Keys to Creating a Culture of Accountability in Your Business

• 47:08
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
accountability culture, radical accountability, military processes, job descriptions, stress reduction, leadership model, team success, planning importance, process documentation, leadership self-discovery, team motivation, consistent results, training benefits, leadership assessment, global movement
SPEAKERS
Dave Rosenberg, Damon Pistulka

00:00
Music.

Damon Pistulka 00:08
All right, everyone, welcome once again to the faces of business. I am your host, Damon Pistulka, and I am so excited for our guest today, because we have none other than Dave Rosenberg from locked on leadership here today, and we’re going to be Dave is an accountability expert, and we’re going to see why shortly, but we’re going to be talking about the keys to creating a culture of accountability in your business. Dave, thanks for being here today.

Dave Rosenberg 00:38
Thanks for having me. Damon, by the way, I was just starting to dig your your intro music and Olson and cut away. Man,

Damon Pistulka 00:44
yeah, I know we can’t go too long because we just be going. We going. But Dave, it is awesome to have you here today. And as we always like to start out the show, let’s talk a little bit about your background and kind of how you got into what you’re doing today.

Dave Rosenberg 01:01
Sure, it’s been a long road. I’ll keep it brief. It starts with I chose to be an engineering major, which why is that important? It’s important because I had no clue what I was doing. I was good at math. I had no idea what an engineer was. I’m in school trying to figure out what I’m gonna do my life. And a buddy of mine and I always wanted to be an astronaut. That’s, that’s the truth. I just, you know, since I was a kid reading science fiction, I’m like, This is so cool, yeah. And I wore glasses, and a buddy of mine said to me, Hey, you ought to be a naval aviator, because more naval aviators have been astronauts back in the 80s than any other from any other way. There’s no career path, but this is seems to be the best way in Yep. And I’m like, Well, I wear glasses, I can’t fly. He goes, No, you could be a naval flight officer. What’s that? So all those of you who saw Top Gun, that’s what goose did, right? We didn’t actually have the flight controls, and so I thought, Hmm, so I go to recruiter. Next thing I know, I’m in the Navy. So that sort of was the start for me. Did seven years I was able to do an operation. I was there for Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and we spent 111 fun days at sea without a port called while that thing was building up, and I get out and I go into business, and this is where my eyes really opened up, because in the military, there is training for everything. And my first management job as sales manager, and I’m supposed to build this sales department from scratch, and there wasn’t a manual to be found, yes. So, so I started, I wrote one. I’m like, okay, doesn’t exist. Make it, you know, it’s one of the things I learned in the military. And because I wanted to be able to have an effective way of teaching people how to do what I did, and I didn’t want to forget stuff. I’m kind of lazy that way. I didn’t want to have to think about it as I just I wrote it down. And then as I would start, you know, training people, and I realized, oh, there’s a better way to do it, I would revise the manual. Long story short, left that job, moved on to another company, where I ended up getting promoted to VP of Operations. Same story. So once again, I started creating a manuals, and I realized really quickly that manuals are key to having consistent results, and that became a hallmark of my career. As I worked for other people, and I ended up running four companies, a couple of which were mine, couple of which were other people’s as president. And every time I walked in, it was the same thing. We had inconsistent results, because people were learning over people’s shoulders and and I started creating manuals and processes and procedures again, because that’s how I learned in the military. Yeah. And I started seeing people improving. And then I noticed something else. Not only did they give better results, they had better attitude. And fast forward to 2015 the company I had been running was sold. I was president of the company. Was a moving company, and I’m out on my own trying to figure out, now I’m north of 50, trying to what am I going to do next? Look for another job. I got to look for another high level job. You know, it’s going to be a year. I’m just setting my wife up for this look. It’s going to be a while. I got to find the right job. It’s not, you know, yada yada yada. And a friend of mine, so a guy, when I was in telecommunications, one of the businesses I owned. I had became friends with a guy. We were friendly competitors. He was a managed service provider who did telecom I was a telecom company that provided MSP services. And after I sold my business, I used his for running some company or running the ITP So some companies I was in. So. Yes. And he asked me, Can you come work for me? There’s a half million dollar company, and I’m like, You got to give up a significant part of your revenue. That’s not going to work. So he said, Well, can you at least help me and my wife? And I thought, you know, I’ll get some income while I figured out what next is. So I started consulting for him, and then I thought, You know what? I can get another job, working for somebody else, until their kids come in after they graduate from business school and take it over where they sell it, which is what happened to the last one, four or five years. I’m going to be doing this all over again. I don’t want to do that, so I started coaching consulting, and I just did it under my name at first. And what I realized is that the piece that was missing is leadership. And so I started on tap, what I call tactical leadership. What are the day to day activities that people need to engage in to elevate their team members? And as I started working when I’m developing this, I ended up writing a book about it. Ended up speaking on stage, and you know, now I go around, I speak to conferences and conventions, and the one piece that everybody commented on was my section on holding people accountable. And back then, I was just focusing on that accountability conversation. Yeah. And I realized this is where people struggle. And as I developed it, more and more, I came to the conclusion that people are saving the accountability conversation to the end. And my success came from creating cultures where people held themselves accountable, or Yeah, right? Instead of saying you did something wrong, let’s talk about it. You went, I did something wrong. How do I fix this? Right? And that’s a whole different dynamic. And so the concept of what I now call radical accountability was born. And I mean, that’s the 32nd answer. Well, probably more than 30 seconds, you know, but that’s that’s the path that got me where I am today, and so now I help organizations develop a culture where people willingly do what they need to do when they need to do it correctly the first time.

Damon Pistulka 07:14
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. We’re going to get into that, Dave, because that is a great base to start with. I just want to say uzmans, thanks for stopping by today. He said, Greetings to us today. Thank you for doing it. He said, Nice to meet you. That’s best wishes. Thank you so much, uzman today, for being here so you I tell you what, Dave, it’s like the the sometimes things just align. Because we were talking about some leadership things with one of my clients. Today, I was actually on site with them, and this is going to be a very interesting conversation, because you said one thing in your in the very towards the end of here, you know, radical accountability. First of all, I love that phrase you talked about. The other thing you talked about is the military and the military having processes, and then coming into the private sector, and that not being something that was commonplace, you helping to instill that, which is something else. I think we’re going to get into a little bit, because that is one of the things that founders, visionary leaders that start companies things they don’t really understand the importance of what you said there at the beginning is the manuals, or a process that’s actually documented in some way, shape or form, that gives people the I that gives people the knowledge so they know this is what I am supposed To be, supposed to be doing. And if I do this 10 times every day, I’ve done a good job. And you you talked about people were they got better results, but the attitudes, because I think a lot of businesses suffer from not having a process documented so that people don’t understand what a good job is, so they can’t feel good themselves knowing they did get a good job because they don’t know what a good job is. Yeah, and

Dave Rosenberg 09:07
it’s actually, you’re spot on, right? It’s so if you’re familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which is really what drives all of us to everything, because it’s, it’s just a statement of our need to survive, right? And and having processes situated that safety and security levels is a second level. So, so physiological needs is the first thing. We’ll take any risk if we’re going to die, if we we can’t eat, drink, we’ll take any risk to solve that. But once we’ve established that, and that’s what getting hired does, by the way, it solves the physiological need issue, the next one is safety and security. And if I don’t know what you expect of me, then I’m in this uncertainty, and I’m like, Oh, what do I do? How am I know? I’m always worried, and so I can’t then achieve the next level, which is love and belonging. I don’t even care about that. And that’s where a team start to form. Yeah. Yes, and so processes. So it’s several things required to do that, and you’ve hit on them, right? So one is great job descriptions. Job accurate job descriptions. There’s been, there’s a study out that shows that what’s called job discrepancy, which is the difference between what the job description says and what the bosses expect. And the greater that delta, that difference, the more stress that creates. And that’s all sorts of bad things for us, right? Because stress create, you know, you release cortisol. The brain actually shuts down in a stress environment and goes to fight or flight or freeze, right? Or fun is, I just heard that flight, flight, freeze or fawn. So that’s the sycophant, oh yes, boss, wherever you want, right? Okay, the flight is that people will duck around the corner and hide freezer. People won’t make a move without the boss telling them what to do, because they’re too afraid of making a mistake. And the fighter guys who argue all the time, yeah, it’s not the right way, right? So we need those to be accurate, so people know what to expect. We need metrics, which you alluded to, how many a day? What’s the what’s good enough? Just give me the basement. What’s good enough. Because most people are competitive, we’re going to want to least do that much and and the beauty about that is you’ll see who the real go getters are, and they’re the ones who are doubling your good enough, right? And now you know who your future leaders potentially are, and you also know you can improve your process, because somebody’s doing it better. And then that’s the last piece. Show them how to do it with not just good processes, but then in the process, need to be written in formal, but formal training, which actually does double duty, because then in the future, when somebody doesn’t do well and they can’t say, Well, I didn’t know I was supposed to do it that way, you go, Yes, you did, because we went through the training and you passed the test. It’s a win, win, win. When you do that. Now people feel good because they feel ready. They’re like, I’m equipped to do my job. And that kicks in a well known survival mechanism called reciprocity. See, when we were hunter gatherers, we we depended on each other. So you do for me, and I do for you. And you think about your, your My closest friend asked me to do he was injured. He couldn’t do so. He asked me to change a lock on his mailbox. He insisted on buying me lunch. Come on, I’ve known this guy for over 30 years. You know the stuff we’ve done for each other? You can’t, you know? Yeah, of course, I’m going to help you out. He’s my bro, yeah, but he insisted on buying lunch. That’s reciprocity, that innate human instinct that we help each other out. And so when you train people, they’re they’re the way they reciprocate is doing a good job. Oh,

Damon Pistulka 12:53
that’s that’s good. I’ve not heard that before. By training people, you’re doing them, doing them a solid by getting them set up right, doing what they need to do, so they’re going to try to do a good job. I just that the the whole piece in not taking the time to document processes and train people properly is such a waste in our in our organizations today that I think that simple step alone can help so many small businesses they don’t even realize the benefits they would get from that it’s

Dave Rosenberg 13:29
not just small it is definitely small businesses. And I will tell you, I used to think, oh my god, enterprise they had the no enterprise is just a bunch of small businesses all contributing together, but they are set up exactly the same with the exact same issues. Yeah,

Damon Pistulka 13:45
wow. So as you’re as you’re coming around into accountability, one of the things that that I love, I love the term radical accountability, and I love that you build a you know, we’re talking about building a culture of accountability today. One of the things that I see in organizations is finger pointing, and how do you build a counter of accountability that, as you said earlier, where someone will say I didn’t do what I needed to do, rather than somebody else pointing out a problem and finger pointing all the time, I It’s not my fault. It’s somebody else’s fault. Or those kind of things where you really get that sense of, Hey, I didn’t do it. I know I didn’t do it. I need to say something, and we need to figure it out.

Dave Rosenberg 14:42
Yeah, that’s a great question. So there are three elements that I’ve identified required to create radical accountability, the culture of accountability. I call this the the triad of accountability. We’ve discussed the first one, which is the mechanics. The mechanics are all the processes, procedures. Is everything we just discussed, the things that set people up success so they know mechanically what to do, how much to do, how to do it. The second is mindset. And it starts with, why does your company exist? And I’m going to put you, I know you’re interviewing me, but I’m going to put you on the hot spot here. Damon, why does your company exist?

Damon Pistulka 15:27
Because I want to help 1000s of business owners lead a better life. I mean, that’s honestly what it is, drives me every

Dave Rosenberg 15:34
day, yeah, and I get that. I love that. And so what is your mindset? Right? There it is about other people. It’s not about so sometimes I was in BNI years ago, and you know, why do I exist? And everyone’s laughing here, because it’s small business people. We all know that it’s a great organization. Ivan Meisner is a great guy who’s brilliant. What he did, yeah, nothing about here should ever be heard about slanting BNI. And the same time I would hear get people get up and they’d say, Well, here’s why they do their their presentation, you know, the whatever, however, here’s why I’m doing it, or showing their family, right? Which is, okay, that’s somewhat outside, right? But it’s kind of me centered. Yeah. Nobody pays anybody to do anything because they need to make money. We pay other businesses because they bring us value, meaning they do something for us we can’t do for ourselves. That’s the economic exchange. That’s the promising economic exchange. I buy a service from you or a product from you for however much money I pay for it, the value to me is more than the amount I pay for it. And of course, the value to you as the seller is less than the amount you’re getting, that’s your profit, right? And it’s a win. It’s a true Win, win scenario. If I don’t understand why I’m in business, why? Well, how I support other people, right? Then I’m going to make decisions based on what’s good for me, not what’s good for them. And I ran a kitchen and bathroom modeling company where the owner thought that way used to drive me nuts, and we’d have a problem. We’d both put in a kitchen. It would be a problem, and he would do what’s best for him to solve the problem instead of what’s best for the customer, and he ended up going bankrupt, right? Because that’s what happened. Yeah. So first I was, why are you in business? And I would go even bigger picture, like I talked to plumbers. For example, why are plumbers? Are in business? Plumbers actually built civilization. Civilization would not exist without plumbers. Think about that. What if you’re advertising for a job, and that’s your message, we help civilization grow if we didn’t have running water, if we didn’t have sewage, if we didn’t have cisterns and we didn’t have irrigation, we don’t have civilization freaking huge. Yes, it is. So you start with that, but then you have to inculcate the mindset in everybody about how their actions affect their stakeholders. Okay, so your clients, that’s why, why you’re in business is important, because you want to hire people are excited by that reason. And then you say, Listen, you don’t do this right here, that people are suffering, and you’re here to help them. People won’t let that happen. Oh, and by the way, here’s how your actions or inactions affect the rest of your team. Well, again, we go back to primal needs. We don’t want to let the tribe down mazov’s hierarchy. So the fourth level of Maslow’s hierarchy is esteem. That does so the second level, the third level, is love and belonging. That means we have this need to belong to a group. We are pack animals, but once we’re in that group, which provides a safety, by the way, right? Because there’s safety in numbers, we want to stay in that group, and that’s done by esteem, which is not self esteem, though, how do I feel about me? No, how do you, as my teammate, feel about me? Am I contributing? Because if I’m not, what are you going to do? You’re going to get rid of me. Because otherwise, I’m taking resources and they right. So I need to know that you value me. So when we talk about mindset and how others are affected, we tap right into that. Yeah. And then last is model, and this is the piece that probably most leaders don’t understand which is their team will never behave any different than they do. They leaders must model the behaviors they want to see from others. They must set the example. That’s why they are leaders. They are leading the way. Lead by example. Be that person. When you do that, naturally, the group will become self correcting when the leader models taking ownership. You know what? Guys, I was working with a client the other day, and they’re changing their culture, and they’re like, Well, how do we come about making this changes? So the first thing you do is you apologize to your team for not having done this sooner that we. We’ve made all these mistakes that we by not having policies and processes in place, one of the things they avoided doing is putting policy we don’t want to get pigeonholed, and I hear this all the time, we need to be more flexible. I don’t want to force myself in a box. What if a situation comes up, what if we have to change the policy? I’m like, we have a policy or procedure on how to change procedures. That’s easy, right? But you want to give people the guardrails so they know how to make decisions. And so the first thing I had them do is say, Listen, guys, here’s some changes that are going to come on. We’re going to come out with some new policies and procedures and give you some guardrails. And it’s they haven’t existed because of us. We screwed up as leaders. If we don’t own our mistakes, no one team will. That’s where it starts.

Damon Pistulka 20:46
Yeah, it makes a huge difference. Because if you don’t, if you have to be human, right? And then this is, this is something honestly has, has kind of been talked about, but I think in the last 10 years has really come about a lot more as as leaders and being more human about Yes, we make mistakes. Yes, we don’t know everything. Yes, we because when you build that team around you and they know that you’re you’re as leaders, first of all, we should be getting people a lot smarter around us than we are. First thing, but the second thing is, is when you are that that way, and you’re able to model that behavior, other people want, because you’ve, you’ve helped them go, you know, with the training and everything else that you’re doing, they want to help you succeed as much as you want everyone to succeed around you.

Dave Rosenberg 21:41
Yeah, you’ve nailed it. Brene Brown brought this to the public attention, right? She’s, she’s arguably the leader of the vulnerability movement, for lack of better term. But we need to be vulnerable, right? We just need to do it. It. You know, you’re right. People will relate to you, if you’re human, if you’re that. You know Jean Luc Picard, captain of the enterprise, and even, even if you watch the show, he evolves as a character to admitting asking for help, all of that, but in the beginning, so especially early, he’s like, I know it all sort of thing. No, this is what we’re going to do. You can’t, I couldn’t relate to that character. And you can’t relate to that person as a real person if they’re doing that, and if I can’t relate to you, I can’t trust you, yes, and now if I can’t trust you, I’m down at that safety and security level again, going like, I don’t know which way is up. I don’t know is my job safe? Is my job secure? I’m just going to keep my head down. I’m not going to be innovative, I’m not going to stand out, I’m not going to do anything because I don’t want to lose my job. I

Damon Pistulka 22:43
uh, yeah, you, you just brought up COVID things. You’re exactly right. If you, if there again, they have to be able to trust you, relate to you, and trust you as a leader, to be able to to really perform at their best. So one of the things that I, I would have to imagine, I want to have you talk about this is, what are some of the reasons that people say they don’t want to look at creating cultures of accountability.

Dave Rosenberg 23:11
You know, I tend to work with people actually do want to create cultures of accountability. The ones that don’t tend to avoid me. But even with the ones who do right, what’s one of the questions I frequently ask is, well, how come you have it? And a lot is fear of being held accountable themselves by their team. That is way up. There is one, probably one of the top one reasons. It’s probably the number one reason. Yes, you know if, if I, if I, if I hold you accountable, then I have to do what I say. And God, I like being the boss and showing up late or not showing up when I said I was going to, or not starting a meeting on time, or just blowing off the day and going and playing golf. Okay, great. You liked it. You can have it. Build your team up so somebody else takes that role from you and you’re not involved in a day to day the company there are. As you grow a business, your role becomes less important if you do it properly in the day to day, the people get to that size where they’re like, I don’t want to grow anymore because I don’t have enough hours in the day, they’re not doing it right? Yeah,

Damon Pistulka 24:26
yeah, that’s for sure. And that you you make a great point, because those visionary founders are usually the ones that that have trouble with accountability, so that they see that in themselves. But what they don’t realize is a lot of other people in the organization want that. They want to be accountable.

Dave Rosenberg 24:50
You know, one of the things I say frequently is we only hold people accountable we think are capable. You. Uh, think about this for a second, if you have do. I mean, I realize your your kids are probably grown now, but you have children, yes, yes. So when boys, girls each, okay, so when your son was about five years old, he probably thought mowing the lawn was really cool, right? Yeah, yeah, and he wanted to mow the lawn. And if you had let him mow the lawn, and of course, there’d be areas where he would have missed right, because he’s only five. Are you yelling at him for not getting all the grass, not doing straight lines, not getting the edging just right? Of course not. He’s a five year old. He’s not capable of doing it at 15. Whoa, whoa, whoa, son, before you got with your friend, you’re going to do this right? Because he’s capable. When we fail to hold people accountable, we’re telling them we don’t think they’re capable. Is that the message you want to send?

Damon Pistulka 26:03
No, I mean, it’s it’s it all. I love the topic of accountability, because you’ve explained it so well today, when people know what they’re supposed to do, starting back at the beginning, when you talk about in business having a process. Damon knows what he’s supposed to do every day, and he knows if he does it 10 times every day, he’s doing what we expect. And then if he only does it seven times, he would like someone to come up and ask him why he only did it seven times that day instead of 10 like he was supposed to

Dave Rosenberg 26:37
Yeah, and maybe there’s a legit reason, like the process is broken down someplace, or flaw in the process. And when you ask him that, I ask you that, and you point that out to me, and I go, wow, we have a chance to improve the process. Yep, right. So it allows you to iterate and improve. It also allows you under high stress situations to perform. You know, I mentioned to you in the pre game. I’ll call it you know that I have this upcoming travel retreat again, command expedition, yeah, and it fits right in here. So our first one, so we’re gonna be traveling twice a year to various battlefields and some leadership lessons from iconic battlefields. The first one is Battle of London. It’s more just battle of London, but we’re going to England and start with battle of London. Start with battle of London. It’s going to end with the beginning of D Day. Okay, it took, it took Eisenhower and his staff three years to plan the D Day invasion. And for about a year, there were people training on how to embark and disembark at all the various things they needed to do to storm the beaches at Normandy, they trained for ever, and no aspect of that was left to chance. Having said that there was a ton of chance, because no plan survives contact with the enemy as this, as they say, right? But, but the other thing Eisenhower said is, in combat. I’ve found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. So the planning, the training, all of that sets people up for success. And we know how successful, obviously, D Day was, because I’m not having this conversation in German, yes,

Damon Pistulka 28:17
yes, that planning is is even when you talk about that, and even as as we all know, in in business and life, the the best made plans. As you said, don’t, don’t survive very long on the battlefield, but people that are better prepared make better decisions in those battles, I believe, because they’ve they’re more capable of making a different decision, right?

Dave Rosenberg 28:43
So here’s, here’s basically what happens. And this has been so invaluable to me as a civilian, because I learned this in the military. You, first of all, planning is a skill unto itself. So the more you plan, the better you become at planning. So now when something happens, you have to alter a plan. You’re good at doing that, even if it’s on the fly. You’re still planning, right? You’re not from the hip. It’s just a really quick planning. In fact, the Marines have this rapid planning thing they do all the time because, you know, the balloon goes up, the bubble burst. You’re like, Oh, my God. We didn’t expect this. You know, if you talk to any operator Special Forces guys. They call themselves operators. When things go wrong, the first thing they do is stop and assess the situation. They develop a plan very, very quickly. So you plan. The active planning teaches you how to plan. But the other piece that comes up is usually it’s not the entire plan that goes the heck. It’s just a piece of it. If you don’t have a plan, you don’t know how to adjust. But when you have a plan, you can adjust for it. There’s one other piece, though, that most people don’t get for us in business where we deal with the same things, it’s not as dynamic as a combat situation. You. Uh, between, depending on the industry, between 75 to 85% of your scenarios are the same. So your plan covers worst case, 75% of everything. Of that, 25% that’s left, 75% of that is a variant, right? So what’s that? It was 75% of 25% is something like 18% roughly, right? So now we’ve got 93% covered by two scenarios. That next 7% three quarters of that is covered by a third scenario. You get 99% of all your scenarios with three variations. Anyone could come up with three variations, and so that’s how you start getting consistent results.

Damon Pistulka 30:41
Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s a great way to explain it, and the importance of planning. And, wow, I had no idea that they planned for three years ahead of D Day that that obviously a very big time and, and the planning was necessary. And beneficial. That’s for sure. That preparation, for sure. We have Robert stop by to say important, discussing your discussion you’re steering here. And then Muhammad said he’s excited to join this session on creating a culture of accountability, and building accountability is such a key driver for team motivation and sustainable growth, that’s, that’s is, I really think that when you see teams that work together, that they understand their their own responsible for their own performance, right? For I’m part of the team I have to take care of. This is my piece. I we’ve been trained. I know what my piece is. When it doesn’t happen, right? They’re already figuring out in their mind how not to let it happen again a lot of times, and they don’t want to let the rest of their team members down.

Dave Rosenberg 32:01
You’ve just summed up what I just said in 45 minutes, in about two minutes.

Damon Pistulka 32:05
Well, I think, I think you know, you’re gonna see I account a culture of accountability is a beautiful thing, because you can have honestly, and I’ll just say it a shit storm. Somebody just made a bad mistake, and it was, it wasn’t intentional, but it was just a bad mistake happened. And you see everyone walk around, come around them, lift them up, help them to figure out what happened. There’s not finger pointing, there’s not anything like that. It’s like we’re all part of this team. We trust each other on this team. We know we’re all here to do the right thing. They fix it and they move on. Yeah?

Dave Rosenberg 32:52
And that’s why we say it’s the team’s success. Success. The success belongs to the team. Yeah, that’s simple, because that’s exactly how it works. Everyone has a part. Everyone does their part. And if there’s a failure in my world that belongs to the leader, because it’s our job as leaders to ensure success. So when it there isn’t success, we fit. That’s what our role is, period.

Damon Pistulka 33:18
Yeah, and that that comes back again to that accountability, because a leader takes ultimate accountability for their people. Yep,

Dave Rosenberg 33:26
the buck stops here. As Truman once said, yes,

Damon Pistulka 33:30
yes. Well, Mohamed asked another question. He said, what’s an unconventional approach you’ve seen for fostering accountability when traditional methods fall short.

Dave Rosenberg 33:42
Well, you know, it’s traditional methods unconventional. I think everything I described when i is unconventional in the sense that it’s just not implemented. I think it’s the only sensible account approach to it. It’s the only thing that works. And it’s what I’ve done is, frankly, just looked at history and looked at what’s worked and synthesized it down into an approach that people can now adapt with with the system. So, you know, that’s a really difficult question, what’s unconventional? Takers take accountability for yourself. Start with you be the and you don’t have to be the boss to be the leader, you set the example. And when you do that, hold, hold yourself to your true values, not not the values you think people, what are your real values? Start with, what are your real know your real values, and then live those values. You start there, everything else will fall into place. Yeah,

Damon Pistulka 34:44
that’s awesome. That’s awesome. So as you’re working with companies, you’re helping them, you know, really embrace this culture of accountability, and they really get into it. What are some of the things that they. They tell you that our discoveries, that they didn’t really understand, didn’t think will be happening. What are some side effects, positive side effects that you hear and things that they just come up to you and say, why? I would have never thought.

Dave Rosenberg 35:17
Yeah, that’s a great question. Probably the first, most important one is people think that process, procedures, policies, written, a written framework for making decisions like that that allow people is constricting and it’s actually liberating. That’s number one. I do this exercise with my clients where I say, I want you to draw me something. And my clients, for most part, they’re not, they’re not artists. Every now and then there is right and you kind of get this blank look anything in the world. I don’t know where to begin, so I put constraints on them. I say, just using a pencil, I want you to draw a pet that you’ve owned in your life. All of a sudden becomes much easier to create because I put some boundaries around them, and now they get creative. So when we start creating these boundaries, we actually foster creativity. And that’s usually a shock.

Damon Pistulka 36:26
That would be, but you’re right. When you have too many possibilities, you can’t make a decision. But when you limit the possibilities, it’s much easier. Yeah, you know,

Dave Rosenberg 36:36
it’s like Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy in his the great book 10x is greater than 2x that’s exactly the concept there. Right as soon as you decide to I want to massively grow the number of options you have goes really narrow. And it’s like, I can see my way to do this. I can see this 10x path because I don’t have all these other possibilities. More constraints, the more creative.

Damon Pistulka 36:58
Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff.

37:00
So

Damon Pistulka 37:04
what are some specific tools you use to measure accountability help them implement and still show your clients how to use Yeah, I

Dave Rosenberg 37:15
actually have created my own radical accountability assessment, a team assessment, which it’s super, super powerful. And so we measure on the three elements, mechanics, mindset and model. And we’ll do is we’ll go out to the team. It’s not, I’m not asking the boss. It’s not a self assessment. I have a different self assessment. So which bosses can use for themselves, if they’re going to be honest. But this is really a great look for the team to see, you know, where is it? We’re short. What are we missing? You know? And so it asks things like, you know, is, does your boss ask you to do things that are unwilling to do? You know? A great example, I have a client who I’ve known him for many years. He was complaining about lateness, people being late at work, and I said to him, I said, So do you start every meeting you have on time? No, I’m the boss. Do you ever call an impromptu meeting for something that’s not vitally important? Meaning, it’s not like there’s an emergency. We need to deal with it now, but you just feel like talking about it now, so you disrupt somebody’s plan for their day because you feel like it, yeah, I’m the boss. When you whatever, wake up and not show up to work when you said you’re going to be there because something else came up, yeah, I’m the boss. Okay, so you don’t respect your team members time. How is it you expect them to respect yours? Right? Yeah. So, so these are sort of things that come out in the assessment, and that’s pretty eye opening. And, you know, I’ve developed a model of four different levels of leadership, and so this will tell where you sit in there.

Damon Pistulka 39:01
I bet this leads to a lot of leadership self discovery.

Dave Rosenberg 39:06
It does. You know, probably the one thing most people don’t realize is our job as leaders. Our leadership strategy is to grow people. Our business strategy is to grow our business right? But we want to grow people as leaders, and so if we hire people who are have the chance to become self actualized again, to use Maslow’s term, right? Who would get excited because it’s doing what they feel like they’re born to do in whatever business you’re in, and then have to set up the pathway for growth so they can have better forms of themselves. That’s what our job is. Well, if we go back to my model, in order for other people to grow, you need to lead the way and grow ourselves. And that’s the piece that scared the bejesus out of folks. I’m

Damon Pistulka 39:58
just going to give us a moment of silence. It’s there because that that is, that is great that you brought that up like that. Because one of the things that I think as people progress in their career that it’s real easy to stop your continued development, and even to the point that we’re we get so engulfed in our business and what we’re doing in business and what we’re doing right there, that we don’t step back and say, if I want something for me to change tomorrow, I better be changing who I am today so we can get there tomorrow. And it is you bring it up so eloquently, because that part of leadership is something that you you know, like you said, they need to model the behavior. My behavior is not where we ultimately want to be. So my behavior has to keep changing and developing so that everyone else comes behind me.

Dave Rosenberg 40:58
I literally and no hyperbole here on a daily basis, ask myself, who do I need to be to have the effect I want to have? I’m going to I’m on a mission to make global to make radical accountability a global movement. It’s that simple. Who do I need to be? I will tell you right now, the guy you’re interviewing right now he is not capable today of creating that global movement. What he is capable of doing, what I talk about myself in a third person, which I always laugh at when people what David’s capable of doing, what I am capable of doing is starting that process, yeah, and growing into it. But who I need to be every day I ask myself that question every day i i think about it and inculcate more of those qualities. Yeah. And if we do that, how much better would the world be if everybody not not try and be me, God forbid, one of me is more than enough. One of you is right. We’re all unique, but if each one of us tried to take our unique selves and make us a higher, better version, I think a lot of the world ills would disappear.

Damon Pistulka 42:11
Yes they would, yes they would. So if people so you’ve got a couple things coming up, we we briefly spoke about your travel retreats. That’s something I think is awful cool. The first one you said is going to be around the Battle of London, and let’s talk about that just briefly. Yeah,

Dave Rosenberg 42:29
it’s September of 25 so a year, just under a year from now, yeah, just finished putting the itinerary together. It’s seven days in London. We’ll go to Canary Islands, as mentioned, we’ll some some custom so what we’re going to do on a daily basis, we’re going to have some little training in the morning, set our intentions. What is it that hope for you to experience each day? Of course, your personal growth will be yours. So I’m always shocked by what people get. I go into these things with thinking, here’s the major point I want to get, and what people get is something completely different, but it’s exactly what they need. So I’ve become humble enough to go, I don’t really know, right, but it’s going to be transformative. I can tell you that much, and then we’ll learn, discover what Churchill did, what Eisenhower did. We’re actually going to head to the Canary not the Canary Islands, the Channel Islands, because they were occupied by the Germans, uncontended. And so there’s a whole bunch of lessons there. And how did you know? How did Churchill keep his country together in the worst, darkest times of their history, and get people to step up and do what you know? On my signature, there’s a quote. I love this quote. It’s from Churchill. It says, Sometimes doing your best is not enough. Sometimes you have to do what’s required. Yeah, I literally get choked up every time I verbalize that, because that’s the sentiment that I think we all need to inculcate. Just do what’s required to help each other. And he did that. So how did he do it? We’re going to discover that as well as how to take that back transform your team. So they do that as well. So that’s the first one. I do have the second one following up, but it took three years to plan the invasion of Normandy. I’m doing it in six months. So that’ll be the second one. That’ll be like June of 26 beyond that, we go into battlefields all over the world twice a year. So if you want more information, you know, get on my newsletter, on a website I’ll be coming up in the next two months, probably with all the fine detail that you’ll need. Nice. Know about that

Damon Pistulka 44:28
nice Well, Dave, if someone wants to talk to you about about these travel retreats, or about you coming and speaking at their corporation, or just reaching out to talk to you more about, maybe some coaching, what’s the best way to get a hold of you? Yeah. So

Dave Rosenberg 44:42
what I’d like you to do is go to my website, locked on leadership.com. L, O, C, K, E, D, O N, leadership.com/newsletter. Sign up for my newsletter, and I send out great information. Right now it’s twice a month. I might be increasing that to once a week, but right now it’s 12. A month, it goes out and on the thank you page, you’ll also be able to download some resources for military minded leaders. There’s a, first of all, a 20 page white paper on radical accountability. So a little more in depth information. The the leadership assessment I alluded to is up there, as well as, as well as getting a copy to my book, if you want to reach out to me on the website, you know Dave at lockdown leadership.com, or just contact me on the website and we can, we can schedule some time together, find out what’s going on with you. I think there’s a leader. I think there’s a scheduling link on that. Thank You page as well. Yeah, there is a schedule link on that. Thank You page as well. If you want complimentary 30 minutes, we’ll just sit down and chat.

Damon Pistulka 45:43
All right. All right. Well, I just thanks so much for joining us today, Dave and again, for those listening, I wanted to say thank you. We were talking with Dave Rosenberg today about the just, I just keys to creating a culture of accountability, but so much more, because Dave is just a voracious advocate for radical accountability. He lives it, breathes it, and teaches people how to bring that culture of accountability in their organization and build much better teams and happier happier people, basically. So thanks for being here today. Been my pleasure. Thanks

Dave Rosenberg 46:24
for having me. Damon,

Damon Pistulka 46:25
yes, I want to thank all the listeners that were out there that hey, those of you that dropped the comments, we had Muhammad. We had a LinkedIn user, I can’t see your name, but we had Robert and uzman that were dropping some comments in day. Thank you so much. Those that were listening, but didn’t drop a comment. Appreciate you. Thanks for being here today. If you got into this late, go back to the beginning, because Dave dropped some serious gold nuggets about radical accountability, getting your team together the way you want to be, and personal development. Thanks everyone. Thanks again, Dave, we’ll be back again. Have a great rush your week. Everyone. Bye.