challenge getting effective listening vehicles, but I think we got
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better and better at it. One of the tools that you use was what
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you referred to as a skip level lunch, skip level lunch. Can you
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talk a little bit about that, how those developed, who was involved?
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And yeah, skip level lunches are that the pretty consistent tool I used and
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others use, which is that I'd have lunch and it was important to me.
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And this may be something more unique to large organizations. I don't know,
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but I would do at least one lunch a week with people who were
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down several layers within the organization, several exactly exactly up several layers in the
21:57
organization. I had my administrative assistant picked the people for the lunch so that
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they weren't picked by the business leaders, because otherwise the business leaders would have
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the people who were the highest potential and the people who are going to tell
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me everything's wonderful, and not the disgruntled people who are working in the and
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these are primarily people at headquarters. So in Atlanta, we would do that
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in what we call our store support center, and that would be skip level
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lunches. Here in Atlanta, when we were in the field, they were
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called town halls. So we just get a bunch of associates and go into
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our break room and have the equivalent discussion where there's no holds barred, say
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what's on your mind? Wow, did you enjoy those loved it? Loved
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it was the best? Did you like the corporate better than the store?
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They were both great? They were both great. A couple of things.
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Again, the the surprising positive is as long as you listen genuinely, it's
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amazing what people are willing to say and share. The people in your organization,
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whatever your organization is, actually want your organization to succeed. They've got
23:22
enormous frustrations with how things are done. Some of them you can fix,
23:26
some of them you can't fix. But again, it ties into how do
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you engage everyone? How do you have everyone bought into the vision and you
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know, really really believing that the organization is committed to that vision. If
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you're not cycling through asking how are we doing? How are we doing?
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And asking in not just a generic way, but very specific way, people
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won't believe that you really care about their feedback. Well, they're skeptical.
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There they have to be. And I would think because I'm just imagining this
24:08
even in our organizations. So for example, I call one of our campus
24:12
pastors and I say, hey, I want to come out and have lunch
24:15
with seven of your employees. And Diane, my assistant, has contacted them,
24:21
and I'm going to have lunch with them. And if I'm that,
24:25
you know, leader of that specific congregation or church, I'm nervous. It's
24:27
like, I'm what are they going to say? So, you know,
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how did you? I mean, there had to be that same kind of
24:33
angst in terms of Frank's coming. He's meeting with my people. I hope
24:37
my people don't make me look bad, or and you're exactly right, And
24:44
there were two. This required some a lot of self discipline on your part,
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on my part because I would say, and with a few exceptions,
24:55
I always lived to it, which was we'd start one of these lin bunches
25:00
or town halls and I go, this is a cone of silence. You
25:03
say whatever you want to say here, and I'm not going to go out
25:06
of this meeting and ripping through the walls. And that was important so that
25:12
people would feel that they weren't being disloyal. Right, So would a store
25:19
manager be in one of these or no, they're off their sweating bullets somewhere
25:23
at the bar hoping that hoping to have a job with the office. And
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I actually, because my predecessor didn't do this so much, I made it
25:34
a point we never took, never took, with one exception, disciplinary action
25:44
against a store manager on based on what you heard and based on what I
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heard in the one disciplinary action wasn't even what I heard in the meeting.
25:52
So I mean, in my view, in my view as a leader in
25:57
an organization. Colin Powell had a great expression for this. Colin Powell talked
26:03
about optimism being a force multiplier. Our job as leaders is to be a
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force multiplier within our organization when whether it's me or you or whomever, when
26:17
we're on the floor, we're there to provide energy and optimistic drive. We're
26:23
there to listen and learn. But it is not if it becomes a hey,
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Frank, is that to catch me? When it comes to the skip
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level, it would it would no one would speak, everybody would. It
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would be Potemkin village. Everybody would be saying, everything's wonderful here, please
26:42
go away, and I hope this meal is over fast. So so when
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you take all of these concepts and put them together, you essentially end up
26:52
with a virtual cycle to where as we talked about last month, you're communicating
26:55
up through the organization. You're communicating all the way to the front lines to
26:59
the people who are dealing with customers. At the same time, you're trying
27:02
to figure out how to listen all the way through the organization, both in
27:06
terms of management and frontline people who are involved with customer service, which is
27:10
the critical exchange with a critical event for retail, and every organization has those
27:15
critical events. So you have aggressive listening, which prompts discussion, which then
27:19
prompts the challenge of Okay, are we going to do anything with this,
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because if people don't see some response or change, it's like why are we
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meeting? You know, we're you know, these words are just bouncing off
27:30
the ceiling. Nobody's listening. So can you talk a little bit about just
27:33
that sort of virtual cycle of communication and information. Yeah, I do believe
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it's a lot like the making vision stick in that these things reinforce themselves.
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And I want to start by say, boy, I don't want to give
27:48
the impression that home Depot was perfect here or that we got anywhere close to
27:53
one hundred percent, But I know I know that this is directionally that as
28:02
you show your team that you are willing to aggressively listen, you're not just
28:08
expecting positive feedback all the time. And then as you reflect back and address
28:17
things that you heard, it makes people more willing to speak. And as
28:23
they're more willing to speak, you get better informed decisions. And as you
28:30
get better informed decisions, it's easier for you to assign responsibilities more effectively.
28:36
You understand where you need to empower people more completely, and maybe perhaps the
28:41
reverse and it helps you understand whether the initial concept that we talked about,
28:51
which is your communication getting through hard to know really whether your communications getting through
28:59
if you're not a restively listening right, So it helps you adjust what you're
29:03
communicating. And to me, part of the genius of that first going back
29:10
to the very first video on making vision stick, is that notion that this
29:15
is a cycle that they reinforce each other. Don't expect if for the sake
29:22
of discussion, if if you're communicating and not listening, that's not going to
29:27
work long term. And people know, and people know just as if you
29:33
set your vision and you're not living to your vision, don't expect it.
29:37
Or if you set your vision and you're celebrating something completely far off of your
29:41
vision, they are. And this was this was again it took time to
29:48
learn this, and I would I would never say, I would never say
29:51
we're all the way there, But they mutual there's a mutual reinforcement that's incredibly
29:59
powerful as a leadership concept. I think one of the things that you've done
30:03
for us these past two months, Frank, is you have taken away all
30:04
of our excuses because when when you listen to information like this, or you
30:08
read a book on leadership, all of us do the same thing. We
30:11
say, yeah, but in my company and my business and my nonprofit in
30:15
our situation as large as the home depot is as difficult as the situation was
30:21
when you walked in. And the fact that you took these very simple principles
30:23
and you went over them and over them. You told me earlier that you
30:26
put them on a whiteboard in your office almost day one, flipped it around
30:32
so that not everybody saw it every time you came in, but it just
30:34
it was there throughout your tenure because it was just blocking and tackling, blocking
30:38
and tackling. So I think all of us, first of all, you
30:41
took away all our excuses because of the size of the organization and the complexity
30:45
of the organization. But at the same time, these simple, simple tools
30:48
will make a difference in any organization. Well, Frank, this has been
30:52
a lot of fun, and I know our podcast listeners have benefited greatly.
30:56
I just feel sorry for those that listen while they drive because they have desperately
30:59
wanted to take notes so they can go back and do that later. As
31:03
we close, we've had two great discussions. Any parting thoughts, any closing
31:07
words as we wrap up our conversation. One thought that I'd end with is
31:11
I think the power of the leadership principles that you set out are both that
31:19
the principles are simple, but they are also profound. I found over eight
31:26
years at home Depot that I thought I'd understand the simple concept and it always
31:33
had additional layers, additional layers, and I was Frankly, one of the
31:37
biggest surprises over the eight years was how profound those concepts are simple and profound
31:45
all often go together. And that's absolutely, absolutely the case with your leadership
31:51
principles. Well, I appreciate that so much. Throughout these podcasts, Frank
31:55
has reference Making Vision Stick, which began as a leadership talk that I turned
32:00
into a tiny little book. You could read it in an hour. It's
32:01
available on Amazon and other places. It's called Making Vision Stick. And again,
32:07
if all of our podcasts listeners will go to Amazon and purchase it today,
32:09
you would put me on the New York Times bestsellers list, which I've
32:13
never been there. So anyway, thanks for listening, thanks for joining us.
32:15
Next month, I'll be back here with Lane Jones to pick up our
32:20
normal format. Again, thanks for joining us. If you want any other
32:22
information on leadership, you can visit us at Andy Stanley dot com.