The OYT Coaching Series – Jory Schwach at Andium – Talk Less and Lead Better
Communication is a cornerstone in the skills of leadership. This does not mean you have to do all the talking. Actually, there is power in talking less and leading better. When you understand that listening is essential to leadership that aligns people. Our guest is Jory Schwach, CEO of Andium. His company was #200 on the 2020 Inc 500 list. Andium is an enterprise internet of things ecosystem that leverages its end-to-end software platform to bring intelligence and flexibility to hardware like never before. Jory begins by sharing his top strategy for optimizing his time, which is empowering others. He is very analytical and gives us a system to empowering others. In part two, he is coached on talking less and leading better. We look at what gets in the way when you talk too much. You will discover how to talk less and leading better inside this episode.
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Jory Schwach: The Transcript
Target Audience: Jory Schwach is the Founder and CEO at Andium. Andium is an end-to-end industrial IoT platform that brings intelligent software services down to the device layer, offering industries more flexibility, reliability, and scalability in monitoring and controlling their operations, regardless of cloud connectivity.
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Disclaimer: This transcript was created using YouTube’s translator tool and that may mean that some of the words, grammar, and typos come from a misinterpretation of the video.
Jory Schwach
Do you build on a foundation of trust, and you ensure that they are not wanting for things? Obviously everyone wants for things, but they’re not in that baseline mode, where they’re thinking about self, so much is thinking about how do they get the collective us to that next level, startups have the incentive of often have option plans as well. So we use that as well to align incentives. But nonetheless, if you’re not looking around worrying about something, you know, allows you to kind of think ahead and kind of get ahead.
Intro [0:32]
Welcome to Growth Think Tank. This is the one and only place where you will get insight from the founders and the CEOs of the fastest-growing privately held companies. I am the host. My name is Gene Hammett. I hope leaders and their teams navigate the defining moments of their growth, are you ready to grow?
Gene Hammett [0:49]
Your time is very important. And there’s nothing better than you can do. And your time can be the right kind of leader for your people. Because when you lead them to take over some of the small things that you’re doing some of the big projects, and some of the really important aspects of growing the company, you will see the scalable growth that you desire as a leader. When you think about your job as a visionary. The more time you spend on the most valuable aspects, the better it is for your business. This is part of the optimizer time series. My name is Jean hammock, we’re going to be talking with the CEO and founder of Andium is Jory Schwach. And we talked about what the number one thing he’s done in order to create space and optimize his time as a CEO of a fast-growth company. They were on the Inc list this past year tremendous company and have tremendous opportunity for you to learn about what does it take for you to create a better space for your time and create better strategies. And we can actually go into pretty deep today talking about what delegation and empowerment look like when you want to grow fast. And it is a critical element of hundreds of interviews I’ve done with founders and CEOs of fast-growth companies. This one topic of empowering people is a critical aspect.
Gene Hammett [2:05]
Now in part two, we’re going to dive into an area that which Jory is really working on as a leader. And it’s about talking less. Now you may think that that’s not a big deal, because you don’t have a problem talking less. But we actually look at one of the some of the issues that go on to him talking more than he should inside of its meetings, specifically inside of sales conversations. we dive into this in a coaching kind of exchange, you get to be kind of in the corner watching a coaching situation happen. And you can see it on video or you can hear it through audio, but you get to see me coaching him about talking less. Now what you will see through this exchange is my job is not to tell him what to do next. But to help him understand that talking less is actually a powerful structure. This is a very important conversation that I’m happy to share with you through the growth tank platform. And when you think about your own leadership, hopefully you’re growing, you’re on the right path. I’d love for you to tune into this and listen to the things and the areas where you can improve just from our conversation. Now here’s Jory.
Gene Hammett [3:12]
Jory. How are you?
Jory Schwach [3:14]
I’m good. How are you doing?
Gene Hammett [3:15]
I am fantastic. It’s your first time on the show. Appreciate it. Your company made the inkless for the first time this year, you guys, you know, worked really hard, probably coming out of some stealth mode and had revenue enough to qualify this year you hit number 200. Tell us about your company Andium.
Jory Schwach [3:35]
Yeah, so Andium is a Internet of Things enterprise company. We focus on industrial spaces, and our bread and butter is we believe in the truism that what you can monitor you can manage like your finances, and you can monitor your finances, you can manage them. And so we work with a lot of industrial players heavy in the energy space, that focus on how they can better manage assets by way of monitoring them. So we our thesis is empowering leaders for meaningful change. So we build tools for monitoring that enable management.
Gene Hammett [4:09]
So you get a pretty small team, you guys have grown really quite fast. And I wanted to ask you the key question because this is in the optimizer time series, what’s been the one thing that’s really moved the needle for you to really make the most of your time?
Jory Schwach [4:25]
Yeah, the most of my time, it’s definitely delegation. And not so much through tools like physical tools like a monday.com or other digital tools so much as face to face these days and exam, working with my leaders to ensure that not only they have what they need, but that we’re thinking ahead of what they might need so that we’re constantly ensuring that I’m, I’m the dumbest guy in the room, in every meeting.
Gene Hammett [4:56]
Well, let’s look into that a little bit. When you’re the dumbest guy in the room. What does that give you?
Jory Schwach [5:04]
That’s a good question. I believe that the privilege of being in the position I’m in is that I have visibility and experience with all aspects of business. Which means that if I’m the dumbest guy in the room, and I have a holistic view, and you’ve got a lot of very smart stakeholders, they’re capable of telling me what they think, without fear of whether it’s retribution, or that they’re going to look stupid. And doing so you remove a lot of the things that impede cadence impede that continue to speed this necessary to keep scaling at this rate.
Gene Hammett [5:42]
This sounds a lot like some of the things I’ve talked on stage before where I talk about, do you have a mechanism in your company? Where where the best idea wins? Not just the idea that comes from the top?
Jory Schwach [5:53]
Sure. Okay. That’s it.
Gene Hammett [5:55]
I’ve kind of been talking about.
Jory Schwach [5:57]
Yeah, I’d actually go further, I’d say Do they feel like they need to ask permission to to take a good idea? Or do they kind of are coming to ask for forgiveness. And in so doing know that they therefore want to get ahead of it by talking about it so that they know they’re headed on the right path without being told, like what is the next step in the process?
Gene Hammett [6:17]
This probably scares a lot of people when you talk about you don’t have to ask for permission because they create their businesses with a certain amount of control and, and protection so that bad things don’t happen. So how do you how do you create that space for people to be able to operate where they don’t have to ask you for permission?
Jory Schwach [6:37]
Yeah, I guess the obvious answer is you build on a foundation of trust, and you ensure that they are not wanting things. Obviously everyone wants for things, but they’re not in that baseline mode, where they’re thinking about self so much is thinking about how do they get the collective us to that next level, startups have the incentive of often have option plans as well. So we use that as well to align incentives. But nonetheless, if you’re not looking around worrying about something, you’d allows you to kind of think ahead and kind of get ahead of things.
Gene Hammett [7:14]
You know, Jory, you have been dancing around this, let’s get to the heart of it really quick, to optimize your time you’ve empowered your, your your people, to work without you, and not without the fear of failure, and without the fear of them losing their jobs if something doesn’t work out. And that’s one reason why you’ve been so successful is that got about right.
Jory Schwach [7:35]
Yeah, in fact, I think we had long talks at the top all the way up to the board level. As things were tough during the pandemic, people I mean, especially as a startup, you’re really subject to macro effects that are going on around you. And we made it a priority to ensure that our people saw no change, like no, no financial change, no structural change, and the safety to not need to do things they didn’t want to do. Because we felt that in doing so we kept the entire organization in the best possible position to help move past or through whatever this pandemic is.
Gene Hammett [8:15]
So we started off with delegation, we talked about empowering others and not having to ask permission, any other elements that are critical for you to optimize your time, so that you’re actually really focused on the most valuable work possible.
Jory Schwach [8:29]
So Andium is, we are an Internet of Things company, which means we have a hardware and a software component to our business. So we usually have an operational side that has to deal with inventory has to deal with physical products, but also our bread and butter is SAS, our recurring revenue. And so being able to focus in a space like that means you’re kind of building an ecosystem. But your head is always on product, right? You’re always focused on how does this this thing are building and you’re delivering and you’re responsible for not only how are you keeping it moving, but also how are you continuing to push it forward. And so I try to keep my time there. So in order to do that, I have leaders from different parts of my organization, one from Tech, finance, from operations. And even with such a lean team, we tend to do a lot in house, there’s not it’s an end to end ecosystem.
Jory Schwach [9:21]
So you know, we were responsible for all of our customer, customer, happiness, checkboxes, right, if you will, where, where they’re dealing with a phone call like this things aren’t working, whether or not it’s related to our products, to make sure that they’re successful, to be able to manage things that are using our tools for so for example, in our business, we put cameras in the fields in the middle of nowhere. We definitely have cameras in areas that the movie The Martian was filmed. He’s, like, look like future space worlds. And so in doing so you have a lot of concerns that could be power that could be web. You can have communication challenges and responsible for all of it. And so he’s always so busy, that the only way to make sure that everyone feels that they’re moving forward is that they have the support. And so when things were a little slower than the pandemic is a really good example, actually, when things were a little slower, we decided to focus on how we could drive better success through not just reliable product, but in innovating product is it at our core, we’re a tech company. And so to do that, our leaders focused on how they can automate the things they were doing in order to work on new things, and then set the priority for what things they wanted to work on. And then we actually evolve the product in that way. And so our people got to actually feel empowered, going back to the topic, feel empowered, because they were not only empowered to remove parts of the jobs they didn’t like, but also to push products and push the things they wanted to do and see how that played in that space between what is this ecosystem we have built up with, you know, devices in the field versus the services that run on them, like artificial intelligence that allowed our customers to be successful with them.
Gene Hammett [11:08]
One last question on this thread here. Some people may be listening in going, you know, that sounds like a lot of chaos, like we’re gonna let them just gonna do what they want to do and power them. Like, do you put guardrails around them at all? Or do you how do you manage that not turning into chaos?
Jory Schwach [11:25]
Yeah, actually, if anyone is the chaos monkey in this scenario, it’s me, I am definitely against monkey. It’s why my number one learning topic that I’m still working on, and I have a feeling I will always be working on is talking less, it’s because I have this tendency to want to understand everything. So I’m always digging in. And it’s not always efficient. In order to, I think, move some of those pieces along, it felt very much as though I feel like team members rely on each other more than they rely on me. And so it’s more of this familial feel. With such a small team, and so much going on, it really does come down to how they interact with each other as well. So ensuring that communication is strong, ensuring that, you know, even with all these remote tools that you’re ahead of it. And so I think team members, that empowerment comes not only from the things we get to work on, but ensuring that they’re burning down a checklist at a cadence that they’re happy with. And we use an agile mentality when we build that way.
Jory Schwach [12:25]
So the expectation of delivering something is every two weeks. So you’re actually planning while you’re delivering, and then you’re hardening while you’re like planning again, right? So it’s this cadence every two weeks that they’re pushing things forward. So in doing so, say six weeks in, you’re actually through three, what we call sprints. And so then on a quarterly basis, we review how we’re doing relative to the bigger target goals. Like there’s there’s great tools like that entrepreneurial operating system that helps from a leadership perspective, how to kind of manage something on that larger scale. at the team level, it’s very much agile, we have our own for software development, we can get into it. But for software development, there’s some really good tools, some I feel like we’re actually inventing, and some are really ages, things we’ve seen excellent practice in the in the space.
Commercial [13:17]
Now, before we move into part two of this conversation, let’s recap what we just talked about in part one. When you think about empowering your people, what gets in the way of you being the best leader, you could? Well, many times, it’s that you think you can do it better, or that you think that they won’t get it right or that it’ll take longer if you show them how to do it. But here’s the reality, over time as they learn to do what needs to be done if they learn to take what you have, and actually go better than where you are. This happens nine times out of 10. When you have someone really focused on something, it’s better than what you would do if you only sort of focused on it. That makes sense? Well, I’m here to share with you some of the concepts behind this conversation with Jory, because I really do believe empowering others is a very strong leadership trait and skill that if you can embrace this, and you really understand it, then you will have a stronger company, you will face the challenges with more agile, and you will be able to get further with fewer people. And that’s proof with what Jory has done inside his company. Now as we move into part two, we talk about something that is a little bit different than what I’ve ever talked about before. And it’s actually Jerry said, I want to talk less. And so talking less is something that he knows is important for his own leadership style. And we get to the heart of that inside the conversation, we get very specific and use a sales example. Hopefully what you’ll see in this is a way that you can actually learn to talk less and why it’s so important for you to be more of a question asker than the problem solver inside of your leadership style. Now, this is just an example of What coaching is, it’s not the real true thing, because I would go much deeper, we would get much further into this so that the transformation is very clear. But hopefully you’ll see this as entertaining and grow from it as well. Now, here’s Jory.
Gene Hammett [15:15]
Well, I appreciate you sharing that with us Jory. I want to take a second here and move into part two, because that’s, that’s the real heart of this optimize your time series. Everyone’s kind of curious around what has worked for you, but you actually gave us a little preview, what are you working on right now, that would allow you to work on the most valuable things, and be the kind of leader that your team deserves,
Jory Schwach [15:40]
Definitely talking last. The number one challenge is getting out of your own way, especially when you’re empowering others, you can almost think about the percentage of time you’re talking in a meeting, and how productive The meeting is. And I bet most people could draw a straight line between the productivity or the effectiveness of the meeting and how much they talked, if I’m talking a lot, it’s probably not a great meeting. That’s a good example.
Gene Hammett [16:05]
You know, a lot of leaders have pride themselves in their ability to communicate. And they want to communicate the vision, they want to communicate, the way they see things and all the trends and all that, you know, not necessarily to boast about what they know. But just to make sure that people get it, we’re all on the same page. But are you is that one of the things that you kind of like to be able to do.
Jory Schwach [16:31]
Early on in the company’s phase. It’s very much its star plan, especially its fail fast. So the anecdotal story to how to think about it, I guess, comes from in the very early days before I’d raised much capital, if any, is mainly friends and family, I, I was really interested in building this idea of like a little solar product that could track things. And I was convinced that there was a way to do it, I wanted to explain that you could do this is, you know, it wasn’t that wasn’t about technology, in general is the way to make a product. It was basically using mobile energy. So like if you put it on a trailer, you could track trailers, because people lose them all the time, you could track them with motion. And I looked at research and in fact, figured it out, I went and talked to these professors, I found myself not just talking a lot, but also getting in my own way of trying to really understand what was going because I was convinced I knew how best to do it. And then it turns out that when I put it on a trailer, the power died. And when we went looked into it, it turns out that since then 60s, I suspension systems, fantastic. I’ve removed all the motions that you would have used to harness power, right, that’s why I wouldn’t move to braking. I got really bad no problem. Quick pivot, go to solar, grew up in the Midwest, a lot of snow, that again, and just kept moving this way, where failing fast and failing often, through feeling like you know the right way.
Jory Schwach [18:11]
Working with others now, it’s really nice to take ideas that others are bringing to the table that are tried and true. Take what you know, to try and guide them in the right direction. But ultimately, you know, you just kind of have learned from your mistakes quickly. And and you have to trust your people. And I think that’s something you kind of learn over time. And when you don’t fully trust people. That’s when you find yourself trying to drive your mission really heavy, right? You’re like, No, no, this is what you have to do it now. I’m like now, I screw up all the time. Like you probably get some great ideas. And so I need to always remind myself how often I fail and how that’s part of the game. And ultimately others giving me ideas and then sitting and thinking on those ideas. Right? Take a be right all these good tools that probably exists and I still don’t do very well.
Gene Hammett [19:00]
So Jory. While you were explaining that my mind was kind of going through this, trying to figure out where specifically you want to talk less? Is there a situation that you know that talking less is really important, that’s a high value situation, not something that’s trivial.
Jory Schwach [19:16]
Definitely sales meetings, okay. I often find myself to be the sales guy, and just out of personality. And so early days, I’d remove myself from the room altogether, but to ensure I wasn’t meddling now I know I need to let my team lead and just be there for support that that’s an area where directly it has impacts that everyone can kind of identify with.
Gene Hammett [19:40]
Alright, let’s dive into this. This is a sweet spot of mine. I will tell you I bring about 30 years of sales experience into this conversation. So here we go. You want to talk less and inside of this we’re going to kind of get to the heart of it. Maybe it’s reframing or maybe we’ll use a different framework around this but if you Maybe it’s it’s, it’s just getting you to see it from a different perspective. This is the coaching moment. So let’s dive into this. You ready?
Jory Schwach [20:08]
Deck over, let’s do it.
Gene Hammett [20:10]
When you walk into a sales meeting, and you are talking more than your team, and you’re talking even more than the client, how does that typically go?
Jory Schwach [20:22]
Depending on the level of conversation? Who I’m speaking to? Like, who’s in the room? It has a variety of outcomes.
Gene Hammett [20:31]
In general?
Jory Schwach [20:32]
Yeah. When you’re in there, and higher level.
Gene Hammett [20:36]
When you’re doing the talking, what happens?
Jory Schwach [20:38]
I think people start to zone out as time goes on.
Gene Hammett [20:41]
Okay, I’m gonna write that down. Can you write that down for a second?
Jory Schwach [20:44]
Yeah, sure.
Gene Hammett [20:46]
People zone out. Is that the intent of your sales conversation?
Jory Schwach [20:53]
Now? It’s okay, I’m looking for in that part.
Gene Hammett [20:57]
What is the intent of your sales conversation, not to get them to buy but what is the intent?
Jory Schwach [21:02]
I think it’s build trust and educates,
Gene Hammett [21:05]
okay. build trust and educate now, when you go in, and I know you probably do some of this. So that’s probably you’re never going to go in and just say, let me tell you how great we are, I want to share a story with you. And this comes from one of my clients, I won’t say which one because I don’t want them to, to think I’m talking bad about them. But this was a big breakthrough for them. And they’re a digital agency. And so they would do a lot of research in the first meeting, in a sales conversation on who that client is, and what they’re doing, what’s working, what’s not working. And they would, they would really knock themselves out to go in prepared, which is there’s nothing wrong with that, right. And then when they get into the meeting, they would take all that preparation, and they would have built a very specific presentation for the client, and they would deliver it in the first half of the meeting. So they’re basically talking a lot. And then the second half of the meeting would be kind of us getting to know each other and talking. Does that make sense to us and how that flowed? Sure. And it worked. But I asked them, What would happen if they did not build the presentation, but they just did their research and showed up in the first half of the of the meeting was to ask questions, and not present. What do you think happened? On the two different versions of those approaches?
Jory Schwach [22:25]
Yeah, I think, as I’ve seen with my head sales, when you ask a lot more questions, they sell themselves, they help describe the problem in a much clearer way. And frame your technology or your value proposition into what they’re trying to solve, rather than from the topic of the goal is educating right where you want to educate them what you do.
Gene Hammett [22:48]
I’ll give you one of the keys that I use with them. And you’ll get it right away, is in the first half of the meeting, if they talked about what they were really trying to do, what they liked what they didn’t like, they would know what to stay away from, in the side, the second half of the presentation, which is we actually came up with this, instead of customizing the presentation, right, have a slide deck that had 30 slides or whatever it may be. And you actually because of the conversation, you know where the clients going, they would be able to go, we need slide four, seven and 11. And that’s all we’re going to talk about today. And so it’s kind of an audible if you follow sports. But they were listening in that first half selling themselves exactly like you said, but then in the presentation, it was zeroed in on exactly what to do. And they stayed away from the touchy areas or the things that could get them out of, you know, out of the running. Does that make sense?
Jory Schwach [23:45]
As we put a lot of things that that reminds me of investor meetings where you hit your idea, and then you’ve got an appendix that’s a mile long, and you’re trying to roll through the appendix to make sure you answer questions.
Gene Hammett [23:58]
So if you’re trying to talk less inside of the sales presentation, just and this goes for you and your team, it’s better to ask questions is what you said before and let them do most of the talking. Right.
Jory Schwach [24:16]
Make sense? Yep.
Gene Hammett [24:17]
So that’s part of it. It makes logical sense. So why is it an issue for you?
Jory Schwach [24:24]
I think that I tend to do because the tendency to educate is there’s a revision aspect to it. I think I find myself trying to figure out where there’s a gap between what I’ve explained and what I feel like they heard. And now maybe one of the takeaways that I’m picking up on is perhaps I should have materials that address each piece, and instead spend my time while I’m listening, seeing if the words I’ve already prepared or things that people have looked through, I can simply bring the right answers to answer those questions that are coming up.
Gene Hammett [25:00]
Yeah. I don’t know why my head’s going there. If you had a solar product, and they fell like, you know what we tried a solar product before? It’s absolutely not where we’re going, you wouldn’t waste half the meeting going look at my solar product, right? You would venture into something else where you’re like, let’s look at this differently. So that’s a part of it is, in general, in a sales situation, we should be asking more questions and less talking. Because here’s the thing, you can ask a long question, but a long question. Sometimes you lose, they lose their train of thought they don’t know how to answer, especially a compound questions get very convoluted. I try to I had to learn a lot here. This is like over Episode 600, on the show. Sure. And I used to do a little bit more compound questions. Now. It’s usually one question answer one question. So looking at this kind of from the top for you, asking questions is a much better way for your team to, to show up for a sales meeting, and let them do most of the talking. That makes sense, right?
Jory Schwach [26:09]
Actually, I think you were backstage, like, there’s a way that you can feel respected in that province. There’s something interesting about them.
Gene Hammett [26:17]
Here’s the interesting thing, like, I know they’re there, you’re there to educate them. But can’t your questions still educate them?
Jory Schwach [26:23]
100%, like leading 100?
Gene Hammett [26:26]
And if your questions are very, when you know your product very well, you’re able to go, have you thought of something like this, you’re able to lead them down the place of, of what you know, the value your product brains, when you ask the right question, and they sell themselves on the solution that you’re offering
Jory Schwach [26:45]
Actually the same feeling I was receiving when you were asking the questions, I think I would describe it as empathy. I talked a little slower, ensuring using fewer words, always a good one, and then empathy.
Gene Hammett [26:58]
Love that. And so, again, this is just the first part of this. Now, if you’re going on a sales team, it’s not just you, it’s your team, right? Correct. Um, you trust your team quite a bit. I do. In fact, you empower your team in a way that most company most leaders have not gotten to yet. Are you ready? Why wouldn’t you trust them to be the ones asking the questions instead of you?
Jory Schwach [27:24]
Yeah, I think I think at that point, I do. Well, it’s when I started talking, I found myself answering. I think that’s really good like gotcha.
Commercial [27:36]
Let me take a second here to remind you that if you want to keep getting episodes like this, you want to evolve as a leader that you want to make sure you go to genehammett.com/subscribe. genehammett.com is my home base, the podcast is Growth Think Tank. And if you want to be a visionary leader, if you want to keep learning from all of these amazing founder CEOs that go to genehammett.com/subscribe, so you don’t miss an episode.
Gene Hammett [28:02]
I did an interview with someone on the show. And the very simple aspect to this was, you know, I asked him, when did you know that you really were a strong leader. Because Funny enough, we had a meeting the other day with a strategic partner. And there were about 10 of us sitting around the room. This is before COVID. But he was said, at the end of the meeting, someone came up to him from the strategic partner side and said, Oh, yeah, by the way, Jeff, why are you here? He goes, I’m the CEO. He goes, Oh, I thought it was was Andy over here, I’m making up names. But he went out of that room, so proud of the team because they were able to take control to be leaders in the meeting, and him not have to exert any kind of authority or control whatsoever. Complete empowerment, because I knew that next time when I couldn’t show up, that they could handle this without me like a charm. Does that make sense?
Jory Schwach [29:01]
Yeah, I’d say a good guy and this morning. So that would be not only is it when they’re in the room by themselves, but it’s actually a good way to get the feedback, not only for your product, and also for the sales pitch, because then even if you’re just secondary in the meeting, even if you’re not there if you’re able to do the same process, ask questions, team. And ultimately, you’re not only going to talk you’re going to get that feedback loop from your team, the way you feedback with your customer. It seems like compounds all the way back to internal like that’s the way I’m hearing.
Gene Hammett [29:35]
So what we’ve been talking about here, I want you to recap for me, I’m talking less in a sales situation. What have you kind of discovered for yourself today?
Jory Schwach [29:44]
It’s a using tool like asking questions that drive me lower the barrier between your customer you to getting to the same outcome, a positive, mutually positive outcome and putting your team first is always going to make it, it’s going to enable you to spend time thinking about what you can do to further your vision, actually what I took away, I can get more time back, because not only am I empowering but also I’m finding I’m gonna get better for that. And actually, I was gonna make that the other thing that came to my mind, as you’re talking about this was oftentimes getting the truth can be difficult, right? When you build a practice, and you get your customers at to do this, a lot of people chase their tail end product, they’ll go with the customer, they need they want it, but actually what the customer needs. So I feel that the takeaways on I’m thinking is that asking questions has a much faster path to getting to truth, to get into what the re the reality of the situation.
Gene Hammett [30:51]
And you can always share your education through some some powerful questions and guide them to places where they might say, you know, I’m not sure how we do that. I’m not sure how we track that I’m not sure how we measured that I’m not sure how we were able to optimize that situation. And then you’re able to log that in so that in the time when you are in an education mode. Your words are very succinct to them. So you eventually are talking less you get that right. Yeah, I’m kind of curious, let’s step back up instead of just a sales situation, how does this apply to other meetings that you’re in and other situations where you might feel the need to talk more?
Jory Schwach [31:31]
Yeah, the extra tools, oftentimes, like the entrepreneurial operating system tools we use are designed around a combination of issues and questions the team is spending time trying to answer so you spend a lot more time productively problems. So actually, and that’s not like that’s what my team, this is a tool that we should use? Absolutely, let’s let’s go for it. Just empower them to drive it that way, I think may have built naturally a centric approach to internal meetings, which are often very productive. Unless they’re at ease, then all all bets are off. Yeah, I would, I would definitely do could probably even go further and builds the outcome questions right off the bat, like right here, I’d say, how do you ensure that this translates to your team success? And now, you spend time thinking about the answer rather than saying that.
Gene Hammett [32:30]
And let me remind you because I think this is something that a lot of people kind of understand at a surface level. But your job, as the leader of this team is not necessarily to tell them how to do something that’s not really empowering to tell them how to do it, is to ask questions that allow them to understand, do they understand the direction we’re going? Ask questions about why it’s important, ask questions about what could you do to help them? And when you when, when that series of questions is kind of run through. The idea is that someone has truly understood that you trust them if they own what’s next, which is, how to do it, what tools to use, what’s all the deadlines, stuff that goes with it, and they own all the challenges that come with this. And they own everything of the goal, as well as the process? That kind of makes sense when you’re asking questions, as opposed to telling them how to do something. And so, stepping back, again, Jory from the top level, I know, you said you might always struggle with this, I would, I would ask you to look at those languages and say, you know, it’s something I’m working on, and not say that you’re always struggling on it. Does that make sense?
Jory Schwach [33:45]
Yeah, it goes further? Yes. And very likely, it might just become a barometer for how well I’m doing under the guise of profits.
Gene Hammett [33:57]
Could you see the day or the point in which your team, you can walk into a team meeting doesn’t matter which team it was, it could be even the executive team, and you’re sitting back, and maybe not even saying a word, they are running the team, they’re running the meeting, everything is progressing through just like you’re not there. I’m not saying that you’re not there. But imagine them having that kind of autonomy to the growth of the business. Because one of the things I know for visionary leaders is they need to create more space to think, and more space. So that means removing themselves from meetings. And that definitely means they’re not running the meeting and talking all the time.
Jory Schwach [34:36]
Right, I’d say my number one current goal has been to eliminate myself from as many meetings as possible, which is not because I don’t want to be at those meetings. It’s because I know that actually, you put weights when you add more people or add more focus points that don’t necessarily core to the reason for the meeting. So yeah, It’s a really great tool is can you remove yourself completely from the meeting? still, be there if he wants it? But it’s completely.
Gene Hammett [35:09]
Perfect. That’s been helpful. Yeah, very.
Jory Schwach [35:15]
It’s good to hear that feedback, but also be able to reflect on what’s going on in real time. In meetings that we’re in, I probably can put that to work and see how things change.
Gene Hammett [35:26]
I think one of the good marks of a good coaching conversation is you being able to apply it very quickly and test it out. And having the confidence and clarity that, that I can do this if I left you with kind of the clarity of what you can do as you show up to these meetings to talk less.
Jory Schwach [35:44]
Yeah, I think that the value of good coaching isn’t the volume or the duration? It’s, it’s how effective the feedback is. Yes. It’s perfect in the coding, and it’s also clean, right?
Gene Hammett [36:02]
It’s all right, thanks for being here, sharing your journey with MDM. And being on the podcast.
Jory Schwach [36:09]
Yeah, I really appreciate it.
Gene Hammett [36:12]
So this wraps up another fantastic interview in the optimizer time series. We are really excited to be bringing you all these founders and CEOs and what they’re doing, that’s moving the needle for them as they optimize their time. Here’s the thing, they’re always evolving, you’re probably always evolving. If you want to have conversations about where you are, what your roadmap Ford is as a leader, and go to my website, genehammett.com. You can find a way to connect with me right now. It’s called start your journey. You can find some information, it’s absolutely free. I will help you create the roadmap to help you see what you can’t see for yourself. This is what I do as an executive coach to fast growth companies. So thanks for listening to this episode. As always, leave with courage. We’ll see you next time.
Disclaimer: This transcript was created using YouTube’s translator tool and that may mean that some of the words, grammar, and typos come from a misinterpretation of the video.
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