Bruce McLeod - Building a Healthy Company Framework

In 3, 2, 1.

Welcome back to Becoming Preferred, the podcast where we help you level up your business and become the best version of you.

We talk a lot on this show about how individuals can become the preferred choice in their industry.

But what about the ecosystems we build?

What happens when a company grows so fast that it starts to consume the very people who made it successful?

Our guest today has the dark side of rapid growth from the front row of Corporate America.

Bruce McLeod is the founder of Company Connections and the author of the Healthy Company Framework.

Bruce has developed a revolutionary approach to business that doesn't start with the balance sheet or the C Suite's wealth.

It starts with the health of the employee.

Today we're going to discuss how to heal your organization, why People first is actually the ultimate growth hack, and how to build a legacy that lasts far.

Beyond the next quarterly report.

Join me now for my conversation with Bruce McLeod.

Well, hi, Bruce.

Welcome to the program.

We're delighted to have you.

Hey, thanks so much for having me.

I'm excited to be here.

Yeah, I'm excited to have you here.

Now, where are we speaking to you from today?

Coming out of Birmingham, Alabama.

Beautiful.

Nice and warm this time of year.

You guys warm up before the rest of the company, so you thaw out before everybody else does.

I think we've got lots in bloom.

The aals are in bloom.

Just about anything you can imagine.

Of course, that comes with a whole lot of pollen, but that'll go away in a little bit.

And that's just a good side effect of having all the good stuff here.

So if you've got allergies, it's not a fun time, but pretty part of the country.

So you're.

And great food where you are, too.

So glad speaking to you in your home turf.

I'm excited about this subject matter.

We've not really covered it within the podcast and we're on season six, and it's what's unique is looking at companies and how do we make companies better and how do we become healthy as companies?

Before we get into it, though, and some of those details, let's go back to where Bruce started.

You're back in high school.

You're deciding what you want to be when you grow up.

How did you get on this path?

What was the initial plan and how did you end up here?

Well, it's ironic as life often is.

I was a music major, so loved trombone performance.

That's, you know, that was my passion.

I went to college to.

To do trombone and I chose performance because I didn't want to teach people.

I said, no, I don't want to be a conductor, an educator.

Well, like most of the men in my family, we all were music majors and wound up in software because.

Right.

That helps pay the bills.

But throughout all of that, I really learned my style of just sort of approaching problems, included a lot of the components that ended up writing this book.

So the Healthy Company Framework.

Right.

That's the book.

And all of the pieces in there, I realized I was doing since college.

So how I got better at my grades, how I started departments, how I did well at my jobs included all these pieces and components.

And I eventually realized that I'm most successful when I put all this stuff together.

And it got to a point to where I said, what I could do is keep sort of helping out with point solutions and projects.

Or I can be a lot more effective if I make this methodology, codify it into something that is, I think, universally applicable and infinitely scalable.

And that's how I wound up here.

I felt it was very easy to write the book.

Really want to tell people about, you know, I think the impact it'll have.

Well, that's interesting.

Well, it's interesting with the music background.

My father was a professional musician as well, trumpet player.

So I grew up playing trumpet and bass.

So I get it.

Trombonist.

And I think you guys have eight positions in a trombone, if I recall.

Something like that.

We got seven.

We got seven.

So that's what it is.

All right.

That's pretty good, though.

It was pretty close.

Most people probably wouldn't know that one.

But what's interesting is what made you pick this subject matter.

So you're doing what you're doing.

So you've got a front row seat to, let's call it corporate dysfunction, if you will.

So you've spent a dozen years in corporate America watching rapid growth actually hurt companies.

What's the single most common symptom of a company?

That it's growing too fast for its own health.

I think just sort of the recognition that, boy, we aren't small anymore.

That's usually a pretty lagging indicator of things.

Sort of.

I write in the book, pain is a lagging indicator.

I use the example you start getting a headache because you're dehydrated.

That didn't start when you realized, hey, I've got a headache.

That started when you stopped drinking water the night before the trip before, whatever it is.

Right.

And I think it's sort of that lagging realization of, oh, we aren't Communicating like we used to.

When you have that realization of we aren't communicating like we used to, that is arguably a little late to act.

But that's the second best time to act.

Kind of, you know, they talk about best time to plant a tree is 30 years ago.

Second best time is right now.

So when you realize we as a company aren't communicating as well as we used to, that's a wonderful time to say, hey, how did we get here?

Yeah.

Do you see similar problems across different organizations, depending on their size, where you can almost predict the kind of health issues they're going to run into, if you will?

Yeah, I really think you can.

You go into sort of, hey, this has always worked for us.

People get this sort of a good cadence of, hey, we've operated this way for maybe, you know, a year or maybe 10 years or even 20 years.

I've seen where you go, hey, this has always worked for us.

We just need people who are good enough to do that old pattern that usually is right before you realize, hey, we need to change our system.

Because right.

At some point you can work faster, you can work harder, but at some point that doesn't go well enough.

I'll use a music analogy and you should relate to this, having played trumpet yourself.

But I had a professor in a lesson one time say, hey, that was really good.

Let's do it to a metronome now, let's do it a little faster.

And we got up to I think 120 clicks.

He said, okay, now Bruce, at what point are you going to start double tonguing this exercise?

Right.

Because you know, music wise, you can single tongue, double tongue or triple tongue to be more articulate.

And he recognized that while I was really good at single tonguing, at some point I was going to have to learn a new technique and switch to double tonguing.

I think the same thing applies in business where you go, hey, we've operated this way for months or years.

And when you start having those communication problems, that may be a good indicator that, hey, we might need to change how we do things just because we're at a scale we haven't previously been at.

Well, you talk about this, that companies, they lose that ability to solve new problems with new solutions because they're stuck in their old processes in ways.

So they have the manual processes to solve high volume problems, which leads to, of course, employee burnout.

And, you know, their best people end up suffering from it.

Now you teach and believe that an advocate for the employee.

In other words, you can't have a healthy company without healthy employees.

Is that the starting place typically for most companies?

I don't know if it's for most companies, but I think it's the right place to start because you've got countless books out there about how to cultivate your customer.

Most schooling is on how to take care of your shareholder.

Even if you're the shareholder.

Right.

If you're the business owner, you're the shareholder.

There's not a lot out there that really helps companies take care of the employees.

Now, I'll tell you, there are loads of books about how you, an individual, can do better.

And I think the healthy company framework can help with individuals.

But it's a good recognition for, I think, company leadership to say, hey, are we doing the best job we can at making sure the employees are taken care of?

Are we as sort of the coaches doing a good job at making sure they're in the best position to win at their job, whatever that is.

Do you see common problems with the employees?

Like, what kinds of things do you see that will have a material impact on the business itself?

I think one of the biggest that is maybe hard for some people to recognize because they're too familiar with the problem.

But at some point, the employees no longer understand how they impact the vision.

Right.

As a business owner, as somebody in upper management, you say, well, yeah, I know what my KPIs are, my OKRs.

I know the vision we're trying to do.

I know what we're trying to do next quarter, next year, everything.

You're going 100 miles an hour.

And the person on the front line is going, yeah, I have no clue how my job affects what you end up getting paid.

Sure.

And when I don't have that connection, well, I'm not going to care or I'm going to be working too hard on the wrong thing.

Right.

So they're putting all their time and energy into something that doesn't move the needle.

And that disconnect really hurts.

That's where I go back to communication.

When you feel like you're not communicating as well, maybe you as the business leader have a great vision and you keep touting it very well and you're just confused why people don't seem to be jumping on board with things.

So I think that's a very common tell.

A couple other just really ones that jump out to me are when you have high turnover in a department.

I worked at one company where One department of 10 or 20 people, which was, I'll call it 5% of the company was responsible for 50% of the company's turnover.

One department should not by far and away be leading your company's turnover.

That's a pretty good indicator too.

Gosh, we've got something going on here.

Another good indicator that maybe easy to dismiss in your mind is when your long tenured people or your superstars start either leaving or checking out.

Because your long tenured people generally care a lot about what they do.

They care about themselves, right?

They care about the product they deliver to you.

And when they start checking out, it's usually not a personal change as much as it is the environment around them has changed to a degree.

They can no longer produce their top quality work.

Do you find that there are things going on a personal level like I know it'll work for me sometimes is it's a place to go, it's a nice distraction sometimes from daily issues.

Right.

We all have lots of stress going on in our lives.

Everyone's dealing with stress, just different levels of it.

So when they bring that into the workforce, it's how important is it to really work on the individual and do you address that in your framework at all and what the individual can do to get themselves in a healthy place or to create that healthy environment?

So there's not a lot that the book focuses on as far as, you know, not bringing in the outside, personal things into the workplace.

Right.

I do talk about boundaries a good bit.

One of the things that's hard or difficult to do sometimes is to say, hey, I've brought in too much of the home life, the outside world into my job.

That's not good.

But then more of what the book talks about is the I'm pouring too much of myself into my job that has evolved into me doing other people's jobs.

So that's more of where the book does address some of that.

People are stretched too thin because they're overperforming, right?

So a lot of superstars will, in order to help either their own job or the company, or because they love what they do, they start taking on a lot of micro work from other departments.

And that's where the boundaries can really help.

Because it's very important to understand what the people left and right of you do.

And it's also very important that you not do their job for them.

And I'm not talking about you can never step up for somebody.

Right?

We all have to pitch in here and there.

But that's a way that the book does help with individuals being able to say, gosh I feel like I'm doing too much.

How do I not do that?

Interesting.

Most traditional frameworks, and you teach a framework, prioritize shareholder value above everything else, you kind of flip that on its head.

So why is starting with the employee actually the most profitable long term strategy for the C suite?

Yeah.

So if you say, hey, all we have to do is hit next quarter's numbers, you're going to make a lot of sacrifices.

This is a bit hyperbolic, but you may or may not know the human head weighs roughly 10 pounds.

So the easiest way to lose 10 pounds, you could argue, would be to cut off your head.

Okay.

I don't advocate, don't recommend that, do not do that.

Right.

But oftentimes in business you can do that.

A real world example, Circuit City was a giant back in the day and a buddy of mine experienced this.

He was one of the higher paid managers there.

And to help save money, they said, we're going to fire every manager that's making more than X number of dollars.

And that did it.

That helped them with that quarter.

It didn't help them long term.

When you invest in the individual, when you invest in your employees and say, hey, if I have people that really want to work here and are really connected to where I want to take this business, you end up with a whole lot of wins.

You're not having to spend any time or effort training people to take care of your customer.

They want to do that.

Right.

You have people who are giving you better ideas about, hey, here's how we can make sure we stay ahead in the marketplace, react to this change, handle this downturn, do all those other kinds of good things.

You also have a workforce that says, hey, come work with me.

Come work where I work.

You want to work here?

What does that do to your recruiting efforts?

Well, now, you aren't necessarily working to find people.

You're going, I can now find the best people from a great pool of talent and, and on and on there.

There are many more benefits of that.

Well, you're attracting them.

And it's that culture, that environment where it's a safe environment and the workforce has changed.

I mean, and what people view as healthy and do you see a difference with employee health related to the different generations?

We've got five generations of workers still out there today, so baby boomers all the way down.

And I remember, you know, the younger folks today, and I'm not saying they're wrong on this, it's actually probably healthier where they go, hey, you know what I'm taking a personal day or, and you talked about boundaries or I don't feel at it today, therefore I'm, you know, I'm gonna not come in.

My generation was, suck it up, buttercup.

You know, you got a job to do and just do it.

It was work and perform.

And I'm not saying that's the best way.

For me, it worked out fine, but I sort of get it.

I mean, if you're taking advantage of it, it's one thing.

But do you notice a difference within the different generations, within workforce and what healthy looks like?

I do.

And I think with the, you know, I'll just sort of broadly say the older and younger generation.

And I'm going to put millennials.

I'm a millennial.

I'm going to put us kind of on the fence.

Right.

Because depending on the person, okay, are they the youngest sibling or the oldest sibling?

You're going to get a very different sort of millennial.

But healthy, I think to some people means, hey, the company's doing well and my paycheck's okay.

And there's a lot more willingness to sacrifice, a lot more personal well being because those other things are there.

And I think it's exactly flipped on its head the younger you get.

Right.

I don't really care about the paycheck.

I care about how I'm feeling as a person.

Am I contributing to the group?

Do I understand how my work is getting there?

Do I understand?

Do I believe in even where the company's going?

Am I feeling valued?

Yeah, exactly.

Because if the company can't say, here's where we're headed and here's how you personally make a difference, then I don't want to work here.

Even if you're paying me six figures.

Yeah, I'll go work somewhere that's paying me minimum wage because, boy, I like the people and I like what we're doing.

Yeah, I have to admit that's.

That was eye opening for me.

Like, I grew up old school.

It was about the paycheck and you did the job and the task and you kind of moved on.

But today is creating that culture, that environment at the safe place to work.

You need your needs met.

But beyond that, it's Maslow's hierarchy.

Right, all over again.

You've got to move up your food chain and go from there.

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And now back to my conversation with Bruce McLeod.

I love some of the words that you use in the language you use.

Call it healing the individual to save the company.

That sounds almost clinical for a business book.

But what does a wounded employee look like in a corporate setting?

And how does that wound drain the company's bottom line?

I'll take two sort of ends of the spectrum where you've got the superstar and the underperformer.

So the underperformer is really doing what they're allowed to do.

So the underperformer is there because their manager or their boss or whoever is ultimately okay with what they're doing.

Now you may say, no, I'm not okay with the underperformer.

Well then how do they still have their job?

Because if you weren't okay with it, they would have been fired, they would have been corrected, they would have been doing whatever.

They're doing what they're allowed to do, right?

And frankly, that's also the superstar.

They're also doing what they are allowed to do.

And that's a double edged sword that ultimately hurts both people, right?

So you can say, hey, I love my superstar.

They're going above and beyond.

They're doing all this extra stuff.

You might even be saying to yourself, boy, what a deal.

I'm paying them for this one role.

And I mean secretly I know they were doing like two, three, maybe four jobs.

But hey, if that's what they want to do, then that's okay.

Because again, maybe you're of the older mindset where it's hey, okay, everything for the paycheck.

They're obviously okay with it.

Yeah, they're high Achievers.

Yeah.

At some point that breaks, right?

The underachievers are hurting your customers, they're hurting your co workers.

They're certainly not recruiting the best talent there.

And the superstars, they get burned out, they start dropping more.

They start, and I talk about this in the book a little bit.

Superstars can have a negative effect in that they train people into incompetence.

If you and I are working together and you always do half of my job, well, after enough time, I'm going to think my whole job is only the half that you've left for me.

So then when you come to me and say, hey, Bruce, you haven't been doing your fair share, I'm going to say, absolutely not.

I've been doing everything you've expected from me for the past six months or years.

So, you know, I'll go into.

One of the techniques that I have in the framework is what I call success scorecards.

And it's a way to say, hey, here's what we expect from everybody.

This is sort of a baseline that we need everybody to perform to.

I talk about some people are more familiar with this in terms of PIPs, Performance Improvement Plans.

Right.

But the time to introduce, am I doing a good job at my job?

Shouldn't be when you're trying to fire me.

That should be something on the very front end.

You say, hey, here's what we expect of you.

Here's what we want you to get done.

Here's how you get this done.

Here's sort of how much we need you to get done so that out of the gate, you know what's expected of you, that helps bring in and normalize some of the, hey, you're overachievers.

We appreciate it, we love it, and we need you here for the next 20 years.

We don't want you to burn out.

Hey, person who is just trying to get the bare minimum done, here's what we say the bare minimum is.

So I think I answered the question, but that's one way to say, hey, here's how both the superstar and underperformer can hurt your business.

But then one part of the framework that helps you say, how do I fix both of those with a single technique?

You know, like, I've always been high achiever, but I know what it's like to burn out and to feel burnt out.

Right.

You're just overachieving.

So there's that happy medium and that boundary you talk about, and it's about setting those boundaries for seeking out new employees.

If we're going to be hiring and recruiting.

Is there a way to identify that middle ground where they've got, you know, they've got potential to develop to a high performer and to identify them if they're not that way?

I think you can.

You know, the framework itself begins with what I call a good foundation.

That's the first principle is having a good foundation.

And that helps you connect where your company's going, why a job matters, what a person does and how they're supposed to win at their job.

And what's nice about that is that covers, as you mentioned, all five generations.

So you can say, hey to the person that needs to feel connected to where the company's going.

That takes care of that.

You can say, well, I just need to get my job done and perform.

You have those expectations already set and somebody who says, hey, I just need my paycheck.

Okay, well, simpler conversation, but all of that's there.

You, as an employer who has these things figured out is able to really ask better questions and give candidates better information.

So you can know not just, hey, they seem like a good personality fit.

Right.

But you have some of the technical details.

Even if you don't do the job, you can have some good questions to ask people.

I'll give you an example.

One of the roles I was hiring for was very checklist oriented.

It was a very detailed, contract like thing where you really couldn't miss anything.

And I asked a candidate a question.

I said, do you like checklists?

And they went well.

Right.

Then I knew they weren't the candidate.

I didn't have to hear anything else they said because it's a role where if you don't go, man, I love checklists.

Let me tell you about the checklists I've made for my personal life.

I have checklists for my checklists.

Yeah.

You're not going to this job.

No.

And so if you don't like the job, I don't want you to have it either because you're going to be miserable.

No matter what the pay is, no matter what the other things is, even if you can muscle through it, you're going to make the rest of the team miserable.

Right?

Yeah.

When you go to the detail of saying, hey, I want to know how to structure these things as far as knowing my jobs, knowing how things should be, I've corrected the under and over.

Performers, you can ask way better questions for your candidates you're looking to hire.

Good point.

You mentioned superstar.

Let's talk about superstar retention strategies.

We've all Seen the superstar employees, they burn out, they leave.

But beyond just paying them more, what does the healthy company framework suggest is the real secret for keeping top talent when the pressure's on?

Yeah, so I think you've got two kinds of superstars.

You've got the one that's happy in their current role and they want to stay there forever, and you've got the one that wants to climb the ladder.

Right.

So I'll try and address both of those.

The superstar that is just.

I had somebody tell me this one time, they understand their little cog and the whole company, but they love being their little cog.

And you need people like that.

Right.

It's important to, for especially that superstar's role, know what the upper end of the limit looks like and know what the boundaries of that role are.

Because, yes, the superstar can keep taking on more and more at your current pace of business, but if you're looking to grow your company and your company grows, all of a sudden, they're going to burn out real fast.

So having those good boundaries of here's what the role looks like, here's what we expect from this role, and you're always at the top end.

You can monitor that to say, is it realistic to now say, hey, we need to raise everybody up, or is it realistic to say they're an anomaly, they're just so good at this job that this is, you know, way at the top end.

The framework helps you really do a good job of understanding sort of that balance and giving you the right tools to make informed decisions around that.

And that can help prevent burnout from top talent going into the superstar that wants to either climb the ladder or just work different jobs.

I have a friend who, he gets bored.

He's so brilliant, he can't work in the same role year after year because he's become the expert at it and needs to move on.

When you use the healthy company framework, I'll jump to the third component, which is know what you're doing.

It operates in what I call a 20, 60, 20 way of thinking, where people don't just know how to do their job, but they know who is left of them and right of them.

What do I mean by that?

Well, you have to know who hands me work, and am I communicating with them in a way that makes sure they're equipping me?

Well, the last 20% is the inverse.

Who do I give my work to, and am I actually giving them the work they need?

You might think all I have to do is my job.

That's 60% of it.

That's a good start.

You have to take a full 20, 60, 20 approach to really know what you're doing, I think as an individual.

But when you apply that to a company, what you're able to do is understand how all work is connected throughout your company.

So for the superstar that wants to move up or move on, they've got an easy built in bridge, an easy built in map to say, I know where all this stuff goes throughout the whole company and this job does or doesn't interest me.

I now can communicate better with upper management because I want to go higher up the corporate ladder or this other department really interests me.

And I've been working on talking to these people to get over there to know those things.

So it gives the superstar really a built in map as well as you, the business owner, a built in map of how work moves across and throughout the company.

I can see where your background in music, it really comes and lends value to this because it's.

If you take an orchestra or a band, you've got your orchestra conductor.

All right, so you're a leader.

But now you might have solo acts.

You know, like in trumpet, I was not a first trumpet, I was a third trumpet.

So my dad was a first trumpet.

I just didn't have the lip.

And so I was good filling in.

I was a good player, could play the music.

But then I looked at the drums and I went, that's a cooler job.

So I want to go learn percussion.

So I went to learn percussion.

And then when you got to do a solo, it was fun.

And plus the girls liked it, right?

Oh, you're the drummer versus the trumpet.

There you go.

And so there are different roles within that orchestra and it's getting everything moving at the same time and knowing what the pieces are and the orchestra's job to make sure, hey, this, everybody's in tune.

Which would be the same as everybody's healthy.

Because if you got somebody who's not or you don't show up or whatever the case, it can throw off the whole song, if you will, or the whole performance.

Right.

So it's almost a perfect metaphor really for running an organization, wouldn't you say?

I would, and I agree with that a lot because I can recall times where, and I won't say I was never called out for this, but the conductor would ask, hey, who has the melody right now?

And no one would raise their hand and say, who has the melody?

Because everybody was just playing their music as loud as they could.

Yeah.

Well, that doesn't help anything for the listener.

Right.

And this analogy, the listener, the audience, that's your customer, that's who you're providing value to.

So when you're able to say, hey, we need to know who has the melody, how does that get handed off?

How do we transition these things?

That very much does overlay very well.

I have some friends who are conductors that I'm actually trying to work with them on getting the framework and getting their input on that.

Because it, it does apply very well.

Yeah, I think so.

Let's talk about scaling without breaking.

Your framework is described as infinitely scalable.

So for the entrepreneur currently at say a five person team looking to get.

To 50, what is the first structural.

Pillar that they need to put in place to ensure they don't lose their culture during that leap or jump?

Yeah.

So I'll take this opportunity to tell you that the Healthy Company framework has three principles.

You got the foundation, you have a two part epoxy and you have know what you're doing.

And they're in that order for a reason.

If you're saying, hey, I want to go from 5 to 50 without doing it wrong, maybe I want to go even from 50 to 500, how do I do that?

I'm going to zoom in on the foundation and say it begins with three components where you have to have vision with purposes first, units per group second and success scorecards third.

Okay.

Those are terms that I've come up with, read about them in the book.

But what does that really do for you?

It helps you keep up with, and I mentioned this earlier, where is your company going?

You have to have that first and foremost.

What is your company trying to do?

What's the action?

Who and benefit?

What are we doing?

Who is it for?

How does it provide value?

You as the business owner probably have that pretty well.

Yeah.

You then have to make sure you understand why each person's job matters.

If you lose that why I think you really lose, maybe not the older generations, but you lose the younger generations of why do you need me to come in and push these buttons?

Anybody can come in and do that.

Why should I care?

But then as we talked about for the underperformers and over performers and just anybody you're going to hire, you have to know what is it that they're going to do and how do they win?

I'll use a brief story here about NASA.

We just launched, I believe, the Artemis 2 to do all that.

Let's go back to the first time we did this.

President Kennedy said that I think by the end of the decade, we should bring a man to the moon and home safely.

Okay, fast forward.

There's a story about how he went to the halls of NASA, met a custodian, and said, what is it you do here?

And the Custodian replied, well, Mr. President, I'm helping put a man on the moon.

If you pause briefly, it's a wonderful story, right?

How is this guy really doing that?

Was he just saying the company line or did he believe it?

I'm going to argue he believed it because he said, hey, if I can keep the facilities clean, the restrooms, the floors, the waste baskets, all those things, that's going to free up the engineers because they have to do the math to come up with a trajectory to build the rocket, to put a man, to send him to the moon, to bring him home safely.

So I actually am helping put a man on the moon.

So I went through sort of that.

Where, why, what, how?

And that's the custodian helping put a man on the moon.

That's how you as a business owner can say, as we grow, as we add departments, which you have to do, you add layers, you add departments, you add people.

When you do that, I really encourage you to go through the framework and say, okay, why do we need this department?

Why do we need this person?

What is this person going to do?

How do we know what success looks like with this?

Because when you do that, people stay connected.

Let me do one other sort of quick story that may make it more real.

Let's suppose you, me, and the listener start a business.

The three of us do.

If I'm the detail guy and I take a week off on vacation, the two of you instantly know.

We got to pay more attention this week because Bruce is the detail guy, but he's not here.

Yeah.

Okay, great.

We didn't have to tell each other that.

We just knew.

And let's say you're the big picture guy.

You're gone for a week.

Oh, we really got to make sure we don't get stuck in the weeds.

Otherwise he's going to come back and be mad at us, Right?

Well, when you go from three to 30 people, if you're not intentional about teaching that connectivity, and then you go from 30 to 300 people, you lose the fact that all the people, all employees, are working for the same company.

So the framework helps you do that with those questions.

And that's why.

That's the first principle of the framework.

Well, again, I Bring it back to music, you know, for a four or five man band and we get to play with each other.

We're knowing you got your rhythm.

Guys who are set the rhythm, they make the guy with the vocals, those upfront guy sound better, the instruments better.

You take away any one of those components and it starts to fall down, falls apart.

Right.

Unless it was designed that way or as an acoustic thing or a solo.

Get into an organization where you get 30 or 40 or an orchestra and all of a sudden you could have something that just goes awry and it takes out down the whole performance.

So again you're seeing that.

I think what you're saying there is, you've got, we need to document our values, our purpose, our way we do things, our processes and move from tribal knowledge to where everybody knows everything to a system of health where the company and it's baked into the systems, the processes.

So you might have a different function or different role eventually.

And that's why sometimes I think it takes a different band leader for a small company to become a big company.

Sometimes it's not the same person.

They can't migrate, they don't move.

That's why you get bigger.

Companies as they scale might need a different leader for that time in order to take that.

Right.

Like they don't understand all those nuances.

So that's interesting.

Let's talk about the danger of new problems using old solutions.

Sure.

You noted that companies often fail because they try to solve new problems with old solutions.

So how can a leader foster a culture of innovative problem solving when the team's already exhausted just by the daily grind?

Yeah, you alluded to it a little bit.

I'll touch a little bit on one of the components which I call self healing.

A lot of companies and a lot of people are really good at reacting, right?

Oh gosh, there's a fire, we gotta put it out.

And some people love that environment.

Bless em.

We need em.

That's wonderful.

What you can do when you're overwhelmed is you get stuck in the reactionary state.

So when I talk about self healing, what I mean is you yourself have to bring healing in a twofold fashion.

You do have to react and put out the immediate problem, but you also have to be proactive and say, how are we going to prevent this from happening in the future?

So if you make it a part of your culture to say, hey, we aren't just going to put out fires, we're going to see what we can do to even prevent embers, not even put out embers, but prevent embers.

When you do that and you make that a part of your culture and that's expected from every role.

You've got everybody coming up with, hey, we've been able to put this fire out.

We've been able to put these embers out with this little squirt gun, but the fires are bigger now.

So now we actually need to, ooh, we need a fire hose.

But that means we need a new water main now.

That means we need these new things.

The people who are doing the work are going to be a lot better at helping you go, we need to rethink this.

And when they're not, because they're in the habit of saying, how do we both fix the immediate problem and prevent it from happening again?

Leadership's in a position to see patterns better.

They can look at the patterns and say, hey, this keeps failing.

We don't recognize it in the moment, but this keeps failing.

So we need to reimagine what we've been doing.

I think that sort of ability to say, hey, instead of being stuck in a reactionary state, let's get everybody to think problems are solved two ways, reactionary and proactive.

How do I prevent it from happening again?

Gets you more ideas and it gets you able to see patterns better and think more strategically if you're more in that leadership position.

Makes sense.

Let's talk about legacy versus liquidity, because there's an ROI to having a healthy company.

Absolutely.

A lot of people, you know, entrepreneurs, they founders, they focus on the exit, you focus on legacy.

So is it possible to build a company that is both a healthy place to work and an attractive acquisition target for those who only care about the.

Numbers, I absolutely think you can.

If you're thinking more of legacy and you're going, hey, I want to have a company way outlast me.

I want it to be so much better.

A lot of things that I found, unfortunately, many of those leaders have done the double edged sword, good job of making them the identity of the company.

But if you're the identity of a company or even a department, say you want to retire now, what happens to your legacy?

If you were the linchpin, it's going to fail when you leave.

So by implementing a healthy framework, you're able to say, hey, I started it, I built these things.

And you know, I had the initial vision, but because I've set up a vision where people understand where we're headed, why their work matters, other people can say, I want to go where he said, It.

And you know what, we're going to carry this on even though they've retired, even though they've left.

One of my favorite examples of that is Magellan.

He's credited with the first person to circumnavigate the globe.

But if you know the story, he didn't make it.

He didn't finish the voyage.

I think he passed away somewhere in India.

His crew said, we're going to finish this anyway.

So even though he's credited with it, his legacy is he circumnavigated the globe.

He didn't do that.

Right.

So the Framework helps with that.

But you also look at that and say, how is that helpful for acquisition acquisitions is, from my observation, they want it to go as smoothly as possible, right?

Yeah.

They want a de risk asset.

They want, you got.

Your retention is going to be big, your customer satisfaction is big.

That all goes to the multiple.

I mean, from everything I've seen, they want to come in and say, hey, we're going to buy this, and then we don't ever want to hear from you again and we want to collect our paycheck.

Now, how nice of a deal is that?

If you're looking to say, hey, I want somebody to sell it, if you've done what the framework has in there, you're able to say, hey, look, whether I'm running it or you're running it, this thing's going to do real well.

Here's all the fundamental reasons on paper and culturally, they're going to make it a very lucrative investment for you.

Yeah.

Let's talk about identifying the neglect early.

If a CEO is listening right now and suspects that their company is unhealthy, what is the one question they should ask their frontline employees or employees today to get the most honest answer?

Yeah, I do think that does depend a little bit on sort of the state and culture of your company.

I think one of the biggest tells that you can do is it's a two part question.

What's the vision of the company and how does your job impact it?

Because I think even Amongst the best CEOs, if you've pulled your C suite, unless you're in the habit of constantly talking about your company's vision, I think even your C suite is not going to answer that the same.

If your C suite can't answer that the same, the front line certainly can't.

So when you ask all your front lines, hey, where's the company headed?

What's the company's vision?

How do you impact that the Bigger the variety of answers, probably the bigger disconnect there is in your company.

They should all be on the same page or on the same bus.

Yeah.

Because we talked about that five person company going to 50.

At five people, everyone should answer about the same thing.

The framework allows you to say even when you get to 50 or 500, people are still answering about the same thing.

So I think that's a very good question to help business owners understand.

Does everybody understand where we're going and do they understand how they're helping us.

Do that objective and then communicating that obviously, which is get everybody on the same page?

No.

That makes sense.

Let's talk about.

We call it the Birmingham Influence.

You're a native of Birmingham, Alabama.

How is your background or your personal life with your lovely wife Emily shaped your view of what a good life looks like compared to the standard corporate ladder definition?

Sure.

For me, personally brought her up because.

She's prominently displayed in your website and everything else out there.

And you're obviously a good salesman too, to land such a lovely lady.

No, she easily the best decision I've made and I'm grateful she has agreed to stay with me.

To me, a lot of that health looks in.

How is your job impacting your life?

Yeah, because that can be very positive.

Right.

My job has brought me all kinds of opportunity, all kinds of wealth, all kinds of connections, lots of positive things.

You can also.

And for a period it was, oh my goodness, my job is having negative effects that I don't realize.

A lot of people use the frog in water.

You can't put a frog in boiling water.

You can put them in water and turn the heat up and before they know it, oh, they can't get out.

And I think especially with corporate America, that can happen to you.

And I unfortunately experienced some of that before I really codified the framework and I've also watched that happen to a number of my friends.

And for me, success looks like helping people either personally or company wide navigate.

How do I have.

Yes, my job is absolutely having a big impact on me to the very positive as opposed to, yeah, my job's having a big impact on me.

So same question, same answer, very different tone, very different outcome.

So that's.

Yeah, you're going to bring it home.

You're going to bring it home.

If it's an unhealthy place at home, it's.

You're going to bring it into the workplace and if it's an unhealthy workplace, you're going to bring it home.

So Absolutely.

That holds and it.

Well, very interesting conversation.

Our time runs quickly here on the show.

Bruce McLeod, if people want to get hold of you, what's the best place for them to find.

We got company-connections.com I know they can reach out to you as far as finding the book, I'm assuming anywhere they.

Find books or website, the book is available on Amazon.

It's available just through Amazon.com, look for the Healthy Company Framework.

That's going to be the best place to get it.

You mentioned my website.

LinkedIn is another great place to find me.

Look for Bruce McLeod would love for you to connect with me there and I may be jumping the gun.

I'll volunteer that.

If you're curious about any of this, contact me either on LinkedIn or through my website.

Tell me a little bit about your situation because what I'd love to do is respond with a here's how I think the Healthy Company Framework is going to benefit me you.

We've talked about a wide variety of topics.

There's an infinite number more we could talk about.

I want to make it personal to you.

So if you reach out to me on LinkedIn or my website, Company Dash Connections, I'll respond, respond there and give.

You a personal an initial consult.

If there's something that they're looking at and they already know, I think those listening you already know if you're in an unhealthy environment.

So I strongly encourage them to reach out.

Bruce, you advocate your position real well and your insights.

Thank you so much for sharing them with us and lots of good value in there and something we should all be paying attention and look to.

So thanks for being our guest today.

Yes, Michael, thank you.

And I'll leave with one final thought and it's that you have so much more control over what you realize.

So take that, be heartened and enjoy.

As you are listening to this episode, what is one idea that you've heard that's caught your attention and why does it matter so much to you?

And who is one person who you can share that with?

Either sharing this episode or just sharing that insight that occurred to you while you were listening?

Perhaps it is that employee disconnect is a primary driver of turnover, specifically when team members no longer understand how their daily tasks impact the company's ultimate vision.

Or maybe it is that superstars can inadvertently train their colleagues into incompetence by consistently performing portions of others roles, which eventually lowers the standard of the entire team.

Thank you for listening, for learning and for investing in yourself so that you can become the best version of you.

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Goodbye.