Welcome to the Impact Podcast. I'm Eddie Wilson here to help you visualize what others cannot see, create opportunities where others have failed, and push you to build empires where once there was empty space. Let's embark on this journey together and make a difference in this world. On today's podcast, we're going to tackle these three people. I'm going to do it by way of parable. I'm going to teach a parable and I'm going to anchor into three people. I'm going to help you understand that there are three people that you absolutely need in your life, in your business, in order to gain success. Then I'm going to give you the fourth person that you absolutely have to caution. The three people. Let me start by telling a story. There's a struggling business owner, the struggling business owner. He walks out of his place of business and he's in the city and he's walking next to a park. He now sees three people standing in the park. These three people are talking about the fact that they have to accomplish the renovation of this park today. They've got until the end of the day to finish the renovation on this park. The first person is the person which we're going to assign the name Cara. Cara is the first person. Cara is sitting there and she's sketching on a piece of paper. She's sketching the final vision for the park. It's halfway done, but they still need some things. She's sketching it out on a piece of paper. She's also rallying the other two with encouragement. Hey guys, we've got enough time. We're going to do this. Think about what it's going to mean to the city and to these people. Cara is what we call the culture driver. Cara is the culture driver. She sets the tone. She creates the energy and she makes sure everyone feels a part of something bigger. That's Cara. The next person that steps up is a person by the name of Alex. Alex comes over. He says, Cara, you're right. Can't wait to do this. Let's finish this up. He starts checking his measurements. He's checking his plans. He's making sure no step was skipped. He's looking over all the inventory to make sure that they have the right plants. They have the right planks. They have the right facade and the things that they're going to need to finish this park. He says, and just to reiterate to you guys, we said that we have to be done by sunset. He said, we owe that to each other. He ensures the promises are kept and progress is matching the plan. We call Alex the accountability partner. You've got Cara, the culture driver. You have Alex, the accountability partner. Then you have the third person. The third person is Danny. Danny is sitting there listening to Cara talk about the future, talk about the experience, listening to Alex rehearse the exact measurements and the timing of all of this. Then you have Danny who, as he's listening, is now hauling logs, starting to hammer. He's sawing relentlessly in motion. Sweat's pouring down his brow as the other two are setting the culture and making sure the standard is held. He's saying to them, let's move, guys. We've got to get going. I know that your dreams are big and I know that we have to be precise, but if we don't actually start putting action to the plan, then we are never going to be done by sunset. Danny is the execution driver. Danny is all execution. He doesn't just talk. He moves. As this person is sitting there watching this take place, and you see this project come to life. The three people, Cara, Alex, and Danny, they end up finishing it all. Each one of them playing their very specific role. The person that's sitting there struggling to be successful in their business realizes that there are three very specific pieces that are missing in their business. These are the three that are almost always missing in your business. You can appoint a CEO, a COO, a CFO, a CRO. You can appoint every executive. Underneath of that, you can have a vice president of every single one of those divisions, marketing, operations, finance, sales. You can have vice presidents everywhere. You can then have an entire army of people underneath of those vice presidents. You can even go down to the director level. Now, the director is actually directing the people, and then you've got the actual followers doing the work. But I will tell you that if your organization does not have these three components and champions in each one of these areas, you are going to suffer. And it doesn't matter if you are tied or Home Depot, or if you're the average laundromat down the street. You need these three people, and someone needs to play these roles. So first of all, let's just go back to the person who's driving culture. Culture is the very heart of the business. It's the why. It's why are we actually doing this? What is the purpose of it? And so in every thriving venture, you have to have somebody who's driving the why. You have to have somebody who has it in front of them. If you think about it in my organization, and many of you've heard the podcast now for many episodes, and I have a private equity firm called Collective Influence, for me, I am driving culture. And that's really my responsibility as the CEO. Oftentimes, I need to drive culture. The main purposes of a CEO are to number one, know their numbers, number two, know their people, and number three, have all the big relationships. That's the purpose and the role of a CEO. And as a CEO, I have to drive culture. Culture is not just what we say it is, right? Let me define culture for you just for a second, so that you understand if you actually have a carer for culture on your team. Culture is not stating something that you want. It's a systematic behavioral activity that's taking place in your business. For instance, if you say, man, I really want to have a culture of family. But all of a sudden, you've got people that are on each other's heels, and they're being negative. And if you don't care for people, if you don't give them time off, if you're driving, that's not typical of a family. Typical of a family is supportive, understanding, nurturing. So if you look at the systematic behaviors in your business or in your life, and you say, I want the culture of, but the systematic behaviors don't represent it, you don't have a culture. You have a dream. You have an aspiration. A culture is what's currently taking place. It's not this group of sayings or words on a wall as you walk into an organization. It's what's actually taking place. What systematic behaviors are actually taking place within those four walls, because that is the culture. If you say, hey, I want to have a culture of accountability, but yet you don't have standard operating procedures, you don't have meetings to essentially govern or define what it means to have success, you don't have a culture of accountability. You have a desire for accountability. You don't have a culture for accountability. So you need somebody who's the culture driver, right? Somebody who's actually going to drive it. For us, it's number one, it's tied to our nonprofit impact others. And so we lead so much with talking about why we do what we do and the impact we're making and the orphanages that are started or it's instead of just giving gifts at Christmas time, we give trips to go with us to these places. We take our team members to see it. We come back, we give reports that our aspire to where we're standing on stage talking about it, right? Like it is the culture that we want. It's a culture of understanding that our work impacts more than just what is happening today and in my proximity, right? Number two is you have to have somebody who focuses on the how, right? This is Alex for accountability. Someone in your organization has to essentially beat the drum of accountability every day. Oftentimes, that's typically either your finance person or your operations person. And then it trickles down, but you have to have a champion, right? Like you can have lots of people in your organization that adhere to your culture or drive culture, but you have to have a champion of culture. You have to have somebody that is driving it, right? Next, you have to have somebody that is driving accountability. Who is holding all parties responsible? Who's pulling data up to say, we said we were going to do this, but we didn't do this. Where is the accountability coming from? Who is driving culture? And then lastly, when you think about Danny and Danny's the driver, right? Danny's execution. And you have to have somebody who understands and focuses on the now. You have to have somebody that's like, I understand that we're dreaming about this tomorrow, but what happens today? Where do we put feet to this plan and action to this plan? When we work together, you can essentially do anything, right? And you do it with the right efficiency and productivity. And so when you think about these three people, I want you to look in your life and think about anything you're trying to accomplish, whether it's something personal, whether it's something professional, do you have these three people present? When I say those words, do people pop into your head? One of the greatest lessons of playing sports in life is you realize that not everyone gets to be the star and not everyone gets to lead. When I've coached basketball in my kind of previous life, I always would take on that team and that group of 10 to 12 young men, I would always go to them and we would talk about what we called role positions or role players. And we would say, and I would talk to them, I'd say, look, when you get the chance, you are allowed to shoot the ball, you are allowed to score, but that's not your primary role. Your primary role is to get rebounds, play defense, whatever it was, role player, right? And there are some people that you have to say, look, you're not going to see the floor every single game, but your job on this bench is to bring the energy and bring the excitement and when you get to come in the game, you come in with passion and excitement. And what happens is, is when everybody, when they buy into the role that they have, you have a power in the team together. But when you have everyone jockeying for, but who's actually in charge and who actually is supposed to be driving this and who is actually taking responsibility here, what happens is, is it dilutes the energy of the team. If everybody thinks they're Michael Jordan, right, then you lose the power of Michael Jordan. If everybody thinks they're LeBron James or Kobe Bryant, you lose the power of Kobe Bryant or LeBron James. What I would like to say is if you go back to the Michael Jordan era, right, like, is Jordan really Jordan without Scotty Pippin, Horace Grant, BJ Armstrong, Luke Longley, right, like the entire supporting cast. I believe Michael Jordan was the greatest of all time. However, I think he wins championships because he's got a supporting team that allows him to be the greatest of all time. And so in this, you have to have role players in your business, you have to have role players in your life, you have to have role players. And you should be looking to see where or what area do you have proclivity to. For me, I have a proclivity to either culture or accountability, right? Like, I like to make sure that we're holding everybody accountable for the roles that they're doing. It's why I make it a good CEO is because at the top, it's easier to kind of hold the levels of accountability. Oftentimes, though, I struggle with driving because I want to innovate oftentimes. And so oftentimes, innovation is in the way of the now, the today, right? And so I want you to take inventory, decide who you have a proclivity to be, and what is missing in your life. And think about anything that you're trying to accomplish today, whatever it is, whatever you're trying to accomplish, something you're bringing to life, something you're trying to do, you need these three people in your life. Now, one caution, and I kind of alluded to that just a second ago, is that I've learned and you know, you kind of go through getting an MBA, there's always this teaching that there really is four quadrants of business. Okay, so just bear with me for a second, there's four quadrants of business and everyone falls into these quadrants. Teamwork and employee experience is one quadrant. Agility, right? And innovation is quadrant number two. Results and discipline, quadrant number three, and accountability, and making sure that there's like data is quadrant number four, right? So you've got these four quadrants. But I will tell you that you have three of these represented in the people that I just talked to you about, right? Like teamwork and employee experience, that's culture, right? When you're looking at results and discipline, right? That's the driver, right? And then accountability, that's the accountability piece, right? But I will tell you that the thing that you have to be most careful with and where I have made mistakes in my career is leading with innovation. I do believe that without innovation, there is death. However, innovation has to be inserted when there's a proper balance between culture, accountability, and execution. If you lead with innovation, you'll never, ever get anything done. All you do is perpetually change. So what you have to do is you have to have a solid balance of culture, accountability, and execution, and then install innovation intentionally through certain periods of time. I believe the innovation is best served on a periodic time frame. And I think the innovation should be looked at on a quarterly basis. If you go to most big publicly traded companies, they're not innovating or changing on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. Typically, they're bringing all their data and all their research on a quarterly basis to look at things that they should innovate on, change, make better, right? So that then their foundation of culture, accountability, and execution can actually then perpetuate or take advantage of the innovation. For all of you entrepreneurs, here's the big caution. Most of you, because you fall into this innovation bucket, you're struggling to actually get things done. If you are somebody who wants to constantly innovate, I highly, highly recommend you to put the people around you that I just talked about, culture, accountability, and execution, and hold back the innovation for the right time to actually deliver it. The thing is, is that person that walked away from their office struggling to find the success they want, they walk into this park, and they see the three people, Kara, Alex, and Danny, they see them succeeding, and they see them succeeding because there's a clear pathway. They understand the job that they're doing, right? And you have all the right parties involved. If you want to accomplish your goals, if you want to get to the success that you want, you absolutely have to have these three people. Immediately, my mind goes to, I have a friend who's starting a business over in Utah. She has a lot of people around her. The roles are undefined. I know she wants to live in the innovation state. Yes. So I guess what I want to ask you is, if there's people out there, they do take inventory of who's around them, and they find an imbalance. What is next steps? What do you suggest? How do they do that? There's almost always an imbalance. That's why I get called so much with our empire brand, because people are not getting to the end result that they want. And what I see is this imbalance. And what I see is a lot of entrepreneurs who have a lot of great ideas, right, that just struggle to execute. So what I say is, is that first of all, you have to take inventory of your life. Like, can you actually sit in one of these seats? As a person who wants to innovate, can you move into culture, accountability, or execution? Oftentimes, culture is the easiest person or the easiest place for a maverick or an entrepreneur to move into, because it's a little bit more natural. They can drive feeling. They can drive, you know, that kind of why behind what they're doing. But oftentimes, they struggle with the accountability and the execution. So you have to have those people in your life. So if you want to sit in the innovation seat, you have to temper it to the degree that these people can actually keep up. So then you put really strong people in accountability and execution, maybe fall into that culture role, and then only innovate as they actually execute. The problem is, is that the constant source of innovation oftentimes is the greatest roadblock and stall for most businesses trying to find success. Makes sense. You asked the listeners to take an inventory and find out what they have a proclivity to. Yeah. Let's say you have a team of three, and they all do some soul searching, and they come back and they say, Hey, I really want to be X. I want to be the executioner. Yeah. Is it possible to exist in another role? What's the end road of that? What's the downstream of that? I think it's a, it's an understanding, first of all, it's an awareness, and then it's a commitment to hold that responsibility. Can people adapt and can they move over there? Yes, they can. We use a tool called predictive index that really show you what you kind of lean towards in that. Those four quadrants I talk about, it actually maps those four quadrants out. And oftentimes, people can modify, but usually only for a period of time. And so what you have to do is you have to modify until you get to a certain level of growth, realize the gaps you have. And then as you hit certain metrics, make sure you're hiring to make sure that you have this person in your staff or in that role. And then let's say there is a team out there of one to five people, they go through this process, they kind of identify where they live. Do you like initiate a meeting where you define these and talk about them? Yes, absolutely. I think that I used to do one-on-ones with my basketball teams. I do one-on-ones with our staff. And in that, I'm oftentimes saying, hey, this is the role I need you to take. You have the desire, you have the ability to be that person on our staff. There's going to be a lot of other people that are going to follow that path, but I need someone who is driving this concept. Like I need you to step out. I need you to understand this is a part of your role. You might be the COO, but I want you to also understand that your job is accountability. You've got to hold us to the line. Any stories in your past experience in your business career of either people in the wrong positions and where it fits or anything you can... I will say that oftentimes culture, the reason I define it so specifically that it's a systematic set of behaviors, it's not just an aspirational goal, is that having someone sit in a culture seat that just tells the story of what we want but doesn't push towards the action of it can also hurt your organization. I had a company where the CEO... So I was the owner, but I had a CEO leader. And we identified these three people and he said, I'm going to lead culture. So, okay, what's our culture going to be? What do we want their culture to be? And he very much, we set this kind of tone of what the culture should be. And he really struggled because what he would do is he would paint this picture about what the culture could be, but he couldn't force the culture to actually become it. And the reason was because he... We always... I used to talk a lot about the warrior culture. He very much wanted to embody this warrior culture. So he would... Like we would say the warrior culture has a self-weeding garden. You come to work every single day and your job is to have your highest level of output that day, not yesterday but today. And we want a culture of accountability. And so we want you to come ready to do battle every single day, not against the people next to you but against our competitors, against the people that are trying to erode our success. Like that was the warrior culture. The warrior culture was they came self-motivated. They didn't need motivation at work because they came self-motivated. We kind of have all these like rules. And it was interesting because he would talk about that, but he couldn't hold himself accountable to it. He would show up late. He didn't always get the most out of himself. He was good at painting the vision. He was good at rallying the troops. He was good at getting them excited. And then all the team would listen to the stories and listen to the kind of directions and then they'd look at him ago. But the problem is, is you don't execute. Like if this is a self-weeding garden, then you should see yourself out. And it got contentious. The person that was running operations for this company, who was a development company, actually called him out in an executive meeting. And like... And he said, you want this to be a warrior culture. I remember sitting there and it was awkward, but it was true. If you want this to be a warrior culture, we should all be... This was kind of our big thing. It's like we're never afraid of the truth. We want the truth because the truth actually gives us the next right action. He said, then I shouldn't be afraid to tell you the truth. And he said, he said, you don't show up on time. You don't execute on what you say you're going to do. He said, and we say a self-weeding garden is an awareness of where I'm failing, right? And where everybody else is succeeding. And he said, I want to hear if you believe that you're succeeding at your role or failing at your role. And he said, he said, you know, I think I might be failing. And he was really caught off guard. But it was a big turning point for that group. And it was a hard, hard lesson to learn. But in the end, you have to have the right people in that seat. He was not the perfect person for culture. He was actually a good person for innovation. He was a creative. He was trying to drive new ideas. And his lack of execution was always tied to the desire he had to make things better or do something different. I can relate. I think I'm applying a lot to that myself. I was in a company in Utah. They had a head of culture there. His idea of pushing culture was group yoga, group sound baths, and openly smoking weed in the office. And that was his driving culture. So I've definitely seen some breakdown of culture. I think people take that too far. They go out to Google or Apple and they look and they're like, wow, look at this beautiful campus and all these crazy amenities. And it's like, but what you don't realize is those people are working 12 and 13 hours and they're just giving them some sense of relief. It's not like a place to play. It's a place. They're tying this to you. Exactly. They're tying it to this. We want you to give everything you have here. And so it's like some people, the pendulum swings way too far. And culture is not sound baths and yoga. And now you can have a culture that embodies that. And I actually know a lending company where they all work out together. They all do yoga together. They all like it's part of the culture. But also it's tied to an end result. I am stuck on imbalances. It's kind of where my mind is. Is there a procedure you follow? Assess yourself, assess your executives, find imbalances, have a meeting, realign? Sure. I would say right now what you have to look at is you have to, if I was, somebody challenged me with these three things, I would be taking inventory of my own organization. I would say, okay, how do I know where the imbalance is? And I'll tell you that if there's a consistent negative cry throughout your organization about something going on, right? Like then that means you have an imbalance, right? And all you have to do is listen to the murmur of the people, right? Like it will come out whether you like it or not. And what you're going to hear is people either don't know their job responsibility and they don't have clear defined boundaries. And so in that, typically that is an accountability issue. It's we have not set clear parameters, clear directives. If it is I'm not heard, I'm not seen, I'm not valued, oftentimes that's a culture issue, right? If that's to cry. And then lastly, if it is a cry of we're not profitable, we're not meeting demands of our customers, we're not, then you're missing the drive component. And so you can oftentimes just by listening to the problems in the organization, see where the deficiency is, and then have to create a champion. And then you have to let them know how important this is in the organization. My instinct is to try to become a part of each of these that you're presenting in myself. Sure. Is that incorrect application? Yeah, I think so. You can have elements of it. But best is if you're a leader who is appointing it. And there can be microcosms of this, right? So if I was running a sales organization, if I was, you know, if I was running a sales department, a media department, if I'm running, you know, a CSR department, I would want each one of these three to be present, right? Like it has to exist at the top, but as the organization grows, you really need microchampions. Makes sense. So that goes back to just being more comfortable in your old position then? Yes, like you don't have to be all of them. You don't have to be all of them. But you need to, you need to assign it to someone. They need to be aware. I think the biggest call to action, the biggest takeaway is that you should take inventory in your life. And it's not just your business, right? It is your personal life as well. Think about your home. Think about what's lacking. Think about what's needed. And because even in a home, it's necessary to have these three components, right? Or else you're not going to accomplish the things you want to accomplish, you know, in your friend groups, whatever you're trying to accomplish, your church, these three are absolutely necessary in order to accomplish goals. So take inventory, not just in your business, but in your life. Thanks so much for being a part of the podcast, for listening today. Love to connect with you further. And you can connect with me on social media at Eddie Wilson official on any of the social media channels.
