Alex Kraft and Ron discuss his "Getting Better" blog post

And if you think about it, the companies don't seem to show any interest in helping us get better either. We're hired to do a job. We're trained to do the job, the specific job. And then we're told to go do the job. If you're on commission, you get a scorecard, you get a check. But if you aren't, most companies don't provide performance reviews for their employees.

It's a serious problem.

On top of that, I don't know that the people did anybody train you how to do or conduct a performance review? No,

There is there is a plan to it. It's disheartening, to say the least. And it's going to change the next five to 10 years, I think, is going to cause that, force it to be changing. The millennials, the younger workers, they want improvement. They don't want to sit on their hands. Their life has been much more dynamic than mine was, as an example. My granddaughter, she's all over the damn place. There's nothing that she won't look up on Google and get an answer, no matter what the problem is. And so we've got this performance review. And actually, the first question really in a performance review would be, if you weren't doing what you're doing, what would you like to be doing? Now we're asking the boss, the leader, to be able to understand that individual across the table, not as a worker, but as a person. And nobody's trained them for that.

Yeah. And the other side of it, the last month or two, I've been reading much more prominent comments that with interest rates going up, with inflation going up, with the anxiety in the marketplace. Performance reviews have come back as a vehicle to get rid of people, not as a vehicle to improve people, but to reduce the headcount. And you're starting to see headcount reductions all over their employees. Yeah. So do you do anything personally that you think would be good for other people to copy that you use to try and get better on a constant or continuing basis?

I agree with that 100%. I don't think, you know, one of the things I used to, sorry to interrupt you, Alex, but one of the things I used to say is, you know, the first day when I was in the front of a class teaching, somewhere in the first half hour, I'd look around the group of people and say, okay, how many of you guys and gals rub your hands in glee coming in here this morning saying, boy, I'm really going to screw up today? And the answer, of course, is nobody. So fundamental truths about people, we all want to do a good job, no matter what the job is. We want to do it well. We all know we can get better, but nobody is helping us get better. So we kind of park it. Our wives do, our children do. Sometimes the church does or our peer groups or whatever, peripherally making comments. Oh, why are you doing that, Ron? You know, you get that all the time, right? Yeah. And as you know, I read like a maniac.

But there's really no purposeful plan once you leave school that you should get into to get better. I think that's a huge hole. It

No, the only way you learn is with making mistakes. And yet our culture hurts people that make mistakes. Now, the obvious example is doing something illegal. But there's also shortcuts at work. There's also shortcuts in the family. Skipping homework when you're a student. I wasn't a very good student, so I'm a perfect example of what not to do. But it's really, I'm getting more and more in the place that I want to start hiring kids at middle school, which is maybe 15. I don't know the ages anymore, but 14,15. And bring them in one night a week, maybe one Saturday morning a week, and have them work with us in different places. See if we like them, see if they like us. And if they do, everything's cool and we go forward. If they don't, we move on to another. I'd similarly like to see us start with interns, where at one of the dealers, two of the dealers that I worked with, the youngest manager, which was me in most cases, had...

people that we hired between their junior and senior years at university or between their two years of a master's degree. And they'd come in for four months and work with us. And the first 30 days, I put them on the warehouse floor, receiving and shipping. And I'd lose a good third to a half of them because that's too much work and it's dirty. And that's not what I want to do. So we got rid of that stuff right away. But Finning is an example. We used to have 12 a year. And when I got there in 1978, The parts managers, the service managers, the branch managers, all had come into the company that way. So imagine the culture that that creates in the company. It's really powerful. But then performance reviews, it's got to be part of the puzzle. But as an example, if somebody quits the exit interview, I quit a job and they had a sensitivity session. which means there were 12 people in the room trying to get me to stay.

And it was really uncomfortable. I wonder what would happen if a mechanic who's going to leave us, if we had an intervention where three or four guys sat down with them and talked about, well, why are you leaving? And really, in 99% of the cases, it's the boss. It's the command and control circumstance, isn't it? It is. Salesmen, what's the primary reason that salesmen leave? Is it because they can't sell and they don't make enough money? That might be part of it, in which case it's self-correcting, isn't it? But if they're good, how come we don't try and keep them? What kind of training do we give salesmen?

What kind of training do we give managers? Very little.

So, you know, you really touched a nerve with me, actually, when, you know, getting better was the headline, I think, of your blog. It really is an appropriate question to be asking. How the hell do we get better? We have assessments. I recommend that everybody, every person that touches a customer or leads people has an assessment of their performance once a year. And there's a score. And then you sit down with that and talk to your boss. The two of you know that you've got things that you can get better at. And allow that discussion to take place. I'm not going to criticize you. I'm not going to crucify you. You know, I used to, Bob Hewitt was the dealer principal in Quebec when I got into the industry. And he was looking for me. I was looking after inventory, but I was out in the warehouse. I was in a sweatshirt and jeans, and I'm schlepping parts all over, and I'm dirty as hell.

Here's this elegant man who's 6 '2",6 '4", in a three-piece suit. He comes up to me, puts his arm around my shoulder. and says, I'm really disappointed in you, Ron. And I looked up at him. I said, me too. What's your disappointment? And you could literally see his face starting to fall apart. But how often do people have that kind of a comment? Did anybody do that to you?

Did your father ever do that to you?

I did that all the time. It was one of those cases. It was never, ever good enough. And I'm not being critical. It's just me.

Yeah. Isn't that interesting, too? Because, again, from a parenting point, you have children. I've had children and grandchildren. As a parent, you don't know how the hell to do those things.

And we excuse it. Yeah. Rather than, rather than, and wouldn't that be interesting from a leadership perspective, mothers and fathers are totally different people, obviously. And they're all of various scales, terrific or not so terrific. All could get better, I'm sure, including me and my wife. But we really don't have this embedded in our thinking that we should be striving to get better. Other than using the athletics example is perfect, but you leave athletics out of it, music's the same thing. Maybe performance arts, dancing and painting, some of those things. But working in an office. A CPA, a purchasing agent. What is there?

Steve Johnson wrote a piece last night about our centers of excellence and how our classes are being approved now in curriculum for technical schools and are going to be replacing general education credits and the structure of our classes and all of it, again, aiming at helping people identify their potential, which is also an alien concept. How do you know what your potential is? Damn, I don't know. You're running to a wall or you're not tall enough. That's easy. I'm not seven feet, so I can't play basketball. I'm not fast running, so I can't be a track star. But when it's an office job, I show up. I'm clean. I can do arithmetic. People can read my writing. I qualify. Right? A friend of mine was a recruiter. management recruiter for a company and you want to talk about a sweatshop, those guys are really something. They call around employers that they've placed and do you know anybody that can do such and such a job as the entry and away we go?

And then they place them. And once they place them, that's it. It's the last that that recruiter is there until he needs another guy. So how do we get that person not to say yes to a recruiter when they call up? It's a whole critique of a company, Alex. It's a whole critique of the organism of a business.

It's societal. It is. Look at Walt Disney. Here comes back Bob Iger. Yeah. One month after his replacement signed a contract extension. Right. It's really interesting. The people that you work with on a daily basis with Heave, you know them like your brothers. I do. You sit beside them, you talk all day long, and socially, if you don't have that, you'd miss it. What do you do to make them better, or what are they doing to make you better?

Yeah, I call that perspective. Some people call it framing. Some people call it biases. It's the model in which we were framed, developed. You know, the guy that coined the phrase thinking inside the box lives in Malta. His name's DeSoto. He's written many books. But isn't that the truth? That 30-year guy that you're talking about, he's in a box.

That 30-year-old product designer doesn't have that box. No. So he's free. He

You know, everybody, Alex, I think everybody's looking for a silver bullet, a magic shroom or whatever, a solution. My buddy at Smart Equip, Alex Schusler, coined the phrase with me of going from paper to glass. When we brought technology and computers in, all we did was we took a paper form that was six-point copy, and we put that format up on a screen, and instead of writing, you filled it in with a keyboard. But we didn't make anything better. We just made it faster. And as you, like you mentioned, we don't have enough time for that. One of the, or let me frame it a little different way, an employee is an asset, not an expense. And almost every business is looking at their workforce as an expense. We hear this term productivity. GDP is going up. Our productivity is going up. Everything's cool. Well, how has the productivity actually changed? It's more work being done by fewer people. Now, is it because we're working smarter?

Or we're having those people working harder. I think it's the latter. You know, it's kind of weird. Six Sigma,5S, industrial engineering, all of these things that have been out there trying to help us change. Your guy comes up with an idea because he's got a different frame. He's got a different view. And some of them will work. Some of them won't. God, if you came up with all the right ideas all the time, he'd be a miracle. He wouldn't be working with you. Isn't something else making a fortune?

I lost my head there for a minute. But that's the other thing that really comes into it. You know, how do we measure our performance?

Yes.

Very rare if that happens at all.

Also, you're introducing a new element for today, podcasts. They're incredible things. I don't know how much you pay attention to TED Talks, but that's a platform that you should really pay attention to. Probably once a week I find something in those. And podcasts, behavioral scientists, Nere Al, you've heard me talk about him in his book, Indistractable, how he gave me ideas that changed how I do work. After 75 years, what the heck's that all about? You would think that I would have figured it out by now. But no, far from it.

Well, I've got a negative perception on TikTok as well, but that's not what I'm talking about. The TED talk, one guy, just as an example, his name is Rory Sutherland. He does one, a talk on perception. And he uses a couple of illustrations, one of which is... the underground in England, in London. Satisfaction with the tube there went up when they put LCD screens up in each of the stations that was a countdown clock as to when the next train was going to arrive. In certain countries in Asia, the traffic lights, the red, yellow, green traffic lights, have a countdown clock on the red or on the green. Or on the orange. So you have a little bit of warning to get there. Now, the Chinese apparently did it on the red light. And it counted down. Everybody was like, it's an Indy 500 takeoff. You know, here we go. So there's obvious things that come out. But he talked about Sutherland as kind of a weird illustration today.

But I haven't liked a drinks party since they banned smoking. So did you go to a drinks party? I guess that's a cocktail party in England. You go to a drinks party and you're talking with people and you get tired of talking and you just want to go to the window and look outside and collect your thought. So you go there and you've got a cigarette in your hand. People look at you all by yourself staring out the window. They think you're some sort of philosopher. You're staring out the window and you don't have a smoke in your hand. You're an antisocial idiot. Again, perceptions, right? Right. So the market guy, entrepreneurs, they'll hit one that works, Alex, after three or four that failed. But I bet you if they had applied the same tools that they did on the fourth and the first, the first would have succeeded as well.

There's some remarkable things in learning, self-directed learning. The trouble with it is we get lazy. It's like physical fitness. I don't exercise anywhere near what I used to do. I don't burn anywhere near the calories. That's also why I end up with a little bit more of a pear shape instead of upside down pyramid. But I want to help people find their potential. Homework. The Department of Education in the U.S. says for every hour of face-to-face time, you're supposed to have two hours of homework. That's a rule. Okay, so I'm working with technical schools, and they have different qualifiers on face-to-face time for academic credits. So one of the guys at company schools that we were working with required 37 and a half hours for one academic credit,12 and a half hours face to face in the classroom,25 hours homework. And you've been around me enough to know that I'm a bit of an idiot. I said, well, what do you do to verify they do the homework?

Nothing. And that doesn't resonate with me. So our classes consist of six and a half hours of face-to-face, internet-based face-to-face. And I've created 13 hours of homework. And with the 13 hours, we qualify it as close reading and annotation. And we have a five-question quiz at the end of every reading assignment that they have to get three correct on. It's called a check for understanding. So our homework. is actually verified. And the schools look at me and say, no, wait a second. That's not good for us. Interesting, huh? So if you think about it in round numbers, if I have 30 hours to get a credit,20 hours of that is going to be homework and nobody knows that you did it or didn't. And you're right. I think that's the way schooling is going. I'll do a dump here, a mind dump. I'll reference you to a book. and say, okay, tomorrow be prepared to come in and talk to me about Southeast Asia.

You learn to score on the test. And it's the same thing with how we indoctrinate people on a job, isn't it? We hire you, we onboard you, we walk you around, we introduce you to people, we show you where the toilets are, where lunch is, and maybe we go to lunch the first day together. And then I start showing you how to do the job the way I did it. And then you do the job with me watching you, kind of like you're learning to fly a plane. And then I tell you, now practice this, keep doing this. Fewer mistakes, make it faster and faster and faster. And this will be okay. And that's it. We walk away. That's pretty common, isn't it?

One of our classes is called What's Your Why? Why do you do what you do? And it's a play on another psychiatrist. What do you do? Well, somebody at a, you know, this is outdated anymore, but, you know, a church social or a. a meeting of scouts or whatever. What's your job? What do you do? And everybody can tell you what they do. Oh, that's interesting. How do you do that? And a lot of people can tell you that too. But then the real question is, why do you do that? Well, you got to make a salary. I got to have a learning. That's not why you work. Why were you a basketball player? Because you like to compete. And you worked hard to be good enough to get on the floor.

It's true. And I wonder how many people say that about work.

Monday morning used to be my favorite morning. Can you believe that?

But you know why that was true? I needed a break. The weekend was too busy.

What would I do to make myself better? What do I need to do to become better at the job? Those are questions that everybody should, every leader and every employee should be asking of themselves. How can I get better? I had a coach in swimming who would walk down the length of the pool side by side with me. And he'd be, I did backstroke. He'd be moving my hand where it hit the water, two inches this way, one inch that way, whatever, just to change the way that paddle worked. It's the why. Reading about John Wooden, one of the best basketball coaches that's around out there in history, he said he had more work preparing for practice than he did in practice. Some people have it naturally, but most people don't. We need to give it to them.

I totally agree with you. I think professional and personal development are the same thing. And self-esteem, self-image is a huge part of it. And as you grow up as a child, bullying at school, gangs, you know, becoming shy, you make a mistake, you don't want to repeat it, so you kind of shrink a little bit. That carries itself forward in our... Our adult life as well. My granddaughter is next semester going to be teaching. And she's teaching undergraduate classes. And she's never taught before. And I said, well, is anybody helping you? He said, oh, yeah, I'm working with a couple of them now. I go to their classes. I watch how they teach. I watch how the different professors, they're helping me get it. I said, OK, fine. So January is going to come around and she's going to be in the classroom teaching. I hope she loves it. But it's not the easiest damn job in the world. Leadership is not an easy job.

And perhaps that's why we don't do these performance reviews well. It's expressing vulnerability, isn't it?

There's Patrick Lencioni. I've mentioned him often over the years. One of his first books was The Three Signs of a Miserable Job. And it's interesting he started there. And those three signs are anonymity, immeasurability, and I can't remember the other one, but I'll come up with it before we're done. And immeasurability was the, it's not a word. He created it. It was you being able to have the ability at the end of every day when you leave work and go home to look at what you did that day and determine whether it was good, bad, or indifferent. Blue collar manufacturing jobs, assembly line jobs can all do that easily, readily. But once you get past the blue collar, go into the white collar, it's not that easy. It's kind of interesting that that's where he started. And he's written about 15 different books now. And they're all great reads. If you haven't read any, you should. He's terrific.

There's one of them called The Motive that might appeal to you now on what you do. It's one of his most recent books. But, again, it's – I used to ask people all the time, you know, what's the last business book you read? And they'd be like alligators or crocodiles. Down would come the inner eye. What are you talking about? We used to have a once a quarter routine when I worked. We'd all get a book and we'd read the book. And at the end of the month, we'd sit down and talk about it. And that's a very beneficial. Again, that gets your perspective that's interesting. Definitely. So that's a good exercise. That's why in our newsletter, we recommend five books that people write. This month, we're going to do some or this newsletter, January, we're going to have something different. We're going to have a kind of a challenge. And we're going to give book gift certificates for Borders or Barnes & Noble. Borders not around anymore.

Barnes & Noble or Amazon or somebody. We have a trivia question that's buried in one section of the and it'll rotate of the newsletter. People will get the right answer. They'll be in a drawing, whoever we draw. gets 100 bucks or whatever the heck it is. Now, I wonder how many of them will view that as a prize. It's a book. It's a struggle to get people. I don't have time for that. If you don't have time for personal development, what the heck have you got time for?

It's interesting. I'm struggling to find the quote. But in the last couple of three weeks, there was a quote that came forward that a really. good leader is somebody that you don't even know exists because the employees look after everything. And, you know, they're, you know, and we've got a lot of talented people. The case with Disney that's going on, getting rid of the, you know, replacing them with Iger, going to General Electric. Jack Welch had a 20-year run and Jeff Elmold who replaced him, the stock value dropped by 80%. And Elmold was... eminently more talented than Jack Walsh. So there's more to it than just credentials. It's a persona. I used to say that you walk into a room and people, you have an aura. Everybody knows you're in there when you arrive.

It's kind of weird.

It is. And there's no beginning or end on this thing. And

No, and the other part that's coming up more recently, the last year or so, the major consulting companies, Accenture and McKinsey and those boys, they're coming in for criticism now. Because they all follow the same cookie cutter approach. They've got the same frame, right? The MBA programs at university are teaching the same thing. The same formula isn't always going to work on a people enterprise.

And I don't know, you know, it's the, oh, we've got a new governor here and we've got a serious homelessness problem here. So an observer on the radio, an analyst, made the comment that, well, he's, you know, he's recognized the problem like everybody else has done, but he's going to apply the same solution. We're going to go to the same consulting companies, the same engineering companies, and they're going to come up with the same solutions that have failed over and over and over again. Why are we doing that? So this brilliant person comes along. Elon Musk is a good example. Everybody's trashing him right now for what he did with Twitter. But be careful. That's not the end of the story yet. The guy's brilliant. But he looks at the world in a very different way than you and I do. SpaceX, geez, imagine reusing the rocket. Cuts the cost down dramatically. Traffic, why don't we dig a tunnel?

This past week, the chairman of Volkswagen said that they were going to pull back on their electric vehicle because they didn't have the talent capable of coming up and competing with an Elon Musk Tesla. That's quite a statement. Right.

again, perspective or framing. He has had a whole bunch, a big, huge reduction in staff, right? Right. Didn't fire anybody. They all left. He didn't pay severance, didn't do anything. They just left.

I'm going to leave you a book. It's called The Storm Before the Calm. It's written by a futurist, an intellectual by the name of George Friedman, who I have untold. The storm before the calm is about the decade between 2020 and 2020, where are we now? 2020 and 2030, that decade. And he wrote it in about 2017 or 16. It predicts everything that we're going through now. It's absolutely unbelievable. And again, he's not from inside. He's from outside. And I think that's where we got to go find our solutions more and more, especially with employees. We got to ask the younger employees, what do you want? What do you need? What do you expect from me? I think that's how we get them growing. And I think that's how we get us growing too. But there's no roadmap.

that's right. That's a really good point.

You should be in front of a classroom of 20-year-olds. You want to talk about energy. You want to talk about having fun. Their perspectives are, I mean, I love this stuff. The energy in a university town, I love. Eugene, Oregon is my favorite. And it's a hippy-dippy weatherman type of thing. Drugs and everything else you want to get into. But it's a wonderful environment for people that want to think and talk and debate. Thank you for this, Alex. It's a weird subject to be putting on a podcast because there is no answer. But it's really true. How do we get better? Who drives us to get better? Who helps us get better? I don't think there's a lot of people thinking about that. So thank you for writing that blog. And thank you for being involved in this.

So thank you, everybody, for being. I hope you're still with us because it's been a weird podcast. We've wandered all over the place and there is no real roadmap, as Alex said. Personal and professional development is the key. And as life is changing so dramatically, it's even more important today than ever before. So thank you. And I look forward to having you with us at the next Candid Conversation. Mahalo. Thank you for listening to our podcast. We appreciate your support. Should you have any thoughts or comments, please don't hesitate to contact us at www. learningwithoutscars. com. The time is now. Mahalo.