Enthusiastic You! With Joshua Evans
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
We deserve a life of enthusiasm and passion. However, because the human condition is so fragile, it is easy for everyone to find discouragement and lose focus. In this episode, Joshua Evans, the #1 best-selling author of Enthusiastic You!, shares his thoughts on how you can provide meaning in what you do and succeed in your life. Bringing it to your organizational culture, he talks about how the team becomes passionate when your purpose is connected and identified. Joshua also dives into combating workplace traps and avoiding spreading toxicity, emphasizing that complacency leads to mediocrity, obscurity, and nothing. Tune in to this conversation to rediscover and reclaim your purpose!
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Listen to the podcast here
Enthusiastic You! With Joshua Evans
Our guest is Joshua Evans who is also the author of Enthusiastic You. He talks about his model Is/Does/Means, how you can take an inanimate object and give it meaning, and how that allows you to find your purpose so you can rediscover and reclaim it in your career. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Joshua Evans. Joshua has quite a story to share with us. He has studied workplace behavior for over fifteen years. He’s a keynote speaker and a TEDx programmer. He’s the number one bestselling author of Enthusiastic You. He is an adventure seeker. He’s also the father of three. Welcome to the show, Joshua.
Thank you so much for having me, John. It is a pleasure to be here.
Let’s talk about how you got into what you’re doing. You can take us back to childhood and school. What was your first adventure or passion point that led you into being so enthusiastic?
I have always had a zeal for life, excitement, and palpable enthusiasm behind everything that I did. The way that I thought as a young child is how I continue to think as an adult. If you’re not willing to throw your entire self toward something, then why are you going to put in the effort at all? You need to do that. What’s funny is that enthusiasm was never a word that I used in my vernacular but it’s fascinating. I’ll give you how I got into what I’m doing now, and then we can even back up from there.
I was in Corporate America. I studied business and workplace behavior. I studied clients, conversations, and communications. I was in a technology company selling software and working with lots of dynamic teams. It was a very fascinating place for me to work. One day, I got into an argument with a guy that I work with. We had walked into a client’s office, and he came with me as a technical resource because I’m not a technical guy. We talked with a client and turned this small $100,000 deal through one conversation into something that was over $2 million for our company.
It was going to be a huge project. I was excited. You get happy ears as a salesperson. I’m thinking about the commission checks. I’m excited, “We’re about to solve all these problems. We’re going to make all this money. It’s going to be great.” My technical guy goes, “Why would you tell him we could do that?” I go, “We can’t do that. I didn’t lie.” He goes, “We can but it’s going to be so much work.” I was like, “That’s why we’re getting paid.” I was so frustrated with how despondent he was. That evening, I was home by myself because my wife was working late. This was before I had children.
I was having a scotch with my dog. I was like, “People should care about their work. They should be enthusiastic.” I started venting in dictation mode to my iPad. It grew to tens of thousands of words. By happen chance, I ran into a publisher. We started chatting. She goes, “I want to publish your book.” When she published it and it became a number-one bestseller, I said, “That’s it.” I quit my job. I put in my two weeks and said, “This is what I’m going to do full-time.” That’s how I jumped into the keynote-speaking world. It’s in my desire to bring passion back into the workplace and to get people to care about the things that they’re doing so that their lives can be much more fulfilling.
One of your topics that grabs me because I love soundbite and alliteration is Purpose or Perish. It’s so much in the news. Are people coming back to the office? Is it going to be hybrid forever? What is the future of work? How do we get top talent? You say that pay and benefits are no longer enough to keep people engaged. What is the missing link? How do companies figure out how to make people feel engaged?
Everybody starts with a deeper sense of purpose in their work. On the first day, when they walk into their jobs, they’re excited because nobody shows up on the first day like, “I can’t wait to be mediocre.” Over months and years within a role, we lose sight of why we cared in the first place. We get stuck in that day-to-day minutia. We’re staring at the KPIs, the unread emails, and the office politics. All those little things distract us from why we cared so much in the first place. We forget.
My goal with this idea behind Purpose or Perish is we have the decision. We can either choose to have a purpose in our work, or we’re going to perish, never having achieved that result. The interesting thing is if you can dig deep enough into anybody’s career or anybody’s job, as long as they’re not doing anything illicit, and if you can dig deep enough into what somebody is doing and follow the impact that their work has on somebody, you can show them that purpose was there the whole time. I love watching people rediscover it and reclaim it in the work that they’re doing. All of a sudden, this light bulb comes on, and they realize, “This whole time, I did have a purpose. I just didn’t realize it.”
Enthusiastic You!: How amazing would organizations be if we took those moments to tell people the amount of meaning their work has to us?
Rediscover and reclaim it. That reclaiming is where people feel empowered. You do workshops and retreats on this as well. Paint a picture for us of what that looks like in a workshop and a retreat.
When I work with companies that want to bring me in for one of their leadership retreats or a team retreat and workshop, my goal is to dive into their business. The more I can understand their business, the better I’m going to be at tailoring my messaging, tools, and methodologies that I share with them directly to the organization. I can give you a good example. I spoke to a medical company. They rent very high-end medical equipment to clinics, hospitals, and doctors that can’t afford to own that equipment. Because of this company’s efforts, people are now able to rent out these amazing lasers. They’re able to bring those to the underserved areas. Patients are now getting access to unbelievable technology they never would have had access to before.
We were talking with their team. The interesting thing is at a moment’s notice, they fly all over the country delivering these tools but they never have time with the patient. Because of HIPAA laws and all the sorts of governing factors within the medical industry, they don’t get to connect with a patient. They don’t get to see the impact of the work that they’re doing. They get to interact with the doctors. They will show up after the patient has been sedated, but they don’t get to talk with the patient afterward to see how they’re doing and how their life has changed because of the work that they did.
They have this disconnect. Not all of them but some of these people have started developing this disconnect between the work that they’re doing and what it means to the end user. A lot of us do that because it gets so comfortable to sit in what our role is and what somebody in our role does. It’s easy. Our role is our title. It sits in our LinkedIn profile. It’s on your email signature. It’s on your business cards if you still hand out physical business cards, but it’s not compelling. It doesn’t make me on Monday go, “I’m so excited. I have this title.” Nobody cares.
The next thing we’re good at is talking about what somebody in our role does. It’s comfortable. It’s all the tasks, functions, and responsibilities we have in our role like responding to emails, talking with clients, and the things that I have to do on my to-do list but then again, looking at a to-do list is also not compelling. The problem is most organizations stop there. Most employees stop there as well. Whether we’re talking about what our organization is and does or we’re talking about what our role is or does. We forget to go that extra step and talk about what it means. Here’s where the rubber meets the road. I can share a fun story about another organization that I work with.
I love a story.
I was brought in for a leadership retreat for one of the top five law firms in the United States. It was a leadership team. In this small conference room, we were going through this methodology that I have of getting to what it means. Going past Is and Does and moving to Means. While we’re walking through this, there’s one guy that is in this audience. He’s the manager of IT. His name is Joe. To understand, Joe in IT is at the table with the partners or the executive team of this firm.
You can tell that he feels a bit out of place. We’re going around the room and working through Is, Does, and Means. I get to Joe and say, “What is your role?” He goes, “I’m the IT manager.” “What does somebody in your role do?” He’s like, “What somebody in my role does is we manage the firewalls, make sure emails are working, and make sure people aren’t going on the wrong sites. That’s all I do.” I go, “What does the work that you’re doing mean to everybody else at this table?”
All of a sudden, Joe looked a bit crestfallen. He looked down at the conference table. He goes, “I don’t know. It just means the computers are working.” My heart broke for him. He can’t see the deeper meaning. He doesn’t see purpose in his work. He sees tasks to be completed and personalities to be managed. That’s such an abysmal place but the problem is most people live there.
I was about to say something. I would love to say something because I’m a speaker. I was about to jump in when all of a sudden, one of the senior partners at this firm stood up and said, “Joe, are you telling me what your role means to us? You don’t know that. You have no idea what your role means to us.” He went on almost a tirade but it was positive. He goes, “Two weeks ago, Joe, when our servers went down, you showed up on a Saturday to get things fixed. I can’t think of a single function in this office that isn’t dependent upon everything that you’re doing.”
[bctt tweet=”A company culture should be unique.” username=”John_Livesay”]
“Without the work that you’ve done and that you make sure continues to work, we would never talk to our clients. We wouldn’t be able to talk internally. We would have nothing. We would not have a firm without the amazing work that you’ve been doing. If I haven’t told you this before, I’m sorry. The work you’re doing means so much to me and every other partner at this table.”
What a great story.
Here’s the crazy part. It hung in the air. I’m observing at this point and taking notes so I can retell this story because it’s so emotional. Joe looked up. The smile on his face told me that he had rediscovered purpose in his work, but the tears in his eyes told me that he had never been told that before. How amazing would organizations be if we took those moments to tell people the amount of meaning that their work has to us?
It’s so rare that you see somebody smiling and also tears in their eyes at the same time. I love that you were able to notice both of those. It’s almost like the sun is up and the moon is up. That doesn’t happen at the same time. Every once in a while, you can see those phenomena but you put meaning to them. The smile told me he loved being recognized, and the tears told me no one had ever told him that before. It was very moving for him to rediscover.
It was such an emotional experience for me as an observer because the human condition is so fragile. We’re all humans that are based on these emotional situations. We don’t always allow ourselves to be that vulnerable or authentic but there in that room, something happened. Something deep and existential connected these people together. I guarantee you none of them viewed their work the same way after it.
I’m sure because everyone starts looking through that lens. You also give a keynote on the topic of building strong cultures and passionate teams. What I love about your work is that it all fits together like a jigsaw puzzle. If you have a purpose, and when that gets connected and identified, then the team becomes passionate again. You have a culture that is palpable. Would that be fair?
I’m of the opinion that not everybody should like your company culture. If you build a good company culture, it should be unique. There should be people like, “I don’t like that at all.” It should be like jalapeno basil strawberry ice cream. Some people are going to be like, “That’s disgusting. I want no part of it.” There are a few people that are like, “That sounds delicious. I want some of that.” Those people are going to be living purposefully within their work. They will drink the Kool-Aid. I’m a huge fan of if you make a good Kool-Aid, get your employees to drink it. I’m a huge fan of that but it needs to be unique. It can’t be a cookie-cutter off-the-shelf culture. We need to do it intentionally.
Do you have a story of a culture of a company you spoke at that you thought, “They have nailed this. They know who they are and who they’re not.”
It happens with a lot of organizations because a lot of organizations will want to hire somebody like yourself or somebody like me to come in. They’re already thinking about those things. I had a great client in Northern Michigan. They’re such a cool company. They have a slide in the middle of the break room. It’s a giant two-and-a-half-story slide. It’s metal. It’s so fast. They warned you before you get on it. I got to ride it.
You got to be this tall to ride the ride.
Enthusiastic You!: Complacency leads to mediocrity. Mediocrity leads to obscurity. Obscurity leads to nothing.
They have stand-up paddle boards because people take breaks to go to the lake right next to their office. All those things are great but they know that those are just perks or bribes to keep employees happy at the moment. They needed to do something deeper. Having become good friends with the HR leader in that organization, when COVID first hit, I called him, “What’s going on? You’re the CHRO. How are you handling this?” The laws in Michigan got very strict quickly.
Anybody without essential jobs had to go home. They’re a manufacturing company. You can’t manufacture stuff at home. They still have to be on the manufacturing floor but all the administrative pieces, sales pieces, and management had to go home. What do you do when an organization has no work-from-home policies in place? They have never allowed anybody to do that ever.
We have people with desktop computers wheeling them out to their cars on their office chairs. How can you get your team to stay cohesive? How do you build that collaboration when they are so remote? They were telling me about the things that they did. It’s about developing this collaborative sense that we’re all in this together. We’re all in the same boat, the same team, or whatever you want to call it.
What they ended up doing is on their Monday morning calls, they would have a few of their employees do a home office edition of MTV Cribs, “Show us your home office.” I got to see some of their videos. It was amazing because they had people like, “I’m in my kid’s playroom. I’m sitting in Play-Doh. There are a bunch of puzzles over there. I stepped on a Lego.” They would show somebody else. Their wife was unhappy with them working from home. They were stuck in their shed next to a lawnmower.
My favorite one was one of them had no room for an office in his house. He set up shop in his laundry room. Since he missed the stand-up desk that he had at the office, he was using his ironing board as his stand-up desk. It’s those little things that humanize us. They reconnect us emotionally to not just our goals within the organization but to the people that we work with and the people that depend on us.
You also have a third topic. It talks about combating workplace traps and how to avoid spreading toxicity. What is a workplace trap?
This is a big conversation. While that’s not a topic I’ve been given recently and I’ve moved on, that is something important to remember. We get stuck doing stuff with an organization using our preconceptions, knowledge, experiences, and how we have seen other people do it. Organizations have this problem too. Somebody comes into a role with an organization and starts reforming it how they have seen it done before. The problem is that makes people complacent. Complacency leads to mediocrity. Mediocrity leads to obscurity. Obscurity leads to nothing.
Now that you’ve written the book Enthusiastic You, you’re not only helping people rediscover their passion but you’re giving them tools that they can use. Give us a little sneak peek of what’s inside the book of a tool that you think that people could say, “I need to rediscover my passion before I can reclaim it. I don’t even know where to start.” What would be one thing inside Enthusiastic You that tells them they could start doing?
One of the simplest tools is the IDM or Is/Does/Means. I have people do an interesting exercise where they take an inanimate object and write down what that object is. I had them write down what that object does, and then I challenged them to talk about what that object means and to get as emotional as they possibly can. I was doing an event for American Express. I had a group of their management team. We walked through this exercise. I pitted these different teams against each other in sharing the most emotional way to describe their inanimate object.
The best one I got was sunglasses. I go, “What is it?” They go, “It is a pair of sunglasses. It has darkened lenses and frames. That’s what it is. It’s not compelling.” “What does it do?” “A pair of sunglasses block the sun. It can make me look cool. It’s shade. It’s a fashion statement. It’s still not compelling. That’s what a pair of sunglasses does.” “Tell me what a pair of sunglasses means.”
[bctt tweet=”Find the meaning in what you do.” username=”John_Livesay”]
This small group of leaders whispered to each other back and forth, stood back, and confidently went, “I’m going to be honest. What a pair of sunglasses means is that my eyes are protected to see the things in my life worth seeing.” He went deeper than that. He goes. “I can see the smile on my wife’s face. I can watch my daughter walk down the aisle. That’s what a pair of sunglasses means to me.”
Having never watched grown men cry in a group setting like that, it was pretty fun and emotional. That small or simple tool of using an inanimate object but somehow getting to a deeper piece of meaning or something very deep to it is so invaluable. If we can do that for an inanimate object like a pair of sunglasses, why can’t we do that with our role? Why can’t we do that with our company? We fail to follow the impact that our work has and the people that depend on the work that we accomplish. We had stuck thinking about the efforts, not the impact of those efforts.
If people are thinking, “This is great for my professional life to rediscover and reclaim my passion,” is there any of this that gets transferred to their personal life, whether it’s discovering their role as a parent or a loving spouse? I’m guessing there is. You might have an example of that.
Everybody starts from a place where they are engaged in any relationship, whether it’s a professional relationship or a personal relationship. It’s like a glass door. In the beginning, it’s so clear but over time, smudges begin to appear. It obscures and distorts our view of the role that we find ourselves in. We get stuck thinking about all the daily challenges and the minutia of our life. We forget. It happens in all of our roles, whether you’re the VP of X, Y, Z, or the Chief Blankety Blank Officer. It happens in our personal lives as well in the role of a parent, friend, or partner. We forget what doing a great job means to those that depend on us. We forget why we cared so much.
It’s easy for us to get stuck in the day-to-day minutia of who didn’t do the dishes, who forgot to pay that bill, or whatever it might be. We get stuck in that minutia. We forget the commitment that we had and the purpose that is underlying everything that we’re doing. If we can bring that back, all the small tasks, actions, and decisions we have to make are less significant because we have this underlying foundation of purpose within the work and lives that we live.
What I hear you saying is when we can figure out how to rediscover and reclaim our purpose at work, it can help us be better people, friends, spouses, and parents, and that it’s not this separate, “I’m one person at work. I’m another person at home.” It all gets connected to one big purpose. I love it. Before I let you go, do you have a favorite quote or book besides your own that you want to leave us with?
My favorite quote is by Virgil. It’s, “Audentes fortuna juvat.” It means fortune favors the bold.
What does that mean to you?
I’ve always been a very bold person. I’ve always been the person that people have told, “You’re being too loud. You need to settle down. You’re too enthusiastic,” but that quote to me means that I’m very content living my fullest being bold. It means to me that I shouldn’t apologize for living out loud like that because others are too afraid to do it.
Let’s go full circle to your story of origin. Did your parents encourage you to be bold?
Enthusiastic You
Both my parents are very bold people. They’re loud people. They encouraged me along the way.
Are any of your three children bold?
All three of them.
If someone wants to buy your book or book you as a speaker, where should we go? Where should we send them?
Come on over to my website, JoshuaMEvans.com. You can check out my Reels there, buy my book, and book me to speak.
I love it. Thanks so much for sharing your enthusiastic and bold passion for living. You’ve got us all re-energized.
Thank you, John.
Important Links
- Enthusiastic You
- Purpose or Perish
- JoshuaMEvans.com
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Signature Leadership With Jamie Mason Cohen
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
If you have a challenge, how do you deal with it? How creative do you get to become productive? In this episode, we will dive into how our guest applies the skills and lessons he learned being in Saturday Night Live. Jamie Mason Cohen, the Host of The Signature Leadership Show, shares how you can become productive through smart work, not hard work. He explains his focus on “What’s your 11:30” is the problem you want to focus on and turn it into a possibility. Being still during chaos is key in dealing with challenges to help focus on finding a creative solution. Learn more about Jamie Mason Cohen’s signature leadership.
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Listen to the podcast here
Signature Leadership With Jamie Mason Cohen
Our guest is Jamie Mason Cohen who worked on Saturday Night Live. Find out what he means when he says, “What is your 11:30?” He said that when you’re laughing, you are learning and you can also hear a story of how to be still during the chaos. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Jamie Mason Cohen. He is a leadership development and resilience expert. He integrates his experiences working at Saturday Night Live as a Dale Carnegie Business Training Award Recipient and as a Certified Leadership Coach with The Leadership Circle to help organizations thrive in change. He’s a keynote speaker and facilitator who’s been hired to teach resilience, wellness, leadership and communication at organizations like SunLife, Meeting Planners International, Broadway Video Entertainment, the Canadian Society of Association Executives and many others.
He uses a toolkit of unconventional virtual approaches to cultivating resilience through unique performance assessment. He has something impressive and a little bit frightening, according to Forbes and the power of a superhero in his TEDx where each person learns how their strengths may serve that organization in 60 seconds. His new podcast is called The Signature Leadership Show. He’s a frequent commentator on CNN and The Morning Show. Jamie, welcome to the show.
John, I’m thrilled to be here with you.
I have been a big admirer of your work and follow you on all these social media platforms. I see how audiences light up. You have this amazing skill of not only all the lessons you learned while being at Saturday Night Live. We’re going to do a deep dive into that but you also have this skill as an artist. I’ve seen some of your paintings and you also can analyze people’s signatures.
You did mine, which was mind-boggling how fast the insights come across depending on the angle of how I cross a T. I want to ask you, before we get into all these incredible things that you do and have done, your little story of origin. You’re Canadian so take us back to school. Where did you first discover your love of creativity? I would think that’s the overriding umbrella over all of your skills.
I trace it back to my mother. One of the things you mentioned was my love of helping people discover their authentic selves through their handwriting. I remember my mother who was an educator. One day I was in drama class. I was standing on stage when I was about twelve years old in Toronto where I’m from. I froze because I stuttered whenever I got up in front of people.
I came home to my mother and I was devastated. I told her what happened and she said to me, “Let me see your handwriting in your daily notes from school,” when we were handwriting regularly. I showed it to her and she saw what you said. She saw the T-bar. The T-bar in handwriting tends to represent your goals amongst other things. She said, “You also have fluency of thought in the way you write.” It’s almost a figure eight for those who know anything about hockey, our Canadian pastime.
You had it in yours too, John. It planted a seed that I could change and grow and that I could in a sense build my growth mindset, which is a fundamental component of all creativity. I went on this journey from twelve years old onward to exploring how my brain works but also about how my creativity and my ability to make these connections in the world between disparate ideas could come to fruition. That’s a short version of how that one moment when my mother turned a crisis or a problem that I was facing into an opportunity.
Did she know how to analyze handwriting? Is that why she asked for yours and then she taught you? From that insight, were you able to overcome the stuttering because you realized the stuttering was not a physical ailment but more of a fear thing?
The stuttering was something that I ended up getting some help and support from experts in that field. It also drew a new level of self-awareness in that I could overcome challenges in my life. Part of it was my mother believed in me before I believed in myself. Something like stuttering was something that I thought was forever at that moment. Is this going to be my future in terms of how I communicate? Many years later, I became a professional speaker and what my mother said about me, “One day, you’re going to write and speak in front of people,” ended up coming true. It was a prophecy that my mother planted in me at that age.
There are so many takeaways here starting with you’re a dad yourself. Whether you’re a speaker, a teacher or someone that you’re working in a situation with other people, the influence we have to see the greatness in someone else at specific times and plant that seed or believe in somebody when they maybe have forgotten the truth of who they are is such a gift.
To be a parent that can do that to a child, I don’t think there’s a greater impact or legacy. As a speaker, there’s no greater impact that you do. Before we jump into your incredible keynotes, I want to hear about this and the audience does too. We teased it. How in the world did you find yourself involved with Saturday Night Live? What was that all about?
I called Lorne Michael’s office 25 times before his assistant said, “What would it take for you to stop calling?” I didn’t know better at that age. I just graduated from school. I said, “Thank you for asking. Can I send him a letter? When it arrives, can you put it on the pile of letters he probably gets every day?” She said, “Fine, go ahead.” I did and heard nothing.
I was working part-time on films in Toronto. I was a clerk at a school and I was living in my parents’ basement after graduating from Western, which is in Ontario where I’m from. I get a call and it sounds like Dr. Evil’s voice which is Mike Myers and Lorne Michaels. I hear, “Hi. Is James Cohen in there, please?” I thought it was one of my buddies, John, because I told all my friends, “I’m going to work in New York for Lorne Michaels in Saturday Night Live.”
Everyone said, “Stop talking crap. Come on.” It was him. I ended up asking him in a few sentences. I know you’re the master of the pitch. This was before I knew how to pitch. I pitched him and something clicked. I ended up going and I was backstage at Saturday Night Live waiting for my few minutes with Lorne Michaels.
I hear a voice coming behind me and it was someone I had heard before growing up but I didn’t want to turn around because I was so self-conscious and nervous. He’s high-fiving people, “How are you doing? How’s everyone doing?” I said to myself, with the introvert in me, “Please don’t sit beside me.” He sat down right beside me and it was no other than the late great Chris Farley a few months before he would pass.
He said, “Who are you?” I said, “I’m no one. I’m here to see Mr. Michaels. I got an interview with him.” For the next twenty minutes, Chris Farley ended up listening to me, actively listening, engaged, leaning in with his body language, completely mesmerized by the little stories I was telling him. It lowered my anxiety.
Lorne Michaels, the king, walks in. Everyone addresses him. He walks in with his Armani and tailored suit. I end up going into the interview with him. We talked about books where I’m from in Toronto because he’s from Toronto. At the end of the brief time together, he said, “Why don’t you come work for me?” That was my beginning at working for Lorne Michaels on Saturday Night Live.
You’ve written a book called Live from Your Class. It’s so clever as everything you’ve learned about teaching from working there. Did you start as his assistant or an intern? Where’s the humble beginning here?
Live from Your Class: Everything I learned About Teaching, I Learned from Working at Saturday Night Live
I started as a little more than an intern. That is a broad company. That company produces TV shows, live shows and SBs. It goes on and on. I worked directly for Lorne Michaels in his orbit, Broadway Video Entertainment. This is his production wing. I worked for the show. I was young and I was more of a fly on the wall. I wasn’t an important player in that ecosystem but it allowed me as a young, ambitious and driven person to jump to different roles.
I learned things like how to pitch ideas because I was around people like Jim Sharp who ended up being one of the people who ran Comedy Central. I learned from several executives who pitched the TV, the film and as well as the show itself. I came out of there after a few years of having this behind-the-scenes but also this corporate understanding of how storytelling works and also where I might fit in the future.
How long were you there?
Four years.
There’s a great quote you have from Lorne Michaels that he would say that the show was not ready because it was finished. The show was ready because it was 11:30 on Saturday night and your whole focus is, “What’s your 11:30?” Can you explain to us how that relates to the audiences you speak to?
“What’s your 11:30,” is symbolic but in the context of Saturday Night Live, which is a metaphor that I use regularly in my talks, your 11:30 is that problem that you want to turn into a possibility or an opportunity. By the end of that week in Saturday Night Live, from Monday to Saturday, they have to have a show. There are people’s jobs on the line. Countless challenges come up. There are ratings they have to make sure they hit. Somehow this show has existed my entire life since 1975. This system works. Your 11:30 is, “How are you going to co-create a solution when you have a deadline in your timeframe that you need to make that happen?”
I’m sure there’s a story of, “We’re never going to make it,” or a celebrity going on after rehearsal. I’ve heard some stories. Whitney Houston was supposed to be in a skit and they didn’t think she was going to show and things like that. Do you have a story of the drama of last-minute people making a deadline or what you had to do when somebody didn’t show up?
I’ll pivot a little within that because what came to mind was someone who handled themselves so admirably and I learned so much from and how they dealt with that high-pressure situation when they had several challenges. That was Jackie Chan. I don’t know if he is the most famous or well-known movie star in the world.
Jackie Chan came on that show and I remember being backstage. That day, I brought my mom who came in from Toronto. She didn’t know who Jackie Chan was but when I pointed out who it was, she went, “He’s such a nice man. I can see he’s lighting up the room.” What Jackie Chan did so well was I watched him in the transitions between the commercial break and then coming out into the costume area where he had to change.
He never seemed to get perturbed or overly serious, which I do sometimes if I get stressed. My brow wrinkles and I look different. His energy with everyone was very balanced considering the situation. Jackie Chan also spoke English as a 2nd or 3rd language. I thought, “He’s going on live American TV in front of millions of people. There are no do-overs and yet, he’s running around backstage with a smile on his face, doesn’t look stressed even though 9 out of 10 even stars are stressed by that experience. He’s got this way of being still within the creative chaos.”
[bctt tweet=”Be still during the chaos.” via=”no”]
That was something where you asked almost the opposite. That was someone who walked into the fire and thrived. As a speaker, what can I take from that? That’s what you and I do. We spend a considerable part of our time standing in front of people, strangers and adults who might be judgmental based on where they came from. We have to somehow make them see something that can help them transform themselves. At that moment, Jackie Chan helped me see myself differently. If he can do that, maybe I can find that within me somewhere.
Isn’t that interesting that not even interacting but observing someone else staying calm and not panicking gave you hope that could happen for you?
It wasn’t his acrobatic brilliant stunts. The superpower he showed me at that moment was being quiet, staying calm, centered and present under pressure.
One of the things that intrigue me about your outcomes after people hear you speak is the difference between focusing on outcomes versus outputs. Can you give us a definition of what those two words mean to you and how that impacts productivity?
I heard this a lot before I started focusing on it. Companies would say, “We have a certain part of our workforce who works very hard and they want acknowledgment of how hard they work, not quite getting the outcomes that we need. How do we deal with that?” I look back on one of the themes in our conversation, Saturday Night Live or live TV as a metaphor for reaching outcomes on a deadline. You can’t hide. At the end of the week, there has to be that tangible show. The concrete sketch has to be turned into something real.
Nobody cares how many jokes were written if it’s not funny.
It’s how you show up. The way that I could simply define them and differentiate them is this. An output is a busy work. An output is an email. That’s important but is that getting you to whatever your ultimate outcome is to help your customers? Is that getting you toward the solution? It could be an email. It could be spending all day on ChatGPT, which I’ve loved doing. Just because I’m on ChatGPT, asking it to list five reasons for something, I’m impressed but it’s not necessarily helping me deliver my speech. It’s often busy work. It could be presentations.
Often, in companies, I found people think that a meeting is an outcome but a meeting virtually or in person, that’s an output unless it has a takeaway or something that’s going to directly move toward that solution. The outcome is the opposite of that. The outcome is solving a problem. The outcome is products. It is a service that helps someone solve their challenge or problem. You know if it’s an outcome because if you think of yourself or I think of myself, what value has the work led to that I am better off and my problem is solved? I have a solution that goes beyond the features.
It’s an actual solution that I’ve helped that person deliver. In some way or another, they are more evolved and less stressed. Whatever your promise is, that has led to that. That’s not to say we shouldn’t acknowledge the output. We need to acknowledge outputs in ourselves and others but we can’t stop there and say that’s enough. Smart work is ultimately more important than hard work.
I haven’t quite heard that before. I’ve heard, “Work smart, not hard,” but that smart work is more important than hard work is a great soundbite. There’s also a takeaway you have here about how to be creative on a deadline. Many people feel so stressed out when they’re given a deadline. Coming from the world of advertising, I was in advertising sales because I knew I was not the person that someone could come up to and say, “Give me twenty headlines by 5:00.” I would be deer in headlights.
I can come up with creative ideas when I’m not under deadlines typically or in the shower and middle of the night. A lot of people can relate to the challenge that my brain shuts down when I’m given a deadline to be creative. You saw that week after week for four years. Can you give us some a tip on what we can do if that’s our challenge?
Let’s go back to that Lorne Michaels quote and unpack that a little bit. Lorne Michaels said the show was not ready because it was finished. The show was ready because it was 11:30 on Saturday Night. What did he mean by that? What he meant by that is people will rise to the timeframe that you give them a task. If you and I said we have to produce this in the next 48 hours, we might not like it. We might kick and scream. We might resist it. Ultimately, if the stakes were high enough and it was urgent enough, we’ll finish in 48 hours.
Some of your readers might not like to read this but this is what the data shows us. There’s real data and organizational psychology that if you shrink your deadlines in half, your team will be more effective. You can take that as you want. People might disagree with that and that might not be popular to say. This is the outcome-based conversation that I like sometimes. If you are struggling with finishing something, give yourself a deadline where it’s cut in half.
[bctt tweet=”Shrink your deadlines by 50% and become more productive.” via=”no”]
Start anywhere. Start at the end if you have to. If you’re stuck at the beginning, find an accountability partner, which is the oldest thing in the book. As a matter of fact, I had someone on my podcast who is a three-time bestselling author and she’s the number one person in her field. She is ranked in several different studies I’ve seen. Yet she said that she is stuck and procrastinating on a passion project, something she wants to do. I told her on the podcast, “I will be your accountability partner. I am going to call you.” I’m going to remind her gently that it’s due. By the end of the day, she needs to take a step.
Signature Leadership: Find an accountability partner.
The other thing is to cut your deadlines in half because we rise to the timeframe. Find an accountability partner. This is not new and it sometimes almost becomes cliché because we hear it so often but what is your purpose? Why is it that you want to do this in the first place? If it’s not a priority, then the question I’d ask you is, “Is there a better project or goal to pursue now?”
I have two real-life examples of these deadline situations, having been in sales for most of my career and you schedule half an hour, maybe 45 minutes if you’re lucky to present. When I was speaking to a sales team in Canada, they said we’re given ten minutes. “The doctor will see you in ten minutes. You have ten minutes in between patients.” A lot of them are wasting those ten minutes by talking about facts and figures the doctor could look up for themselves.
It was my job to teach them how to tell a story or have something of value to intrigue them to want to keep talking. The same thing is true for a keynote speaker. I’m guessing this has happened to you because it seems to have happened to not only me but many of my friends who are in this keynote-speaking world. You’re booked for an hour.
Usually, if I’m the opening speaker, that usually works. Oftentimes, we’re the last speaker of the day. They’re running late and there’s a cocktail party that people want to get to, planes to catch or who knows what. They come up to you ten minutes before you go on stage and go, “Can you cut that down to 45 minutes?” There’s no time to edit the slides.
You talk about deadlines and creativity, first of all, your attitude and then your ability to not go through. Most people are like, “If I don’t have the time to rearrange my slides and cut slides, how in the world would I do that?” Anticipating those kinds of requests is the first step. I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
The question is what happens if this has happened to me as well? Even within that timeframe, you are asked to present. It could be as a professional speaker like we are or in a business meeting and your time is cut drastically at the last minute. What you said at the beginning is crucial. Your mindset going into it is, “I’m okay. I’m going to be okay.”
We’re coming full circle to Jackie Chan. I don’t know what to expect in terms of how they’re going to react to me. All I know is I can go out and deliver this presentation, talk or workshop because I prepared for it. I am ready because of what happened outside of myself that’s not in my control. The audience doesn’t know the difference. They’re not going to be upset.
They have somewhere to go after this. They probably can’t wait to go to lunch and it’s not personal. I am going to fit within the timeframe because my audience is also the event organizer and I want to build a relationship with them. You have two audiences. One is our event organizer. Like if you’re pitching, one is the executive and one is the customer and then there are the actual people in the audience.
Number one, if I make their life easy and I don’t pout and go or say, “Come on. I prepared for the last two months for this,” if I put all that aside and I have the Jackie Chan attitude, which is I’m going to smile, I’m going to go with it, I then will shift to, as a professional and say, “The number one goal here is to stay within my timeframe.” It depends on my structure.
I’ll give you one example. When I give my talk, it’s called Signature Leadership: Transform The Way You Lead. I look at the seven traits of renowned cultural icons and look at their handwriting. Get the audience to look at their handwriting. I then give strategies they can build into their work life to build more of these creative competencies or remove some of these barriers.
I won’t go through all seven. I will go through 4, not 7. I will make sure that my opening is not rushed. My opening is powerful. Like you’re the expert in, I’ll tell a story. At the end sometimes, I bring someone up on stage and I coach them or I do what I did with you. I’ll look at their handwriting and it will be the beginning or prompt for a short conversation about them.
If I have that opening and I have that end, do you think the audience is going to be asking, “Where are the other three traits? You only talked about four traits.” They don’t care. Yet I’m not rushed at the beginning. The beginning and the end are the most important parts of a talk. In the beginning, it’s like silly putty. I can move it or shake it and then we’re good.
That’s so helpful. Also in your book, Live from Your Class, you talk about the importance of laughter increases learning. Does that also apply outside of the classroom? Does it apply to corporate situations and corporate cultures? My question is, was there a lot of laughter in the process of creating Saturday Night Live or was everyone so stressed out? Did you see people who were nailing it, having fun during the week?
The theme of that book is when you’re laughing, you’re learning, which was by a public speaking coach and comedian in England named Jack Milner. When you’re laughing, you’re learning doesn’t mean you’re laughing all the time but there have been studies that show when you’re in a playful mood, you tend to be more creative, collaborative, easier to be around and a better leader.
[bctt tweet=”When you are laughing, you are learning.” via=”no”]
Laughing falls under the umbrella of play and joy. How do you feel when you’re laughing? You feel joyful and inspired. I don’t know about you. Even when I’m a participant on a Zoom call or Microsoft Teams or I’m speaking with groups of people, I’m not blaming them, I’m not judge judging, they’re looking down, they look sad and they’re not smiling. They are carrying a load of crap from the last meeting into this meeting. There’s heaviness.
People welcome appropriate humor, laughing and playing into situations. It’s surprising because it’s rare. I’m always looking for ways to help people within learning environments. I won this award, the TED Education, the TED Talk and International Award for Innovation. It was innovation around creating a curriculum for different levels of learning from kids up to adult education.
What I learned by applying what I had taken over twelve years of this study and application of building learning environments was if you can engage people on various levels on an emotional level, as you talk about, storytelling is part of it, on an analytical and appreciative level, you want to engage all aspects. Their brain and neural pathways are firing simultaneously. They will not only learn but they’ll have this emotional experience. The learning experience becomes an emotional unforgettable feeling that they take with them and they are more likely to apply it if they’re in that state.
Signature Leadership: If you can engage people on various levels, their brain and neural pathways are firing simultaneously. They will not only learn, but they’ll have this emotional experience.
Let’s go back full circle to the letter you wrote as a young man. Do you think there was some emotional state that you created when Lorne read that letter that made him decide to reach out, pick up the phone and call you or a lesson for someone who is trying to break through, whether it’s a prospect in sales or an event planner to get a relationship going for a speaking career?
We always are trying to grow our reach and network. When you look back at what you wrote to him, was it so heartfelt and authentic because you were that transparent and that he responded to it? Is there anything that you can see that you wrote that said, “I didn’t know I was doing it at the time but here’s what made him pick up the phone?”
Number one, it was short. I have found consistently that if you are at any age or level, if you’re attempting to reach out to people and cold calling especially but even if you have a distant thing, you’ve got to keep it short. Whenever I’ve gone against my instincts on that, I’ve been wrong. I have to explain my whole reason. Keep it short.
The next thing I did was I made sure that, without going over the top, there was a brief compliment specifically as to why I was reaching out. Not just why I’m reaching out but something about that person, even Lorne Michaels at his level, that inspired me. One thing I learned by being around some celebrities both then and in the years afterward was they do get bombarded with people who give them an almost superficial level of fandom.
There’s nothing wrong with that but, “I love you. I look up to you.” That doesn’t resonate as much as, “You did something years ago.” For him, I have to go back. I still have the letter in my journals that I’ve kept all these years. I talked about seeing him in the early days before he was on Saturday Night Live on a TV show on the CBC.
I saw reruns of that and I thought, “If Lorne Michaels started from where I grew up, maybe that’s something that I could aspire to on some level.” That’s not the usual introduction. It was authentic in how it was done and it was specific. Also, it’s getting to the point even in the form of a question to tell them what you want and if there’s a way that you can make it so that even if it’s 1%, it’s adding something of value to their life.
I’m improvising this because I didn’t know you were going to ask this question. It could be something like, “I noticed on your websites that you were looking to grow this area. You’re looking to hire someone who understands AI. I happen to be a graduate of Computer Science with a minor in AI. I have an idea that’s specific to solving that problem.” Most people don’t do that. Always end, if you can, with a quick question that’s confident. It’s not too aggressive but in some ways, you’re urging them a certain sense of urgency to want to get back to you. That’s hard but it’s doable.
Give them a compliment. Tell them why you’re reaching out to them in the form of, “I think I can help you with something,” not just, “I want coffee.” You and I, if I’m in LA or you’re in Toronto, if you’re around, I would expect you to say, “Do you want to have coffee,” because we have a relationship. If you don’t have a relationship with someone more successful than you, this is what a lot of people get wrong. I did the same thing.
Even successful people think, “I’m going to pick their brains.” Picking someone’s brain is coaching. It’s not fair to them to put them in a position where they have to ignore you, ghost you or say, “I don’t do that.” Most of them won’t say no. They just won’t respond. You want to flip that switch and offer them something specific to them.
It’s a two-way street. This has been so wonderful. I love that when we work smart, that is so much more important than hard work. It’s the distinction between outcomes and outputs, shrinking our deadlines by 50% and making us more effective, whether it’s in a team or individually. You gave us so many value wisdom bombs here. If people want to reach out to you to book you as a speaker by your book, where should they go?
My website. They could google me, JamieMasonCohen.com and I’d love to chat.
Thanks again for sharing your enthusiasm, your humor and most of all, your energy.
It’s my pleasure, John.
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Be A Broker Of Fairness With Rich Gibbons
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Employee loyalty is a competitive advantage. So how do you keep them? In this episode, John Livesay has the guest who can boil it down to one tip. Rich Gibbons, the President of SpeakInc, dives deep into the value of becoming a broker of fairness and what it brings to the industry. The one thing that needs to be everybody’s North Star is that you are not trying to stack the chips in anybody’s favor. Rich emphasizes how being fair to everyone makes you more advantageous in your business. Also in the business of selling himself as a speaker, he then shares why he thinks the key to finding the right speaker is finding someone who listens. If you wish to know how to keep your employees loyal, learn the speaking culture, or simply gain great nuggets for success, then you should not miss this conversation!
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Listen to the podcast here
Be A Broker Of Fairness With Rich Gibbons
Our guest is Rich Gibbons, the President of SpeakInc, a bureau that books the top speakers in the world. He said, “It is important to be a broker of fairness. When you are easy to work with, it becomes a competitive advantage.” Find out his secret sauce to keeping his employees loyal. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Rich Gibbons, who’s a native of Connecticut and Glasgow, Scotland. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He joined Speak Inc in 1991, which is one of the top speaking bureaus, and now serves as the company’s president. He has been closely involved with the International Association of Speakers Bureau, IASB, and is a past president of the organization.
Because of his knowledge and expertise in the industry, he has been sought after as an expert witness on legal issues involving professional speaking. He has also been involved with the Corporate Event Marketing Association, serving as a board member. He and his wife, Heather, have three children. Shout out to Julia, Jackson, and Max. In his spare time, he enjoys mountain biking, road cycling, windsurfing, motorcycling, and skiing. Welcome to the show, Rich.
Thanks for having me, John. That was a fun recitation there.
I’m always curious to have someone tell me their own story of origin of how you get started in the speaking business. You can take us back to being in Scotland and coming to America or wherever you want to start your story. You have been speaking for a long time, which is something we are going to dive into.
I first moved to San Diego, California, 33 years ago. When my wife and I first moved here from New York, we showed up in California. We didn’t have jobs and no contacts. We didn’t know anybody. I went to my alma mater and looked up the alumni directory and thought, “There is got to be somebody from our school out in San Diego.”
Sure enough, I saw that one of my fraternity brothers was out here. He was a couple of years ahead of me. I looked him up and came to learn that his wife, Ruth, had started a speaker’s bureau. I didn’t know what a speaker’s bureau was. When I paid her office a visit, I saw all these books, audio cassette series, and VHS tapes of these fascinating people. Ted speakers weren’t a thing back then. It’s that genre of subject matter experts and a lot of interesting people.
I would say to her on a Monday as I pay her office a visit, “Would you mind if I borrowed this series of audio cassettes? Can I take this book for a week? I want to look at this VHS tape.” It was almost like going to the library. I would check these things out and come back a week or ten days later and return that stuff and walk off with other stuff.
I was a real voracious curious consumer of the content of people like you that have a tradecraft and area of expertise. The arch of their story is endlessly interesting. She and her husband were working closely. When it came time for them to expand and grow the business beyond just her, they thought, “This Gibbons guy seems to be interested in the product.” This summer 2023, it will be 32 years. It must have been an idea whose time had come.
One of the things I found intriguing in your bio is you are being called an expert witness. I’m guessing there is a story there of some of the cases you have been called on. How do they even find you? One of the things that a bureau does, for those people who aren’t familiar, is all the contracts and getting the money upfront. If a speaker doesn’t show up, you have a whole roster of other people for backup, which gives the client peace of mind.
There are a lot of details and now, contracts are getting more complicated, from what I have been hearing. Tell us a little bit about what SpeakInc and your brand’s expertise is in those kinds of contracts. If you have a story of being on trial because we watched those shows on TV. We know how an expert witness is coming up and the defense is going to try to discredit it.
Our company and companies like ours, my brethren in the industry, or industry colleague friends across the lecture circuit, we serve as an intermediary between the companies and the trade associations that engage the talent, and that universe of talent that is out there. We want to be a broker of fairness. We want it to be fair for both parties. The one thing that needs to be everybody’s North Star is that you are not trying to stack the chips in anybody’s favor.
[bctt tweet=”Be a broker of fairness.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Our role is to make sure that there are no areas of ambiguity and that everything is clear. We have all had more familiarity than we would probably like with force majeure provisions coming out of the pandemic. A lot of people pre-pandemic were like, “Force majeure? What is that?” Everybody knows what force majeure is now. We are being an advocate for a level playing field and making sure that expectations are set with a great deal of clarity.
The second thing you asked was about the expert witness thing, which was entirely passive. I received a phone call one day from an attorney locally here in San Diego, California, who had been referred to me by a colleague of mine in Texas. It was related to a medical malpractice case for a popular, prolific, and bestselling author that had been a host of Oprah’s favorite or Oprah’s Book Club.
She had a book club where she would pick a book. She had her favorite things. It could be products to buy during the holiday time. One author that she raved about was Men Are From Mars, Women are From Venus. She had the whole audience participating in that situation where women have this wake-up call where he is not that into you if he is calling you Friday night to go out Saturday.
It wasn’t the Men Are From Mars, Women are From Venus. It was a similar author who had his moment in the sun and sold a lot of books. He had a heart event and was purportedly mistreated in the healthcare facility. There was a lawsuit. The insurance company was defending. Oftentimes, expert witnesses are brought in to weigh in on arcane industries or cottage areas of commerce that are not that well understood by people who are extramural to it.
When I was invited to participate, I went to a friend of mine who was a litigator and an attorney. I said, “I got this phone call today. I’m shying away from it.” We found out that I was being collared to be an expert witness. He said, “You should do it.” I’m glad I did it because it was illuminating and fun. His prediction came to pass. That was, “You will be part of a deposition and a dialogue where your area of practice will be the topic of conversation. No one in the room will know what they are talking about except you.”
That was absolutely the case. I was shocked at how authoritative the old expression, “Often wrong, never in doubt.” These attorneys were definitive and authoritative. I would listen to them and think, “That’s not remotely a reality.” There’s always a place for an expert witness to inject a little bit of truth into the conversation.
Most people don’t even have a clue that it exists as a profession. I remember going to a doctor’s office. The doctor is looking at the job title or profession on the medical intake form. I wrote, “Professional speaker.” He goes, “Is that a thing? People make a living speaking.” He couldn’t wrap his head around it.
When I learned that my fraternity brother’s wife had started a speaker’s bureau, I said, “What the heck is a speaker’s bureau?” They were like, “We help these groups and identify talent for the platform.” I thought to myself, “That must be like shooting fish in a barrel. How many companies can be doing that?” You then get into it and you realize, “It is competitive.”
Let’s talk about speaking because what you do that I don’t think people first think of is selling. You are in the business of selling yourself as a bureau to get clients to pick you to find their speakers, and you’re in the business of selling the speakers that you have on your roster as being the right fit. One of the things that stood out for me when I was browsing your website is the key to finding the right speaker is finding someone who listens.
I have a whole belief premise that soft skills, listening, empathy, and storytelling are what make us strong. You got listening on your website. We are on the same page here of how important that is to figure out even if you are the right fit sometimes as a bureau, let alone a speaker. If you could speak to that a little bit about how important listening is, and how you have that be part of your culture.
For a company like ours, as a non-exclusive bureau, we don’t have a backroom with a dozen names under contract that we get gigs for. It is not like that. Our marketing communication, branding, and positioning in the market are not unique to us, but it is the wall we are leaning our strategic ladder against. We can be impartial assets and counselors to those people putting together agendas.
Broker Of Fairness: There’s always a place for an expert witness to inject a little bit of truth into the conversation.
Oftentimes, it’s the number of event stakeholders and executive leaders that want to get their fingerprints on speaker selection. They want to talk about a theme. There’s the almighty budget, and the cross-section and demographic of the audience. These event stakeholders can take 10 to 15 minutes to tell you about one slot, the opening general session or the closing keynote, what they want people to think and feel, and how they want their audience to change their orientation after the program as opposed to before it.
You can take the same briefing and description of all I have mentioned and share it with ten people, and you can get ten different answers. There is a lot to interpretation, follow-up questioning, and understanding of who has worked well in the past and who has maybe not hit the mark. Getting a feeling for the entire fabric of that entire landscape tells you a lot. It becomes the curation process and suggesting candidates that will align well with what is being described. It is not an art form, but it is not going to be reduced to software code anytime soon.
I want to double-click on something you mentioned, “Listening includes deep questions beyond the initial question.” In the world of psychotherapy, would you go to a therapist with your partner and say, “The romance is gone?” That is what is called the presenting problem. People think, “As soon as we get their romance back, everything will be fixed.” The therapist will usually say, “That is the presenting problem. There is something else going on that has caused the romance to go away like lack of trust and hurt feelings.”
That is their job to do that. As a sales keynote speaker, I work with the audience on thinking of themselves as doctors, asking questions like that, and not taking the first problem that a client gives you as, “This is our big problem. If you solve this, we will hire you,” or whatever. Sometimes it is as simple as saying, “Anything else on your mind? Anything else that you want this event to be? Anything else that is a concern to you?”
You get down to another level, especially if they are interviewing you and maybe elder bureaus or maybe other speakers, and I’m the one that said, “Anything else?” Everyone else goes, “You want them to hit their quota. I can do that. Bye.” If I say, “Anything else?” They go, “We also like them not to take rejection personally, be a little more resilient, or whatever else they are struggling with.” I can then go, “I can do this and this.”
If I don’t ask the question, they don’t often give you more than the first-level answer. I thought that is a great example of what you are saying there. With events in particular, there are many moving pieces. They almost need you to be a therapist sometimes and realize you are not alone in this. That is part of the messages.
That’s a great way to put it. I feel a little bit like a fossil making this observation, but so much of what my colleagues and I did when I first got in the business back when dinosaurs roamed the land in the early 1990s, everything was phoned and faxed. I don’t even think the email was a thing back then. There is so much automation, and everything is very digital that I will be diplomatically insistent.
A lot of my colleagues, both my partners here, as well as my industry colleagues, to the point you made two minutes ago about anything else. You can’t ask anything else over email or text. That is got to be eyeball-to-eyeball. That is why having these conversations over Zoom or Teams, there is more of a dialogue. It can be more conversational.
There is a famous speaker who came of age in the late ‘80s. He had a great firm that has stuck with me for three decades that is prescription before diagnosis is malpractice. It’s a lot about that to the extent you are making recommendations before you have heard the whole story and unpack all the nuances of the meeting landscape and direction.
There is such a huge ecosystem there that to have that conversation, and to the point you made asking open-ended questions, “What else would you like me to know about?” The stuff you pick up in those dialogues. Sometimes it is not possible if you are working with an agency or a production company and you are a couple of degrees from Kevin Bacon. You are not right at the coalface. It is a little bit of the telephone game. You don’t get that granular detail.
When you are talking with a CMO or a director of events, and they have a seat at the table, they understand the details and nuance of how they are putting that together with the energy and the theme, and where they sit in the evolution of their company and organization. When you have the dirt under your fingernails familiarity with everything they are dealing with, it makes you pick up these minute details in what they are communicating. To the extent you know the minute details, background, experience, and history of the speakers, you can make those connections that are hard to do when you get a macro, generic, or general brief.
[bctt tweet=”‘Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.'” username=”John_Livesay”]
Sometimes if you are talking about the details, it can be as simple as when you land or get to your hotel, text the bureau and the client. Let everybody know you are there. That is one less thing they have to worry about, especially if there is bad weather, canceled flights, or 100 other things. That requires a speaker to not be self-focused the whole time and realize that you are just one cog in this big wheel. If you can take that, that is one of the easiest things you can do to be known as someone who is easy to work with.
From what I have heard from having the pleasure of being with you in person here in Austin, that is a big criteria on which speakers you recommend. Are they easy to work with? That is one thing you can do to be easy to work with. Are there other things that people should be aware of? Is that a competitive advantage of being responsive and easy to work with? I love you to speak a little bit about that.
If you look at a pie chart of these are the things that the event marketer and meeting professional has to worry about for the annual sales kickoff or the global customer conference, there are enumerable things they have to chase after and that are keeping them up at night. If you are a 6% slice of the pie chart, but you are 45% of the headache, you are upside down there.
I want to come back to what you said. Are there things that the speaker can do? The days and hours leading up to the start of a huge event are filled with heart attack emergencies and migraine headache-inducing problems that the event owners have to solve in real-time. Meetings start on Thursday morning, and here it is Tuesday afternoon and we have a huge problem. They got to figure that out.
That is not the time for a speaker or a bureau to be in their hair asking about AV tech needs or something that could have been dealt with several weeks earlier, straightforward and simple. We tend to think of that 2-week or 3-week zone leading up to the event. You got airfare, air itineraries, and ground transit. You will be like, “We will figure out the tech check as we get closer.” There are those things that are a bit more plastic in real time. If there is anything that can be taken care of far in advance, it should be taken care of far in advance.
What experience bring is anticipating problems before critical thinking in action. It is what you described. One of the things that I’m also impressed with because I’ve had the privilege of meeting not just you but several other people virtually and then in person, Lisa Warren and Jenna George, is this incredible loyalty. This is the problem that many companies of any industry of any size struggle with. How do we attract good talent? Done. How do we keep them?
The loyalty factor is huge in speaking. I’m sure a lot of people will go, “I got to lean in here.” Rich is the president. He probably sets the tone. There must be some culture that keeps people from being wooed away. For whatever reasons, people leave jobs because people say, “They don’t leave the job. They leave their boss.” I’m guessing reading goes into it as well, making people feel they have concerns and flexibility. If you had to boil it down to one tip you could give people who have employees, what could they do to keep people loyal?
First of all, thank you for your generous observation. The principles of this company are proud of our brand and our reputation. One of the things that we are most proud of, as you rightly noted, is the tenure of our team. Yes, if you have seen my business card, it says president on it. I am lucky to be surrounded by incredibly smart people and partners. It is not remotely a lonely experience because there is a new problem to figure out every day, and I don’t have a patent on being right. My wife would certainly confirm that I don’t have all the answers. I don’t have all the answers.
The extent to which we are a collaborative operation, and this is a long-winded answer to your question. It is a little bit hack need and almost a trope that the proverb like, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” We are emblematic of that. We have been in the business for 33 years. We must have some level of tenacity and longevity in the business.
It is a function of going together that every single time we run into something, somebody’s background and industry connection, the way someone is wired, whether it is a fellow agent, colleague, or journalist who is deeply involved in finance. Everybody has their little niche of experience. The collaborative nature certainly helps out. It is certainly not unique to our company or us.
Some of my best friends in the industry at other companies also have ESOPs. They also have some of the key staff that are stakeholders and shareholders in operation. I’m thinking of the company that went flying out of my head, Upstate, New York, a yogurt manufacturer founded by a Turkish entrepreneur. All of his employees are part owners in the company.
Broker Of Fairness: If you are a 6% slice of the pie chart, but you are 45% of the headache, you are upside down there.
Is it Chobani?
Yes, I see it in the grocery store every time I go. He is looking at the world through a prism of abundance and realizing that you can’t dominate your team and ring their best effort out of them without them coming along for the ride. Any successful operation has that notion of, “We are all in this together. Whether we fail to succeed, this is our success or problem.” If you look at a company like Chobani, it is emblematic of the notion that when people feel like their opinion matters, their perspective is valued, and they have a stake in the action, how can that not breed loyalty in ownership and buying?
I want to take that one step further. Thank you for that wonderful answer, and show it as not just nice to have. You are not spending a lot of time training and interviewing people. One of my favorite phrases as a sales keynote speaker is, “What this means to you is?” When you are presenting your bureau to a big company, and they are saying, “We are looking at you and two other bureaus. One of our big points of differences is we have one of the most, if not the most, loyal teams out there.”
You insert the phrase, “What this means to you is?” You can start painting that picture of if someone has got a turnover all the time and you are working with the bureau that has a different agent servicing you year after year. There are no history and no frame of reference. You are starting from ground zero versus us. We have a history together. That allows us to build on that history together. There is a shortcut in a language we develop and trust. That is the other ROI that people don’t always put together and connect those dots.
Some of my aging colleagues who have these incredibly immersed, deep, and loyal connections where they know the entire events team have spent innumerable hours at these events and chasing after things that are maybe technically one of my principal partners of the last 25 years. I think of him at an event and receiving this celebrity who had traveled to the event with her toddler in the entertainment industry.
He found out at the 11th hour that the car service that had said they had a child’s seat did not have a child’s seat. This car service, like an hour, needed to go pick up this celebrity at the airport. It is like probably a Lincoln Town Car thing. There he was. He was running off to Target to purchase with his company credit card a car seat.
Nowhere in your job description say, “You will be responsible for purchasing a car seat.” There is enormous loyalty that is earned on the part of the agent to the degree they are swimming in the water column with the event pro onsite, “We found out about this problem.” To the degree, we as a team are able to say, “No problem, we will chase it down.” That creates an enormous amount of connection and loyalty that is not unique to us. There are lots of other colleagues I have in the industry that would do the same thing, but I think buyers, to a great degree, understand who is leaning in and who is phoning in it.
Any last thought or a quote you want to leave us with, Rich?
My colleagues love to give me heat and static. As my Scottish mother would say, “That is good. It will knock the sharp corners off you.” I don’t have any sharp corners left, but one of the things they tease me about, and it is well earned, and I am guilty as charged, is how somewhat hand-ringing and OCD to the extent to which I overthink things.
One thing I have been trying to embrace and move forward on, and I can’t remember who said it, or it could be a dozen different people that have said it, but the quote I read that stuck with me was, “Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.” That notion of the 1.0 version of whatever you try that is new, might not be your best effort and product. You might be trying, but the end result might not be the best.
As one of your guests shared, when you were talking about speaking with Wayne Dyer’s 74th birthday, “Did I live the same year 74 times in a row or 74 different years?” I’m butchering that quote, but the point is to try new things, get outside your comfort zone, and be okay with doing it poorly because you can’t get to the 6.0 or 7.0 version of anything without doing the 1.0 or 2.0 average mediocre.
[bctt tweet=”Loyal employees create value.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That is something that you asked for. Is there anything you like to say in closing? That would be it. All of us during a time of such, it is awfully hack needs observation, but we live in a time where market change, technology change, and all the tools that we have at our disposal are changing fast, radically, and yet so powerfully that we need to be comfortable.
Particularly me, I need to be comfortable with maybe coloring outside the lines once in a while and being okay with imperfection because I’m not like that. I have colleagues who I admire because they are quick to try new things and new approaches. I’m a little too hand-ringing in the corner with a T-square and a protractor. In this day and age, that is not how to be.
Thanks for inspiring us to remember to loosen up a little bit, how to create people who are loyal by letting them feel seen and heard and creating a culture of us, and more importantly, reminding us all that we can all lean in a little bit more instead of phoning it in. Rich, if someone wants to hire speaking, what is the best place to send them to?
They can certainly go to our website, which is SpeakInc.com. We are on social media and everybody’s got an email.
Thanks for sharing your wit and your wisdom with us, Rich.
It is a pleasure, John. I admire how present you are, and it is super fun talking to you.
Likewise.
Important Links
- SpeakInc
- Rich Gibbons – LinkedIn
- International Association of Speakers Bureau
- Corporate Event Marketing Association
- Men Are From Mars, Women are From Venus
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