How to Build a High-Performing Team with Gary De Rodriguez

Source: GeniusDen archive transcript checked against the recording. Administrative opening and closing material is omitted; the presentation wording is otherwise preserved with light readability edits.

Gary De Rodriguez, I am passionate about helping people become more aligned in their businesses. And that means from strategic planning and strategic executive teams down to where staff meets customer, which is literally the profit center of your business. So my whole purpose is to help people stop the suffering between their ears, stop the disconnect between their ears, and begin to start showing up in a way that actually contributes to an overall culture of high performance. Number one, a culture is really based upon the collective well-being of each individual.

So if you have one individual that is offset and is not in the mode of uber-accountability, they can contaminate an entire team. How many of you ever worked in a team where there was one person that actually nosedived the entire culture? I was working in the law and pharmaceuticals and the VP hired me in to come in and work with their, come on in, to work with their global safety division, the most important division of the entire company. They were the last fail-safe check before a drug went to market. He had recruited for five years top scientists onto his team. In three months, the entire team started nosediving, and he had absolutely no idea why.

So I went in and was going to be about communication, right? I go in, and we start the training. At about half hour into the training, there's one individual who's acting like he's 13 on methamphetamine. And I stop and I go, you don't want to be here, do you? I think I was numb. I said, pack your stuff up and get out. Like, get out right now. Pack it up, get out. As soon as he'd left, the entire room took a collective breath. And I was like, oh, okay. So I said, is that the problem? And the whole team burst into about a thousand complaints simultaneously. I said, close your manuals. We're not doing this training today. We're going to redesign the department.

I said, what are the consequences if this continues? Twelve of his 25 top people said our resumes are already out. I said, great, the impact of that. How many of you think that that's a huge impact? Financially. Cost 400% of a high-level employee's annual salary to replace them. Do you think that that's a bleed out in the profit center that no one even recognizes or measures? It's a huge bleed-out. Attrition rate will kill a company. So we redesigned the entire company with him placed in another position. Because he was a quality assurance person that everyone had to go through. So everyone had to engage with this guy. And I had dinner that night with the VP, handed them our proposal.

And I said, the consequences of not enacting this is you're going to lose 10 to 12 people like within the month. He enacted 95% of our proposal. And we redesigned the entire department in a day. Do you think that that's important to be agile so that you can shift the bad apples immediately and take action immediately? So it's not this ongoing lengthy slow death of a culture of a department. Do you think that that's important? It's vital. All it takes is one. Culture by far is the most important element of your team's performance. If your culture's nosediving, then you're going to have a huge cut into your profit center. So building the right team is again being the right leader.

The number one thing that people quit their positions because of. The number one reason is that they do not trust the leadership capacity of management. And if you lose trust and respect of management, people will leave right, left and center. I'm working for a company currently. I went in to do a measurement of their culture. They hired 120 people in the beginning of 2015. At the end of 2015, they had 20 people left. Do you think that there's something wrong? Yes or no? Yes. There's something drastically wrong. So we went in and measured just one element of the team dynamic between what teams felt about their existing leader and the disparity of what they were actually experiencing, showing the gap between what they experienced and what they actually desired was incredibly telling.

It gave us a laser focus on what the team wants and what they're actually getting. So what we need to do is, first of all, look at who are we as leaders? Because whether you're a solo entrepreneur or you're running a larger organization, who you are as a leader is either going to inspire the trust of people that it really engenders a loyalty that can't be broken, or you're going to have a disconnect with your teams. And that disconnect is going to cost you a lot of money. Now, our company, we have offices in Singapore, Australia, and I've opened up offices here three years ago in Dallas. Our whole strategy, our whole philosophy, we were published by Bloomsbury Publishing House beginning of 2015.

And our whole premise and purpose is that we make teams profitable by lowering the attrition rate, investing in the human equity, training leadership skills across the strata of the organization. So the entire organization for where their profit center is, where staff meets customer up to the strategic planning levels and up to strategic management, everyone has the same language and the same responsibility of how to manage my own mental emotional management and how to have people intelligence, how to innovate, how to think strategically, and every single person has the same skills. What do you think that does to a team? Do you think that it empowers?

It absolutely matches and meets Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, which is that you create a culture of caring and people are self-actualized. If a company self-actualizes their staff, they become this cohesive whole of people that are grateful for the skills that improve every aspect of their life. And they've gotten it from a company that cares enough about them to invest in their well-being and happiness. I lived a lot in Australia. I worked down there for about three to six months for 14 years and lived down there for three. I worked for the largest pharmaceutical distribution chain in Western Australia. They hired me, and I worked with them for a solid year. At our very first company-wide training, the CEO

He got up and he said, I have no idea what he's gonna do, but I have total faith that he'll do it. And then he said, I don't care if you're with us for thirty days or thirty years. I want your life to improve and I want your life to become better as a consequence of knowing us, and walked off the stage. That company right now is the most successful pharmaceutical distribution chain in Australia. They're currently going nationwide. Why? Because of their talent retention, their succession planning, they stopped the bleed out of their high attrition rates, and they actually truly invest in their people on a monthly basis. Their incentive programs are philanthropically based.

They get together as a collective whole and go out into the communities and service the communities, right, left and center. Their brand is the most powerful brand in Australia. So our secret philosophy as people listening is we believe that we can create companies to be more profitable through staff retention, having a conscious capitalistic approach to business. What will happen is they will have more profit that they can pay forward into the communities in which they serve. Do you think our governments are ever going to do it? Everybody gets to say no. Do we? No. Our religious organizations give a good go, but it's too big of an issue. However, if we have entrepreneurs running businesses that turn into larger businesses and we can make them profitable through education on the one most mysterious thing of capitalism, that is the talent management aspects.

If we can make companies powerful and profitable, they can take that extra money and pay it forward in the communities that they serve, thereby building their brand even stronger by going out and actually making contributions where the communities are injured and hurt. I worked throughout the DeSoto School District in 2014. There were kids showing up who would absolutely take as much food from the cafeteria on their free lunch meals as they possibly could because they knew they weren't going to eat over the weekend. How wrong is that? There were kids that ate cardboard to fill up their stomachs so that they didn't have the pain of hunger. How wrong is that?

When companies could actually, if they invested in their human equity, stop the attrition rates, they would have the extra profit to pay it forward. Would that be a good thing? Would that streak fit a brand? Would that make you not only inspiring to your team members and your staff members but actually going out there and doing the one thing that you cannot do in any other way? Show a culture of caring, a brand of actualization, and get out there and change the communities. So, in order to build the right team, you better be an inspiring enough leader to actually win the trust of people and then prove it through consistent behavior that engenders the trust of top-level talent because people do not become engaged and loyal to an organization.

Because of the pay, they become engaged with the organization because of what they feel in the four walls of the culture that constitutes and makes up that organization. So, leadership, Drucker. How many of you have heard of Peter Drucker? He's a very cool guy. He was one of the world's most influential business gurus. Accept leadership not as a rank, but as service. So, when the leader himself or herself steps into the place of their big why. How many of you have answered your big why? I'm serious about the big why here. How many of you have answered that for yourself? Like, you know what your big why is. Like, what the hell is my purpose? Why do I get up and drive this project or idea forward?

What is your big why? How many of you have answered that show of hands? Cool. Your big why is always going to be based upon your values. Your values are your deepest subconscious filter that once discovered and aligned because your top five are going to drive your behavior. Those top five values better be merged into your mission statement and your value statement for what's driving whatever entrepreneurial business or business that you're doing. If it is, you will have the emotional juice to see it through and make sure it's congruent. The worst thing an organization can do is say this is what we stand for. And then throughout the workplace, inconsistency, incongruency is showing up from leadership down to the teams that meet.

Your clients. Now here's the deal. Where do you think your absolute profit center is? Because if you're not inspiring your lowest level employees, the people that actually meet your customers, then your brand sucks. Because if they can't demonstrate it, they're not inspired enough. And if they're not inspired enough, you have failed as a leader to infuse them with that level of inspiration to carry that forward into that interchange between the customer. And when they do, your brand does this. It does that. Now, I generally fly Southwest. And this is a few years ago. Southwest has kind of done that. But I was in, where was I? I was doing a talk in California.

And I was in San Diego. And I was eating at this restaurant. I had my suitcase with me. And it was an outdoor restaurant. And there was this group of women that was at the table next to me. And so one of them kind of hollered over at me and she said, are you traveling? And I go, yeah, I'm traveling. She goes, who are you flying? I go, I always fly Southwest. She leaped up out of her chair, ran over to me, threw her arms around me, hugged me and said, thank you for flying our airline. Have you ever seen a Delta employee do that? Or a United employee do that? Or an American employee ever do that? Have you? I thought to myself, that's branding. So what we desire to do is inspire through leadership.

Next one, it's not a service. You've got to serve your people. It is not a rank. Next one, earn and keep the trust of others. What do you think creates trust? Someone yell it out to me, or I will call on the most embarrassed-looking person in the room. Keep your promises. Right, keep your promises. What else? Doing what you say you're going to do. So it's consistent behavior, yes or no? And being that leader in a crisis situation. How many of you have ever been in a crisis situation and watched a leader crash and burn right in front of your eyes? Crash and burn. So what do you think the leader has done, and why do you think they crashed and burned?

It's because fear was motivating them rather than reason, thinking, and mental-emotional management. Fear. You know what fear does? It dumps neuropeptides, [unclear phrase about the reptilian brain], and then additionally dumps all kinds of adrenaline, all kinds of cortisol in your body, and biologically shuts down your frontal lobes, which means you go stupid and you cannot reason. How many of you have ever been afraid before? Oh, cool, we have some oxygen in the room. So when you get afraid, what happens is that you literally stop your capacity to reason. If you taught yourself a seven-step strategic thinking strategy, you could work your way out of anything.

But most people are never taught to think. How many have ever taken a course in thinking? But did you take strategic thinking courses? Yes. Unless you take at least seven different perspectives of a problem, you do not have enough data to make a decision. So think about it this way. Why do teams actually get frustrated, like really frustrated, with management? It's because they're never asked their perspective on how we can change this particular point of operation, how we can actually improve the flow. What can we do that the historical problems are constantly showing up that management never addresses them? How many of you think that management always knows everything?

Anybody in the room? How many have ever led teams? I've led teams of like 120 people. Scariest, the scariest thing I've ever done. How many of you got leader shame, meaning that you know you're in a position of leadership, but you also know you don't know? Everybody should be raising their hand in this room. You also know you don't know, which means there's an aspect that you don't know. I was training at a university down in Australia called Edith Cowan University, and I was with all these PhDs that had done every leadership training in the world. And at one point I said to them, how many of you have got leader shame? There was a collective gasp in the room.

Like, oh my God, that's exactly what I feel on a daily basis. It's like, I'm supposed to know, because I've got a PhD at the end of my title, but I don't know. And I have one eye forward and one eye behind me trying to figure out who knows that I don't know. Anybody ever work in an academic setting? Oh, it's very difficult. So live with integrity. Keep your word at all costs. How many of you think it's challenging to be a leader? Keep your integrity, be consistent. And as a servant leader, it's super difficult. We're going to be diving into that a little bit later. If we have the time, I'm going to show you some processes that will train you in mental and emotional management as a leader.

And if I have to blast through the slides to stay on time, I most certainly will. I think we'll have enough. Be consistent. Be accountable. I want to speak to just a little bit about accountability, because it's huge. If we have extreme accountability as a staff member, as a manager, as a leader of an organization, extreme accountability, which means that if something is going wrong, who are and what are you going to do? Who are you going to be and what are you going to do? One of the premises of having extreme accountability is that when you are looking out of your eyes at the problem, if you have a team that is doing this, pointing the finger to others for the reason why it's falling down, that is the first indicator of toxicity in the workplace.

If you let it grow, you will create massive disconnect. You will actually permit the one virus that runs through all organizations. I'm a victim, and it's not my fault. And you'll never be able to push a product or a service or a new idea or your innovations out to market successfully, because not everyone in the particular team has taken extreme accountability. What if, as a foundational process of your culture, was we take extreme accountability? That is what is introduced at the onboarding. That is part of the cultural DNA of your organization. If no one does that, you do this first, you find out what your contribution is to that problem. You generate through a seven-perspective thinking style and cycle to begin to start innovating new ideas.

And this can be from a frontline server in a restaurant. You say, this is as much your responsibility as it is me, and I own the company. What is your idea about how we can actually streamline the historical issues that are happening here? I mentioned I ran a company with 120 people. We were losing $11,000 a month in equipment repair and truck repair costs. I literally did not know what to do. I couldn't give raises. I couldn't give bonuses. I had no resolution. So I called everybody into the warehouse and I said, we've got a problem. It's a company problem. I have absolutely no idea how to resolve it. I want to turn this next hour into an innovation hour, and I need to harvest the genius that's in this room that I don't have.

We've presented the problem. I broke them up into pods of thinking to begin to start generating ideas to help us solve this problem as a team. Do you think that's a good idea? It is the most powerful team building process you can do. Why? Because you self-actualize your people. We're all the same. We all have this unending wound, not loved enough, not seen enough, not acknowledged enough, and people didn't care about us. Now, when people come into the workplace, do you think that they leave all their family of origin stuff behind them? Yes or no? They drag it right into the team, they project it and transfer it all over their team members, and before you know it, you have a clustered mess.

This is why people get really frustrated managing their talent. You know why? Because no one has given those employees the initial skills and tools to empower them to have their own mental and emotional management, to take extreme accountability for their emotional states, to stop the blame, step into innovation, and resolve it no matter what stage of the work they're in, no matter what position they hold. And when that staff member and you're onboarding someone and you're interviewing someone, you go, we develop the talent, and we hold you accountable to innovate solutions so that you're seen, heard, and we harvest your genius.

Do you want to play with us? Or do you not? Because if you're here to be a victim, this is not the place for you. If you're here to be an entrepreneur, an intrapreneur, an innovator, a change agent so that we can actually take this organization, make it more profitable, so we can pay it forward in communities that we're serving, and we can begin to start healing the pain that is all around us if you want to play at that level. Come on then. When was the last time you went to a job interview, and someone actually said that to you? And what would you do if someone said that to you? Would you go, wow, like this is a different kind of company to work for.

Because my whole premise is, my whole passion, I'm only 65 now, and I'm thinking, I've got like 10 more years of 14-hour days in me. And in these next 10 years, it's going to be full pedal to the metal, because I desire to transform as many organizations as possible so they can have this massive effect as big as possible throughout the communities that we're existing in. Do you think that's a good mission? That is my big why. That's why I get up, that's what I do, that's why I work as hard as I do because I'm passionate about that. Oh, by the way, how many of you are you gonna grow? Seriously. This is an inevitability, right? I began my whole career working in the AIDS community.

Remember AIDS? [Brief audience response unclear.] So 35 years ago, this was when people were pulling oxygen machines behind them and they were homeless because no hospital would take them, their families kicked them out, and they had no place to go but sleep on the street with their oxygen tank attached to them. That's where I started. And I started by creating the AIDS Holistic Response Program in Southern California, which turned into a nationally sponsored program. The deal with that was, I saw more people die than anybody my age should have seen. What I noticed was some people clawed at the sheets to stay in their bodies because they knew—[unclear aside about the time of death]—they knew they did not do what they came here to do.

How many of you know you've got something to do here and you've got a bloody purpose? And the more you live it, the more you can dance out of your body. And the less you live it, the more you're going to claw at the sheets of your bed to stay in your body because you know you didn't do it. Are you with me? This is not a game. This is not something we can retract the time that we've wasted. This is actually a time of massive action. So, these are the leaders core tasks. Number one, develop a set of cultural standards. Here's the deal. The values that you establish, which is no easy task, by the way, don't get on the internet and try to do a values analysis because you will not get them.

You will not get them. They're deeply unconscious. It has to be done in a one-on-one setting and you get to do contrastive analysis to get them. You'll have 'em. The values become the cultural standards. Have I been talking about cultural standards here so far? Thinking strategies, people intelligence, innovation and self-leadership, extreme accountability get to be some of the cultural standards and from onboarding, even advertising for new talent, and then onboarding from that point, at that first touch point, that has to be infused throughout and it must be demonstrated not only by management but every single staff member. That gets to be, in my opinion, what they get to be reviewed on before you even advance them in their careers.

How have they demonstrated your core standards? Next, develop systems of appreciation, and it's not always money, by the way. It's not always money. I was talking to a district manager of a company I'm working with that's in five states, and the head of corporate—they're in operations—the head of corporate. He said, 'God, Gary, I'm so glad you called me. I just got off the phone with, I'll call him Fred, with Fred, and he's berating us that our debt ratios are too high, our bad debt ratios are too high. And he accused us of not working hard enough.' One of the district managers hasn't seen her four-year-old son since November because she has such high attrition rates because they pay so low in an area where call centers pay very high.

It's in Utah. They're starting their staff off at $16 an hour. This company only starts them off at $9. And they've worked them like dogs. She works no less than 14 hours to 16 hours a day. And here is the CEO of corporate accusing them of not pulling their weight. They, every one of the district managers flipped out and hung up the phone on a weekly call to corporate. I'm gonna have to do some housecleaning there, aren't I? So, what is that? It's a complete ignorance of what and disconnect between departments of an organization. If you don't know what every team member is actually experiencing as a leader, you haven't done your job. And you're not doing your job.

You're disconnected in the [unclear phrase about personal significance]. You've got to get out of it and find out what every member of your team is actually experiencing. So that you know. Remain consistent. We've already spoken about that. Earn the trust of the team by remaining consistent. Next, measure your culture. Now, this is really important. I go into companies to measure culture before I ever suggest trainings. Because I want to have whatever I suggest custom to that organization. I desire to have it absolutely based upon what the team has identified is what they are lacking to feel the most empowered within the organization.

If you roll out any kind of staff development training without data, then you're really shooting blindly. And you're developing blindly. You have to know what the team needs. Next, develop your people. Create a culture of caring. Create a culture of caring that empowers them across the board in every aspect of their life. What you will have is an organization that stays loyal to each other because people don't leave because of money. They leave because of people, primarily leadership. Next, hire the right talent. So, there's a whole process for actually hiring the right talent. So, you have to assess. You have to interview. You have to have a powerful set of questions to uncover.

Most importantly, whoever is assessing new applicants has to be trained in how to actually listen for the hidden meaning under the answers that come. How many of you know that language reveals how a person thinks? Language is everything. I've coached 11,600 people worldwide. That's a lot of problems to listen to. And one of the things I learned was I could go down to the bone with a client in five minutes by a set of two questions that will uncover their deepest core issues based upon the language choices they answer the questions in. I'll know exactly what the issue is. So, it's streamlined. Language reveals thinking. This is why when someone speaks based upon their vocabulary and their word choices, you know exactly what's happening at the deep structure inside of them.

Listen to politicians. And you'll become very curious about how they actually think. So, hire the right talent. There's a process called metaprograms, which I'm going to be demoing when we get to that particular point of the presentation, which reveals, I only ask probably 12 questions. I can ask 12 questions and know more about you than you've ever known about yourself. They are the deepest unconscious filters a human being has. How many's ever heard of metaprograms before? Robert, that's because you've trained with me. But metaprograms, nobody even knows about. I can ask you one question and I can figure out whether you're going to stay on that job consistently doing the same thing for more than a year or whether you're going to have to be moved to another level of responsibility or you're going to blow out of the space and quit.

Now, let me just ask you. Do you think that that would be a useful thing to know if you were hiring someone, whether they could do repetitive work or whether they had to have variety? Would you think that that would be useful? Absolutely. Be absolutely useful. I had a secretary. She was fabulous. She was Spanish, Filipino, and Greek. Professional belly dancer. She had tattoos before women had tattoos. She was the most exotic thing I'd ever seen. She had purple and green and turquoise dreads. And she'd come in and she'd sit in my office at the front desk and people would walk in and go, oh, it's like a light show.

Her name was Kali. So, guess what happened when Kuwait Petroleum sent 20 of their top leaders to me to train? First thing they saw was Kali. It was very interesting. They were like, we have not seen something like this before. She was a wild woman. And what I knew about her is that she sorted on differences, which means that I had to change her position. I had to give her different tasks weekly, which I did. I kept her for five years. She never worked at a job more than one year. It's because they didn't know. And she was the most brilliant secretary P.A. I've ever had. So, talk about being able to pick the right talent. This is Extended DISC, a graph that depicts it.

Extended DISC is the most researched behavioral profiling tool in existence. The origins of it date all the way back to Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine. Most of the assessment tools out there that are called a variety of different things are based upon this. I use this because this is the most researched behavioral profiling tool on the planet. And so, I trust it. Now, this is quite important from the perspective that you want to be able to pick the right person for the right role, which presupposes you're going to have your role definitions clearly defined. So, when you have your role definitions clearly defined, you can hire smarter.

So, D, dominant driver, this is the individual that will take a project, create innovation, start to actually drive a project forward and make things happen. Their weakness is that they never stick to one thing. They're constantly churning and developing constantly. Their downfall is that they will burn up their teams and they will become quite emotionally incorrigible if they are taken advantage of or have a perception that they've been taken advantage of. So, those are the downsides of DISC. That's the upsides of DISC. I is the individual that is the networker, the person that goes out and makes the front contact. They can grab a microphone and they can inspire people.

They can get on, they can network, they can sell, they can do all the people stuff, and they love it. Their strength is, it's all about people to them. Their downside is, I don't say downside, but their developmental area.