Jennifer has developed her expertise in Talent Strategy & Leadership Professional Development over her exciting 20+ year career as an HR Professional.
00:00 S1: Welcome to the Lucky Titan Podcast. Here you will learn how to fill your favorite platform with tons of your dream customers from some of the world’s top entrepreneurs. I’m your host, Josh Tab. Now, let’s get started. What is up everybody? Josh tap here again. And welcome back to The Lucky tit and podcast. So today, we have a very special guest on… We have it Jennifer thought in here with us. And she’s the founder of 304coaching.com. Jennifer is really an incredible person, we just had a great conversation before this, and she’s really keen on providing value for the people for the show, so I’m really excited to have her talking about… Really, we’re gonna be covering the entrepreneurial addiction is what I would call it, and I love this title, I’m just gonna read it because it was amazing, so your addiction to being right is slowly killing your team and your business results, and that is totally going to be the title of the show. Just so you know, Jennifer, I didn’t even have to work for that one, which is great, but setter, and then tell us one thing about yourself that most people wouldn’t know.
01:02 S2: Hi, thanks for having me. I think then that’s always a difficult question ’cause I’m somewhat of an open book, but the one thing that people probably don’t know about me is that for the last couple of years, I’ve made it a goal to make some sort of donation or volunteer for an organization 12 months out of 12 months every single year, and I’m in three years into that… And most people probably don’t know that I make a point to do that. And to remember to do that every single month, I actually have it on my calendar.
01:34 S1: I love that is scheduled in. So you’re… You’re very scheduled person. That’s what it sounds like you’ve got a very… Life structure, I guess you could say I’m totally the opposite. I am I a loose gun, right. Liana, so I wanna ask you this though, what’s been your favorite one that you’ve worked with so far, because you’ve worked with quite a few different charities and everything, what’s been your favorite?
01:55 S2: So why favored charity is out of New York. I’m in Dallas bits out of New York. It’s a dog rescue, and one of my friends here in Texas rescues MOMA dogs that are about to have puppies out of the shelters, and then the dog has all the puppies, and my friend takes care of all of them and get some all healthy in the motion for them up to New York where they find amazing homes, and I don’t have the ability to foster, but I support her foster, Diontae month after month.
02:26 S1: Okay, here’s money. And here’s people. Yeah, I love it. That may be curious, because I know that it’s really fun to see the different ones that pull your heart strings and the ones that really kind of call you… I guess I feel like everybody’s kind of got certain ones that they’re called to, so it’s always fun to add… Well, Jennifer, let’s hop into business now, I do want to know about the 04 coaching. This is something… And I had to say three, of course, it’s not a 304, it just sounds kind of lame, honestly, Pro for coaching. So give us a little bit of background on your company and what you’re trying to do, and then we’ll kind of get into someone… To the gritty car.
03:03 S2: Yeah, so my background before I launched my own organization was in Operations for half of my traditional corporate career and then HR for the second half of my corporate career, so I have a really interesting take on how do we create teams because the operation person inside of me wants to make sure that we’re hitting our objectives, that we’re focusing on the business and the business plan, but then the HR side of me thinks, Well, the only way to do that is through talent, and so I took that viewpoint and that’s how I walked into starting my own company, and what we do today is we help fast-growing organizations really find a way to develop their team, so the teams grow fat, the nostril most Chinese in really fast is the business actually out grows the skill of their team. And when that happens, then you start leading through stress and crisis, I’m highly directive leadership, and when that starts to happen, your best people aren’t gonna stick around, or you’re about… People are not gonna just made and think about how to really help you in the violating your top talent once you’re left with or the…
04:13 S2: Yes, Serena folks, and are driving new ideas, and so I just… I wanted to help people prevent that for happening and real help in how to drive their town the G against their business strategy. So at the end, the business doesn’t stop growing because you don’t have the right people, that it actually grows because you do have the right people in the right place.
04:35 S1: That is awesome. And so really you’re focusing around helping bring people together through values and through mission-driven purposes, where it sounds like you’re attracting the right people… This is gonna be a fun conversation. So I’ve been doing my MBA in the evening, so I always wanted to do it. I’m doing through the Jack Welch management as Titus whole. Jack watches whole premise is about values and mission, and you probably know all about his strategy being in that sector, so it’s gonna be exciting. I’m excited for this one. So let me ask you this, Jennifer, when you decided to make your transition out of corporate America, what was the first business you did and did it succeed? Or is this the first one you did?
05:13 S2: This is the first one I did, but you’re planning it out and trying to figure out what I was gonna do, how was I gonna pay the bills, how is it gonna come together… What did I want it to look like? A lot of ideation and just putting things in place, what my business looks like today and what it looked like when I launched is different, it’s evolved, but it is actually the business that I always dreamed of having, so I feel really fortunate, but the work I put into launching this business is paid off, and I’ve been able to do every day and do what I love.
05:47 S1: I love that. That’s what it’s all about, right? Well, so good stuff. I’m just kind of curious if you had done other businesses before and had your first big failure yet, maybe you’ll dodge the bullet and just make it right. So I do it.
06:03 S2: I’ve got plenty of my closet, lots of failures in the class that I promise…
06:08 S1: We want deltas on the holes podcast. So let’s talk a little bit about the addiction, I love the word addiction to being right is like that phrase because I mean, as an entrepreneur, I’m not that kind of person that pushes my opinions on other people, but as the owner of the company, I do tend to run into this problem where I’m just, Well, this is just the way we’re going to do it. Because it was my year, and when we work with contractors, it’s a little bit easier ’cause we don’t have any full-time employees, so I do wanna get your take on that, because most of the people listening to this probably don’t have a really big in-house team so let’s talk a little bit to that and then I’ll just let you free flow from there.
06:48 S2: Awesome, so the reason why we call it an addiction, it is an addiction, we know that when you are right or you win or something good happens, that you kind of said, Hey, I wanna do this, and it happens, you get a dopamine hit in your mind and who doesn’t love a good dopamine head? It makes us feel good, but it’s the exact same firing off of that dopamine that when if we were addicted to sugar or addicted to alcohol or whatever our addiction of choice, it’s the exact same process inside of our mind. So what happens is, if we continue to be right, just like If we love sugar and that’s our addiction, we need more and more to get that same high being right, the exact same thing when we start to get addicted to it, we need more and more of it to be right. And so I think of people I’ve worked with early in my career and they were amazing, they were open-minded and really collaborative, and because they were so good, they started to rise the ranks, and then 10 years into their career, I’m like, I even know that person anymore, like they don’t listen anymore, they used to be so collaborative, and then once I really started studying the neuroscience and the mind and how it played out in the workplace, I realized it’s because they became addicted to being right, and that addiction stopped you from hearing things that stops you from hearing the truth, you will do anything to not have your drug taken away from you, and it is a true addiction, and just like addiction to sugar or substance or any of that can be hurtful to family and loved ones, our addiction to being right can be hurtful to our business, and honestly, it can be hurtful to our family and friends too.
08:28 S1: Yeah, and the way you put it is really interesting because it’s kind of like an addiction to validation or success, and so when somebody gets to that point… And honestly, most of the people listening to this, it’s probably one of those things we need to start looking internally for because they’re… Like we talked about before the interview here is a lot of people listening to this have their own company, they’ve plateaued in their business, but they plateaued because they don’t really know how to scale team that they haven’t held to actually grow a team. I’ve even fall into this category multiple times, and I think there’s just certain times when you have to do internal retrospect ion on it, so when it comes to self, How do you identify it and then how do you target it out…
09:13 S2: Yeah, it’s a really great question. So if you think that, Hey, wait a minute, maybe I’ve been right a little too many times, and I’m convincing myself of the outcome is exactly what I wanted, even if it wasn’t some of those mind tricks that we play on ourselves to make sure that we are getting our dopamine head of being so smart and so… Right. So one of the things you wanna start to look for is, if you are in a room of people and you ask them their opinion about something and they all look at each other and say nothing, they’re waiting for you to tell them how they’re supposed to think, then the problem, if you go home at the end of the day and you’re saying to yourself, My team doesn’t know what they’re doing. No one knows what I want them to do. And everyone’s disappointing me. Well, it’s probably because you have some addiction to being right and people aren’t making decisions around you, people aren’t giving you honest feedback, and that can be someone who works for you, it could be a trusted advisor, someone that could really help you with your business, but you’re so addicted to your own validation, your own being, right, that you aren’t willing to listen to them and because of your actions, they’ve probably shut down and stop telling you the truth in fear of your reaction.
10:28 S2: And so if any of those things are starting to go on. The other thing too, is if you don’t go home every day at the end of the day and say, I learned this or I heard this and it changed my opinion, then you’re addicted to your own your own Gods, because you’re not allowing new ones to come in and as a business owner, we’ve gotta be letting new ideas come in all day every day, to stay ahead of the curve because… Yeah, it’s ever-changing world these days.
10:54 S1: Yeah, well, those are great identifying factors because it almost doesn’t even look at yourself, it’s looking at the reactions of other people to you, and so when you identify what’s kind of your strategy when you work with people is something you’ve done many different times, so when you work with somebody who’s got this issue in their business, what is your first approach to helping them tell the company…
11:19 S2: Yeah, so as any addiction, our first approaches to met that we have something going on, we’ve got something that’s wrong, and that’s always easier said than done, but we do a lot of work, if there is an addiction, you have to be willing to change and people don’t give up their addiction unless the pain of the addiction is more than the pain of change, and so for those wanting to change, we have to really start to think about what’s the value of the work, because the mind has to get excited about the end result, because the work is painful and not super painful, but you have to start getting… Your ego starts to have to adjust, and for some of us adjusting our ego is pretty painful, but when we say, Okay, if I do this work and I humble and I kind of emits some failures and I open myself up and I change the way I act with people around me, at the end of that, what’s possible? And so we really start there about what’s possible for you, because if you want that and you will work towards that, and that’s one of the beauties of the mind, is that you can offer a new ideas and get it…
12:26 S2: Excited about it.
12:28 S1: Yeah, that’s awesome. So when it comes to building a team, the correctly the first time I started saying, Okay, this is how we attack it, this is how we resolve that issue, but as you’re building a team out, how do you help them to feel like they’re able to help you partier to provide creative ideas to your… Your business.
12:51 S2: Yeah, so one of the things that we have to really think about is how we use our language and the words we’re using either put someone into fear, unconsciously, it’s… Our primitive brain takes over… Its job is to make sure we don’t die. So it works really hard at that, but what that feels like in the modern world is, Oh, if I say the wrong thing, I’m gonna lose my job. Oh, if I say the wrong thing, I might not be able to feed my family ’cause I don’t have a job, or I’m not gonna get this promotion, and so the fear starts coming in, so as a leader, we have to really manage our language to make sure that our language is really opening up our prefrontal cortex, which is all collaboration and ideas and learning and all the good stuff we actually want, but our traditional leadership style that we’ve all kind of grown up with, that 20th century leadership style actually promotes fear in the language, you know, I’m gonna really put pressure on them to make them perform well, no, putting pressure on them, freaks them out, and you’re actually being counter-intuitive.
13:52 S2: It’s actually counter-intuitive. So what we wanna do is think about our language, and so you can still say what you need to say, but say it in a different way, so for example, if you have a product that’s just not doing what it needs to do, and you’re incensed about it, you don’t understand why and you’ve done the work and you believe this, and you’re kind of in your addiction, and so you’re not seeing why your product may not be doing well, bring your team in, but you have to set it up very specifically, you have to say Alright, product ABC is not doing well. And so we want to… We wanna get it going. I’m gonna have a meeting this Friday at 2 o’clock, and I want you to bring me the most ridiculous ideas you can come up with, ridiculous, and in fact, I’m gonna give awards for the most ridiculous idea you bring me, because what that Intel is… The mind is, I can think and do anything and I’m not gonna be judged for it, I’m actually gonna be rewarded for the most creative approach instead of getting in trouble and judged, if you take that same team and you’d called and said, I don’t know what the problem is you guys should be selling this product and the numbers are down, and I want you in my office on Friday, and I want you to tell me what you’re gonna do to make it change…
15:07 S2: Same outcome, two different ways to approach it, and you’re gonna get two different pieces of information, and so really getting people to be rewarded for pushing the envelope, rewarded for telling the truth, rewarded for thinking outside the box, that’s when you start to see those relationships change and the business actually starts to grow.
15:26 S1: That’s a really cool approach because people might come with some super bizarre ideas, but like you’re saying kind of trains their brain so that when they can come to you, they’re saying, Hey, here’s an actually a creative idea that is productive at that’s really cool. Well, so being somebody’s like, We have no full-time employees, we’ve done that before, we’ve had interns or what have you, but we should prefer work through contractors or the agencies, virtual assistants, or what have you… How would you recommend instilling this in the short-term relationships like this or that, the ones where you’re not communicating as often… Yeah, and so when you’re working with contractors, you’re really working with experts in their field, and
16:04 S2: So there’s a lot of beauty in that and making… Even companies that have full-time employees, I really, always recommend looking for experts in their field and bringing contractors, and they’re a great way to bring in expertise. So if you are like yourself, I’m bringing in a lot of different contractors, when you are deciding who to bring in, the first thing you have to do is get really clear on the actual work you want them to do, and that’s the biggest mistake most people make is they’re not clear on the work, they just know they need someone in this kind of general area, so they start talking to people, they get emotionally connected to someone, and then they hire them and then they’re disappointed and I’m like, Well, were you clear on the work this person doesn’t even do that, or this isn’t their expertise, so get clear on the work first, then once you hire the expert that is an expert in that area, make sure that you say things to them like, I’ve hired you because you’re in expert. So when you talk to me, I want you to talk to me as if I know nothing because I do want to learn from you, and I want you to be an expert in making decisions that are right for my business.
17:09 S2: And here is my goals and here is how I can I see you playing into those goals, how can I help you grow as an individual, so you’re meeting your goals, ’cause the contractor has different goals and an employee, but allowing them and saying upfront, you are an expert, therefore, I need your expert voice in the room, and you have my… To tell me that my idea is bad, but it doesn’t work that it’s ever been done, but whatever, permission, but you do have to give permission to them to be an expert. That is awesome. Well, hey, so we’re coming up to the end of the interview here. So I wanna ask you this one last question. If you could give people three solid step saying, Hey, there’s the first things that you should be doing when you want to either revamp your team or we build your team, so that you can fill this out, what were those three steps be… First thing is get clear on the work, and when you get clear on the work, you have to get clear on what I must to do, what’s a nice to do in what’s vanity work? And vanity work is the stuff that makes you feel good, that doesn’t really matter, and as owners or as executives, we push out a lot of vanity work, so you have to get clear on the work…
18:18 S2: Then the second thing is you have to get clear on who you are as a leader. So that you can be consistent. And so, oftentimes, leaders don’t even really know their values or who they want to be or how they wanna interact with people, and so they’re really inconsistent, so the second thing is get consistent on how you want to lead, and the third thing is create an environment where everyone’s voice is heard, no matter what it is, because their whole voice is our reality, and it’s someone’s view point on your business, and you have to take that seriously.
18:53 S1: That is awesome. I’m going to add in a fourth step to that… Okay, just for you. Okay, that number four is to go and hire 34 coaching dot com, call Jenifer, gotta figure out if this is something that could work really well for you guys, because this is something that, especially if you’ve plateaued, it’s 99% of the time, it’s because you’re not doing a good job of scaling your team, and if you can scale your team growing from there, it gets excellent. Ally, more easy. So if you’re just starting out, Jenifer might not be the right person for you, but if you’re really plateau… She’s a place to go. So Jennifer, thank you so much for coming on today. Is there any last final parting piece of guidance that you’d like to get to our audience.
19:33 S2: My advice is to do what you do well every single day and then hire experts around you to do the other stuff, so often business owners are trying to… Oh, I’ll just figure that out and do it myself. Don’t do that. Hire an expert. Stay in your zone of genius.
19:50 S1: Welcome to the Lucky tie podcast here, you will learn how to fill your favorite platform with tons of your dream customers from some of the world’s top entrepreneurs. I’m your host, Josh tab. Now, let’s get started.