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Andy Stanley - From the Vault Vision with Frank Blake Part 1 · Andy Stanley Sermons

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Hey, everybody, Welcome to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast. I'm Andy Stanley,
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and today I will be your host because today I have my good friend
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Frank Blake in the studio with me, which means I get to ask the
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questions for a change. So, Frank, thank you so much for joining
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us today. I am thrilled to be here. Well, I'm thrilled that
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you're here, and our podcast audience is even going to be more thrilled after
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they hear what you have to say. Some of you know, Frank recently
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stepped down as the Chairman and CEO of the Home Depot. Prior to that,
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Frank served as the executive vice president at the Home Depot over business development
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in corporate operations. Frank previously served and this is amazing, This is why
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we're so honored to have you here today. Are part of it. He
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previously served as the Deputy Secretary for the US Department of Energy, General Counsel
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for the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency Deputy get this deputy council to Vice
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President George H. W. Bush. He worked with Jack Well General Electric.
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They continue to maintain their friendship and Frank's got lots of Jack welch quotes,
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maybe he'll share one with us. He's got his undergrad from Harvard,
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so he's way more educated than anybody in the studio today. His law degree
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from Columbia Law School. It goes on and on and on. Serves on
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the board of board of directors for Delta Airlines, Procter and Gamble Grady Hospital
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for those of you who live here in the Atlanta area, and also one
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of our favorites, the Georgia Aquarium. His wife, Liz, worked as
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general counsel for Habitat for Humanity International until recently, and they are quite the
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power couple. And Frank and I actually met through a mutual friend over lunch
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a few years ago. We stayed in contact ever since. And in a
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minute, if I'll quit talking, I'm gonna let Frank talk a bit about
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the culture at home depot that he walked into, the trends that he inherited
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when he took the job. But first I want to just give our listeners,
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if it's okay, Frank, just a little bit of context. We
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have lots of business owners, entrepreneurs, pastors, people who work in large
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organizations. But just to give some scale and some scope, for the environment
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that you stepped into at the Home Depot. Home Depot is an eighty three
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billion dollar business, eighty three billion dollars over twenty two hundred stores. And
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then this is what is most staggering to me, three hundred and fifty thousand
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associates. Think about that, three hundred and fifty thousand associates, which means
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for you football fans, if you rented the AT and T Stadium or we
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used to call it Cowboys Stadium in Dallas, it see, it's about eighty
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five thousand people. You would need four AT and T stadiums for all the
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people who are associated with or who work with Home Depots. So it's quite
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an amazing organization. It's much bigger than most of us can imagine. And
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yet you stepped into that the role as a president and CEO. So just
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to get us started, Frank, tell us just a bit about how you
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became CEO. That was a surprise to you, as you'll share with us
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in just a minute, and a little bit about the situation that you walked
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into. Great and again, I am I'm thrilled to be here. I
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view this as a bit of a testimonial for reasons I got set out in
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a second when I got this job, and it's a testimonial to Andy and
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the Leadership podcast and what Andy teaches about leadership. And let me let me
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set the scene in two thousand and seven when the board of directors at Home
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Depot called and asked me to be the CEO. At that time, I
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had never had experience as a line leader of an organization. I had had
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staff positions through my career. Andy gave a little bit of the background to
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that. I'm a lawyer by training. I'd had staff positions moved into business,
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but they're all staff jobs. In addition to that, I didn't have
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very deep retail experience. I've been at Home Depot for four years having worked
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at GE and the transition at Home Depot was not a slow transition. It
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was the board calling say you're the CEO, and literally the next day step
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so you didn't see this coming at all. Did not see this coming at
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all. It was nothing. You know, you drive along at night thinking
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about things. I never thought about being the CEO of Home Depot, or
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frankly, the CEO of any company. And while so let's just start at
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the bottom and work your way up right exactly. And so while I had
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worked with some great leaders and Andy reference some of them, I hadn't given
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a lot of thought to leadership and what it was how to think about leadership,
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never mind how to lead an organization of three hundred and fifty thousand people.
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I remember, and it is one of the most vivid memories that I
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have, is a flying back. And the great thing about being CEO as
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you get your own plane. So I'm flying back on the company plane from
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the board meeting where they made me CEO, and I have to speak to
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all of our three hundred and fifty thousand associates over home Depot TV. The
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next day. I'm flying back on the plane and I'm thinking through what am
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I going to say? What am I going to say? And I had
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the opportunity to watch a DVD and happened to be a DVD that I had
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in my briefcase because my wife, Liz, whom Andy referenced, goes to
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Buckhead Church, went to Buckhead Church before I did, had a DVD of
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Andy's presentation at one of the Bill Heibel's conferences on making vision stick. And
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I put the DVD in and watched it on the flight and thought, that
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is the most intelligent, straightforward, comprehensible, inspiring description of what leadership is
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about and how you cast a vision for an organization and then live that vision
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and celebrate the vision. That just encapsulated leadership. And it was truly a
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you know, if you think, for me, a personal fork in the
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road in terms of thinking about what I would be doing at Home Depot and
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how it changed my perspective, because my perspective, if you had asked me,
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my perspective would have been what a leader does is make lots of decisions,
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and the more decisions you make, the more effective you are as a
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leader. And listening to that description from Andy really changed my entire perspective on
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the job. And I'll say this because Andy's too modest to say it again.
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I've had the opportunity to work with amazing leaders in business and government and
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elsewhere, and I believe, and I think my time eight years as CEO
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of Home Depot showed this that Andy's leadership concepts are probably the most powerful leadership
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concepts out there. And I would, just before getting farther into this,
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say the other part of the story is I'm very proud of what we accomplished
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at Home over the eight years. In two thousand and seven, we had
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a market capitalization of around fifty billion dollars. In eight years, we paid
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back to our shareholders through dividends and share repurchases around fifty billion dollars, and
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the company now has a market capitalization of over one hundred and forty billion dollars.
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So these concepts that I think maybe a lot of people listen to them
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and they think, well, that's awfully. That may be interesting in a
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church world, but how does that translate into business world? I think they
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are deep, deep and true leadership concepts. And then finally, sorry for
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the long introduction, The other part of that flight back was thinking about within
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Home depot, we had a concept called the inverted pyramid and that the CEO
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is at the bottom of the pyramid and the customers are at the top of
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the pyramid. And really, for me the eight years of the CEO as
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CEO, OH was linking Andy's concepts on leadership with how you think about running
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an organization where you truly put the customers at the top and the CEO at
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the bottom. So, long winded introduction, But my comment to Andy has
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been if you want a blank sheet proof of concept on his leadership principles,
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I'm here to give that testimonial because I didn't come laden with a lot of
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other thoughts. This is how I thought about leadership over the last eight years,
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As uncomfortable and as potentially self serving as all that may sound, One
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of the reasons I wanted to have Frank here is because I know this stuff
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works. But to hear it from a different voice, especially somebody in a
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very different organization than a local church, certainly means a lot. Because these
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are principles, and principles are transferable. So tell us a little bit about
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those opening weeks and months at Home Depo. Because things weren't going well.
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You walked into a very strange culture. You've given me some details. I
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don't know if you're willing to share those with our podcast audience, but here
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you are, just to paint the picture. To say it again, you
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have actually never been CEO of anything. You'd never been the point leader for
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an organization, you'd never started a company on your own, and you get
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a call you are now the CEO and the president of the Home Depot at
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a time when you know, housing prices were about to tank, mortgage lending
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was about to tank, which certainly intersects with the home depot core business.
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So take us from there, right, morale issues in the company. The
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housing recession was just starting, the country recession was still a year away.
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But these were tough times in the company. We lost a lot of our
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key leadership. So it was building again a great It's a great company with
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a great foundation. Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank and Ken Lang Gohon who founded
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the company, founded a great company, but a little bit we needed to
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go back to some of our older culture and also reinvigorated, which was the
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comment that I made about the inverted pyramid my very first broadcast with our home
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Depot associates. My son who worked in the company work still works in the
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company. At that time, he was a store manager, and he said,
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Gee, one of the things I do is I start my store manager's
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meetings with quotes from Bernie and Arthur's book called Built from Scratch. I thought
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that sounds like a great idea. As I was listening to this same flight.
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As I was listening to Andy's video, I'm flipping through Built from scratch,
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you can see that there's a lot of last minute preparation here. And
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I come across this idea of the inverted pyramid, and that's how I started
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my discussion with three hundred and fifty thousand associates. And the nature of retail
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is once you put an idea out like that, it developed its own legs.
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We started to see inverted pyramids show up in all the breakrooms around the
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company. I hadn't given it a lot of thought at the time other than
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gee, that sounds appropriately humble, and it seems like a good concept.
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Over time, what I came to realize is it's a great expression of a
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lot of Andy's leadership concepts. And when you put those two things together,
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you have a challenging and demanding but really compelling model for thinking about leadership.
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And essentially, the inverted pyramid is just another way, or maybe the original
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way of looking at a whole lotia servant leadership that we think about leadership at
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the top and information and passion and vision trickles down, you turn it upside
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down, and as you've described in our personal our private conversations, everything changes
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when you begin to picture the organization upside down, and it's not just it's
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not as simple as servant leadership. Now, the burden is on those at
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the bottom, which are the CEO and the president and the board of directors
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then to then take mission and vision and push it up through the organization.
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So let's talk a little bit about that, because that was very eye opening
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to me, even as I think about what we do here exactly, and
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you start and you look at the inverted pyramid and you say, well,
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that's a good expression of servant leadership as it is, But I also think
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it forces you to think about leadership principles in a way that connects very directly
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with some of the key principles that you lay out. It forces you to
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think about who you're serving. The customers are on the top. It forces
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you to think about how you communicate because you've got a lot of people in
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home depots instance, you've got three hundred and fifty thousand people between you and
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your customers. And someone early on told me a great had a great expression
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for my job. You said, you have a very prominent job, but
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you don't have a significant job. The only significant jobs in your organization are
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the jobs that interact with your customers. Well, you're the person who gets
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to go out and speak to the analysts and the community and things like that.
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But the significant jobs in your company of the folks who interact with your
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customers every day. So how you communicate with those associates eventually to your customers
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really determines how successful you're going to be in the business. And how you
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listen to those associates and those customers determine how successful you're going to be.
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And that's really, as they say, forces the thought process that leads you
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directly, in my mind, leads you directly to some of your leadership principles.
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So when we talked about this originally and we talked about the inverted pyramid,
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and you said you felt like there were three dominant challenges when it comes
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to leading up or again, I love the terminology of the inverted pyramid really
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more than servant leadership, because when when we first talked about this and I
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actually pictured the inverted pyramid, I realized that when you're at the bottom,
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the burden and the weight of the organization is actually on you. When you
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think of the traditional pyramid, the burden and the weight of the organization just
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visually sits on customers, which is completely incorrect. So you turn this thing
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upside down, you find yourself at the bottom. And as you've shared with
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me, you said, there is no gravity doesn't help when you're at the
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bottom. Gravity only the perception of gravity helps when you're at the top.
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But when you're on the bottom, the weight of the organization sits on the
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leader as opposed to being able to somehow leverage gravity. So in our podcast
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today, we're going this is going to be a two part podcast. Today
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we're going to talk you said, there's basically the three challenges of the inverted
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pyramid, or how to communicate, how to get things done, and how
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to listen. So for the next few minutes, let's talk specifically about how
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do you communicate to an organized when you're thinking in terms of leading from the
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bottom up or influencing up as opposed to allowing you know, supposedly allowing information
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to trickle down, which we know ultimately doesn't really work. So let's just
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talk about the challenge of communicating and remember and to our podcast audience, remember,
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here's Frank first leadership opportunity, first time to be a CEO an organization
15:20
that is scattered really all over the world to some extent, and now you're
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going to begin the process of trying to influence this whole organization through communication.
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What does that look like? Right? And just as you said, Andy,
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I do think it's a myth for leaders to think that they set a
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statement and then it kind of cascades down through the organization. It doesn't work
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that way. That message gets lost so rapidly when the meeting's over you and
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maybe even during the media, depending on And this is where as I said,
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the end verted pyramid ties directly to Andy's leadership principles because the notion of
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where you need to start is you need to be communicating a vision that's simple
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and portable and repeatable. Why is that. Why do you need a simple,
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portable and repeatable vision. The reason you need that is if you're at
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the bottom of the pyramid communicating up, you need all the layers within the
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rest of the organization to tell your story forward. They need to be taking
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that story. They need to be understanding it. So you can't make it
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too complex, because that understanding has to survive multiple retellings. It needs to
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be retold because it needs to move up through the organization, and it needs
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to be one that can be repeated over and over again. And in the
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process that communication starts to change. It's no longer just the community nication from
17:00
some distant CEO that everybody said, Well, that's fascinating that Frank says that.
17:04
But yeah, it becomes what they're communicating, and they own that communication
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and it empowers them as they tell your story forward and within your context.
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It's so much more complex than what most of us face because within an organization
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as large as the Home Depot, you not only have multiple sites, cities,
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states, countries, you have multiple languages, different cultures. So the
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challenge I remember when we first met, listening to you talk about this,
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I thought, that's just impossible. Is that? Is that even possible?
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And yet somehow, Frank, you were able to pull this off. So
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you mentioned that the idea of story. How did the Home Depot story?
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And I want us to get back to Mission Envision in just a second,
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But the Home Depot story, I mean, you weren't you weren't a founder,
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You weren't there in the beginning. You were in the company what four
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or five years before they tapped you on the shoulder, and said, tag
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you're it, you know, go get them, Frank. We'll stand back
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and watch you, you know, succeed or fail. How did the Home
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Depot story become personal for you? And the reason I think this is important?
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As point leaders who are constantly bringing new people into the organization, we
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don't want them to simply do jobs. We want them to feel responsibility.
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We want the story of our organization to become their story. How did this
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become so personal for you that you were able to then in turn help make
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this personal for new people and people that have been there a long time.
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A couple of ways. First, as I mentioned, my son worked for
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the company, so I was able to see the story of Home Depot through
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his eyes as a store manager. As a store manager, it's a compelling
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the Home Depot story itself. I won't go on too much about this,
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but it's a compelling story. Bernie and Arthur. Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank
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were actually fired from their prior job. Bernie was in his fifties when he
18:52
was fired. They had worked it was a hardware store called Handy Name,
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and actually told that story on our podcast in the past. Yet and so
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from being fired, they went and set up the Home Depot here in Atlanta
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and is very much an entrepreneurially driven success story and a lot of the culture
19:17
of the company, the core company culture involves around revolves around empowering the store
19:23
managers to make his or her decisions within the store. Bernie and Arthur had
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a great expression. They said to the store manager, pretend it's your name
19:33
on the front of the store, not Home Depot, and that's how you
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need to treat your store. And I spent a lot of time between spending
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time with my son and the other associates in the company. You realize the
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power of giving people an opportunity to succeed within a business like Home Depot.
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Every single one of our division presidents at Home Depot started as an hourly associate
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in the store. Wow, so you've got an enormous opportunity to succeed if
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you're willing to work hard. And in fact, Bernie Marcus's phrase was the
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number one thing to understand about Home Depot, in addition to the customer service,
20:15
is that we take care of our associates and we exist to make our
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associates successful. So you were able to basically go back and leverage some of
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the history, exactly, personalize it, put your own terminology around it.
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But so you kept not sort of you kept the foundational concepts and then I
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guess brought them up to date, personalized them, embraced them, you went.
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And I think that that's an opportunity every single business leader has, whether
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it's within a division or department, a franchise. You don't have to be
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the founder for it to become your story. And I think that's a big
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part of the takeaway from this. And again, and I didn't ask you
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this privately, so I don't know if this will make it to the podcast,
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but was it difficult for you to walk in and find yourself leading men
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and women who had been there not only longer than you, but began as
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hourly folks when in fact you stepped in in middle management. Here's a group
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of people that had paid, to some extent a higher price to get to
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where they were. Was that a challenge or absolutely? Absolutely? And I
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put I put a high premium myself on working in the stores, so actually
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spending time with the CEO as the CEO not very effectively helping customers. In
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fact, as I moved towards retirement. One time I was working in a
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store here in Atlanta and the cashier came up to me in the break room
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and she said, Frank, I just got to tell you this. One
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of my customers came up to me as he was checking out and said,
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does Home Depot have a new program with aarp? That old ball guy loading
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cars out in the lot? But yes, it put a I felt an
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additional need. I think it's a good idea generally, but I felt an
22:03
additional need to work in the stores now and understand that from this, and
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that brings me to something I was going to mention later, but I'll mention
22:08
it now. When we first met, we were having lunch at Home Depot
22:12
headquarters here in Atlanta, and I said to you, I don't remember exactly
22:17
how I phrased the question, but I was trying to picture what what do
22:18
you even do? I mean, I'm thinking the CEO president of Home Depot
22:22
was sitting in an office and just look at spreadsheets all day long. What
22:26
does you know, Frank Blake do on Tuesday afternoon? And when I ask
22:29
you that question, you said, I walk the floors of the stores and
22:33
I put on an orange apron because that customer, the relationship with the customer
22:37
is everything. And I've never forgotten that I've shared that so many times that
22:41
there every organization has critical events. You quickly identified the critical event for Home
22:47
Depot happened right there at the checkout or on the floors of a store.
22:52
So for you to again skip multiple layers, put on an orange apron and
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walk the floors of a home Depot store. I think that has contributed a
23:00
great deal, not only to your success, but obviously it would be much
23:03
easier for the home Depot story to become your story. And I think that's
23:07
a fantastic illustration of the inverted pyramid. You figured out a way to actually
23:12
physically move from the very bottom, which is the top traditionally, to the
23:18
top, which is the bottom traditionally, to interact with customers to the point
23:22
where they complained about your customer service. Right, And when we get to
23:26
the point of talking about listening, that is one of the important elements of
23:30
listening is you've got to think of different ways to listen when you realize you're
23:34
at the bottom of the pyramid. Bernie Marcus made a great comment to me
23:40
when I got the job as CEO, he said, you are going to
23:44
find that you just became a whole lot funnier because everybody's going to laugh at
23:48
your jokes. And he said, let me tell you you're not funny.
23:52
And there's a deep truth to that in the sense that as a leader,
24:00
people tend not to want to tell you tough things to hear, and you
24:07
have to you have to push yourself to get to the position where you're hearing
24:11
those tough things and with people who are willing to tell you them. And
24:15
our customers are great at giving feedback. As our frontline associate, we're going
24:19
to talk a lot about that next month and we talk about listening. That's
24:22
a great, great prelude. So getting back to the mission vision piece.
24:26
You know, the mission, the vision has to be portable, memorable.
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So where did home depot? Where did you land with the home depot as
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it relates to mission and vision, what was that portable takeaway? So our
24:37
vision was set to be the best customer service retailer in the world. That
24:41
was our vision, say one more time, to be the best customer service
24:45
retailer in the world and the most powerful thing. And if there if there's
24:51
just one part of that initial DVD listening to Andy talk about leadership. That
24:59
took up a a lot of my time at Home Depot, but I believe
25:03
was one of the most important things we did. Was you set the vision,
25:08
but then you have to live to the vision, and then you have
25:11
to celebrate the vision. And those three things are actually mutually self reinforcing.
25:21
As you live the vision, you're more comfortable talking about it. As you
25:26
celebrate the vision, you understand it better. And we spent an enormous I
25:33
spent personally a lot of time at Home Depot celebrating people who did great things
25:40
on customer service. Every weekend, I would spend an afternoon just writing handwritten
25:47
notes to our associates for great things that they had done all over the all
25:51
over all over the country, Canada and Mexico. We did videos every week
25:56
that would take the best example of customer service and broadcast that video to all
26:03
of our associates. We had special customer service awards. There is a very
26:08
common saying in business that you get what you measure. I believe that you
26:14
get what you measure. I think the brilliance of Andy's discussion of leadership is.
26:21
I would amend it by saying, you also get what you celebrate.
26:26
And for me, that was not a natural learning. You know, Sandy
26:30
said, I'm a lawyer by training. That means, you know, I
26:33
live in shades of gray. I don't tend to celebrate and get excited.
26:38
It didn't come naturally to me. And the celebration is the most important thing
26:44
you do because when you think about one of your jobs is how do you
26:48
get people who are working in your organization to understand what you want. The
26:55
most powerful way to do that is to celebrate them when you catch them,
27:00
when you catch them doing it. And that is so powerful because it's not
27:06
it feels to the person like I understand it. I understand this. I
27:12
did this, and I'm getting recognized for it. I'm getting celebrated for it.
27:17
And they don't have to be big celebrations. I mean, these were,
27:21
as I said, for the most part, handwritten notes videos. We
27:23
did do monetary celebrations as well, but the celebratory atmosphere around your vision and
27:32
making sure you're living your vision so that you're not doing things that are discordant
27:37
with your vision. Again, when you think about leading an organization from the
27:42
bottom of the pyramid. That is the best way to get the associates at
27:48
the top of the pyramid to understand because they internalize it and then they celebrated
27:55
it. In fact, we had a program within home depot whether the associates
27:57
could celebrate themselves for great customer service. How did that information get to you?
28:04
Because obviously you put a lot of time and thought. You know,
28:07
it's one thing for me, I can walk the halls of a local church
28:08
and catch people doing things, pat them on the back, write a note.
28:11
Somehow information is filtering from all over the country Canada, Mexico to your
28:17
office so that you know enough to be able to write a letter that you
28:21
know it's not a good job. You knew you had spactly how did that
28:25
information get to you? And I think it's a great question and another powerful
28:29
thing about what you start to do when you start thinking about celebration. So
28:33
we actually had by week all of the districts, the regions and our division,
28:37
so that's kind of how we're organized. They would roll up examples of
28:41
great customer service at the start. This was part of their job description.
28:47
This was part of what they did at the start, you know, to
28:49
be honest, it didn't. Everybody, what are we doing all that time?
28:53
It's got time for this. This seems awfully random and silly. And
28:57
then, just as when we predict from your principles, it started developing a
29:04
momentum of its own. People wanted to be on the list of what got
29:10
rolled up as the greatest thing in the district, the greatest example, and
29:15
I mean we have just amazing associates in the company. And because they were
29:21
stories about customer service, people want to do great things for customers. People
29:26
want to feel empowered to do great things for customers. So it actually reinforced
29:30
what you know, a strong company culture should be in any case. But
29:36
it it took time for it to fully, you know, get itself rooted.
29:41
But once it was rooted, it was completely selfis. It became part
29:45
of culture. Absolutely. Now there's so much to unpack and all this,
29:48
but here's something that ran through my mind that perhaps a lot of our podcast
29:51
listeners are thinking, you took time away from something else you were already doing.
29:55
I mean, there's not just there's not big empty spaces in the day
29:57
where we sit around going huh, what are I'm gonna do today? So
30:02
you took time away from something else to write handwritten notes. You're having to
30:06
read these stories so that again they're personal, they're specific. So on average,
30:10
and I know it's just an average, how many approximately, how many
30:12
handwritten notes would you do, say, in a week, around one hundred,
30:15
one hundred see and again, if I was just writing the same note
30:21
over and over and over one hundred times, I can't imagine doing that.
30:23
But again, processing the specifics of the story, that's that's unbelievable. And
30:27
the other reason I think this is so important is you know, when you
30:32
laid out as the vision for home Depot to be the best customer service retailer
30:36
in the world, and you're looking at this enormous flywheel, asking the question,
30:40
how do I even begin pushing this? How do I again, how
30:42
do I not push this down through the organization, but push this up through
30:45
the organization. I can't think of a better way of taking your energy,
30:51
your time, and your influence and again sort of fast tracking it all the
30:55
way to the front lines of the stores than writing these notes. That's just
30:57
amazing. Imagine your direct reports as they you know, your assistant is saying,
31:03
sorry, we can't interrupt Frank, he's writing, he's writing notes to
31:07
employees, and again these notes begin to show up on the front lines and
31:10
in the stores. I imagine that influenced them as well. I mean,
31:14
did other people start doing this? No, exactly, Andy, And I
31:17
loved your use of the word flywheel, because that's exactly what happened. I
31:22
started to see division presidents writing notes, regional vice presidents, district managers,
31:26
store managers as others see the power of that recognition. Yeah, and so
31:30
this really again earlier we talk about, you know, with inverted pyramid things,
31:36
don't we have to think in terms of pushing things up rather than things
31:38
trickling down. But this was something you were able to actually push up through
31:41
the entire organization exactly. And I'll admit to it to start wondering, So
31:48
I've bought into your concepts in theory. And then there were periods of time
31:52
where I wondered, all right, is this really worth the time? And
31:56
so I'm writing all these handwritten notes saying, Okay, maybe I'm not is
32:00
this worth the time? And the switch point for me was I was walking
32:04
a store and an associate came up to me. And this was early on
32:07
and said, I received a note from you. Would you mind rewriting it
32:12
to me? And I said okay, sure, and they said well,
32:16
I said why and they said, well, I saw the note and it
32:21
looked like a handwritten note. But everybody said it couldn't possibly be hamret it
32:25
was auto penned, and so I put it under water and sure enough the
32:30
ink bled and I need a new note. And so they didn't believe it,
32:34
right, and I thought, Okay, that's it. That's a sign
32:38
of It's that celebration. Because I'd say the other corollary to the leadership principle
32:45
on the celebration is, as a leader, when you celebrate something, you're
32:51
investing a part of yourself in that celebration. And the people who work for
32:57
you see that and they go, gee, you're actually investing your time in
33:01
doing this. It must be important. And if you and you know in
33:07
my case it was handwritten, knowes there are lots of different ways of doing
33:09
it, but having your team, no matter what the size of your team,
33:15
having your team understand that you're actually investing in celebrating the vision, that
33:20
the vision isn't some dry thing that you come up in a conference room and
33:22
you wipeboard it and people work the language, but you're actually invested in it.
33:28
You're invested in as the way you behave as a leader and what you
33:30
celebrate as a leader. I think one of the biggest learnings for me from
33:35
that broadcast of yours, so first you had to lead people past corporate skepticism.
33:39
There's no way he wrote this. I mean that just tells you a
33:44
lot about our culture in general. So somebody actually says, honey, look
33:47
I put it under water and the ink came off. So somebody actually wrote
33:51
this, And now people are beginning to believe these notes are actually from the
33:54
CEO of this company. And the next thing you know, people are I
34:00
see the notes framed by their desk and it's we all And I do the
34:07
same thing when I was working at GE when I got handwritten notes from Jack
34:12
Welch, I frame those suckers. Yeah. We we respond to recognition,
34:19
we understand recognition. And again it wasn't something that came naturally to me,
34:27
but I do believe that one of the most important things a leader does.
34:31
Now when I talk, I go look at the first question to a leader
34:36
is what do you celebrate? What is it that you're out celebrating and how
34:39
does your organization celebrate? And that's just such an It reveals so many interesting
34:45
things about organizations and a lot of times, again this is in the business
34:50
world, what you'll find is what you're out celebrating is the person who cut
34:53
costs of the person who you know did this or that. That's more directly
34:59
by bottom line oriented. And this goes to another Anty concept of you know,
35:06
don't confuse your intention and direction. So you might be intending to do
35:12
something great, but look at what your actual direction is. And I think
35:15
one of the great signposts on direction is what do you celebrate? Wow,
35:21
Well, this has been fantastic for those of you listening. The DVD that
35:23
Frank is referring to is no longer available, but since I have three kids
35:28
in college, I took that talk and actually created a little bitty book called
35:31
Making Vision Stick that is available on Amazon and it's been out for several years.
35:37
But if all of our podcast listeners would buy one today, it would
35:39
put that book on the New York Times Bestsellers list in a day. And
35:43
I don't think a book that old has never hit the New York Times Bestsellers
35:45
and I've never had a book on that list. So there's a good objective,
35:49
there's a good we'll celebrate, Yeah, we'll sell that. It's called
35:52
Making Vision Stick and it's essentially all these principles in a book that you could
35:54
read in less than an hour. Okay, so we've talked about communicating the
36:00
communication challenges with the inverted pyramid. Next month when we come back, we're
36:04
going to talk specifically about how to get things done, which of course we're
36:07
all interested in, and then, as we alluded to earlier, how to
36:10
listen. So for our podcast audience, you are not going to want to
36:14
miss next month's podcast. Thank you so much for being a part of this
36:19
today, Frank looking forward to next month. In the meantime, if you
36:22
are interested in more leadership content, you can visit us at Andy Stanley dot com.