00:00 - Are You a Multiplier or a Diminisher?
In the leadership of your company, are you a multiplier or a diminisher? Until I read this book, How The Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman, I didn't really know the difference. But in today's podcast, I'm going to share some key takeaways that'll help you run a better snow and landscape company. Hey, everyone. Jack Jostes here. Welcome to the Landscaper's Guide podcast where we share sales, marketing, and leadership inspiration to help you grow your snow and landscape company. Today, I hosted our quarterly Wild Frontier mastermind and book club with several of my clients, and we read this book, Multipliers. And it's a thick book. It's a dense book. It's a lot. It, it was more than we could cover in this podcast episode or even in the. In the book club.
00:52 - Discovering Your Team’s “Native Genius”
So I wanted to share some of the highlights with you, and one of them was around finding people's Native genius. So the premise of the book is ultimately, there are different leadership styles where you can be a multiplier, where when you work with other people, you're multiplying each other and your impact together. Or there are diminishers and this is a negative leader who is holding people back from their full potential. And a key concept in here is finding people's Native genius. So I asked my mastermind today, how do you find people's Native genius? One of my clients shared that he uses the Myers Briggs personality assessment when hiring for office positions. We had another guest on the show, Jason Kupp, who's a business coach and landscape professional, and he uses the Kobe personality assessment.
01:44 - Using Personality Assessments to Hire Smarter
I use the DISC Profile assessment at Ramblin Jackson and also the OMG Objective Management Group when I'm hiring salespeople. And I swear by both of those, and I absolutely agree that those personality assessments can help you figure out before you hire somebody what kind of role they're going to be in that could. Could really help them succeed and thrive. I feel like when you have people matched with the right role for their Native genius for how they're wired, they enjoy the work, people enjoy working with them. And I also had for the first time the experience of having somebody work with me for many years, and then their role changed.
02:29 - When Roles Change and the Fit No Longer Works
What the company and what our clients needed from their role changed, and that created a lot of conflict for their natural Native genius, and they ended up not being a fit for my company anymore. So I think that knowing people's Native genius helps you not only hire and retain people, but also when Things change. Either helping them get into a different seat on the bus or some, in some cases, getting off the bus if that former seat is now stressing them out. But you don't always have to use personality assessments. One of my clients in the book club talked about just working with people. And I agree that as you work with people, you get to see what their skills are, what their strengths are. You learn what their native genius is.
03:18 - How to Spot and Develop People’s Strengths
And for him, he now has people who are in the number two and number three position. He's actually going to promote one of them to CEO and one of them is in a different operations position. So I'm curious, how do you find people's native genius? Do you use personality assessments? Do you just observe things? And do you ever think about moving them into different positions in your company? If they're a company fit, then maybe not a fit for the role. Some of the questions that I liked from the book about figuring out somebody's native genius is what do they do better than anyone else that they do? What do they do better than the other people around them? What do they do without effort? What do they do without being asked? And what do they do readily without being paid? I love that.
04:06 - Praise the Positive: How Leaders Build Confidence
And it goes on to talk about a high school rugby coach who would always comment publicly about one of the players speed. And that helped this person develop a positive self concept that they were fast and other people saw them. And so I liked that. You know, praising people for what they do well is something from another book we mentioned on the podcast, One Minute Manager, One Minute Press Phrasings. The same chapter goes on to talk about how a players attract other A players. And it talked about Bloom Energy, whose CEO established one rule, no prima donnas. Leave your ego at the door and work as a team. That's been another leadership lesson for me in working with people who sometimes, you know, working with high performing people.
04:59 - The “No Prima Donnas” Rule for A-Players
Some people are high performing on a team and they can stay on the team and they elevate and they multiply other people. And then some people are high performing, but they're not a culture fit and they have an enormous ego and they can become toxic to your organization. And that was something my mastermind taught me about that I'm in was, you know, A players who are a culture fit and A skills fit. B players who are a culture fit but they need to be coached up into their, into the skills. And then there are C players who are neither a culture or skills fit. And then the upper quadrant is the most Confusing one or it's not confusing.
05:39 - Dealing with Toxic High Performers
I just didn't know what to do until I learned about it, which are people who are a skills fit, they're very good at what they do, but they're not a culture fit. And they can become prima donnas. Like the book says, they can be toxic and you got to help get those people out because they can be very destructive. One of the other traits of multipliers that I liked was talking about going public with mistakes and lessons learned. And I found that when I admit mistakes and I own up to things with my team or even with my kids or my wife or really any relationship, that builds trust, it goes well.
06:16 - Going Public with Mistakes Builds Trust
And I think sometimes new leaders and new managers struggle with this because they want to be seen as an a position of power and they don't want to lose their power and their status. But I think there's a balance here of being humble and admitting when you do things wrong. And I've seen it always go well. And in our mastermind today with my clients, one of my clients was saying it goes really well with their own landscape clients, like if there's a mistake and they own up to it, they found that often earns them five star reviews and repeat business. Whereas when they tried to save face and ignore that, they made a mistake and there was an issue and it was obvious, it's a real detriment. So I think that applies to really all relationships.
07:05 - The Power of Healthy Debate
But it was a good one to read about. Another chapter that stick out to me was about debate. And so one of the multiplier leadership styles is the debate maker. And debate makers aren't overly swayed by opinion and emotional arguments. They continue to ask for evidence, including evidence that might suggest new or alternative points of view. And I like this. And right now, I'm out in front of the flatirons, these famous mountain peaks here in Boulder, Colorado. It is a gorgeous overcast day and I'm going to be meeting with our leadership team at Ramblin Jackson for dinner at Chautauqua Dining Hall. It's this cool historic restaurant and we prepared an agenda for the meeting and I rewrote some of them after reading this book so we could debate the questions a bit further. Because this talks about how diminishers bring issues or decisions to people's attention, but they don't frame it in a way that allow others to easily contribute. They often focus on the what rather than the how and the why. And so it goes on to talk about how to debate questions. So frame the issue, prepare the team and lead the debate not with forceful ideas, but with a process that encourages people to weigh in before having to buy in.
08:37 - Turning Meetings into Meaningful Debates
So I rewrote a lot of our agenda in the form of questions that we could debate and I'm excited to see how it goes tonight to see if we have a. I already feel like I have good communication with the leadership team and this book inspired me to take that to a next level when I need to lead a conversation in a group environment in my company to get into the why are we doing it? And posing questions that we can debate around to solve. And then right. And then part of multiplying is pulling other people's area of genius and their insights and things to help formulate a solution to whatever topic we're talking about. Related to this was the challenger leadership style. And this is somebody who lays down challenges and asking people to participate in like a mission impossible.
09:41 - Why Great Leaders Ask “Mission Impossible” Questions
So I liked this and it, you know, it talks about how diminisher leaders are know it alls and they solve all the problems and they rescue everybody. Whereas a multiplier, again leveraging and really inspiring the team to contribute their best ideas is going to start at a starting point but not a complete solution and lay down a challenge and invite people. So this is just an exciting idea to me that I think you could take with your landscape company and ask questions and get people to rethink things. For example, how could we at Ramla Jackson increase our response time to website edit requests from clients? So how could we respond to them? What is the response time that we should set as our standard and how can we track it?
10:42 - How to Fix the #1 Client Communication Problem
That's something that's on my mind that I know we're already pretty good at, but if we got great at it, our clients would really care about. And you know, that's kind of similar to many landscape companies how when clients request that the tree is trimmed for whatever HOA community property number one that you work on, or when they request these certain things, a lot of people just want to hear back, hey, thanks, we got your request and we're going to work on it on this date and then you do it and then you close the loop. But in any business, my business, your business, if we don't nail that basic communication, clients get grumpy and they leave. And so it's just something that I see in my own business to improve. And I definitely see it when I'm reading the reviews.
11:31 - Leadership Is a Long Game
We have hundreds of clients who come through. Well, one we have a lot of clients of Ramblin Jackson and then all of their customers are giving them feedback. And that's something that I know landscape customers care about is that communication around really basic small stuff. So this book, Multipliers is a good read. I'll admit it's a very dense read we talked about in the book club. It felt like work. It felt like, you know, reading the book Good to Great was another book that was like on my list of things to do and I did it. And I appreciate reading really is part of my job. I think it's part of landscape leaders jobs. If you're leading a company is continually reading and expanding your thinking and reflecting on how am I doing and how could I do better?
12:21 - Final Takeaways: The Work of Becoming a Multiplier
And that is always the byproduct for me of reading books like this. And I definitely took away some nuggets. So I would recommend the book. And it's work. It's. It's a dense book. It's. It's got a lot of data, it's got a lot of different stories. It's got a lot of big ideas that I find when I read it. I'm like, oh man, now I'm thinking about all this stuff. But that's what a good book would do. If you enjoyed today's video, make sure you like this video and subscribe to our YouTube channel where we post weekly videos with sales, marketing and leadership inspiration to grow your snow and landscape company. I'm Jack justice and I'll see you in the next video.