How to Create Systematic Change, Reduce Turnover, & Feel More Fulfilled at Work with John Toups

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Starts at the top. Do you believe in the value of your workers and want to focus on them now? Are they the most important asset to drive success for your company? And if so, that's a real blind spot in the industry. I have last couple of years I've been asking our clients, how many teams do you have? Who is the team lead? Is he trained to lead a team? And how well is he performing as a team leader? That's a blind spot.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Oh, yeah. That is my friend, Mr. John Toops, founder and CEO of myetracker.com. And he's got some hot toss that is going to help companies demonstrate appreciation for the men and women that are out there on site doing the work all day, every day. In this conversation, we talk about leadership blind spots. Like, what? Leaders have blind spots? Uh yes. The conversation is framed around the book Love and Work. And in the book and this conversation, we talk about finding fulfillment and having fun in our job, in any job. So there's some like magic ingredients there. John also shares some methodology, some thinking, some tools, even around creating systematic change in your business, in our business. And for me, I'm hoping it's going to happen to our industry, which is the construction industry. So you want to listen in very closely to all of the nuggets, and you're probably going to listen two or three times. And then you're even going to be like compelled to share this episode with all your friends and colleagues, and we will appreciate that very much. And what else do we appreciate? We appreciate our patrons. Patrons, thank you again. Y'all have been faithful and true in your support. And folks, if you're interested in contributing funds to support the Learnings and Missteps cause, which is to enhance the image of careers in the trades, head on over to learningsandmissteps.com and find the Become a Member button. Hit that button, and there's another link there that you can click and do the thing so you can um make a deposit. We would appreciate that very much. And also, if you're not in a situation where you can like contribute money, that's okay, not a big deal. Sign up for the newsletter. We send out a monthly newsletter. It's almost never on time, but it's actually a video because it's just easier for me to do video than it is to write out like a newsletter that's not a lot of fun for me. And we gotta give that LM love to that LM family member that went out of their way to leave a supportive comment. And actually, they don't even have to be supportive, like any comment. I appreciate all of them for real. And that LM family member is Mr. Tats. If you don't know Tats, you gotta find him. He's got a podcast, he's on the LinkedIn, he's on the Insta, he's on the TikTok. Check out his TikTok because he drops a lot of nuggets, like good advice for entrepreneurs, and it's not like BS advice, it's stuff that he's actually learned and he's just sharing his knowledge. So Tats left us a review on the Amazon about the book Lean in Love. And Tats says, I really enjoyed this book by Jesse and Jennifer. It makes you closely examine the various relationships in your life and uses the lean framework to make progress and improvements by becoming a better listener and communicator. Another thing you don't know about my buddy Tats is he's also an emotional bungee jumper. He he took the leap without very much information at all because that's kind of how I do things and I'm working to improve that. Uh, to sign up and become an emotional bungee jumper at the early adopter rate. So that is available right now. We'll leave a link in the show notes. You are welcome to come and take a leap. Give it a shot. You're gonna be spending time with industry leaders, professionals that have significant influence and responsibility in their companies. And we're all working towards learning how to listen, learning how to be vulnerable, and learning how to give and receive feedback. Maybe not necessarily learning how to do it, but getting some reps and getting some practice around giving that feedback and receiving it in a graceful manner. Anyhow, that's all the selling I'm doing. Here we go, on to the rest of the show. What is going on, folks? I am here with Mr. John Tooth. How are you doing, sir? So the LM family knows I got to meet Mr. John via Adam Hoots. Adam Hoots connected us. We met in October. We were up in New Orleans for a conference, and you hosted us, you took us fish in, we had a good time. And you and I got into a conversation about people, about the construction industry and some of the things that you're actively working to improve that you've done in other industries. And you turned me on to a book. You we had a conversation after, and you mentioned or suggested that I read Love and Work. And I said, I haven't, I gotta, I need to, I'm finishing up this book. I gotta read another book. Let me check it out. And I think I was on a drive up to Dallas, and I listened, like I finished that book on the trip up there. It was a lot of beautiful. I remember I was on the uh toll road to go around Austin and it was raining. I was on my way back actually, and listening to us, man, there's a lot of really deep, meaningful concepts in there, and they really just said things in such a way that resonated with me, or maybe in better ways than I ever could have said them. And then it then I'm like, wait a minute, this is like the same conversation John and I were having. I was just trying hard to keep up. So then we said, Hey, let's have a conversation about it, and here we are.

SPEAKER_02 5:44

It's a great book, but it's a culmination. It's his latest book. I got introduced to Marcus when he wrote a book called What Great Leaders Do First Break All the Rules. So, why do great leaders have to break the current rules to be a leader? Why aren't the rules working? Then he wrote another book called The Nine Lies About Work. Nine Lies About Work. So I took that book and sent it to some PhD organizational development people, and they said, This is heresy. We don't think this way. I even sent it to the president of a company, and he read it, and I said, How'd you like the book? He said, Depress me. I said, Why did he say, I don't manage this way, this is not the way I operate. All right, and so it's really challenging. And then we have the latest book, Love and Work. And so it's about designing work that people want to come to. And the reason we need to do that, let me take some liberty and read to you out of a book called The Pocket Sensei. It was written for the Lean Construction Institute. It was Hal McCumber and uh Callie Davis. So they're talking about the construction industry is designed for lean. The construction industry provides a fine example of failures. The growing critical demand for infrastructure and construction is global and it's not being met. By almost every measure, construction is one of the saddest industries in the West. Its participation has experienced almost no growth in 50 years. And its industry is famous for breeding bad moods, unhappy work environments, and perhaps the most notably mistrust and resentment. So that pictures the construction industry. And then with the changes from pandemic, we have now 71% of the workforce have some type of stress. And in the construction industry, suicides are five times the national average. People are not showing up for work. We can't staff a job with quality people, correct? And so at the bottom of the summary on love and work, it says normal work, the ecosystem has seemed to been designed to exploit us, stress us, and reduce our agency. And if management doesn't realize this and change, they will always wonder why they can't hire the best people and why they have the turnover, because they haven't redesigned the work to meet the changing needs of the current workforce. So that's why the progression of the thinking by Buckingham to me is revolutionary, and I am struggling with it, to be honest. For example, if I can't rate you, how do I give you feedback to grow? I own this company. How do I do that? So you got to figure out a way. And he gives you some tools and some strategies to do that. As we're speaking today, I wrote a little list of what I would hope to accomplish for your listeners. Craft person, I heard one of your cohorts does some training, say the cavalry's not coming, you got to help yourself. So in the conversation today, I hope to share a way that a worker can define his strengths and find a way to deploy him on a job site to make the job more enjoyable and more satisfying to himself because he knows his strength and he can control it. So that would be objective one, Jesse. Objective two, if you have managers listening, we hope to challenge you with some thinking and give you some resources to look at how you do grow people. How do you build that ecosystem where they want to come and give you some ideas that you need to pursue? I'm not here as the consultant to everyone, but just to say there's hope. There are ideas that could work, right? And I guess it's not just little big bucks and they'll come and they'll love it. There's a way to develop something. So part three of what I hope to accomplish is that your managers would be able to come to an understanding of how to talk to senior leaders about the system they're operating in and have them see the need for change. That's a challenge. How do you talk to somebody about the system they own and be able to demonstrate something? And we'll get to a few words that we'll get to and show you how we do that. And then, four, if we got a few minutes at the end, I will show you how I have tried to craft a system where people would love to come to work. How would you do that in the construction industry? And we have actually spent six years building a process of using technology to capture that. So that would be my objective today. If I achieve all of those, you can that would be amazing.

SPEAKER_00 10:55

That would be huge.

SPEAKER_02 10:56

If you could give me a star, I'll give you some ratings out there.

SPEAKER_00 10:59

Good. No, I think having it broken up that way is going to give our listeners some clarity in it and understanding what to focus on. And ultimately, two there's a lot of folks out there that do what I receive as fear of marketing, right? They talk about how bad it is. And then they say, Give me a call if you want to experience something different. And which is a nice tactic, but that's not what you're doing here. You're talking about reality. And then in the end, you're gonna say, Well, something that can be done. So that's a very different approach than what most of the common media feeds people. And of course, it's what we want to be providing our listeners or the LM family. We want to give them something to chew on, and we want to give them something that they can go and do as soon as they get done listening or while they're listening, even. Plus, I just love talking to you. Every time you and I get on the phone, we're on the phone for a minute.

SPEAKER_02 11:54

More than a minute, right? You're a serious player about delivering results and helping people to get improvement. I think some comments in one of our conversations was that you're amazed that when you go on a job site and simply start having conversations with people that is so foreign to certain levels of management to have that face-to-face. Adam, you mentioned earlier, says the workers are the invisible assets that people walk by every day, all day long. They don't know who they are, they don't know what they love, what their talents are, whether they're having a good day, and whether they're gonna go home and be mad at their wife or not. It's a transactional relationship. You show up, I give you money, you give me this. That's what it is. It's not anything more than that.

SPEAKER_00 12:40

100%. They're never asked a question, they're never asked what they think. Shouldn't say never, because there are some leaders out there, and I'm on the hunt for more, John. There are some leaders out there that are recognizing to have the business success that they're seeking, they're going to have to do something dramatically different. And it's more than KPIs and new dashboards. They're recognizing that if they demonstrate appreciation for the human beings, that they get outstanding results. And those are the leaders that I'm looking for. And I think those are the type of people this conversation is going to resonate with.

SPEAKER_02 13:24

Absolutely. It starts at the top. Do you believe in the value of your workers and want to focus on them now? Are they the most important asset to drive success for your company? And if so, that's a real blind spot in the industry. I have last couple of years, I've been asking our clients, how many teams do you have? Who is the team lead? Is he trained to lead a team? And how well is he performing as a team leader? That's a blind spot. How many on a construction project? Who could tell you how many teams are on the ground? Who is the team lead? Has he been trained to lead? And how effectively is he leading?

SPEAKER_00 14:07

How would you know that today? Yeah, there they there's. I'm hoping your mechanism will help us understand that because right now it's more like I've got my hands on the wheel, but the wheel's not connected to the car.

SPEAKER_02 14:22

The most invaluable productive unit in our workforce is the team in performance. Why don't we know more about the team and give the team leads, tools, and training to be more effective and know that he's got it and be able to mentor and coach him? Why is that not part of the system?

SPEAKER_00 14:43

A lot of what's out there is what I lived through was I was a pretty good installer. I got stuff up a little bit faster than everybody else, with less mistakes than everybody else. And then they said, Hey, you've got leadership quality, and put me in charge of a team. And all I knew was how to go fast by myself. I had to learn how to over probably a decade or so learn how to engage my team so that we could perform together instead of me being a taskmaster, screaming, yelling, threatening, and running through people because I did that for a long time. Just hurry up. I ain't got time for your stuff, install the thing because I didn't know how to engage the human being. And I'm just now learning how to do that, and the difference is remarkable.

SPEAKER_02 16:16

It is remarkable if you have a workforce that trusts management, trusts his team lead, and trust his co-workers, he's 42% times more productive. Woo, baby, 42 times. So, how do you get trust and alignment all the way? That's what we have the blind spot and don't have the system to do. And then what we do have doesn't work. So I'll go to my little number one. If you're a worker, how do you help yourself have more fun at work? How do you do that? You have to know what your strengths are, what gives you energy in the day? So I got a little list here of uh, and this is not my original work. This is coming from Dr. Marcus Buckingham. Understanding yourself is important. So ask yourself when was the last time you lost track of work, time at work? Right? When did you instinctively volunteer for something? When did you feel in control of what you were doing and it felt good? When you surprised yourself how well you did something, when you were singled out for praise, when was the only person to you were the only person to notice something? What did you find yourself actively looking forward to doing at work? So there's a series of questions to help yourself say, Well, I really like this, I didn't like doing that, and so you do that for about a week or two and you're checking off. I love this, I didn't like that. Then you have a picture of what really gives you some energy, and then you go to your boss and you say, Jesse, we're interested in productivity and doing the good things. I've noticed I have a pattern, I'm more productive when I'm doing this, I'm less productive doing this. I mean, and if you could help me do more of that, I'd appreciate it. And then you try to find ways to bring that into your day. You become your own cavalry, know what the job is, know you're doing that, and try to position yourself to do more. And the research at the Mayo Clinic says if you can do what you love 20% of the time, it adds to your complete job satisfaction. Overall. Overall. That way you're helping yourself, making sure you get to do what you love to do, which is a key component of why people go to work. They get to express themselves around something. Not that they have a talent at, but they have a love for it, they have an energy for it, fills them up when they're doing it.

SPEAKER_00 18:47

That's like the red thread that the author talks about in the book, huh? Yes, he calls it your weird.

SPEAKER_02 18:53

It's a north like European term for what is the essence of your being? What's the uniqueness about you that you can bring? And the value of that is I was talking to somebody about a salad. Do you want all onions in your salad? Or do you want cucumbers and tomatoes and celery and olives? Each person brings something different to the mix, right? Yes, and you can't work on standardizing everybody, it's not gonna happen. Everybody's unique, and so in the book Love and Work, it talks about one-on-one. Each person has an individual experience, individual beliefs, and you need to treat him that way. And so, for the managers, how do you do that with a lot of people? And so he has a process, he calls it the weekly check-in. Okay, so the weekly check-in is very simple, it's four questions. And so, Jesse, what did you enjoy doing? What did you enjoy and love doing last week? And he said, Well, I really loved, and I was hanging pipe and I was by myself, and I what didn't you like about last week's work? Now, this is an informal, yeah, no perfect way to ask the question. And then you listen, and then you say, What do you have planned this week? What's on the agenda that you know of this week? And he speaks and he says, How can I help you? So, in that quick four questions, what did you love? What did you hate? What can I what are you doing? What can I help you with? What did I just do? I didn't say you are high potential or a low potential. I didn't say you need to improve this. I'm simply interested in you. Yeah. And I'm listening to you. And then I want you to know that you as the welder, you as the plumber, you as the air conditioning guy, if you have an issue, you can come to me. Yeah, I'm gonna help you. So you build that one-on-one trust and you find out what he needs help with. Some people need a chart that they can't remember. No tell them what the individual strengths and weakness of the individual is. So it's a one-on-one check-in. You should have no more than 10 people as a foreman, and you should do a weekly check-in with every employee that works for you. Yes, it doesn't have to be perfect, it doesn't have to take long, but you start to see a pattern in the person and then how you can help them with their interest in. You can help make their love at the work happen more and be more fulfilled. So that's just one of the techniques that Buckingham's book, Love and Work, can reveal if you have an interest in learning how to do that. Again, this is not an originator of these. Now, in my career, I flew up to Blackbergs, Virginia, every month for two years to study and develop a business with a guy named E. Scott Geller, one of the leading behavioral scientists in America. And he used to accuse me prior to our relationship of being a pop psychologist. I read so much, but I didn't have any research-based facts. But Buckingham is research-based facts, not opinions, like radical candor and a lot of other things. Where is the research to prove that those things help as opposed to hurt? And I would encourage you listeners to go listen to Buckingham's talking about the feedback fallacy. Why does feedback not work? And we all want to give feedback, it's our number one mode of helping. And so the first thing he says is that you're not the conventional. Of truth about you. If I'm watching you, I am blinded by something called the idiosyncratic rater effect. So I wrote an article on this a while back. It's 40 years of research, of psychometrics, that has shown that people don't have the objectivity in their heads to hold object thoughts and rate other people. And training won't make it go away. So if I'm rating you, I'm really seeing me in 50% of the rating. It's not objective. So if I can't judge you objectively and it's skewed by my biases, how do I do it? That's an interesting question, right? If you're a manager and I want to rate my manager, but I'm going to be subject to this, what would I do? Here's what he suggests you do: you ask the worker these questions. Do you know what's expected of you at work? Do you have the materials and equipment to do the right job? At work, do you have the opportunity to work on what you do best? In the last seven days, did you receive recognition for the work you've done? Does the supervisor or anyone seem to care about you as an individual? At work, do your opinions matter? So if the answer to these are negative, it tells you that the manager is not giving clear directions. He's not making the person feel important. So the manager's job of what he should be doing is not happening by the results within the core group he's leading. So I'm not judging him, I'm seeing the impact of his leadership method on the workers he's leading. That's a question I pose to my staff the morning meeting. If people have this idiosyncratic radar effect, it's like being a person with colorblindness. Yeah, it's permanent, and any training is hard to make color. How do you make it go away? It's part of you. And then this 40 years of research, you can't train it away. So then how do I get a colorblind person to see the true red rose? You can't be colorblind. So isn't that what he just did? The guy can't rate his boss, the manager can't rate the supervisor, can't rate the manager. So he asked the workers to show the results that should be coming up that are not of the manager. If we went to senior management and said, Let's look at our system that we bring to the work site, and let's survey the workers. Do you feel important here? Do you feel respected? Do you feel your ideas matter? What is the turnover rate? What is the rate of people coming into the industry? If you take those measures now and present that, what will it say about the system we have put in place?

SPEAKER_00 26:01

It'll present some gaps.

SPEAKER_02 26:08

If you thought the system was not designed to bring love to work, and you really don't know what the system is from an owner perspective or a general contractor perspective, and can you own it because of all the contracts in the different parties? Are those barriers to be overcome? Or do you just throw your hands up and say, Well, their people are not mine, there's nothing I can do.

SPEAKER_00 26:33

You got to get involved. It's pay me now or pay me later.

SPEAKER_02 26:36

Here we are 50 years, no improvement in productivity. And the review magazine says there are bids going out with nobody bidding. If you take a bid for 500 million or a billion dollars, Lord help you, if you can deliver on time on budget, how do you do that? I have a client who's a president of a company, he's been president for six months, and I called him up and said, How are you doing? He said, Terrible. Worst six months of my life. I said, Why is that? You're king of the hill. He said, I get a bid, I win it, I go to get the labor, and I don't have enough labor to show up. So now I got to go back to the owner and say, Look, let's prioritize the work because I can't get it all done. And he said, This is an unusual situation in our industry, but it's real, it's a growing situation. So, how do you stay in business when you bid something and you don't have the labor to do it?

SPEAKER_00 27:27

A lot of risk. We've got to do something differently. That's what excited me about our conversation. And like I said at the top of the call, I'm looking for leaders that want to do something dramatically different. And when you and I got to talking, it was clear that you have a system that can help people do something differently. So it's not just throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks. You have a tried and true system that works and it's focused on the worker. Here's a question, John. You spent a lot of time in this space thinking, right? Understanding performance and psychometrics and productivity and interpersonal relationships, and the question of understanding what you love at work. What was it about this field that got you to fall in love with it?

SPEAKER_02 28:22

I really don't have an answer, other than to say that my mother lived a life of service, and it brought joy helping others. And in my Christian walk as a Christian, the tree produces fruit, but the tree doesn't eat the fruit. The fruit is for the other people in your lives. And I don't know exactly what it is, but I love helping others that truly want help. And I've been on the board of directors of an organization to help young children get educated that are in poverty. I've been involved with rehabilitation of drug addicts for about a decade. I've been involved with my wife and I in celebrate recovery again as a recovery program. And I've just been asked to be on the board of another organization to help human beings recapture their life, and it's been demoralized by events. So I don't know what it is, but what my passion has been is if you engage workers around the process of work. I was fortunate enough in the 80s to be doing business with Martin Marietta and Ralph Tartridge had a mission success, went to Japan, came back with a bunch of books, gave them to me, and engaged me in the improvement cycle that Deming produced. I actually went studying under Deming and then spent 15 years teaching at a university and going in the real world and setting up people to change their systems. And I never failed. Now I can't take the credit, but the imagination, the ingenuity, tenacity of people giving a chance was just phenomenal. Working in the space shuttle, the first deep water drill ship in mines, in hospitals, in banks, in refineries, I got to see that people want to contribute. They have ideas. We just don't channel it. So because of my belief in people's and people's ingenuity and imagination, if we will just let it and use it structurally, systematically, P, plan, do, check. And at the worker level, there's amazing things to happen. There's a lot of experiences in the job site where you hit a snag and it's the team on the ground that helped you figure it out.

SPEAKER_00 30:41

Yeah, they're the ones living through the pain. I just ran an improvement exercise or event here in Dallas last week when we wrapped it all up. And it this happens almost every time we do this type of work. One of the leaders was like, Man, I just didn't realize how much they had to say. One guy told one of his leaders, he's like, And thank you for talking to us. Nobody has ever asked me about my work. And once we start the improvement, getting their feedback, taking action, putting things into play to improve the work, to make it better for them, then they start opening up and saying, Hey, we were thinking about this, or on one job, we did it this way, and I think that would help here. One of the leaders was like, Man, why haven't they said that before? And they said, Well, come out. We were just talking about one of your installers telling you that nobody has ever asked them about their work. And now we have the big dogs out here getting involved with them, helping them, buying things for them, putting stuff into place to make it better for them. And now they're starting to open up. It's like we can't blame them. Y'all are the ones with the most responsibility, the most influence. It's your responsibility to go and engage them. And just like the technique we talked about earlier, the weekly check-in with your team members, making those deposits into the relationship account, letting them know I'm here for you and taking action on their words, then that opens up the faucet, right? And people start sharing those things, and there's glorious, monumental improvements to be had when we source the worker 100%.

SPEAKER_02 32:24

And so you have to set up the system to do that. So if I asked you, Jesse, how many red cars did you see today? I didn't look for red cars. I want you to look for red cars. If you find the most cars, you get a hundred bucks. I've set clarity, and then you're gonna get rewarded for it. So now the mind can see things. So what's happened through the feeling of disrespect, the feeling of stress, the feeling of not being listened to, the mind literally shuts down. It becomes apathetic. So in the restructuring, we need to be very clear about expectations. In the formula that I'll give you later on, instead of having a huddle, we call it instead of a JSA or task safety. What if it was a smart safe execution plan? What if it was specific, realistic, measurable, attainable, and time sensitive? And the workers believed it was realistic and attainable because they could feed into it. When you go to execute and you look at the predetermined what are the barriers, what are the risks, how do we mitigate them, and now go to work, knowing you have an opportunity to see a deviation from plan and to see it speak up, right, and to get it solved, and then get recognized for your effort. It now says this is important. And we're safe in speaking up. So now more things get recognized, more things get the end and chord, the dimming end and cord, pull the end and chord, solve the problem collectively, and then leverage it on the project and into the organization systematically. Yeah. Now you see the ideas flourishing, people. And to tell you where that goes, I went on a project for Exxon out of Santa Barbara and to deal with some long-reach wells. In California, they're not letting you permit any more wells. You're not doing any more riggs, you can drill from that platform. So to get out there, you got to go down and straight. And when you're drilling straight and you got those cuttings, it can jam up your pipe out of gets stuck. So they had a guy working on a process, and I was working with them on improving efficiency. We hit three vision wells in a row from the worker input. Now, vision well is what is the best surface casing run? What is the best 17-inch drill rate? What is the best perforation rate? So if you take the best from all the area wells drilled, the best possible is this. Okay. And very seldom do you break it, right? Because it came from three different applications, best from out of here. But to break the overall vision rate three times, it was phenomenal. It had nothing to do with that. Other than letting people say, if we do this, we could try that, and have management listen to them. And we learned every cycle. Because what do you do? You're turning pipe every day, you're taking it alcohol every day. Yep. So if you're getting better at the pump rate or the speed rate, or the they let them experiment. That's not the only occasion that's happened. That's phenomenal, breaking three vision wells in a row in one area. And so the results that organizations that listen to people have achieved are phenomenal. Yeah. It can't be willy-nilly, it has to be systematic, they have to trust the organization's response to them. That so the beauty of the system we'll talk about later is transparency. So if you had a list of all the foreman and you knew how many people were turning in ideas to improve productivity or reporting barriers, and somebody's reporting them and somebody's reporting none, why are these people reporting things and engaged in safety and productivity, but none from this foreman? Why would you think they're afraid to speak up?

unknown 36:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:31

So what if the data that went to upper management that here's what we here's what we found, here's what we did, here's what we recommend, and we need help, and you're not getting the help. You see it in an aging report. So now you know what channel is not providing the assistance. So you get real transparency on who's participating, what is your closeout rate, what is your recognition rate of people fishing, and we would call it normalizing engagement. See something, say something, do something. Jesse, look what he found, look what he saw, look what he did, look at the impact. Thank you, Jesse. Can more of you do that? This is what we're looking for, and make that part of the system and easy enough to manage. Yes, part of every system, right? We should know, right?

SPEAKER_00 37:25

Yeah, this weird expectation that the workers will do that, right? So it's this thing that leaders, managers abdicate all their influence and decision-making power to the people with the least amount of influence and decision-making power. And they do that by saying, why don't they think for themselves? Why don't they make recommendations? Why don't they say something? It's like because they get no response, right? Or studying some electricians doing some work and they're breaking crates. They had these buses that they had to bust out the crates. And they were using a sawzall to cut the nails because it was a bunch of nails or all over the damn wood. They had wood blades, and so it was taking long to cut through the metal. And so I asked the guy, hey man, you got a metal cutting blade? Yeah, can I borrow that? Yeah. I went back over and said, Hey man, try this one. He tried, he said, Man, that's fast. I said, Why are you getting those blades? Why don't you get these blades instead of that blade? He said, I know I've asked for them, but my foreman told me to stop complaining. And so that's what the workers deal with on the regular. Now, it's not just because the foreman's an ugly meanie. The foreman has probably requested or ordered stuff before that wasn't in the budget. And a project manager somewhere said, wait a minute, that's not in the budget, decline that order, we're not gonna buy that. And so there's this history, like lots and lots of history, of a good idea getting squashed. And so to the apathy point that you made earlier, if my ideas are getting squashed time and time again, guess what? I'm gonna bring no more ideas to the table. Or what's even, I think, maybe worse or more disappointing, is where they don't squash the idea, but they don't take action on it either. It's even worse. It's like the suggestion box, right? It's full of suggestions, but ain't nobody reading them. Take the stupid box down, you're just wasting people's time.

SPEAKER_02 39:28

That's exactly what happened. So that's why you need transparency, and you need to be able to know what the impact is and what's worth doing or not, because construction moves so fast. But it if somebody has to look at it and say, No action, are we gonna act? Because it's on a list. Yep, somebody ought to be able to say, What is the time savings? Because we ask how frequent this has occurred, how many hours are impacted? So now you've got to measure from the feel of what's happening. Um, and that story is is happens over and over again.

SPEAKER_01 39:58

Always, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:59

But I remember a story that occurred in something that we were doing on a drilling rig, we were charting on performance and we had a two-hour improvement. And so we went back to the crew and said, Why did we save two hours? Oh, we borrowed the impact wrench from the mechanics. They typically won't let us use the impact wrenches. So, wait, this rig rate is a hundred thousand an hour. We just saved we it's a lot of money. Well, I'm not saying a hundred thousand, ten thousand an hour, I guess. 100,000 a day. Yeah, 200,000 a day. So we just lost now. How often do you do this process? We do it every other week. So there's four hours a week at that rate on the year, and you're on a three-year contract. How much money are we talking about? If you do it like that and you presented it to the company man, he said, Well, how much does an impact wrench cost? He said, A good one might be $700,000, $70, $70,000. Oh, no, $700.

unknown 40:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:59

Because if that one goes so visibility and somebody making a judgment, and believe it or not, you don't have to respond to every one of them. You just got to respond to a small percentage, 25% are being responded to. The other one says that we don't have time, we're going to be moved past that by the time we get the inventory. But what it does, it says that work as imagined and work as done in the field, there's a difference. And we're asking the workers to now document work as done. But here's the unique thing. We typically think that fixing problems is going to lead to improvement. What's the best way is what worked well today that we have to duplicate tomorrow and on every team. So in our little system, we want to know what went exceptionally well, like the saving of two hours, not just the problems, because excelling comes from repetitive excellence, not from solving a problem. You need to do both and recognize both. But there's more to be gained by recognizing excellence and leveraging that than there is by fixing problems. But what's unique in that if you can capture it, suppose the delay was reading the blueprints, we didn't have enough detail and we were confused. So now you need to send that to the architects that there's not enough detail for the next section. You need to do better. Go back and revise them, right? Or is logistics, we can't get the sheetrock hung because it's not delivered properly, or it's too many floors down, and our speed rate's not there. It's not just the workers, it's the supply chain. Totally. And how does management get to see the impact of the entire supply chain from the workers? Because once you have it documented, you can bucket it. This impact came from what? From engineering, from coordination, from the tool crib, from engineering million different places, and now you got it. So can you see that accumulating? That we got a problem with the lumber, and it's consistent. We need to clean this up. We're way behind in that whole supply chain, right? In the parade of change, when one holds up one, it holds up the whole train.

SPEAKER_01 43:33

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:34

So, how do we improve the flow? That's the question. How do we see it to improve the flow, right? So, this is a way getting the feedback from every worker in every team on a daily basis. How do you see it in a consumable way? Yes, how do you do that?

SPEAKER_00 43:55

Engage the worker. The only answer that I can think of is engage the worker, but you can't just willy-nilly engage workers, you there's got to be something behind it, otherwise, you you just have a another rat's nest to be digging through alongside all the rest that you've already got. So you mentioned growing people, right?

SPEAKER_02 44:16

How do you grow more? Is feedback the element of growth? Yeah, there's a belief that people are an empty vessel, and you fill it up and it now performs. A friend of mine's writing a book, a PhD at LSU is writing a book that training doesn't work. So, how why does training not work? Okay, so let me read you the list. You've Very well trained, but I don't know what's expected of me. Ah. So how do you execute? I'm very well trained, but I don't have the material and equipment to do the job, right? Very well trained, but I don't have the opportunity to do what I do best every day. So the worker is subject to the system. Yes. The way that if you have, which we all have, this idiosyncratic radar effect, the way that you help a person is not to say, Jesse, let me give you some feedback. You say, Jesse, let me tell you what I observed this. Or Jesse, when you were doing that, you lost me right here. Let me show you what I would do, or this is what I would do. So if I know my feelings, I can rate my own feelings. I believe they're true. And so I'm giving you my interpretation of what's going on. And then I'm willing to cross the line from me to you and say, let me look through your eyes and help you tweak what you're doing. So they explain it like this: if a tree has a branch, it's easier to add a bud to the branch, neurolinguistic buds to the synapses of the brain, than it is to build a new branch. So we learn more from what we're currently doing and expanding that and then building new components. And then when you do that, you have to have a way of clarifying and supporting and then coaching to help people get the proficiency they need. Typically, in training, you put in a room for three days, you're shown some stuff, but you don't have what's called fluency. And then it's not like in the training room out in the real world, it's different, but who do you ask? There's nobody of signed to help you, so you're guessing and you're fearful of making a mistake. So in new people, they truly need a mentor that guides them in the easiest things first, building their self-confidence and the ability to share vulnerabilities with another person to help them. And that can be structurally done as well. We've done that. We've helped organizations create a new employee checklist, competence, incompetent, supplier mentor in small segments where you take all the tasks, the easiest ones first, and make sure it's the 80-20 rule, right? 20% is gone 80% of the time to find those and get assistance, and now he's more productive, more competent quickly. Yeah, with a one-on-one level of support. But nobody really does that when you just show up. Who really knows your competent level and who is of willing to be vulnerable? Say, I need help here. Oh, yeah. That's a big one. We actually did that for Kaneko. We had uh this list of audits. So here's the problem you come to work for me. I want this in my orientation, I tell you my expectations. You forgot them, you can't remember that. No, because I got all kinds of them. They got all so now you document them, but then you ask the worker to rate it. If you're gonna go in a confined space, what do you know? What do you don't know? And be honest, and then if you need help, you got help. And we did that, and it was amazing. It won a national award for helping people, setting them up for success, telling them what the expectations were, being vulnerable, let them being vulnerable and supplying a peer to help them rather than not knowing they don't know and let them risk blowing up something or killing somebody. Yep. And they demonstrated no penalties because you didn't know and you asked for help. How many contractors bring a human being out there that they call from the hall or just hire in? You don't really know what that person's capable of, and they he puts you and everybody at risk with some assumptions that he should know.

SPEAKER_00 48:48

Yes, and then they blame the apprenticeship or the employer or the employee, like it's okay. They keep going down the list because there's other people to blame. And what does blaming accomplish?

SPEAKER_02 49:02

Nothing, nothing, taking ownership does. So it's all is it willy-nilly or is it something that is in the industry? In other words, when I started doing some things with some of my major clients and we introduced something, they'll get a value, but unless it became the industry norm because you use different contractors in different parts of the world, you don't benefit from it. So the standardization of best practices and expectation of best practices is important, just not a one-off. You need to make it a best practice for the industry. And what I've been very fortunate in my life is that in a number of our clients, when we bring a process, this is amazing now, they have a lot of contractors involved, but they will mandate the contractor use one system. But other than that, they get no visibility, they want information to help, but it's so many different types of systems they can't see it. So we have had some very large companies say, when you come on this project, you will use this. And I've had some vice presidents of some very big companies say, if you don't, you're in a penalty box because we don't trust that you come with a system that builds teamwork that listens and responds effectively to your people, but we know one that will let us see if you're doing it. We have a client that was getting a hundred engagements a month. Okay, they used us to help them, and they in the first 60 days it went to 1100 engagements. And you know how they did it? It was this simple. The workers were asked to contribute, and because the data went to the contractor and went to the owner, and the owner said this you have 24 hours to fix the discrepancy reported by the workers. If not, we'll see it in the data and we will collectively solve it together. You're on our property, right? But we're watching you, and it's your initiative, right? Yep, and because it was transparency and responsiveness to the worker, it went from 100 to 1160 days. And guess what they came back and said? We got less damaged equipment, we got no turnover, we got zero first aids, we got improved productivity, everybody's paying attention because they tied in the recognition system for the energy of the workers.

SPEAKER_00 51:27

Isn't that amazing?

SPEAKER_02 51:28

It was amazing.

SPEAKER_00 51:29

Yeah, yeah, it's so simple. If you respond to what people are saying, they're going to say more. Here's a typical response that I've had in my career when I'm bringing up issues is stop complaining, stop whining, stop being such a crybaby. The people out there that are bringing issues are not complaining and whining, they're bringing you the things that you should be doing as a manager and leader to facilitate their growth and their productivity.

SPEAKER_02 52:02

Listening to them and helping them. And everybody tends to do that. I can remember when, uh just as you said, the workers start participating, and then Madden says, Holy smokes, we got a welder's work list now. Look at all the work lists we got. I'm working for them now. Yeah, you forget who's running this thing. Yeah. All right, believe it or not, you ain't getting the 50% productivity out of the man hours. Yeah, so what are you really getting? And that's a joke in the industry, right? 50% productivity, 25% material waste. How do you win on a job?

SPEAKER_00 52:33

Everybody loses.

SPEAKER_02 52:34

And we have family in the trades, yeah. And my heart goes out to the guy, he's working 12 hours a day, 13 days, gets one day off, the job ends, then he got to go somewhere else, traveling in the morning, and then you don't get to see his family and grandkids. And so, what kind of life is that? It's and the reason he gotta work 12 hours a day is because there's not enough people to do the job, so they work them to death. Yes, and they blame them for not going fast enough, yeah. And nothing there to do. So I'm close enough to it with family in the trades and work in outages and projects, and I've been very fortunate to have an organization real close to us that lets me go sit with workers that are going through some training. I pay them 20 bucks, they don't know my name. I start asking questions and they start opening up. There's no cameras, I don't know them, they don't know me. I just trying to learn. It's amazing what they tell me. Yeah, there's somebody to listen to. Somebody to be listened to. Yeah, so in reviewing, I don't know what our timeline is, but it workers can take charge for themselves. Management can study Buckingham's work about feedback fallacy, the nine lies of work, and then how to use the check-in and then how to give feedback. Yeah, change it from feedback to coaching and say, let me tell you what works for me. Yep, let me tell you what didn't work for me, and change your conversation with the workers, right? Yes, but the organization has to make focusing on the workers an important priority.

SPEAKER_00 54:12

Yes, yes, that's the fundamental change.

SPEAKER_02 54:15

The fundamental change. So, how would you do it? Is it appropriate at this time for me to walk you through the simple process we have? Come on, let's hear it. Okay, here it is. It starts off with a questionnaire from senior management. And in asking them, do you want to do it? Will you assign a C-suite champion to oversee it? What would the measures of success look like against your existing measures? Oof. Yeah, so this is not being done for fun. It's really got to benefit the worker and the company. Well, give me your turnover, give me your overrun times, and so how can you see it benefiting you? And then what is your current beliefs and challenge those, right? So if that's done in an orientation meeting, where you typically one way tell people what you want, right? Here's the rules, what we need you to do, here's the safety rules, etc. In that meeting, you actually say, We're glad you're here. We want to make this job fun and enjoyable, and here's how we're gonna do it. Here's our goals, right? Here's our timelines, and then we want you to help us improve the flow of work, and we're gonna listen to you. And so, what we're gonna do is we're gonna start with a six-point questionnaire, and it's gonna ask them on your last job did you have clarity of what was expected? We can ask these questions. Do you expect to be rewarded for good work? Did you have the material you you needed? So you're gonna see the biases and the feelings of the worker coming in. Yes, and it's a little six questions you ask them, yeah, and then you ask them this what would you like to see more of on your job, on a job, and what would you like to see less of? That data spits out overnight, and you come back and say, Hey, we're gonna give you more flush toilets, we're gonna give you more hand wash stations, we're gonna give you better tools, we're gonna respond to what you say. Yep. Wow. So that would be something. Then you give them a little pocketbook where they can see your life-saving rules that you want them to follow, and you have a way to record deviations in work and in safety. Okay, so you give them a recording method that'll either work on a phone or a piece of paper in their pocket, optional or both. Yep. So now the day is gonna start with an AP, a smart specific execution plan. We're gonna clearly say that here's the specific goal for the next five hours or next two hours or the next day. And is it realistic? Is it attainable? Do you believe it? Then you can say, here's the components of execution. Let's use them to tell us where the barriers might be. If we don't hit that goal, what could stop us?

unknown 56:57

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 56:58

Logistics, tools, enough labor coming on board at lunch, whatever. If you know the drywall's got to be finished, or electricians got to be finished for me to go put the sheetrock, whatever. What are our risks? How do we mitigate it? Now, some people say, well, it's a costly meeting. Guess what? You're only 50% productive anyway. Yeah. The best time you can put is in you can't get excellence out of poor planning, and you can't get engagement when people don't feel like it's realistic. And they buy in. They're not buying in because you tell them to buy in, they understand the plan. Yeah, then you capture what went well that's worth repeating, and what barriers didn't we see. It's captured, and you try to solve it. It's Deming's endon cord. You pull a cord in this book that uh that Hal McCombrae wrote, he talks about that. He's got some great stuff in here. That it is expected in Toyota that if something's not following the plan, you are expected to raise your hand, pull the endon cord, swarm it, and 80% of all immediate discoveries are solved with a 5Y process on the spot, right? All right, so now you capture that, you capture safety around life-saving rules, about behaviors, about unsafe conditions, you're gonna capture the environment. What are the environmental factors that you're doing that are dumb, that are difficult, that are dangerous, or that change too often to understand? What are you doing that impacts your clarity, your commitment, your caring? What's impacting you? Right? Yeah, what are the things that are changing? And the last thing is events, the near misses, or a stop work where things were so confusing that you had to say, well, let's get reorganized. It's dangerous here. And so you're gonna capture five components around safety, and you're gonna capture what went well and the barriers and constraints, and you'll try to solve them and leverage them immediately. And then you have a recognition that'll now tell you you get a report automatically emailed in Excel to every manager for every company and every superintendent and down the line. They can see their own reports, and so can the general manager and so can the owner. So the transparency, and then you can see how many were turned in and how do you want it recognized. And it has a simple recognition system where again, look at what Jesse saw, look at what he did, look at the impact. Let's have more of this. Thank you. And so that all rolls up into using a variation of software and paper. You can scan paper, you can use your phone iPad, depends on what you can let people get away with. But the key is the transparency, and then management has a C-suite executive that is coached. Look at what's going on here. So it's pretty easy to implement, and that system applied to safety, has won extraordinary awards around the world in terms of chairman of the board awards and excellence awards. Yeah. One example, we did a project on some outage work for an oil company. They were getting 800 engagements and outage, it went up to 26,000. Ooh, baby. And another instance where a vice president came to a plant, looked at the data, and said, he called him into a meeting with the plant manager and said, We think you're faking the data. There's nobody getting this much engagement. I see different posters all over the place. What's going on here? And he says, Well, the data is relative to each unit in each department. They can't fix something in another unit, so they're only getting their data, and because of it, we went from like 2,000 to 40,000 engagements, and they couldn't believe it. Yeah, so they hauled him up to corporate to explain at a corporate level what are we doing at this one location?

unknown 1:01:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:06

In the whole corporation, the people want to be recognized. Yes, we don't want feedback, we want attention. Yes, we want attention to our uniqueness and help us do what we love to do. And if your system is structured to say we're systematically going to engage you around that process of work, listen to you, and use it and reward you, miracles happen.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:32

Miracles happen. So, this system you're talking about is that the myetracker.com?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:37

It's my tracker.com. We think we ought to change it to uh worker-driven intelligence. So we're using the intelligence of the workers, but it started off as e-tracker years ago, and it's called e-tracker. Okay, it's been a safety application globally, and we've spent some time modifying it to my consulting career where I studied under Deming, implemented demming principles about systematic engagement of people around processes. Yeah. Use the current technology to capture that and use it. So that's what we've done. And uh we're fixing to roll it out in January.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:14

Woohoo! Right around the corner. That's about it right now, ready to roll. I like the name worker-driven intelligence. That's a sexy name.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:27

Oh, yeah. We're driving it from the worker's viewpoint. Just as you wanted to know if there was a good manager. Is he giving me my tools? He's telling you whether the organization's meeting his needs. And so I read a book from McCaffrey on the Afghan war.

unknown 1:02:43

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:43

And so what he did was they have a meeting every day with 4,000 people. And so the reason it's intelligent is you hear from the data where you need to react, and the data will help you react spontaneously. It doesn't need to be a plan and tested, and imagined by engineers, and sent down. So the intelligence is the workers giving you the feedback in real time about their about what's impacting them, not about not meeting plan, go out and put a red sticker and a yellow sticker and do a time in motion study and find out where the gaps are. No, it's not that.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:25

Let's go fix it right now. Let's go fix it right now. So, John, let's say I'm a field leader and I love this system, and I got to take it to the office, I got to take it to Shiny Town. How could you help me equip people to talk to their senior leaders about change, about adjusting the current system to better serve the human being and the business?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:53

Okay, so that's what I could even use some help at. The leader is the colorblind person, right? He sees what he sees. And if you study Dr. Schein's work, culture is a culture of leaders, a culture of engineers, and a culture in operations. So that shared belief of how the world is is just part of their fabric now. They grew up, they're senior executives. So just like the manager who couldn't rate his manager, he asked the people, are you filling their needs? So my thought would be: if you want to present our idea to management, I learned this from Eugene Ernest, Senior Vice President of Proctor and Gamble, when the pain of change is less than pain of staying the same. So if we prepared a document that said, let's look at what our current system is producing. Yep. The result of the system, the fact that we haven't increased productivity in 50 years, nobody's coming into the industry, jobs are short of labor, 80% of the jobs are in overrun and cost overrun, and have a whole list. This is what we're producing. Is there time? Is it rational to look for something different? Yeah. So you have to say, is the pain enough to want to change? And then now let's go look for something that we can handle, right? So I have enough proven experience handling, we're doing 600,000 documents a month from people all over the world and turning it into data overnight so that management could support, not take away the authority of the field leadership, but support and see where the system breakdowns are. So if you could have a conversation about what are we producing, this is an idea I have, right? Because I need to figure out how to get them to pay attention to. Yeah. Right? So you got to pay attention to what's impacting them and how they run the company. And so what if at a system like I described, and workers said, I got an option to go to work somewhere, I'm going to work over here. Yeah. They listen to us, they recognize us, they do a weekly check-in, they try to make sure I feel like I'm effective every day. When I go home and tell the wife, how'd you do today? Man, we got some really good things accomplished. I came up with a couple of good ideas. They love me over there, as opposed to complaining, had to sit around waiting. We finally got a permit, and then there was nothing to go get when we had to descaffle and move to that. Happens every day, right? Yeah, the plan does not get fulfilled because of some reason. So it would start. With how do you have a conversation with somebody who seals the world this way if you don't look at the results that it's producing? And is that painful enough to look for something else? What would we look for? Do you want an app? Do you want a piece of software? Or do you want a system? And then start looking. We just might be one of many. I really don't know. But we're trying to, you could not succeed without leadership support. No. They have to champion it themselves. And then you have to make it simple enough so that you answer a question of a superintendent. What do I have to do? More do I have to do?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:13

Because that's always the question. Okay, sounds great. Where do I fit it into this plate that's already overflowing?

SPEAKER_02 1:07:21

Yeah, and my answer is that don't you do a walk down every day to go look around to find out for yourself? And what do you think you see? Yeah. What if you had a report that came from everybody that told you, here's what happened, here's what we did, here's what we need to have done, and do we recommend? And you had that in front of you every day, and you had a way to delegate it down. So did that relieve you? And is your job to be an administrator, or is your job to see that there's a system of increased productivity at the worker level? Remember, you're only 50% productive. Yeah, they're sitting around sourcing material or doing something, but they're not time on tools. So you've got to get more time on tools, and it's extremely beneficial to do that. So can it be simple enough to implement? Now, maybe the company may have to resource a part-time person to be an administrator. Our idea is to pilot with some organizations and then do a second pilot and then see what we learn and do another rollout. That's how we do with large companies. We take one site or one department in a site, we roll it out, we learn about the uniqueness that they have. We tweak it, then we roll it up to the whole site, and then we start rolling it out site to site. Yeah, it's never jump in with every deployment.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:43

Yeah, that's the thing. I've been able to see rather, I'll be honest, and I've been a part of really poor deployments where this little idea we tested on one little small thing, and man, it was awesome. Everybody do this, but it didn't fit every situation, and we weren't prepared. I wasn't prepared to respond to all the different impacts that the different personalities of the teams had, the different problems that they were faced with that added a unique barrier to the idea, because it was only it was just a sliver of data that I had, and it's ah, let's go everywhere. I've learned since then to build it, right? Let's figure it out, okay, let's expand gradually so that we can accommodate and learn rapidly because people learn rapidly. And then the other point about having leadership support, and for what I've understood in the conversations that you and I have had, leadership support for some people looks like okay, I'm gonna sign, I'm gonna pay this invoice, I'm gonna approve it. That's not support. Support is active engagement and being a part of it. Now, I have seen initiatives that work without executive leader support. The problem is it's not sustainable because it works in this little environment that I have a lot of influence in. But once it gets out of outside of that environment, I need somebody that has greater influence to help sustain the movement. And that's where like this idea that the questionnaire that you have for the C-suite and having a C C-level champion on the thing is profound because that individual has the influence. They got some stroke, and if there's any barriers, political barriers to deploying the thing, they've got the sauce to make that to get past that. A middle manager like myself, I've only got so much influence, and at some point I just become a nuisance and get dismissed. But that C-level champion, that's a huge deal.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:57

Truly is. And I've been blessed in most of my career. I had some very large companies, but I had at the C-suite level president of companies, I was their private consultants, and so they got a report. I consulted with them and looked at the data and became their coaches, which was an odd situation. These people are very powerful, very well themed. And I had see myself as a coach to them about their own organization they're running. But it's a very odd feeling when you sit down and there's all these vice presidents of all the divisions and the units, and they want to make sure they're getting a clear story and not getting a look good story and can be deceived within their own organization, which I have seen happen more. Oh God.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:42

Yeah, I've seen it all over the place, and it's the nature of competition. I'm gonna deliver, I'm gonna shine up every problem I got. I got a report to my boss, and that happens over and over again.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:54

You know what's interesting as well. I think I I spoke at one of the initial lean meetings 20 years ago in Albuquerque. But as much as Lean says respect for the people, where is the people engagement process that's deliverable outside of the last planner? The last planner puts up and looks at barriers, but where's the heart of the worker in contributing and making sure that day is gratifying to him and fulfilling? And again, he's getting to work on what he loves to do and missing, they haven't brought that into focus yet.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:30

No, not in construction for sure. What I'm working hard to close that gap, and I'm just one small, really good-looking guy from San Antonio, Texas. There's we need a lot more help there, but largely the lean construction stuff is really organizing, planning. It doesn't get into the nuts and bolts of the work. We talk about eight-waist and minimize eight waste, and we'll give we'll define what that is and say do less of it, but we're ill-equipped, largely ill-equipped to get in there and redesign the work based on the worker's experience. We when I say we, I'm talking about like project managers, superintendents, management, foremen, even foremen are a lot closer and they've done the work. Most of their time is spent organizing it, trying to lay out a pathway, which is good. We need that, we absolutely need that, but there's little, very small percentage of effort or even awareness around okay, let's do that, and let's also go in there and learn from the worker what's killing them, what's helping them, and how can we make it better for them.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:42

So a big buzzword is user experience. If you're gonna build software or got an app, what's the user experience journey, right? You hire people to come in and touch point there and touch point there. It's part of the idea of meeting with senior management that you want to get engaged and want to create an environment where people love coming to work, literally. I love my job, I'm producing value, I feel important. I like working with my co-workers. Can we create that environment? Okay. So, what is the user experience map that you have in front of you? And if you ask that to somebody and say, User worker experience journey, what happens at orientation? Yeah, what happens here? What happens here? Did anybody use the same thinking that you use the software? So use it experience mapping, and then go out and see if it you're getting the experience you want. Yep, you plan it, you do it, you check it, and you adjust. Yes, there is that around people.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:50

Yes, I think that's the most attractive element of the system that you've got, John, is and I raz a lot of my general contractor friends because we're really good at talking about the ratings we get from trade partners, right? We get feedback that send a survey out to trades, but who's filling out the survey? It's the project manager, it's the business development, sometimes it's the principal of the organization, and they've got the rose-colored glasses on, right? They're gonna polish the report because they want to get more work with you. Nobody is doing a survey of the installers, of the people that come and clean out the porta potties, the people that come and bring the lunch, the people that are pushing the brooms, the people that are doing the work. No one understands what their experience is on the job. But man, you look on their website and they're gonna talk about how the top 100, whatever, but nobody is surveying or canvassing the people that are experiencing the faults in that system every single day. No one's doing that, and your system does.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:01

One of the things that I think is important when in reading a lot of the work that I've read is that people say, Do you want to belong to Google? Oh, they have these playrooms and this and that. Is it the organization? But when you get there, it's really the boss, it's the team. I'm working with people I don't trust. The boss doesn't respect me. So you the most critical component of performance is team lead and the team. So, why don't we ask companies how do you build teamwork? How do you educate and train your team leads? How do you build a cohesive unit of people who come together on a project? And then how do you see that it's functioning properly? So, how do you train team leads? How do you build teamwork? And how do you measure team effectiveness? Why aren't we asking that? Why do we have such a blind spot around the key execution components of work? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:02

I don't know, I don't have an answer. I think I'll say for me, because I've been there, I didn't know that was important. Right? Like I knew because I could feel the performance suffering, but I didn't know because all I knew was I got to hit these productivity rates, I got to go to these meetings, I gotta make sure PM doesn't yell at me, I gotta make sure the GC doesn't yell at me, I gotta make sure I don't get yelled at for leaving Workley. Those were the things I needed to make sure of. I got to make sure I fill out the safety paperwork, make sure I do timesheets. I didn't understand that I need to make sure these other things, because those other things were gonna make all of this happen. And so that was the disconnect. It's the hyper focus we have on key performance indicators, right? And not the way I think of it. If I my goal, John, and this is a real goal for now, for this 46 year I'm gonna live on this planet, I am restoring a classic. That classic is me. I am going to focus this year on restoring my body. Now, what that means is one of the KPIs is my weight. I'm at 196 pounds right now. My goal is to get to 180 pounds by December 11th. So that's the KPI. And what will I do? Me stepping on a scale 10 times a day does not improve the outcome. But the inputs to that KPI are where the very the improvement can be had. Exercise, sleep, and nutrition. But you know what? You know how much time I spend measuring my exercise and my sleep and my nutrition? This much. You know how many times I step on a scale a week? At least eight times a week. And so there's this distraction, is the KPI. I'm focused on this thing, this measurement, the thing that everybody's telling me is important, and I'm not focused on the input. And I think that's what happens to us as managers and leaders is that there's these things, these metrics that are very important that people are hounding, and we forget or not forget, we're just unaware of the way to change those outcomes is to focus on the inputs. And what your system does, I think, is provide the valuable inputs that are going to transform the outcomes.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:33

When you start talking about personal change, organizational change, it's really been a study of mine for a long time. And there's no magic formula, to be honest. I just read a book by Katie Milkman, who has a hundred psychologists around the globe, as well as a number of other authors and stuff that I've read. And when you got through reading that book, I was compressed because here's a hundred of the world's leading people talking about how they failed to give feedback, yeah, how it doesn't work, and then how knowledge and want-to doesn't equal change, and you got to trick your brain, you got to tie brushing your teeth with it, walk-in. And when I get through all these experiments about how to bring about change, I said, Wow, we just I don't know how to do it. Yeah, everybody wants to change, and then as I said to you earlier in my walk, dealing with drug addicts and abused people and children who have fixed mindsets because of poverty, and how to help them get escape the bottle. I wrote a book called Escaping the Bottle. You're in a glass jar and you see the world, but you're not in the world, you're somehow trapped. So, how to help people get out of there? And so it's like saying words the mind has a history, and you have to replace that history with a new event and create a number of events to overcome the stimulus response of the old events. So, how do you do that? So, I don't have an answer. I'm just knowing that in the walk that I've chosen to help people improve their lives, I've come to this. You have to have a vision, and you have to renew that vision every day, every morning, because the world attacks you. I wasn't good enough, I didn't do, I didn't do enough preparation for this conversation. I missed some key points, and you start beating yourself up. And so you've got to have a vision, you've got to renew your mind, and then you've got to do your own adjustment. But the vision has got to be something you truly want. And it's great if you have a support, like my wife. She says, You're not real serious, you want to eat a cracker with peanut butter for lunch. Yeah, but it would be great if you had a coach that could point out things to you. So, in this journey of life that we're all on, we need to respect each other and have a system that gives people a chance to do what they love doing and recognize it. We just don't do enough of that. So that's what I hope I can bring to the world through this company I have and the relationships like you and Adam and people I know that are also trying to do the same thing. But you got to give management an off-ramp. Okay, I want to do it now. What? Yeah, is it complicated? Is it proven? Can I do it? If I'm aligned, now they'll need a coach too, because they're gonna get off the wagon. I used to have a vice president has called me and said, Hey, come talk to him. He's off the reservation. I said, Well, you're the VP, you know the process. Oh no, he can fire me, he don't fire you. Yeah, you can fire me. Yeah, no, definitely. Right. So anyway, that's what uh change is very difficult unless you force when I used to go to Windy's, people would oh no, it was McDonald's, people just walk up. But if you went to one of the other restaurants, they had a little thing you had to follow. So if you create a system of experiential learnings so that at orientation, you do something, management does something. In the planning, you do something, management does something. In the res in what you come up with, you do something, management comes up with something. So you create a system of triggered response mechanisms so that there's an expectation of doing receiving, doing, receiving, doing, receiving. So you're creating a system of experiential learnings that it's not by telling, but it's by experiencing that I will believe. There's something called cognizant dissident. I don't believe they care about me as a result of this survey I just took, but they asked me what I want to see more of, and they did it. They asked me for my input, and I gave it to them, and they did it. And they did it when Jesse did it, and they did it when Adam did it. I don't believe they care, but they show me they do. I don't believe they care, but they show me they do. Guess what happened? You change your own mind that they now care because you set up the experiences that they now trust. Yes, and so that's what's woven into this the reticular activating system, the mind, building trust, building the new experiences. And when I challenged my workers this morning, I said, Look, I'm gonna be on this call, and it's like being with someone who is colorblind. How do we get the colorblind guy to see the red rose? When management sees this, how do we get them to see something else? So your listeners can be part of this. What would be the questions and the evidence of failed system that shows enough pain that they would want to look for something else? That's that that's what I think we'll have to do together. Yes, you're in your audience. So if they were willing to respond, how would you, what would you say, what would what evidence would you present that the system is failing, that management couldn't refute? That if we continue doing this, we're all doomed.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:02

Going off the edge. Well, you heard it, LM family. That's the question. If you got that question or the answer to it, or even just a guess, let us have it because it's gonna help, it's gonna help John, it's gonna help me, and I think it's gonna help a whole bunch of people out there that that need some help, that they're just right now suffering silently, and we got to be advocates for each other.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:24

Yeah, and trust is really important, and security is really important. I'm going through some things right now with people I know, and I've known people who had family members in the industry that committed suicide. People now in the industry that are having anxiety and panic attacks and can't get out of bed, and it's all because of the stress level about what next and who's death. And so that's a disservice to human beings to put them in a state of constant insecurity about their future and that of their children and their wives to have them go home to that. So we need to have an industry where people love going to work, they feel secure that they have value, it's meaningful to their lives, and they want to be part of it. And we need to do the employee journey and map that out to see if we're having that happen. We need to focus on them, they are the focus now. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:15

So that's my little parting words, right? Yes, sir. Good. Did we miss what did we miss anything, Mr. John?

SPEAKER_02 1:26:23

No, other than that, that it's a journey of learning. So I really am enamored with with Muccus Buckingham's work in his is what what great managers do, the 12 questions about the nine lies about work, and then the reason for love in work. It breaks a pattern that we've existed in, but it supports my use of the deming principles with people. So you can never cover it all in a conversation, but it's easy. The world's made easy now. You can go to YouTube and watch a little five-minute each one of the components and dig into the area that you want to do on feedback, fallacy, on if you want to dig into weekly check-ins, yeah, but you have to have an a want. And like they said, the teacher will appear when the student's ready. Oh, yeah. You're ready, there's a lot of stuff out there. And if anything I said you're interested in, Jesse, I can provide documents, you can hang on your website. Good. You know, I've sent you a number of things in the past.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:27

Oh, yeah, I got a bunch. Yes, lots of really great stuff, actually.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:30

Yeah, so we can share it with everybody. There's no secrets in the world, and there's no competition in helping people feel like they're valued and their importance. And the smile you have and the energy you have around this space, your connectivity to a lot of people needs to generate a process, though, yeah, where we help senior management realize that the current system has failed and be part of the solution as an industry. Agreed. Thank you for allowing me the time to speak today.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:58

Of course, my pleasure, man. I love the conversation. So if people want to get a hold of you, how do they get a hold of you, Mr. John?

SPEAKER_02 1:28:03

John Tubes at jwtoops.com. John Tubes at jwtoops.com, or you can email our phone number at the office is 985 447 5114. Boom.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:18

There it is, people.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:20

You're excited. So call them, email them. When you edit that, you can put that in the bottom.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:25

I've