The Fractional Leader Podcast
Leadership is Hard. We're here to help.
The Fractional Leader Podcast
I Quit!!
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Have you ever considered that sometimes, to reach new levels of leadership, you might need to quit some things altogether? Our latest episode unpacks this leadership truism - "If you want to go up in leadership, there are things you have to give up to get there." What things do you need to quit to make room for the more important things in your business?
The Value of Quitting in Leadership
Speaker 1I like how you're analog .
Speaker 2You got your pens and paper I just , I just uh made an investment . I haven't even opened it yet . It's sitting in the chair next to us , one of those digital paper writing things you know like you should do an ad for it .
Speaker 1Are we sponsored by remarkable , yet maybe ?
Speaker 2maybe we just need to to uh name it and claim it . Yeah , it'll happen , I do . I will say I do like analog , like when I'm reading a book I try to get into kindle , but I want to hold a real book yeah I just love . I love to like kind of touch and feel and write , and this paper will most likely stay blank till the end of the episode , or I'll start . You'll see me doodling here , yeah .
Speaker 1Just take notes of all the amazing things that we say for later .
Speaker 2Ooh , that was good , Drew . What's on your mind today ?
Speaker 1Matthew , you know we ran through a couple episodes that I think really impacted people , talking through hiring and firing and um , this idea of quitting came to mind , but not in the way that I think a lot of people think about quitting . Obviously , you can leave a role and just quit . I think quiet quitting was a fun thing that people talked about at the end of COVID , but I'm more thinking about leadership quitting . What does it look like to stop doing something and to start doing something else ? So today I wanted to talk about the value of quitting .
Speaker 2I love that , right I ? I just think this idea of what , when to start , when to stop , when to continue , right , that's an exercise that I learned from you . It's a start , stop , continue exercise , and I think intentional quitting is probably the key to success for a lot of leaders , because we get so married to what worked in the past what was and this is really easy for me to talk about , because I love new ideas I love changing things , so like of course I love quitting stuff if , and going and starting new things and we talked about the shiny penny thing , right ?
Speaker 2so that's probably the opposite of of what we're talking about on the on the health spectrum , and you can go back and listen or watch that episode . Um , but yeah , saying no , you know , saying no to things that aren't bringing the revenue anymore , aren't working anymore . So my question to you is let's start here how do you know , like , how do you know when it's time to quit something yeah , that's , that's really good or even quit somebody ?
Speaker 1So , yeah , yeah , I'd have to think about that for a second Cause . That's a that's a great question . I think I realized , um , looking through some of our reels , that I always say I think and then I say what I think I need to find , like a new onboarding phrase .
Speaker 2I think , yeah , it's good . It gives me a little edit point .
Speaker 1Well , I think a core principle . I just did it again . We may have to edit all this .
Speaker 2No , I love it , keep going .
Speaker 1One of my first jobs where I learned a little bit about leadership . The executive director of this company said I want you to learn how to replace yourself , okay . I was like , okay , well , that's stupid , I'm never going to do that because I want to do my job . So why would I quit doing what I'm doing and replace myself ? Right ? And then the more mature you get , the more experience you get . You realize if you're going to go up in an organization , you have to give up in an organization . There are things that I thought were core to the work that I did , that gave me identity , gave me purpose , you know , made me valuable to an organization that if I quit doing those things , it would give me opportunity to do some other things that were maybe more valuable . But it's hard to quit them when you think they're the right thing , and so I think a lot of times you need someone to give you perspective and say you need to stop doing this . At a great leader , he he grabbed like a bunch of expo markers from a whiteboard . He's like hey , I want you to hold this marker . This marker represents a very important function of your job . Now here's another marker . This represents another important marker of your job and you do this too . Each marker represented responsibility and he kept giving them to me .
Speaker 1Before I knew it , I couldn't hold any more markers in my hand . He's like your job as a leader is to start giving markers away . You have to quit some things that are your responsibility . Delegate them so you can hold more important markers . And I think that was the first time where it was like really tactical . You talked about analog . I want to touch it , I want to feel it Like . In that moment I thought , oh yeah , I can't physically hold any more responsibility because I feel like I'm a capable person . Bring it on . I can take all the stress and the pressure . I can do this , give me more work to do . But it's like , well , you can't do more important work because you're holding all this stuff so that I quit . Principle in that moment was man , I know I need to do something because someone brought it to my attentions and I don't know that I would have known to start quitting things until they told me to .
Speaker 2Well , it gives you some practical language too , like you can say , because I I wasn't there for that conversation , but I have heard you say and how do you lead your team was , is that a marker you could give away ? Yeah , which you know ? I'm hearing this like what are you talking about ? A marker , you know , but then I , you know , figured it out , and I think that's a great principle for us . Just to pause for a second and say if you're a leader , listening to this , you can't punish your employees for great delegation and giving markers away . That was a great leader who actually valued and championed and rewarded you giving things away to other people , because this leader knows that there's no shortage or no scarcity mindset of things that need to be done in value that you can bring to the organization , and so , as you're giving stuff away , you're able to pick up more leadership , higher level leadership , and I think you should be on the lookout as leader for those people . Yeah , right , those are the people that you say hey , I can give you more responsibility and give you more things , because you know how to to manage other people . Hand this off , get this done , and the results are exponential in that process .
Speaker 1Yeah , that's right . Let's circle back to start , stop , continue . So that is actually a bit of a process that was introduced to us , I mean several years ago , and it's a pretty good framework . I don't think it's the only framework a leader can have , but it's a really good tool . If you get to , you know you're doing your annual evaluation of an employee . It can't be the only thing that you evaluate , but it's a good thing to get an employee to think through like , hey , what are the things that this year you need to start ?
Speaker 2Yeah .
Speaker 1What are the exponential things you need to stop ? What are the things you have to continue for success in your job ? And so you referenced that . Where did that make sense in your leadership ?
Speaker 2Well , I almost wish it was stop , continue , start oh , that's good , because start for me was so easy , but there's just things . You can't start until you're willing to stop or evaluate what we should continue , right . So my problem is I'm starting a bunch of things and if I'm not disciplined to quit and stop other things or evaluate , is this something that even needs to keep happening ? Is this bringing any value ? I think in a lot of ways you have to .
Speaker 2You have to be measuring , you know , you have to kind of whether , whether you're an analytics person or not , you kind of have to fall in love with looking at data and looking at what's actually working , because , especially if you're an emotional leader like me , you'll get so emotionally tied up into an idea and you may love it , but it may not be working and so , even though you love it or it's your baby or it's like , oh , we can't kill this , or we've done this this way for 10 , 20 years , whatever it's where people like me , who don't naturally gravitate towards the numbers or the data or the metrics especially in the business side that I own , where we do social media for people , we see this all the time we have to look and say , hey , you may really love a piece of creative content , but if I'm looking at the backend , the analytics , and it's not working , then we've got to adjust , we've got to stop doing this , or you know , we need to continue doing the things that work , even though you may not want to do .
Speaker 2And so it's a lot of . It's just a lot of discipline . It takes a lot of discipline . I would say , if you're my type of personality , don't start with .
Speaker 2Start , go to the stop first Like okay before I start anything else , what do I need to stop doing ? I mean , even as I'm talking , I'm evaluating in my life . There's probably things I need to say no to right now so I can start doing . I think the harder question for me is , on the continue . Okay , I'm curious from your perspective . What are you looking at Like when you say , okay , we've been doing ?
Speaker 1this thing .
Speaker 2Should we continue doing ? It Should we stop it so that we can start some other things . How should we be thinking ?
Speaker 1about , but let me think this is really philosophical . So go with me on this weird journey . Leadership personality profile assessment . Honestly , I can't remember the title of the assessment , but I love the descriptor of my leadership gifts and it said implementer , conductor . Okay , that was like the two things . That resonates like okay , the idea of conducting obviously our music background , you understand conducting . When it comes to start , stop , continue . I think about this , like if you go to an orchestra and everybody's playing at full volume all the time , the piece has no dynamic . You can't really interpret what's the melody , what's the supporting parts , and so it's like the warmup when everyone's tuning and it's one big no , it's not , it's not fun , but a conductor knows when to bring pieces of the orchestra in and have other pieces go down
Speaker 1and then dynamics here and dynamics there and it becomes this beautiful piece of music . And I think that can be business and leadership as well , where you know , okay , let's bring this up , but if I turn this up , there's probably something I have to turn down at the same time . But continuing is like that continuity . What's the piece that makes it go from start to finish ? That feels like a set piece of music . I think something we could really talk about when it comes to continue is the marry , the mission and date , the method .
Speaker 1In any organization , there's something you do that makes it core to who you are . It's like man . We do this kind of business and in this season it looked like this . But that method's not working . It's not as effective as it used to be . So we need to stop doing that method . Let's do this method . That's different . Let's try this out . We're still continuing our mission . We're still going to be on mission with our organization to serve our clients or sell this product , whatever it is . But the methods do change . You know that from social media , like the algorithm could be one way for a month or two and then it changes on a dime . And if you're still doing the old method , you're done . But if the mission is engagement , awareness , participation , whatever that mission is for your social media like you can be married to that .
Speaker 2But your methods have to change all the time and , a lot of times , the market itself , which is another m for you , if you want to look into your um , the market itself .
Speaker 2If you're listening and paying attention to it will help you determine what you need to do , right ? So , like when we started our business , our mission was to help thought leaders amplify their message so they could help more people . Right , that's what we wanted to do . Well , it was a . We started a podcast company . We were going to help podcast . We're going to do podcasts , we can do micro content or like whatever .
Speaker 2But what we found out early in our business is that wasn't actually the primary need of our market , which we do podcast for some clients .
Speaker 2But most clients are like hey , we want to tell stories on our social media and it's exhausting for us to have to do this .
Speaker 2So , all that to say , we had to pivot early on our company to say , hey , if I fell in love with , I just love doing podcasts and I just love producing those and all the you know whatever , well then our business wouldn't be doing what it's doing today , because we had to say well , what people actually need . That we need to stop doing is promoting ourselves as just a podcast company . We need to start talking about how we can add value to people on their social media and content all that kind of stuff . And so all that to say you've got to listen , you've got to be in tune to it goes back to data results . You've got to be in tune to your market , not falling love with you know , the like you said , the method , like , and I think that's that's a key component as to why you need other people around you , right , of course , and I think when you're , when you're talking about continuing something , there's always fatigue in business
Personality Types in Business Life Cycle
Speaker 2, right ?
Speaker 1There's always , like man , I'm really tired of doing this same thing over and over again because we're not getting the results we used to , or maybe we're getting the same results , but it's taking more people to do it now than it used to , or you're bored .
Speaker 2That's exactly right . You know what I mean . Sometimes it's just like I just don't like doing this anymore .
Speaker 1So continuing is a bit of a discipline . It's like I'm going to wake up and be obedient to this mission . I know I have to go do this . I feel called to make this happen , and that's that's always tough , and I think we're continuing . As a challenge is when you're you're not looking at the data to support it . You do just feel married to the discipline , you feel married to the way you've always done it and you're not getting the results you used to get . You know you're not getting the returns you used to get on the investment you're making , and so it's like , man , I better stop doing this . The continuing is not working anymore . I think it's probably really personality dependent , because there are people who just they're wired to wake up and grind every single day and that's easy for them .
Speaker 2I was literally about to go there . You read my mind Cause I was thinking . I wonder if it would be helpful and shoot me down if this is , if this is out of line but I wonder it'd be helpful if you looked around the room of leaders that you have and you're able to identify who is more of a start person , a stop person , a continue person , yeah , and to be able to draft off those strengths and weaknesses . Because , for me , I love to start . But I'm really inspired about what you just said about continue , because that is true for me . I have to have discipline to get in . Continue , because that is true for me . Like , I have to have discipline to get in .
Speaker 2But if I don't have someone on my team that's a continue guy that's like , hey , drew , I know you're getting bored with this , but this is core to our business . Yeah , let's just keep , let's keep at it . I gotta have that person in the room with me . And then there's going to be people that are less emotionally tied to things . They're like , hey , we could quit doing that , let's just stop . Yeah , let's Whatever . And then there's going to be guys like me that's like , hey , what if we do this ? What if . My favorite thing is what if ? Like , okay , what if ? And you need those people too . But it's dangerous to have any one personality in that room without the others . Yeah , there's a great book .
Speaker 1It's a few decades old , but it's called um barbarians to bureaucrats . Okay , and it's the idea that every business runs through a life cycle where at some point you need someone to just take a machete to the jungle and hack out a pathway right , that's your starters , right . And then as the business matures , it gets more shrewd managers to kind of come in and run it . You don't need the pathway hacked as much as you used to , and usually by the end of an organization's life cycle it's run by bureaucrats . They didn't start it , they're not excited about new , they're the continue people and eventually someone hopefully is wise enough with the bureaucrats to be like , hey , it's time to end this , we've drained every drip out of this , we can possibly get it's over . And so , yeah , there's personality types to consider , there's life cycle of your business to consider ,
Quitting After a Decade
Speaker 1for sure .
Speaker 1And I think like maybe one of the last things I want to wrap with on this quitting episode would be like I've got a friend who just sold a business and so they ran it for 10 years . They thought , man , this is , that was a really good run . I enjoyed it , I was passionate about it , got a lot of notoriety for running the business and I also feel like it's time for a new challenge . Like that decade mark kind of meant something to them and it's time to move on . And so they quit their business , they sold it . Now they get to reinvest the profits from that to try to do something new . And so there's some times where , um , when some people are really passionate about dates my wife's like that . Like her , she just has this memory for it . Oh , it's may , and remember may a couple of years ago . X , y and Z is like no , I had no clue .
Speaker 1That was a thing . So some people are you know , the calendar matters to them emotionally and physiologically and all that stuff . For me it doesn't matter . Oh , we've been doing that for 10 years . I had no clue we were still doing that . But for other people that's like no , I'm going to do something else now . Yeah , I love it . Everybody go quit . One thing today , that's right .