This founder habit is trapping your whole team

Thanks for having me, Mick.

Yeah. So currently we're running Fraction, which is fractional C suite executives to help small and medium sized businesses that don't have a role like whether it's a CMO or a CFO or a COO, for example. And by doing that, we can actually work with the company, work with the team, do the work with them and help even increase their capability and capacity internally, which is a big shift from the previous 30 years when we were an agency doing the work for our clients. So we found that we got the most joy and impact through doing our strategic workshops with the clients. So by doing those sessions, we would usually find that we were super helpful. We moved the company and even the mindset of the people within the company miles ahead and gave them a sense of control and excitement and just motivation. So we wanted to do more of that kind of impact in the world. So we ended up transitioning our own company from being an agency doing the work for our clients to fraction where we could do the work with them.

Typically it's comes from the leader of the organization. If they are someone that sort of takes on all of their responsibility on their own, they feel obligated to make everything work and to prevent errors or if any kind of fire starts up, they try to put that fire out or they try to save time and make it easier for others by just taking on more and just doing it for them or telling them what needs to get done. And that's sort of a role that probably got them to where they are today. But what ends up happening is it restricts the growth opportunity for all the other people within the organization and it ends up trapping that leader in having to do everything because they didn't let go of enough.

Mm-hmm. Well, it comes from just getting to learn as much as we can about the organization and the people within the organization. as an agency, it was all came down to how good of a brief could we develop. And that was required it required a lot of openness and empathy and just being really good listeners and asking really, really strong questions. So I feel like doing that for 30 years has led it to a point now where when I meet with a a new founder or CEO of an organization, typically we can get into it fairly quickly of understanding what got them to where they are at, what they love doing, what they're really great at doing, and what things sort of keep them up at night. what are the tasks that or or the obligations or the requirements that weigh them down and they're not really, really good at, don't have the expertise or experience on those elements. And by getting a sense of again the stage of the company, what type of industry they're in, what type of customers they help, and are they struggling with profitability? Are they struggling with morale? Are they struggling with growth? just there's usually probably three or five very common issues that is holding a company back. And it's usually very obvious which hat or which C-suite executive role is lacking within the organization. So by having that kind of transparent conversation within thirty minutes, typically it's pretty clear what could help them and what's what is the best way to help them.

Actually I need to correct you on that one. I don't know if we wanna read you something here. But I had cancer as a kid. So I had I survived childhood cancer. So that was many, many, many years ago that I had cancer. So I wasn't writing the book during

Do over? Yeah, okay. I lost your audio.

Nope. I I heard the first half of the question when I saw your mouth kept moving during it. Yeah, and I guess it's I never saw myself as a writer or imagined I would write a book. And I think the only reason I wrote a book is because I didn't sit down to write one. So kind of going back to what we did best, which was writing running our strategic workshops, we felt that during COVID, what was the best way to develop a workshop designed for organizations during that time? And we felt that helping them With a scorecard, identify which of the weak areas so that in five minutes we knew which were the areas that they felt needed the most improvement, that they thought would create the greatest impact within the organization. So in five minutes, we could basically do a quick little audit of where where they're at, what's strong, what's weak, and what do they feel needs to be improved. And based on doing 25 years of workshops, we had over 60 different activities that we have used over the years. So From that, we developed a scorecard that we thought, you what, we can organize this into five groupings that we called zones. We could have six focus areas per zone. And based on the weighting of the priority for each area, we had a tool that we thought was the best fit for each one. So we were really designing a strategic workshop series that we could train our own people on. Cause there was people within our organization that, for example, were graphic designers for 15 or 20 years. But they wanted to get involved in facilitating these workshops for our clients and kind of broaden their horizons and get involved in in new ways. So we're writing the training documentation for this. And I started just writing the first six focus areas within the first zone, and I basically developed that content. And someone within our organization said that they just enjoyed reading it so much that this is like reading a book, and we should actually publish this as a book instead of it just being. an internal training document. So that's what the switch was for us is is going from just writing internal SOP in a way to let's reimagine this as a a book one day. And it was really just ri being written as a book so that we could give away this knowledge and this system or these tools so that we could hopefully help as many entrepreneurs as we could for as cheap as possible. So we imagined as a book, it might be able to be something that for an ebook for five dollars, for example, they could take this system and impl and implement it within their organization on the day they get the book and start improving their own environment of the workplace. So that was the reason that we decided to write it as a book and make it possible for distribution.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I guess if they feel like they want to achieve more, it's just too slow or there's something that's just too much frustration going on, whether it's because of the team they're working with or it's just themselves as an individual. This book is really kind of like a choose your own adventure where you can look at the scorecard in five minutes and identify, I'm gonna read chapter 22. And that's the one that I resonate with right now. Jump to that page, read it. And it each chapter is between one and three pages. Like it's a really short, quick read. So you can within twenty minutes learn about the area you feel like you want to make the most improvement for yourself or your team and the tools right there you can implement it that day. So it's something that you can use and very easily pick up and do at your own pace.

The hardest stretch? The hardest stretch in time period or hardest stretch as in like stretching myself?

Time period. The hard most difficult stretch. It was probably during COVID. I mean, it was a a time where instead of us sort of being the driver of change, there was a lot of drivers of change around us that we didn't have as much control over. We were almost a passenger going through that change. so I think that was a moment in time where it was the most difficult because it didn't feel like we had as much control as we would normally feel.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, again, I'm a designer by trade. I'm not a techie. we obviously built a lot of tech products in our in our lives related to it. But my personal view is I I believe AI is very much like a tool that we've adopted throughout our entire lives. it will keep on changing, I guess, between what our expectations are and what it can do. how AI is used by people. people of different levels or different calibers. I believe it's it's improving the capabilities of everyone. So if there's certain people without certain skills yet, AI can lift them up to make them better than they were without AI. And if AI being used well by people that are really good at what their craft, they can just get more efficient. And maybe some of the research or some of the iterations or some of the prototyping can get done, the cycle times on that can be done a lot quicker. So I believe, again, if it's viewed as a tool, used as a tool, it can improve the output that any everyone is doing, lifting the floor and lifting the roof. As far as where AI is going to be long term and its impact on the world overall, I don't think I'm the right person to predict that.

If I would have trusted what I had to say to myself at that time, because I feel like when I was that age, I thought I knew a lot. so as I go through life, I learn the more that I learn, the more I realize I don't know. and I feel like I put a lot of weight on what the achievements were that I expected I would have in my life when I was 20. and the things that I thought I wanted when I was twenty. I've come to appreciate being in the middle of it all and just experiencing it and taking each day one day at a time and every moment, one moment at a time. and just appreciating the actual experience of living the life as opposed to looking towards the future for like how my life could be better if or when, for example. But just look at the opportunities that's right in front of me. and also not trying to do everything on my own and and trying to discover the joy of gratitude and and doing things for others and how much more joy and meaning comes from life when doing that. so if there's any way I could have communicated that to my 20-year-old self, that would have been more years of appreciating that.

It's probably not putting enough weight on capital and and realizing that capital is a part, it's like the fuel of the business. So without the capital, it's really hard to grow the company. So having a lot more priority given to creating more capital, whether that's saving and not spending as much or looking for partners that can bring capital in that have a shared vision. I think that's one of the biggest things that hold most companies back. And if there was a second one, it's probably the people. It's making sure that the people you have are the best people you can possibly attract and keep. and the better the people, the stronger. all the people around them will perform. if you have any weak links, people have to make up for the gaps that those others are creating, which holds everybody back. So capital and the people, probably the two most important ingredients to any company to move ahead.

Yeah, it has to do with the like the founder bottleneck doing too much. it's referred to sometimes as hero syndrome. Not that you view yourself as a hero, but you just basically go in to save the day all the time. So you're trying to take things off people's plates, you're trying to fix problems, you're trying to prevent problems. and that kind of behavior I was guilty of doing. so once I started letting go and I saw people stumble and get back up and than achieve things and I was nowhere to be seen during any of that. Those are probably the moments I was the most proud of looking back in hindsight, as opposed to the things that I was personally involved in with my hands on it. So it was kind of going through that period of of change that I started to realize how important it was that I let go and I give people the chance to grow more within organization.

I think it's looking at yourself and looking at the environment around you and realizing that you have the opportunity to create the environment that you would thrive in. So that's the people you surround yourself. So it's whether it's the employees you choose to hire or keep, having mentors, coaches, role models, the peers, your friends and family, like all the people around you are a part of a really important part of the environment that you're creating for yourself. So the life you want to live, the life you want to experience, making sure you you try to curate and manage the people you choose to include in your life and try to do what you can in the best way possible to create an environment that enables them to grow and thrive as well.

Thank you, Mick. It's great being here.