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CHURN FM is the podcast for subscription economy pros. Every Wednesday we hear how the world’s fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention & engagement to fuel their growth.
CHURN FM
E252 | Preventing Team Churn: Leadership Tactics for Retaining Talent with Mr Joe
Today on the show we have Joe Leech, a Coach to CEOs with 18 years of tech experience, working with over 30 startups and FTSE100 giants.
In this episode, Joe shares his insights on retaining top talent and preventing team churn.
We discussed the common mistakes leaders make in micromanagement and hiring and we wrapped up by exploring effective onboarding strategies for new leaders.
Mentioned Resources
Churn FM is sponsored by Vitally, the all-in-one Customer Success Platform.
[00:00:00] Joe Leech: They say things like, my team is my family, right? My team's my family. This is, we're a family. This business is a family. And that's number one, it's simply not true.
[00:00:00] Andrew Michael: This is Churn.FM, the podcast for subscription economy pros. Each week we hear how the world's fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth.
[00:00:31] VO: How do you build a habit-forming product? We crossed over that magic threshold to negative churn. You need to invest in customer success. It always comes down to retention and engagement. Completely bootstrapped, profitable and growing.
[00:00:45] Andrew Michael: Strategies, tactics and ideas brought together to help your business thrive in the subscription economy. I'm your host, Andrew Michael, and here's today's episode.
[00:00:56] Andrew Michael: Hey Joe, welcome to the show.
[00:00:57] Joe Leech: Really good to be here. And everybody out there.
[00:01:00] Andrew Michael: It's great to have you. That had quite a nice ring. Hey Joe, welcome to the show. But for the listeners, Joe is a Coach to CEOs bringing 18 years of tech experience, working with 30 plus startups and FTSE100 giants to his practice, enabling ambitious founders to hit their goals. Prior to his coaching business, Joe was the director of strategy at cxpartners, where he worked on major projects with the likes of Marriott.com and eBay. So my first question for you, Joe, is what has been the most exciting project you've got to work on during your career?
[00:01:29] Joe Leech: The most exciting one was probably, I worked on Marriott.com on their global relaunch in, what would it have been, around 2014. An enormous e-commerce site, doing around $6 billion a year in revenue. It was one of those ones where they wanted some outside experience. I was working for an agency at the time and we were doing some international work for them. They were like, oh yeah, you should... I nudged our way into the pitch situation because they were hiring some big, hot shot agencies. They kind of invited us along for the, just to be nice, I think. And we ended up winning the pitch and winning this redesign of Marriott.com and leading that.
[00:02:04] Joe Leech: And it was, incredible journey in 38 countries, 18 languages, a huge, incredible project we've worked on. And you know, the numbers sort of spoke for themselves afterwards, an enormous uplift in terms of conversion rate and numbers, especially internationally. They were doing upwards of 40, 50 million extra a year through it. So it's an incredible project to have worked on.
[00:02:25] Andrew Michael: Amazing. Yeah, I can imagine that sort of scale and size as well. How risky, but also how rewarding a redesign and updates and conversion rate optimization can be as well.
[00:02:36] Joe Leech: It was a real eye-opener to me and it's one of the big reasons I am where I coach CEOs is going from that where you had that amount of responsibility or just chasing that through the organization to understand where decisions are made, to really maximize value like that really. And I've ended up in the C-suite now working with CEOs, just from working in that project and unlocking the kind of business value and the risks associated with something that big has got me to where I am now by taking on something of that magnitude.
[00:03:03] Andrew Michael: And what motivated you to go down this path then of the CEO coach psych? Was there a specific trigger or what is it about coaching CEOs that you enjoy?
[00:03:11] Joe Leech: Yeah, two, it means professional and personal really. I think professionally for me, I was seeing poor decision making really, especially in larger organizations down at the implementation level really. Everybody wants to empower their teams to do great work, especially in growth. You want to empower your growth leaders and the folks responsible for churn to really maximize the value because ultimately they're the ones who can really look at and focus on the value in the business. The reality is bad decisions are being made further up in the organization. So I want to go figure out, why chase that down at the very top to understand really what's going through a CEO's mind when they are looking at growth and looking at retention and looking at churn, what are they really worried about, what's the emotional aspect of where they are, why do they make seemingly such poor decisions?
[00:03:56] Joe Leech: And often, more often than not, you know, that reason differs if they're a founder versus being an administrative CEO. There's so many different reasons why people make poor decisions. I wanted to help support that so that they didn't. And from a personal point of view as well, I had my own startup and we raised a huge amount of money in pre-seed, but it was the, it was at the wrong point in my career and in my life, and it would have been really the end of my marriage and probably a lot more if we'd taken that money and gone for this DTC startup I was working on. So it's kind of two sides to it really.
[00:04:26] Andrew Michael: Nice. What are the most common mistakes that you see making? You mentioned there's a difference between founders versus operators, CEOs. Maybe what's common between the two and then what's maybe one from each that you see commonly mistake made.
[00:04:41] Joe Leech: Yeah. They both relate to churn, actually. In fact, they relate to all elements of the business. We talk about founders, CEOs first. If you think about the early stages of a business, really, your superpower as a founder is being across everything, making the right decisions. That button should be blue, not green, right down to that level of detail. The biggest challenge I see is they care about doing that all the way through growth of the business. They still are all over the detail. That's exhausting for them and exhausting for the team.
[00:05:06] Joe Leech: It leads to burnout. And then, you know, they churn, they leave because they're burnt out. They can't carry on anymore leadership and especially the certainty of series A, you see a lot of series B, you see a lot of CEOs kind of being nudged out of an organization because they are focused too much on the detail, not enough on the larger picture of organizing the business and running the business. And that's a big warning sign is too much detail-focus early on. Great. Fantastic for you later on in your career. Absolute dangerous, dangerous place to be.
[00:05:33] Joe Leech: And then the opposite is true often for operator CEOs is, they don't often care about the details. They don't. They are folks who just care. More often than not, operator CEOs are bought in because they come from the money side of the business. I'm working increasingly more with operator CEOs who come from the product side of the business, who absolutely do understand what the product needs to be. It takes a different set of skills to be an operator, to be a visionary.
[00:05:56] Joe Leech: You're either a visionary or you're an integrator. It's a classic switch in terms of your personality type. You've got to understand which one of those two you are. Founders are typically visionaries, operators are typically integrators. You need a team around you to support you on the thing you're not so strong at. Absolutely that's the big mistake I see.
[00:06:12] Andrew Michael: See it. Yeah. A great piece of advice I got as well related to this in the sense that sort of a really good CEO or leader in general really has the ability to understand when they need to dive into the details and when they need to zoom out. And it's a muscle that you need to be able to flex at any given moment in time in a company. So it doesn't necessarily mean like you need to completely be off-hands and out of it. There are times when you need to be in the details, but–
[00:06:36] Joe Leech: Completely.
[00:06:36] Andrew Michael: Knowing and understanding where and when and how is something that you need to work on. A really great advice I still try to do, but it's just, it's very difficult to understand.
[00:06:47] Joe Leech: It's exhausting. Well, I talk about it with the people I work with is and this is good for any leader, really, there's two kinds of problem. You can see things as a leader, right? There's umbrella problems and there's bus problems. And you talk about this with my daughter, right? I live in the UK. It rains a lot here. I’ve got to make sure my daughter takes her umbrella to school. If she doesn't take her umbrella to school, she's going to get wet. I'm not a great parent if I'm always there checking the weather and giving her an umbrella. She, at some point, has to learn to check the weather, pick her umbrella herself. Of course, there's going to be those days where I'm like, it's on her to make that choice and make that decision to do that.
[00:07:19] Joe Leech: She's going to come back one day after school, be wet and angry. Fair enough, but it's not the end of the world. I'm not going to do the same if I see her jumping, walking back to step in front of a bus. I'm not going to let her learn that lesson. I'm going to pull her back. And most early stage leaders and certainly founders, they see everything as a bus, right? Every challenge and problem becomes a bus. Oh my gosh, if we don't get this right, this is going to be really serious. When the reality is most of these challenges are umbrellas and the team need to find their way into it. Certainly when they start and you get new starters, they have to understand, as a leader is this challenging thing I'm looking at here, an umbrella or a bus and adapt my behavior the right way to unlock that from that person.
[00:07:56] Andrew Michael: Yeah
[00:07:56] Joe Leech: Unlock that learning for that person.
[00:07:58] Andrew Michael: It's very interesting. Like as you're talking, I just like had flashbacks of moments working with David Darmanin, the CEO of Hotjar. And there were times that when I, I at least felt like I could clearly see we were making mistakes with the marketing team where we were at. And he also, at some point I went to him, I was like, I think we need to, like do something. And he's like, well, sometimes we need to let people learn on their own as well. And, like it was just for me, I was like, how could you do that? Like, I was just thinking to myself, like, as the CEO, like you can clearly see, but then obviously you see the value in how much people grow and learn from those mistakes as well at the same time.
[00:08:30] Andrew Michael: Like sometimes you can see maybe it's just a cost and we lost money because we wasted time, but other times you can look at it as an investment into educating and to growing the team and giving them the freedom and flexibility and that sort of opened my eyes and changed my thinking. And I think that was one of the great things about the culture of Hotjar is really you were given a lot of freedom to be able to explore and make mistakes and I think that's at the end of the day what attracted so many great people as well to work there because of that.
[00:08:57] Joe Leech: Great leaders do that and founders don't typically want to do that early on because it's expensive. Right?
[00:09:01] Andrew Michael: Yeah.
[00:09:01] Joe Leech: So as your business grows, you can take the luxury of doing that. And so for so long in a business as a founder, everything could seem like a bus problem to you. The reality is you need to just step back because that's exhausting for you.
[00:09:11] Andrew Michael: Yeah.
[00:09:11] Joe Leech: And that can lead to burnout. Right? If everything's a bus or a challenge like that, that’s exhausting and stressful. You're not a very nice leader to work for if you're acting like that all the time. Every particular decision that's made well or not is the end of the world if the best decision isn't made. It's exhausting for you and exhausting for the team. That's when team churn begins. That's when team members burn out because you're on their backs all of the time about the decisions they're making. It doesn't have to be like that.
[00:09:36] Andrew Michael: Yeah. Let's double click into that because I think that's one of the topics we want to talk about today on the show and really is when and how like churn happens, but within the context of our teams and how companies, CEOs, leaders can really focus to retain the talent that they do have and grow and expand with them. I'm keen to hear a little bit about your experience on this topic today. Why do team members leave? When you're working with companies, where do you get started?
[00:10:05] Joe Leech: It's a really challenging situation, right? So when you think early stage, there's like a team of 10 of you early on. The first time you have that wrong high or that person leaves, it really kind of hits you in the heart, to a certain extent. You take that very personally that you've made some sort of mistake. That feeling, I don't think always ever goes in terms of, we're humans, right? We always want to do right by other humans. That's hardwired into us. That can count really strongly for us in good situations, but that can count quite strongly against us when we need to make difficult decisions. I see it typically, the big places, when leaders fail in terms of, too many people getting, leaving really of their own accord, is that classic, the bus is one I mentioned where they're micromanaging everybody, right?
[00:10:47] Joe Leech: Micromanagement is dangerous. You might think like you're helping somebody by micromanaging them. Absolutely, you're not. That causes people to leave. We all instinctively know that we should not be like that, but it's very, very hard to switch that switch off. So a lot of the stuff I work on with my leaders is both a mindset shift, first of all, that I've got to make this choice. I can't be that person who's on top of everything all of the time, right? I have to make that mental shift. Then I have to learn the skill set to be on top of that and be all over that. What does that actually mean to not be a micromanager? I know conceptually I shouldn't do it, but how does that actually look like in purpose? What tools do I need to do so I'm not doing that?
[00:11:23] Joe Leech: That comes down to other skills that you need, like being able to run a one-to-one meeting with somebody. You might think, again, you're good at this stuff, but the reality is most of us aren't unless we've got a very strong agenda that we always stick to. In those one-to-one meetings, you need to have an agenda that talks about things like, you know, what the KPIs you're meeting, what the challenges you're facing, a very structured agenda so you've got a place to talk about people. Talk about the right things at the right time with people, right? Rather than, unless it's looking over their shoulders. So a big one I see early on is micromanagement, right? And that's something we can all fall into, especially as new leaders, we can all fall into that trap.
[00:11:59] Joe Leech: The second big trap that I see around this is around hiring the wrong kinds of people. And I know that sounds, again, very obvious, but that comes in two ways. If you think about it, most founders are visionary people and many leaders are. You're either a visionary or an integrator. You're an operator. You tend to fall into one of those two camps. The danger is you hire too many people like you. There's nothing worse than a C-suite or a team full of visionaries. Nothing will get done. If you're all trying to push visions together, you're going to clash because you've all got probably slightly conflicting visions. If you're all integrators and all operators and you can all build great code, fantastic, but you need that person at the front telling you what to build is we hire people that are like us.
[00:12:42] Joe Leech: That's quite dangerous. We don't want a team just made up of people exactly like us. This is where, in terms of hiring, you need to think about diversity of ability, diversity of outlook, diversity of culture, all of that kind of stuff comes in. Because the more different types of people you get on that team, the better the result is going to be. Because they're going to compliment you rather than, as you believe, conflict with you. The reality is that conflict can cause real excitement. So not hiring people like you is a great call, especially early on. Cause again, that temptation is early on as a founder is to hire people just like me who are visionaries and will drive this a hundred miles an hour. You don't want that in an ongoing business. That's simply not going to work for you.
[00:13:22] Andrew Michael: Yeah. And I think this is something like I heard as well, early on at Hotjar is that there are certain types of people that will come in and they'll be shooting stars and you should allow them to do that just to come in and to run with things and then leave on their way when the time is right. And, but you also need to have like the solid planets that are going to be there and going to be with the company and like having a balance and understanding of who you're hiring. Like you said, like if you're hiring as a founder, you're trying to find people like you, you're typically going to get maybe more of those shooting stars who are going to come in and have big impact and then go, but at the same time, they can also cause a lot of chaos in their wake. And it's important to understand and, and strike a good balance.
[00:13:58] Joe Leech: Oh, it's dangerous.
[00:13:59] Andrew Michael: Yeah.
[00:14:00] Joe Leech: I've got a great story about this actually.
[00:14:02] Andrew Michael: Yeah.
[00:14:03] Joe Leech: I was working for a huge, like, UK, US software company. Like, we're doing hundreds of millions in ARR over a year. They had two products. One product was the flagship, right? It was flying. It was the one that had the most love. The other product they'd launched was not doing as great. Okay. It was doing okay. It was sort of representing about 10% of revenue, but nobody really kind of noticed it. And they got a visionary leader in, like that to lead this new product. And it started to storm. Right. This product was doing a hundred percent, was doubling revenue year on year. Right. It was going increasing, increasing.
[00:14:35] Joe Leech: Sharing was dropping, everything was going right about this particular product and the numbers were going in the right direction. This person was doing absolutely everything in the growth churn handbook about keeping and retaining customers. They were doing all of it. This part of the business was starting to get really strong, but also the leader that was leading this started to do other things in the business to introduce their ideas elsewhere, start trying to change from the bottom up the comp, the whole approach that the business was working. Typically, it was enterprise sales led, so it was led by a sales force. This individual was starting to introduce product led growth into the organization. Okay?
[00:15:10] Joe Leech: And that, on the outside, seemed like a great thing. A different source of customers, a different change in the culture. But the reality, actually, the opposite was happening. Although this business was growing, that larger business that represented the bulk of the core there was starting to suffer because there was a big cultural challenge between these two businesses. And although that person had great success, the CEO could see how they were leading the whole business in a difficult direction, a direction they didn't really want to or need to go to. So that leader took the difficult step of removing that person. And on paper, everything looked like things were going incredibly well for that part of the business.
[00:15:45] Joe Leech: But the reality was, is… it was growing too quickly in the wrong way and conflicting with the core part of the business. And that would have caused real, real headache later on for major customers because of this. And so sometimes the hard decisions, made as like you say is you bring on superstars, you get the most from them for a few years, and visionaries typically only get two or three years from them, and then you move them on. You have to move them out, because they're going to hit, to a point where they're going to start conflicting with the other parts of the business where they don't need to.
[00:16:11] Andrew Michael: The job's done in one place, but you need to move them on, somewhere else. As a visionary, there's nothing worse than getting bored in the position you're in and getting frustrated with the lack of change. You can go in and make a certain amount of change, and that might propel you forward. But equally, that might propel you out of the business. And there's nothing wrong with either of those two situations, as long as it's a conscious choice on both parts of that.
[00:16:29] Andrew Michael: Yeah. Very interesting. But it's definitely like having that balance. I think, as you say, it's good to be able to take advantage of these, but I understand that too many people like you, just is going to end in ruin. And at the same time as well, though, there is value, I think, in having other visionaries on the team and just striking good balance. Those are two things you see happen. What's next?
[00:16:50] Joe Leech: Yeah, so the big ones really is just it comes down to a tactical level of how you deal with people when you, the onboarding experience is key, right? It's offering and being generous with your time for people. So I often see, it's interesting, you look at certainly large big businesses, right? They have HR teams who design and build onboarding processes and they're often fantastic at the, you know, the engineer level or the individual contributor level. They're not, they're often fantastic. Where I see onboarding going very badly wrong is leadership and senior leadership. It's where leaders not, haven't got their own onboarding path set out for them.
[00:17:22] Joe Leech: So if you're hiring a VP, an SVP, a member of the C-suite, a leader of a team, you cannot expect the HR onboarding process to cover all elements of onboarding. Right? Yeah, sure, they need to know how to book vacation time, but that's not about what onboarding is. It's about understanding and embedding them in the culture of the way decisions are made. That's not just the culture, getting them to memorize the tenets of your business culture. It's about understanding how decisions are made, how choices are made, what has worked previously, what hasn't worked previously.
[00:17:51] Joe Leech: So obviously, big challenges is in not being generous with your time and offering bespoke onboarding for senior people, really, and offering them as much runway and support and time as they need to be successful. Because, look at it, you're investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in these individuals. It's absolutely spending at least a month of time really focusing and helping them, getting off to a good start. And more often than not, they're just dropped straight in and told, you know, we love that thing that you said in your interview about, you know, transforming this part of the vision, division off you go. Great. Good luck with that. Right. The reality is they need a lot of help and support from that.
[00:18:29] Joe Leech: So one of the big things I see is not enough bespoke onboarding or support in terms of onboarding senior people. And again, early stage startup, that's onboarding people in general. You need to spend a lot of time and a lot of effort and just expect the fact that it's a J-curve, right? It's going to be more costly to bring somebody on than it is to help them grow. And obviously, everybody's nodding along to this at home, right? Yeah, it doesn't happen. That's the thing we're in, right? It doesn't happen. You hear things like executives saying, yeah, we need to hit the ground running. That's dangerous speak, okay?
[00:19:00] Joe Leech: You need to invest the time. If you don't invest the time, it will not work. It will be an expensive mistake, a catastrophically expensive mistake if you look at a senior executive. It can cost you years in time and hundreds of thousands of dollars if you can get this right. So yeah, it may be your wish and your want for them to hit the ground running, but the reality is you need to spend a lot of time and effort with each human to make sure you get the most from them. And that's the only way that they're going to succeed and they're not going to churn out and leave, right? You're going to retain your staff much better.
[00:19:26] Andrew Michael: Yeah. So one of the moments where you need to get hands on with the details is hiring a critical hire like this.
[00:19:32] Joe Leech: Absolutely. Right. Yeah.
[00:19:34] Andrew Michael: So let's double click into this then as well, like as leaders looking to hire other leaders within the organizations. Or even like for the listeners who are leaders themselves and joining new companies, what would a good onboarding experience look like for a, say a VP or C level executive joining a company?
[00:19:53] Joe Leech: Yeah, let's start at C level. Cause that's the one I have the most experience with. So I was working with a CEO recently who was, you know, we just started talking to each other, he's like, Oh my God, my COO is just, I can't work with them. Right. I cannot work with them. And I'm like, what do you mean by that? Why are you saying that? Well, they've been here six months and they are, they just want to have conversations. They just want to task me how I am. They want to spend the first 15 minutes of every meeting just catching up on life. I just want to get on with the job. I want to get on with this. You can see the fundamental problem. I saw you smiling there when I was saying that, right?
[00:20:26] Andrew Michael: Yeah.
[00:20:26] Joe Leech: We all have this as founders. We're all doers. We want to get stuff done. But the reality is, is not everybody's like that. We've got to understand that we're not the same as everybody else. People do need a bit of time from us sometimes to talk the shit. Even if that's a couple of minutes, that's fine. We accept that people need that. The reality is, is what you have to do is change the expectations of that person into agreements. The big challenge I see across senior leadership hires is there's too many expectations at play.
[00:20:54] Joe Leech: I expect you, COO, to come in, not give me any small talk, to get on with the jobs you absolutely need to do, to report back to me in these 10 areas about these 10 metrics in these ways. Every Tuesday, we'll have this meeting at 4:30. We'll discuss these things. I want you to go into HR. I want you to sort out the staffing and recruitment. That stuff never happens at the C-suite level, right? You rarely get the time where somebody's given a very, very clear idea of how to work with you as an individual. So I'm the CEO, I work this way. I want to work with you in this way. They're often not given a clear enough mandate about what they should do.
[00:21:26] Joe Leech: And that can often come from the fact that the CEO or somebody's worried about people stepping on their toes or other people's toes and that mandate is not fully explained. So the expectation is I want you to completely overhaul the hiring procedure at this business. But the reality is, is I don't want you to do that because I'm too scared about what's going to happen. What you need to do as any leader coming into an organization is you need to catch all the expectations of you when they're out there and be really clear about them and transform those expectations into agreements. Have clear agreements with everybody that you work with.
[00:21:57] Joe Leech: So if you're coming in as a COO or as a SVP and product or whatever that role might be, you need to catch expectations as they arise from both above you, below you and alongside you about what people expect from you to be able to do. You need to transform those into agreements about how you're going to work with that person. Every single person you work with, you create an agreement with them about exactly how you're going to work, what you're going to do, what you're going to talk about, when you're going to talk about it, how you're going to talk about it, what channel you're going to talk about it with them on. You just need to invest that effort in creating strong agreements with people because the best and strongest working arrangements are agreements between people.
[00:22:34] Joe Leech: Most of us, certainly if we're incumbent in a role and somebody new comes along, we don't spend the time and effort doing that. I have one CEO that I work with who does this. His one thing in life is he runs as fast as he can towards any problem. That's the sign of any good leader is they run as fast as they can at a problem. Churn being a perfect example of that, the hidden silent killer, is running as fast as you can at a particular problem. That's the encouragement I take for all leaders out there, right, within your onboarding with any time you get the sniff of this being something wrong or an expectation that's not being met, is running at it as fast as possible.
[00:23:08] Joe Leech: If you're a new hire, the first six months, you can make so much change by just doing that. If you're incumbent and you're onboarding somebody on your team, you run towards the things that they're most worried about, that they're finding most challenging, because those are the things that are going to keep that person and empower that person to be strong in the organization. So two things. Run as fast as you can towards a problem when you see it or smell it. And switch expectations for agreements and you're on boarding. And in fact, any relationship you have with anybody is going to be strong in your business.
[00:23:36] Andrew Michael: As you're talking as well, it reminded me of, like a couple of leaders that joined the company at Hotjar around the same time. And I think the thing that, like, stood out to me really at that point when they joined us, we're around like 70 people at that time. So I joined when there was 20 and this was probably the first time we were bringing in, like true leadership into the company. And one of the first things actually did with the teams that they led was they booked meetings and they had like an hour session, Emma asked me anything. I started with the first like 15, 20 minutes of like, this is what you can expect working with me. And this is how I like to operate. This is how I like to communicate.
[00:24:08] Andrew Michael: And I think like it was, really, like it took me back a little bit. I was like, Oh, this is like, really cool. Like it's really clear. It's transparent. It's easy to understand. Like I can see what the plan is and what they're going forward from here. And I think it goes both ways as well. Thinking about what you're saying now as well is that, as a new hire joining in, like one thing, it's one thing being told what the expectations are, but as you mentioned, it's not always clear and it's not always ready and in place for you.
[00:24:34] Andrew Michael: But you can and do have the power to actually go out and reach to others and ask and understand, okay, what are the expectations? How can we be working together better? And also having your own set of ways of communicating and just being really transparent and upfront about that in the beginning, I think that probably like, put the team forward a month or two months, just having the clear understanding who these two people were coming into the organization, how they like to work and how they're operating styles. It really stood out to me. It's like, wow, these guys know what they're doing.
[00:25:03] Joe Leech: Yeah. That's such a simple thing to do, isn't it? You think about it. That's so obvious. These are the things we take for granted, these expectations. The reason they've done that is because they've seen how that's gone badly before, where the team members don't communicate with them or they don't share things in the right way or in the right format and things get missed. They've absolutely seen that from the mistakes that they've made. That's what I love to be able to do as a coach. I love to help leaders get there quicker by not going through the mistake phase of getting to these situations. You can see that there could be a challenge there later on. Before the mistakes made you create that agreement. You create that approach before things are there.
[00:25:39] Joe Leech: That's the key to any good leader. He's not only learning from their mistakes, being able to spot those mistakes before they happen and offset them, rather than being worried or scared about what might happen, or seeming stupid or naive when they say something. Absolutely, that stuff can be transformational.
[00:25:52] Andrew Michael: Yeah. So it's being too hands on, it's hiring too many people like you. It's not having sort of clear expectations of the people joining. What are some of the other reasons that you're seeing then, why people are leaving and, or maybe like, what are some of the key areas where you see CEOs or leaders doing exceptional jobs in retaining team members?
[00:26:14] Joe Leech: So I'll talk about one more reason for leaving and one more big trap. I see a lot of the leaders I work with come into, right. They often treat their… They say things like, my team is my family. My team's my family. This is, we're a family. This business is a family. And that's, it's not, I mean, simply, number one, it's simply not true. Right. I, there's no way that when my business, my life gets difficult, we can't make the mortgage repayments, I'm going to let my daughter go, right. I ain't never going to happen. Okay.
[00:26:40] Andrew Michael: Yeah.
[00:26:40] Joe Leech: Your team is not your family under any circumstances, right. You're kidding yourself if you think that's the case, right. It's the wrong metaphor to use. You can do something else like it's a sports metaphor, whatever, but family's the wrong one. I saw this most starkly recently. A CEO I've been working with had to make some redundancies last year and their business was a family, right? Really tight-knit organization. They'd had very little staff turnover to that point, high retention, very little churn. They had to make some more unfortunate redundancies last year. They weren't absolutely significant people within the organization. They kept the really significant people they wanted. They were letting people go more than new hires. There was more of a re-correction, right?
[00:27:18] Joe Leech: The real problem hit though is after they made those redundancies, the key people they wanted to keep then quit themselves. The reason they did that is because they felt they were using words like betrayed. That's absolutely because it was created as a family beforehand. If the people you want to really keep with you are that valuable to them, you reward them better. You reward sportspeople better for doing that. You give them other gifts and other ways of doing it. You don't treat them like family because in that situation they felt betrayed because they didn't know that they're, these redundancies were coming and they felt betrayed because they didn't think that was going to be the case that you were not the sort of leader that was going to let people go in the difficult times.
[00:27:53] Joe Leech: And so they lost, he lost three of his key leaders the week after he made a set of redundancies. A lot of big team go. That says a lot because of the culture of this family, which is when it's really, really close, it's really fantastic. But when it breaks down, it's really awful. Because again, when families break down, it operates at an emotional level as much as it operates at a, you know, a business structured, completely functional level, right? It hits on the emotional element and it really, these should be as objective as they can be. Of course, people, you know, have got feelings, but the reality is your business is not your family and you should not think about it like that and talk about it like that with a team.
[00:28:30] Andrew Michael: Yeah, absolutely. I think this is a lesson I've learned as well. Like in my early startup, I treated maybe the team members more like family. Ironically, they ended up becoming like the godfather of my son and the best man at my wedding and, like still, are very, very close friends with, majority of them, but as you say, like over time, as things like, start to grow. And I think it could perhaps work when there's like five or six or 10 or 12 or 15 people, but then anything over that, then it just like, it really, as you mentioned, the sports metaphor, I think is a much, much better way to view a team and understand that's okay.
[00:29:00] Andrew Michael: Like if you're not performing, you're going to go and ultimately the team needs to be winning and if we don't have a winning team and as you say, it's like, you can't really do that in a family environment where you're trying to, you create these different layers and different levels of trust. And I think within a sports team, there is trust, but you trust each other to be the absolute best at your job and to deliver on results. And with family, there's different levels and degrees to which you'd maybe be forgiving and things like this. So I think, yeah, absolutely. Like the sports team metaphor is a much, much better way to look at things. And I learned this the hard way as well over time.
[00:29:33] Joe Leech: Yeah. We've all been through the experiences of working in organizations that are like that. And the other problem with family, as well as treating organizations like a family, people who want to and need to leave, don't leave. They stick around for too long. They're too comfortable. They're too happy. They don't have to perform in quite the same way they are. They just sort of get a little bit comfortable. And the last thing you want, and I'm not going to say this, absolute clarity, the last thing you want is a team that's 100% comfortable all the time. You need that tension of them being pushed outside of their comfort zone at all times because we all perform better when we're just pushed a little bit outside of our comfort zone.
[00:30:04] Joe Leech: People are too comfortable and that can happen again in a family. We've all seen this. We've all got examples of this. That uncle that never leaves home until he really needs to. The reality is you can't do that. With a sports team, it's very clear about where you are, what the rules are, what's expected of you that you can be put on the bench at any one time, that there's a shelf life for your involvement in this. And that's fine. It's back to expectations versus agreement. I'm coming into a business knowing that stuff.
[00:30:28] Joe Leech: I can still build really strong relationships with people and have done. Same thing. One of my best friends is somebody I used to manage. It's like, it can happen, but you're setting out your path and exactly who I am when I'm at work. And these are the rules that we're putting in place in the situation. And that's often not done very well in terms of an organization. Really not.
[00:30:45] Andrew Michael: Yeah. So we've got four things that have been done, bad. How do we do this well? How do we make sure that we're living up to team members' expectations and being able to retain top talent?
[00:30:57] Joe Leech: That's a really good question, right? So the chief thing you have to be able to do is being, again, as I mentioned, as I come back to this agreements thing, is you have a very, very clear agreement with somebody about what's expected of them. How you communicate with them when they report back to you. So they absolutely are 100% ready, right? They're match ready. I have that term in football in the US, it's called game ready. When you're there in your uniform, your uniform's cleaned. You know exactly what you've got to do. Who's throwing the ball to you, what situation, in what way. Everything's going to work extremely well.
[00:31:26] Andrew Michael: Yeah, you kind of, but do you have any good templates for this that you like tend to work with leaders and say, okay, here's like, maybe it's like a one page of expectations or how to work with like, is there any sort of templates that you have or your go to for it?
[00:31:40] Joe Leech: I'll tell you what I'll offer to your listeners as well, because this differs for everybody in every situation, right? I've got a piece of audio that talks exactly about why this is the case and how to create agreements, right? How you go out and you create agreements. These agreements have to be different between different individuals in different situations. Okay. One of them, as we discussed here, you can talk about is how to communicate with me. That can be something you have. I'll share a good piece of audio or a video of how you can do this in real life, how you set agreements and the importance of them as well.
[00:32:07] Joe Leech: But they have to differ in every single situation. The CEO will have to have different agreements with all their team members. If you're a team leader of a pod of designers, developers, growth experts, whatever, you need to have different agreements in place with every single individual and they will be hugely different from every person. That's fine. They've got to be co-authored by both of you to do that. So giving you a template, I'm taking away a lot of your power to create the agreement you need to create.
[00:32:30] Andrew Michael: Yeah.
[00:32:30] Joe Leech: Really, it has to be something that's bespoke to you–
[00:32:32] Andrew Michael: Makes sense.
[00:32:33] Joe Leech: And your organization in the role you're in. I'll give you some examples, but they have to be bespoke to you.
[00:32:37] Andrew Michael: Makes sense. So yeah, the first thing that you had to say is like expectations and then I catch you, where were you going next?
[00:32:43] Joe Leech: Now, I'm trying to remember where I was going to go next in that situation there as well. Let me have a little think about that.
[00:32:47] Andrew Michael: We'll continue with the sports analogy.
[00:32:49] Joe Leech: Yeah. So I was going with the sports analogy. So the most successful sports team in the world are the New Zealand All Blacks, right? They play rugby. And they have the biggest confidence. Statistically, they are the most successful sports team in the world. And one of the things that–
[00:33:07] Andrew Michael: Have they won the World Cup back to back? I don't know.
[00:33:09] Joe Leech: Or true, maybe South Africa have done that. We can debate rugby at a different day, but rugby again, let's talk about rugby as a whole. When you pass that ball along the line, you've got to let go of that ball and know that the other person's ready to catch it. And that's the biggest challenge that most of us have in the organizations we have, is that having that belief that I pass that ball to you, you're going to go and catch it. Right. And you're going to know what to do with that ball and who to pass that onto. That's ultimately all businesses, right? It's a series of processes between us humans.
[00:33:36] Joe Leech: I give you something, you give it to somebody else. We just move through that process. I've got to have absolute confidence that when I pass that ball to you, that you know exactly what to do and what's going on. And that you don't have to give me feedback on that ball or anything like that. I just know that that's going to happen.
[00:33:49] Andrew Michael: Yeah.
[00:33:50] Joe Leech: That's the thing you need to create within an organization is any time you ask anybody to do something, you have absolute confidence that that thing will happen. Right. That's the vision. That's the ideal goal that you want. Then you have to put everything in place to ensure that that does happen so that when that ball's passed to them, they're ready to receive it and know exactly what to do with it and exactly how to follow through on that. And that still might not sound very tangible, but the reality is the first place to start is that mindset shift. If that's exactly what I want from you.
[00:34:19] Andrew Michael: Yeah.
[00:34:19] Joe Leech: Exactly what I want to create from you is exactly that. Right. And then that follows off from that agreement. Really, this is exactly what I mean by that. So you both agree to that and you both make sure that that's going to happen.
[00:34:29] Andrew Michael: I like that analogy as well, because if it's a bad pass, the other person ends up getting smashed or on their end. And it's, yeah, yeah. It's the leaders. Yeah.
[00:34:38] Joe Leech: Yeah. And whose fault is that? Right. Yeah. That's your fault. And that shows that you've got to do some work on yourself and too many senior leaders fill up the pass, right? And expect that other person to pick up from that.
[00:34:49] Andrew Michael: Yeah.
[00:34:49] Joe Leech: And blame that other person because they didn't, you know, they weren't a foot taller or they weren't a meter in front of where they should be to collect their pass realities. No, you threw that ball, you should be able to do that. And these things are always two-way.
[00:35:00] Andrew Michael: Yeah.
[00:35:01] Joe Leech: And if you look at the best leaders, and one of the biggest challenges I have with a lot of the founders I work with is you have to change to be a better leader throughout your career. You have to adapt and change.
[00:35:09] Andrew Michael: Yeah.
[00:35:09] Joe Leech: For too many leaders, that's quite a challenging thing to do.
[00:35:13] Andrew Michael: One of the best like pieces of advice I think I picked up as well, again, my time at Hotjar was I think there was a new team lead who had just joined, or had just been promoted to a team lead and he sent out a survey to all the team leads within Hotjar and sort of said like, what is your bit of advice you would give to a new team lead? And I remember at the time the CEO, his response, like, really stood out to me because he sort of said like, it's always your fault. And there was just his response and he's like, you always need to assume that’s your fault when things go wrong and you need to figure out like, what could you have done better in that situation?
[00:35:44] Andrew Michael: And then sometimes maybe making sure that you're better equipped, your team members. And maybe they failed because they didn't have the knowledge or the expertise. And it was up to you to maybe have seen that sooner or figure it out. And like, when you take it from that lens and like moves the blame game, like totally onto you and then really starting to think about, okay, what can I do to grow and nurture and help the team get to the point where you, as you say, like, you can just hand the ball off and you know, the things are going to get done every time. So I think for me, like–
[00:36:11] Joe Leech: Yeah.
[00:36:11] Andrew Michael: It just stood out to me a lot, that sort of–
[00:36:13] Joe Leech: I love that.
[00:36:13] Andrew Michael: Notion of like, it's always your fault and then trying to figure out.
[00:36:17] Joe Leech: Yeah.
[00:36:17] Andrew Michael: And it's a great way to be like retrospective in these situations, to understand as a leader, like what can I do better to help my team so we don't get to this point again?
[00:36:26] Joe Leech: And I think that's really good advice as well. And part of that can also be, it's my fault that I didn't, you know, I didn't have the courage to talk to my boss about how this should be, right? There's a lot of it, comes down to courage as well. It's having the courage to give feedback to the person passing you the ball is often your… could well be your CEO that they're not passing the ball in the right way. Okay?
[00:36:43] Andrew Michael: Yeah.
[00:36:45] Joe Leech: That does take real courage in an organization, but better results come when that feedback is two ways. Absolutely two ways. You know you want to receive that feedback from the people on your team, but you've got to be in a position where you're not going to get emotionally attached to being right in situations. You can accept that feedback. Everybody has to be willing and wanting to change across that row. Otherwise, they won't. If you, again, look at the All Blacks, after every game, most sports teams do this, they'll go back and review every single play that they made and analyze that. Right. Whose fault was that? What could have been done better? They go back and they do that.
[00:37:16] Joe Leech: And we always talk about retrospectives in the stuff that we do, but we never really do them properly and they're often months after the stuff that's actually happened is having that time to really reflect on where we are and what we've just done can really, really, really useful. Even I do this a lot with the leaders I work with where we'll record a meeting, right, just a standard normal Monday meeting or Friday afternoon meeting. Right. And we'll sit back and we'll watch that together and look at what could have been done better in that meeting, right? How could I have performed better? What could I have said? What facial expressions did I miss in terms of the audience?
[00:37:47] Joe Leech: It's going back and looking at that stuff. Because they're great in terms of churn and retention, right? We're all over the evidence and reviewing and analyzing the data. When it comes to our own performance, we're not, right? We won't go back. We're often quite embarrassed to go back and video like Zoom meetings of ourselves and stuff like that. You go back and you do that, you're going to get quicker, far better, but being a leader by just analyzing your performance than you are by just, you know, endeavoring to do better or reading books and blog posts on this.
[00:38:13] Andrew Michael: Yeah.
[00:38:14] Joe Leech: And that can be transformational. Certainly for the CEOs I work with, just recording a couple of board meetings can have a night and day difference in terms of their performance in front of a group after that.
[00:38:23] Andrew Michael: Feels like there's a product in there as well. With, now all the new advancements in AI to analyze calls and let you know how to be a better leader or how to read the room better.
[00:38:32] Joe Leech: I mean, the thing, the key is to it, is right. It's like, we could do… you could do this yourself, right? We could, I could go back and watch this recording of myself and say, how could I have been better on that podcast? The reality is that's going to be really tough for me to do on my own. I'll go back and I'll watch it with my coach probably and say, what more could I have done? And that'd be really useful having somebody else see it as well. And then you just get better at noticing it yourself. Cause I'll be too, like worried about, you know–
[00:38:54] Andrew Michael: Sound funny.
[00:38:55] Joe Leech: I've got a bit of a blob of something in my teeth or, you know, what's that poster behind, you know, you just get all caught up in the sound of your own voice. But watching it with somebody else.
[00:39:03] Andrew Michael: Is that my voice?
[00:39:05] Joe Leech: Really makes it powerful and impactful. You can do that with your team. You can do that with a colleague. It's a really powerful way of just being better at what you do just by watching recordings and performances of yourself.
[00:39:16] Andrew Michael: Yeah. It's one of the things with the podcast. I think I listened to the first two episodes I ever did. Then afterwards, I couldn't stand hearing my own voice. I was just like, no, I'm not going to do this anymore.
[00:39:26] Joe Leech: But it's the only way you're going to get better, really.
[00:39:27] Andrew Michael: It is.
[00:39:28] Joe Leech: It's a fast way of doing it, right? But we've all been there.
[00:39:31] Andrew Michael: Yeah. And honestly, I didn't do it for a while. And then afterwards I was like, geez, that sounds so boring. I need to change my voice. I need to pick it up a little bit and get some energy in it. I've probably been bad at that the last few episodes as well. But yeah. It is–
[00:39:46] Joe Leech: Yeah.
[00:39:46] Andrew Michael: Yeah.
[00:39:47] Joe Leech: But at least, you know, right? I talked about this, it's Name It to Tame It. If you don't know what's going wrong, you can't do anything about it. If you leave it trapped in a little box, you can't do anything about it. Same as to have churn and retention, right? We don't like to look at the inner causes within ourself of churn in the business cause it might be like just too emotionally challenging for us. The same is true of our individual selves as well. Right.
[00:40:08] Andrew Michael: Yeah.
[00:40:08] Joe Leech: You've got to open the box and have a look in it to really understand what's going on. I call it Name It to Tame It. As soon as you name it, right. That mindset shifts. You just got to look at the skillset to fix it. And the skillset is often the easy bit. The mindset is the hard bit is knowing I've got to change that.
[00:40:22] Andrew Michael: It reminded me again of one of these sessions at Hotjar. We stood this like, meet up every, it was every six months. I think every six months we used to meet up in like a different location and they always had these like five minutes, like lightning talks that were called where you had five minutes, five slides and you could get a point across. And one of the team members, like she came in, her topic was resting bitch face. And essentially what she just wanted to communicate to the team was that, like I have a resting bitch face was the message and it doesn't mean that I'm angry at you or I'm cross. It's just my face. And like, you need to deal with it.
[00:40:57] Andrew Michael: And then I just remember, like after the talk, so many people going up to this, like, oh my God, I have this as well. Like, I just want people to know that it's like, I don't have anything with him. It's just the way I'm looking. And there's just little subtleties like this that you don't realize that you do. They can have an adverse effect on people outside. And again, it's also that sort of thing when you get a piece of feedback for me, it's always like, okay. Even if you don't agree with the feedback, it's more the perception as well that matters. So like you need to understand, okay, why are people perceiving this? Even if I don't think this is the actuality as well.
[00:41:25] Andrew Michael: So that there's always, like a level which you can reflect on when it comes to feedback, even if it's not directly related to how things are, but how they are perceived. And it's just as important as the reality.
[00:41:36] Joe Leech: And it's so true. I mentioned the CEO I was talking about earlier on who made the layoffs last year, made the… his vulnerability, he put himself out there as being the sort of invulnerable CEO that had all the answers, knew exactly what was going on all the time. And the problem is, is when you put yourself out there as being like that, people assume you've got it all totally under control all the time and maybe you have. But a big part of your, you know, your colleague who, with the resting bitch face, that was a really vulnerable thing to say, right? Real vulnerability there.
[00:42:02] Andrew Michael: Yeah.
[00:42:02] Joe Leech: But you saw how that, probably her relationships transformed with her colleagues after she said that. With everyone, right?
[00:42:08] Andrew Michael: With everyone. I had that impression of her as well. I went after her like–
[00:42:11] Joe Leech: Yeah.
[00:42:12] Andrew Michael: Geez, it's good to know. I always thought you had an issue with me and it's like, of course not. I love you.
[00:42:19] Joe Leech: No, the reality is, and here's the thing with us humans, we always assume it's us. Oh God, they're not returning my calls or they're not replying to that email because of me. No, no. 99% of the time, it's them. Record that little clip of me saying it, pull out there and listen it back. It's never you. It's almost always them. Anyway, back to this, the vulnerability thing, the CEO that I work with is we looked at how he could be more vulnerable up there, what he could bring into this in terms of the vulnerability of the stuff he's facing at the moment. Because again, if you bring vulnerability in, you're seeing there's much more of a human that your mistakes have made.
[00:42:56] Joe Leech: People are a lot more forgiving of you and a lot more caring and a lot more open up to give you feedback if you're vulnerable up there. Because you always say we want feedback. Being invulnerable and being super amazing at what you do means that you don't often get the feedback that you need. And so just by switching on a bit of vulnerability in one of his town halls, the amount of feedback that he got from that one town hall, just about… talking about how his dad had died the last previous year and how he'd struggled at the start of the year, right? Just a simple thing.
[00:43:23] Joe Leech: He'd just transformed his relationship with someone. He got so many messages about it. He got so much more warmth from the business through that and strengthened so many more business relationships within his organization just by sharing and being a little bit vulnerable up there that, you know, he had a challenging time at home outside of his office that it transformed relationships. So even just a little bit of vulnerability as a leader, again, can be really helpful to keep people at an organization, right? They want… everybody wants to feel warm and welcome where they are. And vulnerability can help you do that.
[00:43:54] Joe Leech: And again, it can absolutely feel more vulnerable to your team. You're going to, they're going to approach you, you're going to feel more approachable, they're going to like you more, but they're less likely to leave.
[00:44:02] Andrew Michael: And creating an environment where people feel comfortable to be vulnerable as well, I think is important. It's very important in an environment where you want to be taking a lot of risks and you want to be moving fast and you want to be failing as well at the end of the day. So.
[00:44:15] Joe Leech: So true.
[00:44:16] Andrew Michael: If people don't feel they can be comfortable in being vulnerable, then they're not going to feel comfortable in making mistakes and they're not going to feel comfortable in actually taking risks for you and for the business.
[00:44:26] Joe Leech: One of the things that I work a lot with with the leaders I work with is that it's operating with people at an emotional level. Because we're so used to coming in and talking about KPIs and numbers and business and performance and deadlines and stuff like that, that we're not great at the emotional side of it. We might try it and it might come across as being really awkward on the other side of that. We've all received really awkward one-on-ones with our bosses who've tried to talk to us about sensitive issues. The reality is, is if you need to embrace that as a leader, you need to embrace that. You need to be there for people. You need to, like you say, encourage that place of safety.
[00:44:58] Joe Leech: And part of that is speaking to people at a different level. Right. You have to do that to be a great leader. Even if that doesn't come naturally to you, that's not something you appreciate. It's taken us full circle back to the CEO I mentioned earlier on, who really struggled with that CEO, who just wanted to catch up in the mornings when they had a conversation. If you're not prepared to open up a little bit for that person, you don't think that's appropriate, then that's going to absolutely be detrimental to that person's, and that your relationship and that person's career because of that.
[00:45:23] Joe Leech: And you know what, by opening up a little bit yourself, maybe that will change the way you see the world. Maybe that will operate and operate things differently from you. You can't just expect to be exactly the same leader throughout your career and do things exactly the same way because that doesn't work. It will get you to a certain point, but you're, plateau, right? You won't get any better if you don't look to change. There are so many opportunities for that to happen to you. Once they do, there can be real breakthroughs and you can see absolute growth in your business because you've changed.
[00:45:51] Andrew Michael: Absolutely. Well, Joe, I see we've almost run up on time now, so I want to make sure I ask you a question I ask every guest. What's one thing that you know today about churn and retention that you wished in you when you got started with your career? And I guess in this context, let's keep it focused on churn and attention in the context of team members.
[00:46:10] Joe Leech: Yeah. That it's all about people, not process. It's all about humans and emotions, not objective processes. And I think that advice is the same that's true for both returning team members, but also looking at dealing with churn and retention across your product as well. If you really unpick what it is about the human that makes them want to be there and want to work with you and to be in the place you are, that is your secret to your success, both in terms of an employee and their customer and do more of that. It's all about the human. It's not about hacks and loops and processes. It's all about the deep psychological understanding of the human. That's what's going to bring you success. Nothing else.
[00:46:48] Andrew Michael: Very nice. Well, I think that's a wrap for the show today. Is there any sort of final thoughts you want to leave the listeners with before we wrap up?
[00:46:57] Joe Leech: Yeah. It's just to make an offer actually out there. If you want to come learn more from me, I've got more on my website about a lot of this sort of thinking, lots of videos about this kind of stuff that I've mentioned today. Also, again, if you're working with a leader that you can see needs somebody like me, drop me a line. I'd love to hear from you about how you're working with that leader. If you're a leader yourself, I'd love to hear your story. So yeah, drop me a line. I'd love to talk.
[00:47:19] Andrew Michael: Amazing. For the listeners, we'll make sure to leave everything we discussed today in the show notes so you can pick that up there too. And thanks again for joining, Joe. Wish you best of luck now in this new year.
[00:47:27] Joe Leech: Thank you very much, Andrew.
[00:47:28] Andrew Michael: Cheers.
[00:47:29] Andrew Michael: And that's a wrap for the show today with me, Andrew Michael. I really hope you enjoyed it and you were able to pull out something valuable for your business. To keep up to date with Churn.FM and be notified about new episodes, blog posts and more, subscribe to our mailing list by visiting Churn.FM. Also don't forget to subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you have any feedback, good or bad, I would love to hear from you. And you can provide your blunt, direct feedback by sending it to Andrew@Churn.FM. Lastly, but most importantly, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and leave a review as it really helps get the word out and grow the community. Thanks again for listening. See you again next week.
