IDL43 Season 1: Interpersonal Relationships and Honest Leadership with Mike Arrieta
Where can you get the most value: in transactions or connections? Why should you always remember that people are simply people? How do leaders combine radical candor with encouraging patience?
It's my pleasure to interview and present to you Mike Arrieta. Mike and I were introduced through a former guest, Brett Hagler, with whom Mike has a longstanding friendship, both being involved in New Story. Mike has been an entrepreneur from a young age, going from success to success, culminating in Garden City, the company he runs today. His achievements have not dampened his humility, and he’s very open about being “just another person”, pursuing a goal.
Michael currently serves as the Founder and CEO of Garden City, a purpose-driven buyout holding company that buys, grows, and forever-holds service companies across the Southeast. Once acquired, Garden City seeks to grow them through culture, technology, and sales.
Most recently, Michael was an early employee at DocuSign where he served as Global Vice President, General Manager, and Chief of Staff to the CEO. DocuSign has now achieved a $40B market cap with 5,000 employees.
Michael co-founded New Story, a non-profit that has built 2,000+ homes in developing countries and recognized for creating the world’s first-ever 3D Home Printer. In 2016, he was recognized by Forbes as “30 under 30” for his social entrepreneurship work.
Visit the Garden City website. Connect with Mike on Twitter and LinkedIn.
IN THIS EPISODE WE DISCUSS:
Curiosity to connection
People are people
Radical candor with encouragement
Curiosity to connection
“Curious curiosity of connection … that’s where all the value comes from … the desire to learn about people and if you learn enough about people and if you try to add value to people, that’s when everything will come, and if you don’t, it’s going to be short-lived.”
You will find a lot more value, both relationally and for your business, in making a connection with a potential client than only wanting a transaction.
People can notice and appreciate the desire for genuine connection and assistance over a shallow want for financial gain and leveling up in business, over and above the people that you meet along the way.
People are people
One of the greatest assets in business, and in maintaining empathy and connection, is to remember that people are simply people.
Each person that you look up to or want to work with needs to eat and sleep and feels bored and sometimes wants an afternoon off.
“We’re all human, we’re all messy. We all burp, we all have marital issues, we all have financial struggles. You realize no one is that special yet we’re all that special. ”
Humanize your peers instead of putting people on pedestals and treating them other than what they are: another human being with ambition who also has to shower once in a while.
Be authentically real, because that will connect you more deeply with the person next to you than if you were to pretend to be anything other than human.
Radical candor with encouragement
As a leader, one of the best things that you can do for those around you is to spend patient time in understanding them and the situation at hand.
By affording someone the joy of listening to them fully you are better able to help them. A part of leadership is balancing honest candor and positive belief. Sometimes you must be honest about what is wrong and needs to be fixed while listening and encouraging.
You can challenge people with deep care and empathy. Challenge people and build them up at the same time.
Resources, books, and links mentioned in this episode:
Visit the Garden City website
Connect with Mike on Twitter and LinkedIn
BOOK | Ryan Hawke – Welcome to Management: How to Grow from Top Performer to Excellent Leader
BOOK | Bruce Wilkinson – The Dream Giver
BOOK | Simon Sinek – The Infinite Game
BOOK | John Mark Comer – Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human
BOOK | Kim Scott – Radical Candor: Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean
BOOK | Todd G. Gongwer – Lead . . . for God's Sake! A Parable for Finding the Heart of Leadership
The Impact Driven Leader YouTube Channel
Join the Impact Driven Leader Community
Connect with Tyler on Instagram and LinkedIn
Email Tyler: tyler@tylerdickerhoof.com
About the Impact Driven Leader Podcast
The Impact Driven Leader Podcast, hosted by Tyler Dickerhoof, is for Xillennial leaders who have felt alone and ill-equipped to lead in today's world. Through inspiring interviews with authors from around the world, Tyler uncovers how unique leadership strengths can empower others to achieve so much more, with real impact.
Rate, review and subscribe here on Apple Podcasts or subscribe on Stitcher and Spotify.
Especially in our day and age of the competitive landscape where there is so much data out there at any given point in time, it could be your competitive advantage to be well-prepared.
Mike Arrieta
Podcast Transcription
[TYLER DICKERHOOF]
Welcome back to the Impact Driven Leader podcast. This your host, Tyler Dickerhoof. So glad you're here today. I hope you're having a wonderful, great day and it's my pleasure., quite honestly. The best part of my day is getting to have conversations with people and to interview people, conversations, really, it's not interviews, conversations for this podcast. It's how I learn. It's how I grow. I hope in that process that you're learning and growing as well. I'd love to know how are you learning? How are you growing? What challenges are you facing here in 2021? As we wrap up 2021 going into 2022, I want to better serve you. How do I know to how to do that? Well, it's getting feedback from you. So I'd love to know.
But I hope you truly enjoy this conversation I have today with Mike Arietta. Mike and I were introduced by former guest, Brett Hagler. He and Brett have a long-term relationship, been involved in New Story, they share the same office space. And let me give you a little bit brief history on Mike before you hit the show notes. So he not only was a Cutco representative, he starting in high school and became one of their leading sales people. Number one, sales people while I was in high school, went to Alabama, was founder of a startup, ended up a DocuSign, experience at Dell, and then he launched Garden City. You're going to learn more about that, but just such a heartfelt, genuine guy who's spent plenty of time in high success places and yet he's just another guy who pees and poops. You're going to hear about that. Buckle up, get some notes, take notes, have fun with this. If you enjoy it, love for you to share it with someone and I'll see you at the end.
So, Mike, I am so excited to chat with you and really I love, as part of, we were talking about in the beginning, I love doing podcasts, because I get to learn about people that I wouldn't know otherwise about. That is very much about you. I'm thankful that Brett Hagler introduced us and Brett said, you have to talk to Mike. He was right. I need to talk to Mike and I'm so excited to talk to you and just learn about you and have you share a lot of the lessons. I'll kind of kick it off. This is probably a deep question. Do you feel like you've been more well read or well mentored because, let me preface me as you're thinking about that.
[TYLER]
You are wise beyond your years. I'm a decade older and I wish, I don't want to say, I wish I was where Mike was when I was 32, because when the teacher is ready, the student will appear. But I look at you from the knowledge, the things that you've picked up and learned, what I hear you talking about, where I've learned about you and I'm like, yes, we're on the same page. I appreciate that. So I want to know, are you more well read or well mentored?
[MIKE ARIETTA]
Definitely, well mentored. It's probably been just a lot of people breathing truth and wisdom and counsel into my life for probably closer to 15 years now, specifically, probably 10 years, but definitely well mentored.
[TYLER]
So let's take that down a path a little bit, and those people that came into your life, how did they come and or how did that relationship evolve? Because I'll say as a generation I'm a few years older, like I said, I was unaware of that. Seeking mentors, finding mentors, I worked with people, I had supervisors, I had leaders, but never had this idea of, oh, go find a mentor, someone to guide you. And yet when I look at people that are roughly your age, and this isn't an age demographic, but I see guys like yourself that are so like sponges for mentorship; it's something I talk to my friends and we were never that way. So when I hear of someone like yourself, it's like, ah, I love it. Where did that come from?
[MIKE]
I think I've always been really curious. I mean, no one in my family went to college. My sisters and I were our first generation to ever go to school. So given that we were always curious as to what other people did that lived in those big houses or what those people did that drove those sort of fancy cars. We were just like expose into that world, so yes, anytime that I got to experience or meet people that from the outside, at least looked to be "successful," I was just always very curious as to what do you do? How do you do it? Why do you do it? Walk me through your story.
Just last night, I hosted an event where I was the last, last, last person to leave. We hosted 60 plus CEOs here in Atlanta. I told myself, my wife, you know the event ends at eight. I'll be home at eight 30. I didn't get home until 11:15. I was the last car that left the parking lot, why, because I just kept, kept, kept asking questions to anyone that was there. They're like, okay, ask someone else a question or stop asking a question. I'm just sincerely authentically curious as to your career, as to how you raise your kids as to so forth and so forth. So I've just always been really curious, I think.
[TYLER]
So one of the things that we talked about before, I learned you or Enneagram eight, as I am as well. So that curiosity that like, there's a place to challenge, but to me there's like a learning. So I want to know, because I think about my wife and how she would handle that situation. How did your wife handle that?
[MIKE]
Me always being curious and always asking questions?
[TYLER]
No, you saying, hey, I'll be home at 8:30 and then you show up at 11 because you're just like trying to soak it in and learn and talk and connect and just those things that I see you naturally do.
[MIKE]
I mean, as you know Tyler who you marry is probably the second most important decision of your entire life, or sometimes the most important decision of your entire life. So fortunately, my wife and I have been together for over a decade and she knows me better than I know myself. So I tell her that I'm hosting an event last night with 60 people and I'm the host of it I'm like I'll be home 30 minutes after the event's over. She clearly knows that that's not going to be the case. So she was clearly expecting me at 11:00 PM. But she responds with grace and she knows where my heart is. She knows that my intentions are well mannered and good.
Something that's really, really important for us is that every Sunday we ask each other five questions and one of those five questions is what is your upcoming week look like, so there's no surprises. We say surprises are for birthdays and birthdays alone. So she always says clarity as to what's going on. So for a while, it's Tuesdays at this event that I'm hosting. So there's no surprises. So when Tuesday gets here, she's really already mentally prepared. And what I've seen is a lot of times in marriage yes, we tend to just drop it that same day or that same night or that same afternoon of, "Hey, I'm going to this event," and they're like, "What event?" Well, what time are you going to get home? Well, it's over at eight. So we've been talking about it for a while. So fortunately she just knows me well.
[TYLER]
I get that. But there's also an attribute of that preparation and that communication, which in any phase of leadership is so important. Is that something that, again, that you feel like you've learned the hard way, have you learned from good example, have you learned from bad example? And how does that play into, as Garden City does what it does with companies, that idea of communication and hey, let's prepare, let's be proactive?
[MIKE]
So preparation is critical to me. My first two jobs in Silicon Valley was being the chief of staff to two different CEOs. So if you had to define, what does the chief of staff do, a critical word is preparation. I mean, I was obsessed with preparing for upcoming meetings, preparing for upcoming customer meetings, conferences, just investor presentation, board meetings, so forth. So as presentation, presentation, presentation, or sorry, preparation, preparation, preparation, and preparing or failing to prepare is preparing to fail. Failing to prepare is preparing to fail. So I'm just huge on preparation in every way or form. So for Garden City, it's critical. It's one of our standards actually.
So we have 15 standards that we try to do superior to the competition every single day. One of those is preparation. So what we do at Garden City is we buy boring service companies and we think what boring is beautiful. So we believe that service businesses are the backbone of our country. These are people oriented service companies, range of them from blue collar to white collar. So something like a pest control business, roofing company, janitorial business, all the way to a white collar, like a engineering firm, a financial firm, whatever else. It may be accounting, so forth, a legal firm. We can acquire doctor's office so forth. So we'll acquire any service business as long as there's people in it.
What we do is we don't know these businesses well. So before we take the call with the CEO, we prepare far and wide. So we have an executive brief for every single investor or for every single company call that we take, what does this company do? How long have they been around? Who are their competitors? What does they say on their website, their values, their mission, their vision? How many employees have it showing in LinkedIn? So we significantly prepare and we only make about one or two investments per year, but we're preparing like this hundreds of times. But for the times we do make the investment we're just so well prepared ahead of our competition, that it makes us fall out so much more.
[TYLER]
As you're saying that, and I'm thinking about, as part of his book Ryan Hawks, Welcome to Management, his philosophy is preparation is the greatest medicine for fear. And as I think about that, we go into those situations, either we're afraid to fail. And you're like, we've prepared so much, there's nothing and even if it does surprise us, we are prepared. So as I think about that, and you're talking about this preparation of we're going to go through a hundred different companies by that time you buy that company, I've gone through so many different ins and outs and different a company that we buy. There's probably not a lot that's going to surprise us. And even if it does, we're so prepared. We have this breadth of knowledge that, oh, we'll come up with some idea because we've seen so much. That has to be an attribute.
[MIKE]
For sure. Yes. I mean, again, it's in everything in life. It's just, how much more well versed are you on preparation? It takes time to prepare, which is probably the biggest reason why people don't do it. It takes time and a lot of times you just think that you could hack it and many times you just can't hack it. Especially in our day and age of the competitive landscape where there's just so much data out there at any given point in time, you could be, it could be your competitive advantage to be well prepared. I mean, everything is out there.
I mean, I remember one story at DocuSign. We had a call with a big guy, a big CEO of a Fortune 10 company. We were really, really, really trying to knock this sales cycle down and our competitor already had the account. So we finally got the CEO. My CEO, and I had a call with the CEO. So we went through the executive brief, same executive brief that we now use and part of the executive brief has what's the personal background of this person. So we saw where they were raised, how many children they have. So we're finding all this on Wikipedia, on Twitter and so forth. And one of the things they did on Twitter was that they did a little post about their favorite book. They did this like two years ago. There was no quote, no retweets on there or anything like that. But we had in the executive brief, this is his person's favorite book.
So on the call, my CEO, he also read that book. So he brings up, he goes, "By the way, I saw that you like The Art War by Sun Tzu." He goes, yes. So they started talking about it. They had about an hour conversation about this book. It was supposed to be like a 15 minute call. They would not stop talking about it. That building rapport made all the difference and that actually became the biggest customer in DocuSign history. There was a competitive account that we couldn't break into, that someone already was in, that we had a 15 minute call all because we prepared on something personal. Competitors don't do that. No one does that. No one takes an extra mile to do that. But look, again, it became our biggest customer.
[TYLER]
I think you just described to me what something that I admired out in my preparation is this idea of this curiosity, again, of connection. That's where all the value comes from. As I listen to different stories about Mike and your family and the places you've been, and just this overwhelming desire to just learn about people and if you learn about enough people and if you try to add value to people that's when everything will come. If you don't, it's going to be short lived. Did you learn that at Cutco? Or did you learn that as just how you were raised?
[MIKE]
In regards to my curiosity or what specifically?
[TYLER]
The value of making a true connection, as opposed to just looking for a transaction? So, I mean, that's the idea of a relationship and building a connection and say, hey, if we build enough connection, like you start off our conversation today, it's like, hey, I want to learn more about you and hope that this conversation goes somewhere else. That's a genuine desire. That's my desire in doing these podcasts. I want to know where did that come from for you?
[MIKE]
I think that probably, I think if I had one special gift in life, which is definitely not my intellect, it's not my looks, unfortunately, it's truly my ability to connect with people and building rapport with people and building actual real relationships. So again, last night, I'm so high. Still last night, we brought together the top 60 CEOs in Atlanta last night. My phone's been ringing off the hook all day today on just CEOs of Atlanta that I cannot believe they're calling my phone calling to tell me they couldn't believe that they were at the event last night with so many amazing CEOs. I've always heard that before of kind of like Mike, it's amazing this community that you've cultivated, or this group of advisors you cultivated, or this group of investors that you've cultivated.
I've always heard that, which is why I really felt the calling starting this year. I'm going to start doing events and I'm going to start to cultivate these groups of people together so they could get to know each other and they could do life together and so forth. So the big question as to you're asking and other people ask is like, how do you do it? How do you bring together this group of people? How do you build deep meaning relationships? What I always say is, which is funny, but is we all pee, we all poop and we all die. We all pee, poop and die. What I mean by that is we're all created equal. We're all created equal. When I worked for my last CEO, his name is Keith Krach, he's this multi billionaire guy that in Silicon valley is really known for taking a company called Ariba public. Then he became the chairman of the board of trustees at Purdue. He was the earliest entrepreneur resident and earliest investor in benchmark and first investor in box and owned 10% of DocuSign, which is now 60 billion and then became under secretary state.
So when I got the opportunity to interview with him, I was like, oh my goodness, I can't believe I have a meeting with him, yet alone an interview with him. That was the way I looked up to him or first time I ever worked for Michael Dell, at Dell. I can't believe I'm in the same room as them. Then after your 180th time with them, or after you're going on a plane with them for the hundred time, or after you on a plane they're having to go to the restroom and the plane's this big, so they're going to, you realize we're all humans, we're all messy. We all birth. We all have marital issues. We all have financial struggles.
All of this stuff you realize no one's that special yet or all that special. So what that did to me, working for these CEOs and going to world economic forum and doing all these things is I now look at everyone and I'm just real. I'm just authentically real. My faith is really important to me. And what I've realized is I don't have to be this fake Christian person that's perfect. So sometimes I curse, why, because, because it just comes out and I'm just like, hell with it. I'm just real authentic. I'm not trying to put a mask on. Sometimes people will ask me, how are you doing? I'm like, I'm doing really, really, really bad. I feel like my wife and I are just totally missing each other. Or they're like, oh, so you have three kids? How's that going? It's hard. My son is rebellious.
[TYLER]
How old are your kids, Mike?
[MIKE]
Four, two and a newborn. So my whole thing of people, especially in our day and age are dying for authenticity. So many people on social media, we all know put up their best lives ever, which is why I'm not on social media. So we all put our best lives up there. So nowadays when you meet someone that's really, really, really real and authentic and vulnerable it's contagious. So I call it the gun shell. Whenever I meet someone, my first thing that I try to do is I try to put my gun down first. So I lead with authenticity. Because everyone, when they come to a meeting, they always have their guns up. They're always trying to say how rich they, how powerful they are, how cool they are, how connected they are. So when you put your gun down first, the other person immediately puts their gun down immediately after you, because they're no longer intimidated, which now gives the opportunity to be vulnerable and authentic and real. So I think that's how Tyler that I've been able to build relationships.
[TYLER]
So you have that saying that everyone pees and poops. One of the things that I've held onto is everyone gets up at three in the morning to pee. That's something that I've bleed the same away, is that there, there isn't this star struck, which to me is, there had to be a point to where there's a tipping point for you recognizing that. For me, it was coming to grips with my insecurities and understanding my insecurity is what held me back, is when my insecurity showed is like, I was trying to find my own worth and value and I believe completely with yourself. I've had the luxury to be in some amazing rooms with amazing leaders and then you get around them, especially if it's curated by the people that are like, no, just leave your ego at the door. It does not matter.
What's amazing is as those leaders have done that, then all of a sudden the people that continue to be in that room no longer have that ego, because the ones that aren't willing to let it go find their way out. The people that are just willing to say, hey, this is who I am, it's Brad Lamek, he shared this with me the one days, the CEO that's willing to stand in front of the room and throw up his arms and say, I got sweaty pits, that's the person people want to follow and not this guy that has the jet and perfect this and that and everything. It's like, dude, it's not real.
[MIKE]
Yes, or what I think it is even more contagious is a guy that has the jet that is so looked at and enamored that leads with vulnerability. Because from the outside in it looks so perfect. Then when you get up and close, they leave with vulnerability. It just humanizes them. So yes, I just think vulnerability and authenticity is contagious and people want more of it and they crave it in this world that we live in.
[TYLER]
So is that, you kind of alluded to it, that connection desire that you have, but for me, I had to essentially get a few black eyes in life in order to learn that lesson of letting my insecurities go, just be vulnerable, make fun of myself, laugh at myself and just, I don't really care. There's a part of me that I have zero problem making a fool of myself in service of others. I absolutely drives my wife nuts. She's like, makes her uncomfortable for me. I don't care. Is that something that again, you went through life and you had some situations where you had to learn it or has that just been an innate part of you for your life?
[MIKE]
I think both. I think that since, I mean with the curiosity, it always was authentic. I was always authentic that I really, really, really wanted to know about the other person. So when I started selling Cutco knives at 17 years old and I would walk into someone's house, Cutco would tell you first thing to do for the first five to 10 minutes to build rapport. Again, I didn't even do know what rapport was. So I was just like, I don't know what that is. I'm not going to do that. But what I did was as soon as I walked in, I saw pictures on the wall and I'd be like, wow, where is that? Where was that at? Or I'd see their kids, how many kids do you have? Where did they go to school? Why did you choose that school? What did your husband do for, oh, how did he get into that?
So I was just really authentically curious. I was authentically curious and which is build and rapport and which probably is a reason why I ended up being the best salesperson; was because of my curiosity, which was rapport, which was authentic. That said, I also did get a lot of black eyes, to use your saying because there was many, many, many years where I was insecure. So, although that I was also very, very curious, I would always have it wanted to be about me, or I would always want to talk or about how great that I was or what I did only because I was insecure. So the best lesson I ever learned is that just the best way to serve others is just to be authentically curious about what they're going through and how you could best serve them.
[TYLER]
I love it. You iterated a lesson that I had to learn very much myself and I believe it's until leaders come to grips with that, it is the barrier for their ability to actually lead others. Because if not, they're in competition, but then when it's no longer about that, when you start to serve people, it's creating a partnership. It's like, hey, we're going to go at this together. I can't get it without you having it. We have to go together. I know that's a mentality, very much of Garden City. So I'd love to talk about that idea of partnering, of making it long term, to use a Simon Sinek's The Infinite Game to really perpetuate that as opposed to, oh, we're just going to do this short time. We're going to try to get everything we can and then we're onto the next thing. So kind of explain your ideology around that, the idea of no we're in it for the long term and what that really means.
[MIKE]
Really simply put, the story behind Garden City was, I asked myself if I could do anything in the world and money were no object what would you do? A lot of the times, the question that we've all asked ourselves. There's a great book called The Dream Giver by Bruce Wilkinson that really proposes this question. And what I really had to wrestle through was what is that? I think many of us know what that is, and it's probably the same childhood dream that we've always had and we grow up and we tell ourselves, well, that was just a childhood dream. That's not real and so forth, but I think it actually could be real. So what my childhood dream was always was like, be involved with small to midsize and boring companies. Companies, I understand, like I said car washers, dry cleaners, barber shops, so forth and so forth.
So I would be involved with those businesses and I would make them great. I would make them excellent. I would make them worlds class and what is great and world class and excellent means that it would really have an amazing culture, like an amazing thriving, healthy environment where the workers within those businesses could really thrive and prosper and flourish. Or people like my father. If my father had a better work life environment, he probably would've been a much better father during the early years. He was a great father, but he would've been even better if he had a place, a fulfillment and purpose and mission.
Another way we make these companies great, I thought and dreamed is through technology. We're in 2021 now. It's that a lot of these businesses don't know how to leverage, implement the latest technology out there to help grow their business and help better serve their customers and provide a better product or experience. So that's what I thought. I was like, I would just buy these businesses, these people oriented companies, we would make them excellent through culture and through technology. If that's what we're doing, why would sell that? Like, again, if money were there, that's what I would do. So why would he ever sell a business if that's the end result?
So we would just hold these companies forever. We would just buy them and keep buying them and keep buying them and keep buying them and hold them forever. So that was the origin story of Garden City. I read another book by a pastor named John Mark Homer called Garden City and it just proposed this question that in the garden, in the beginning, the garden of Eden, we were all made in God's image to work and rest. And our work should be purpose filled work that He uniquely made us to do. And when we do that, we honor God. So we want to bring the garden of heaven, the kingdom of heaven onto earth, the garden into our city. That's why we're called Garden City. So for us, there will be no reason to sell a company because our end result is to buy companies to honor people. Our end result is not to just make more money.
[TYLER]
Oh, I love it. And again it's something I can relate to. My background in agriculture, growing up on a farm and understanding those businesses, I want to know when Garden City is going to do what you do in agriculture, because quite honestly, I think it's a great fit. It's just a matter of when. So tell us a little bit more about where you see yourself in this role in Garden City and really what is Mike's superpower and moving those cultures within companies, how can you help people and really use that as example? I want the listeners to be able to identify from a leadership capacity, what they can do and have themselves. If you're saying that your desire is to have culture and tech and marketing as key and you recognize that's the difference for businesses growing, if a leader's listening and they're like, all right, man, that'd be awesome if I could partner with Garden City because they're going to acquire us. But yet how can they model what you're so passionate about within their own leadership opportunity?
[MIKE]
So what we do very similar to what you said previously and what we discussed about previously, we are just authentically curious. So when we acquire family-owned service companies, the first thing we do is we listen and learn. We do not know it all. There's no way we know that business or know what to do better than the person that's been doing it for 10, 20, 30 years. That would be foolish of us. So we just listen and we learn and we just hear. We authentically hear what people are saying because they many times know what needs to be done but many times they just don't know how to go about it. So in terms of how do we stand up a culture, a caring culture where people are heard and feel cared for and we could put them on a path of enrichment so they could thrive in prosper? We listen to them.
We want them to feel heard. We should hear them. There's a reason why we have two years of one mouth. So when we buy businesses, we spend a lot of time speaking to people in the organization to hear them and ask them questions without us thinking that we know what's best. So my goal is I want to speak to every single person in the business. Now, depending on the size of the company, it's very difficult to do. If it's a 40 per person organization, I could do it. I could set up 30 minute meetings and crank out 20 hours and get one on one time with every single person there. If it's a several hundred person organization, that would be harder. Obviously that would be my intent. But our team, our management team and whatnot, that would be the intent.
Every single person in this company needs to be heard. They need to authentically be heard from the sea levels all the way down to the janitors, because we want to understand what life here is like. We want to understand what could be better. Because we may think that they need more money or more time off or better equipment or better support through operations. But that might not be the answer. Maybe the very clear answer is that they're saying that that the technology systems are not right, or they might say that that the workplace environment is dangerous. They haven't invested enough into safety. So to answer your question, Tyler, what do we do to make a culture better as leaders, not as managers, as leaders is we shut up and we listen and we learn and we spend time, patient time without coming in with solutions.
[TYLER]
To me that has to be the equation of a question I want to ask. Well, so it's that process of getting close to the transaction of listening to people, of hearing people that you're able to balance, understanding the candor of it. It's like, hey, this is a bad situation, as opposed to no, I believe in you. So it's balancing that, hey, I need to be truthful and give you radical candor, about this is not a good situation, but when you listen and you get that close, you build that connection and trust, then you're able to say, I believe in you. I want to help you get there. And really to me, a part of leadership and especially having it in this vulnerable, authentic, transparent way is balancing candor with positive belief and I believe in you, but I can't tell you everything is great all the time.
You know, if it's a classic, the Lego movie is everything is not always awesome. Sometimes it's just a pile of poop and we have to accept, it's a pile of poop. We can shine that sucker up and put whatever on it. So it's shiny, but it's still a pile of poop. We have to deal with it that way. To me, what you shared in that process of just continuing to listen, that empathetic, that I care about you, okay, this is going to hurt, but this is for our best and we're in this together to me that's just that way to balance telling people you believe in them, but having radical candor.
[MIKE]
Yes. One of our values when we started Garden City was radical candor and challenge deeply or sorry, and direct challenge, so a radical candor, which if you don't know radical candor, go Google it and see the quadrant. But it just shows that you challenge directly and care deeply. But what we realized was we were starting to create a culture where people were getting high fived for radical candor, regardless if it was kind. So it was like, heck yes, I just lived out one of our company values because I challenged Tim that it's that it's nine o'clock and I challenged him that great work only gets done if you're here before eight, or I challenged Tim that he could have done on better on the presentation and so forth.
So it's kind of like, hey, I'm just living out our company value. I'm just challenging you. I'm just challenging you. And we just realized that there was no love in it. There was no empathy in it and no compassion. So we added, we said challenge deeply or challenge with deep care. So now we have our value that says, if you're going to challenge someone, challenge them, but build them up at the same time. Challenge them, but praise them at the same time. Also don't do it in front of others. Do it behind closed door. We praise each other in open situations in front of others but if you're going to challenge someone or you're going to get feedback on someone, even if you do it with deep care, do it behind closed doors.
So we had to learn from that. To your point, I love challenging people. I am an eight on the Enneagram and many times I just challenge, challenge, challenge them. No, I'm doing this because I care for you, but people that are not eights on the Enneagram don't feel that. They're like no, you're attacking. I'm missing the mark. No, I'm not good. So I had be very intentional of building up while giving radical candor.
[TYLER]
I hear you, man. I hear you. I read a book by Todd Gongwer, said it's lead for God's sake. It goes through this story of having a carrot, having a heart and having a hammer and too often, I came at life with a hammer and I needed way more heart. It's been, as I've grown as a leader and especially as a parent teaching me how to lead more with the heart. You got to have the carrot, you have to have the hammer. Those can be balanced out. But when it's centered around heart and you share how much you care, how much of a difference that makes, because too many leaders for too long have, have always been the hammer, this radical candor, I'm just kind of hammer and hammer and hammer. And without any heart it's meaningless and people start to get callous and then they feel beat down. They don't feel valued. They don't feel loved.
[MIKE]
Yes, last night I had dinner with Cheryl Bachelder, the former CEO of Popeye's KFC. She's on the board at Chick-fil-A. So I asked her, I go, "Cheryl, what are your one on ones like with you?" What is it like being your direct report and having a one on one with you? She said, "Well, first thing is I do them." I was like, the conversation could start and stop there, drop the mic. Like it is so good. She actually does them. I've worked for quite a few CEOs now and a lot of them just don't do them. She said, the second thing is I spend a third of my week doing one-on-ones. So that's pretty impressive. So she's doing 10 to 15 hours a week of just one-on-ones. She said each one-on-one is always scheduled for two hours. It's pretty incredible.
She said of those two hours, we spend the majority of the time listening to them, hearing how they're doing, what they're going through. She said the number one word that you need as a leader is patience. You're probably going to want to go in and talk about the business. You're going to go in and want to challenge them on what can be better. You're going to want to push the envelope on encouraging them more. She said the best thing you do as a leader is be patient and listen, and just be in tune with what's going on in their life. That's what creates a great leader. Wow, that's good.
[TYLER]
That right there is a lot of wisdom. And it's only allowed when those barriers of insecurity, when you're able to be authentic, you're comfortable of yourself where you're not trying to justify why you're there as the CEO, but when you understand, hey, my role is to help those around me to be better and perform better than they ever thought possible. That's what I think about as you're saying all that. Mike, thanks so much for your time. I appreciate you being with me. I appreciate being an example as you are and doing things that I believe are the right way to do business and it's a model that I want to follow as well. So I thank you for that and thanks for your time, man.
[MIKE]
Thank you very much. Appreciate the podcast.
[TYLER]
Thank you.
There's a handful of people that I've had the opportunity to interact with by hosting a podcast. Sometimes I'm just kind of like really? Who am I just be talking to these people? Well, I also know that I bring a very unique background, a question set and I just was blown away by the conversation Mike and I had. Mike is one and just such an outstanding person. You can hear his heart in everything he shares and does in knowing that he just wants to serve of people. To me, that was the greatest lesson I've learned. If I can just find ways that I can uniquely serve people as a leader and don't let my insecurities get in my way, man, that's how I can do the best every single day. That's what my desire and my hope is.
That's what I hope and desire for you listening, is to unlock that next level of leadership for you. It's really understanding how can you help others accomplish what they possibly can, by what uniqueness you have? Now there's some barriers that hold us back from that. It could be our insecurities. It could be our lack of empathy or understanding how to express empathy. I've had to learn through those instances myself and guess what? I'm still having to do it every day.
I'm so thankful for the community, the people around me that help me grow, whether it's my wife, whether it's my friends, whether it's coworkers, whether it's people that are part of the Impact Driven Leader round table community. Man, it's really truly each week, it's as much for me as anyone else. I'd love for you to be a part of that. I'd love it for you to be a part of those conversations because I know every single week we're all going to get better. And if we're committing to gaining better every single week, man, by the end of the year, that's 52 weeks where we've committed to getting better.
I don't know another growth plan that is any more specific than that. Show up. Get better. Man, that's what it's about. Love for you to join in, love for you to share this episode and look more into Garden City, see what they're doing. They're just, to me, one of those heartwarming stories that we need more of in the world, I'm thankful for Mike being that story. I'm thankful people that are in his life that are continuing to cheer him on. If you got value out of today's episode, this is what you can do. Go share with someone, give me a rating, a review. I love a five star review. If I didn't earn that, tell me how I could get better because I'm committed to getting better and serving you. Thank you for the process to be able to do so.
Until next time have a good one.
