How to Lead Your People to High-Performance

How to Lead Your People to High-Performance with Chester Elton

Many of you ask the question, “What are the best practices on how leaders succeed?” The answer is by engaging their employees to execute on strategy, vision, and values. Our guest is Chester Elton. He has spent decades helping clients engage their employees in organizational strategy, vision, and values. Chester provides real solutions for leaders looking to build culture, manage change, and drive innovation. In our interview, Chester and I discussed the simplicity of leadership. Pay attention to how Chester breaks down the five disciplines every leader needs to have. Finally, pay close attention to the practical tips Chester provides how to show gratitude and recognition to your team. Chester, thank you so much for joining the show.

It’s a pleasure to be here, Meny. Thanks for the invite.

I’ve been following a lot of the work you do. You’re a world-renowned business thought leader, keynote speaker, and best-selling author of the topic of building peak performance teams and creating highly productive company cultures. Ultimately, you have been in this business for many years. It’s been a while since you started speaking about leadership. Bring us back to the beginning of your journey.

I started in sales and sold various products. It was never lost on me that my best clients had robust cultures, their employees were excited to come to work, they had a noble cause. It wasn’t lost on me that those great cultures always started at the top, you talk about leadership and culture, what comes first. The culture is established by the leader and you’ve seen this many times, change a leader change the culture. Over the years, I started to pay attention to that, become somewhat of a student of leadership and even more a student of culture.

As the business has evolved, and I’d love to get your opinion on this Meny, there are few differentiators left in business. Leadership is always a differentiator. You can never have too many good leaders. The second is culture, simply because it’s hard to replicate. You can replicate products and services and pricing. Culture is that emotional engagement at work and some companies do it well, other companies struggle, other companies don’t care and the results are obvious. What do you think? Do you think that culture can be a differentiator?

This is a fascinating style. I would love to hear your opinion but because you asked, I want to chime in over here. My audience knows how much I speak about culture and it’s an important topic. Even on the podcast itself, we had some guests speaking about this topic and how they transform their business and culture. First of all, my understanding is that people confuse culture with perks. People think that having a great culture means that you have great perks in the office, you have coffee, you have a ping pong table and so on and so forth.

When we speak about culture, we say a culture of excellence, a healthy environment that’s pleasant and pleasing. When it starts internally, it expands externally very quickly and it becomes a place where clients love to hang out. Hanging out doesn’t mean we live in a large world where you have clients all over the place, it doesn’t mean they have to come to work, they have to come to visit your office. It’s almost a place where everybody feels, “I want to be connected to that culture. One way or the other, whatever it is.” Sometimes it’s by spending some money and using their services.

[bctt tweet=”Make sure growth is spread across not just your financial pages but your people as well. ” username=””]

I’ve come up with a definition of a high-performance culture, and that is a place where people believe what they do matters and they make a difference and when they make a difference, somebody noticed it and celebrated it. Those are the key elements, a belief that what you do matters. In other words, it matters to your customers, your clients, it matters to your co-workers, on a higher level it matters to your community. If you get a big bold mission and vision it matters to the world in general.

I love the idea that I have a belief that it’s important that I come to work, that I’m going to do good things, that I’m going to connect what I do every day to our noble cause and then I’m going to make a difference. The reinforcement of that culture is the people I work with and for are grateful for my efforts and will celebrate that. To your point, not with perks or a grand gala, simple thank you is a simple way to make sure that they see what I’m doing and they value what I do and they value who I am. That belief that what I do matters, is key to any high-performance culture, would you agree?

Let me dive in a little deeper on what you said. Other than speaking about culture, this is a topic that many people speak about and many experts and even CEOs of larger companies how they transformed a company with the culture, you added the two words which are the high performing teams and culture. Define what you mean by these two words.

For me, high performance is defined by culture. Generally speaking, if you’re on the investment side, what you want is a return. You want to company that’s in the black and is making money. High performance in other organizations is tied to innovation, “Are we continuing to evolve and innovate and grow?” To me, a high-performance culture is a place where not only is the company growing, the people within the company are growing. Growth is spread across not just your financial pages, its spread across your people as well. To me, that’s high-performance growth corporately or company-wide and grows on an individual basis.

This point is well taken over here at Ptex. I’m sitting in my office on the walls, whoever didn’t visit is free to visit at one point. I have my personal mission statement which is, “Every person should be given the opportunity to succeed in life.” That’s my driving mission is, if we have services or products or even educational content that I could put out which will move the needle forward for somebody or their business, I’m obligated to do it. Therefore, it pushes us forward to a high performance which is I want to give it our best because we could make a difference. Going back to your point is if you have that mindset ingrained in your culture that you could make a difference in whatever you’re doing and whatever service, product, whatever you’re delivering as value, it gives you that that level of clarity and then build a certain culture.

I couldn’t agree more. When have you ever seen a healthy culture that didn’t have healthy people inside it that are growing and developing and moving forward? I love your slogan, could you read that for me again?

“Every person should be given the opportunity to succeed in life.” I want to move into one of your bestselling books, the title is The Best Team Wins. I’ve read a couple of chapters and you describe the five disciplines that one needs to engage in order to lead a team successfully. I would love to dive in a little bit in those disciplines and for our readers to be able to take out some tangible stuff as leaders how they could start winning.

Was there one chapter in particular that caught your eye or you want me to go through the five?

Let’s go through the five.

We started the book off with an interesting story that I’d love to relate to your readers. The whole idea around us writing this book, and as my co-author Adrian Gostick is my partner and has been for years. Is that teams in the modern world or in the world we live in are much different than they were even 7 or 10 years ago with globalization, with diversification, with big employees, with the generational differences and so on. We met a fascinating guy named Chris Hadfield at a conference up in Canada. Chris Hadfield, if you’re Canadian you know exactly who he is. He’s a Canadian astronaut and was the Commander of the International Space Station. The reason his story resonates with us as far as high-performance teams is that his group, these six astronauts up on the space station, had three Russian cosmonauts, two American astronauts and himself being Canadian all working together.

They have differences in language, in culture, in food, in families. They also had generational differences that the youngest astronaut to the oldest cosmonaut the difference was 31 years. You can imagine, he had all the dynamics of modern-day teams. As I talked to him about the success they had, because NASA dubbed that particular mission one of the most productive five months ever up at the International Space Station. Being a curious author, I said, “How did you do that? What were the key elements?” He said, “There’s no question that we were prepared. We knew our roles, we’re NASA, and we’re smart.” No doubt about it. “We obeyed all the rules, we trained crazy.” He says, “We did a few things on the softer side.” He said, “We’ve got to know each other’s families. We ate together. We drank together. We played together. We laughed, we cried.” Those were all important. He said, “The key to me though was not only did we obey all the written rules and all the things that we’re going to keep us safe. We had one unwritten rule that was important and it was this, every astronaut had to perform one random act of kindness for every other astronaut every day.”

I found that fascinating. He said, “It was never anything big, I’ll clean up, I’ll do the calculations. Let me take the watch.” He said, “The impact was in the messaging.” He says, “What was the message in these small random acts of kindness every day? The message was you’re on my team, I’m cheering for you, I care about you, you matter to me and I love you.” He said, “Because of that, we never had a heated argument. Egos were put aside, what was important was supporting each other and getting the work done.” He said to me that was the key to success. To finish up is that, what we found in great leaders is the difference between good and extraordinary was never their hard skills. They had to have the hard skills that were the ticket entry. The difference was their soft skills and number one in those soft skills was how they express gratitude. Number one on the list is managing generations and I bet you’ve got some opinions on the five generations in the workforce which has never happened before.

About generations, are you referring to leaders needing to deal with a group of people that might be from different generations and keep them all together?

To me, it’s all about communication. The best leaders, the best teams we ever studied their communication was extraordinary, there was no gray area. You knew what people meant when they said it. The issue with multi-generations is they communicate in different ways. Older generations it’s face-to-face, younger generations it’s much more digital and everything in between. When I started in business it was simple, it was either face-to-face or on the phone, those were the only options. You were either in the same room or you were on the phone. Think about what it looks like now. You’ve got Slack, texting, emails, and Zoom. You’ve got 10 to 15 different ways depending on where you work and how you work that you can communicate with people. The trick around leaders is finding those generational differences and how am I going to communicate in a meaningful effective and clear way? The way I communicate with my kids is much different than how I communicate with my spouse.

[bctt tweet=”The trick around leadership is finding those generational differences and how to communicate in a meaningful, effective, and clear way. ” username=””]

What I hear and for our listeners is as a leader you now have a responsibility that may be many years ago you didn’t have as part of your responsibility which is, you’ve got to communicate but you also have to communicate speaking to those different people on your team effectively.

That leads us into one of the other elements, one of the five dimensions is, manage to the one. The old school is we treat everybody the same and that’s fair. The new school is we treat everyone fairly and differently. Blanket policies don’t work, particularly when you’ve got a remote employee that’s working out of a small office in Singapore and your headquarters is in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The way that you manage and what’s fair in Tulsa, it may not have any application in Singapore whatsoever. We get caught in these traps that if we treat people differently somehow, it’s not fair. That’s not true. Not only is managing generations and understanding the different motivators, but it’s also important to communicate on that one to one basis. When we talk about managing to the one, we talk about do you know where they want to be 2 to 3 years from now? It’s interesting and people make a lot about the Millennial generation simply because the largest portion of the workforce is their motivations are different. In fact, they are.

We’ve got a wonderful online tool called the Motivators Assessment and when we look at the top three motivators for Millennials, it was impact, learning and family. This idea of where do you want to be 2 to 3 years from now, learning is such a big motivator, generally speaking for Millennials you never want to pigeon those people. Generally speaking, if there isn’t room to learn and grow, they’re more likely to leave. Smart, mobile generation. If I don’t feel like I am growing and developing, I can take my talents somewhere else. This managing to the one, one of the keys is do I know where you want to be 2 to 3 years from now? Am I engaging you and challenging you? Are you growing and developing as the organization is growing and developing? It’s a much different dynamic and compact between supervisor, team leader, VP whatever your role might be and the individual employee. Does that ring true to you?

Yeah, 100% and I would add as far as growth that depending on which industry you are but let’s say in our industry, we have a creative agency and we help growing businesses flourish, which means helping companies get to the next level. I always tell my team that it starts with growing yourself. How could you sit in a room and think ideas and brainstorm on how you can help another company growing if you’re not thinking about how you are growing? Same as with leaders sitting in a boardroom and thinking about, “How can we overcome this next big challenge, a new product of innovation and so on and so forth if they’re not in the mindset of growth?” How could they even think that way? It goes hand-in-hand, meaning it’s for the benefit of the people that work for you but ultimately, it’s the benefit of the company.

I often say our best managers were our moms and dads. They taught us simple things like, remember to say thank you, say please and thank you. They also taught us that you can’t give what you don’t have, and that’s exactly what you said. How can we help our clients grow if personally we are not growing ourselves?

What are the other pieces of the disciplines that you mentioned in the book?

The third discipline is this idea of speed to productivity. We used to hire people and we could take our time in getting them up to speed. It would take a year to figure things out. The second year, you would break even. The third year, you were a profitable employee, because of the mobility of the workforce and the speed of business, that’s no longer the case. We don’t have a year to get people up to speed, we’ve got a month. This idea of better hiring practices, getting to know the individual, letting the team interview the potential candidate and I know it sounds a little trite, I find it to be true though, slow to hire quick to fire. We take our time. We make sure there’s a cultural fit. We put mentors in place. We’ll even do some pre-work.

I love the intern methodology where you’ve got an intern that’s been working with you for 3 or 4 months, it’s the test drive. Now, when you come to make the offer, not only do you know the individual, the individual knows your culture, knows how to get things done, and knows the team. You’ve had that time to grow and develop. This idea of speed to productivity is another key element. Fourth on the list is this idea of challenging everything. We live in an innovative world, it’s innovate or die. You need to create a culture. Amy Edmondson at the Harvard School of Business did some wonderful work on psychological safety. This idea that we can challenge the sacred cows, we can challenge the way we do business and it’s safe. We’re not ridiculed, we’re not put down — this idea of you challenge the idea, not the person. No one laughs or ridicules and you’re going to get your best ideas. How many times have you seen in your career an excited employee coming in with what they thought was a great idea just to be laughed at and dismissed? When are they going to bring you another good idea? Never, it’s not safe.

I listened to a podcast and I don’t remember the name, I’m not going to quote a name to it. He was a CMO in one of the large Fortune 100 companies. He went on to do many amazing things with his career. The interviewer asked him point-blank, “Is there anything that you regret not doing in your career?” He said, “Putting out more challenges in those board meetings.” Especially he worked with real Corporate America, he said, “At one point you get ingrained in the culture that, this is how we do stuff and this is how it’s done for the last several years. We’re going to continue to do it, add on it versus challenging it from the get-go.”

It’s true. When we’re on our deathbeds we’re going to have more regrets about the things we didn’t do as opposed to the things we did do. That comes with Innovation. The fifth step is don’t forget the customer. We talk about all these dynamics of great teams and certainly, you’ve got to have trust and those things. We can easily get caught up in the dynamics of the team and forget that our job is to stay in business, don’t forget the customer. We’re creating these dynamic and diverse and wonderful teams to deliver incredible products so that we can serve our customers and that’s great.

To recap, my observation on those five disciplines is that if it boils down and sometimes we as leaders or we as business people, people in general try to overcomplicate stuff. When you go back to the basics and you say, “These are the five things that you should be good at.” If you are good and this is the way you hire, this is the way you maintain, this is the way you train, this is the way you work with your customer. It’s simple and yet it gives you the success and the growth for your company as you need.

It’s easy to overthink things, keep it simple. We’ve got a new book coming out and it’s called Leading with Gratitude, the eight best practices of the best leaders we’ve ever met. I’ll tell you what’s fascinating is you can boil it down to what your parents told you. That’s be nice, be kind, lead with gratitude. We have studied the greatest leaders we’ve worked with. It wasn’t their hard skills, but it was their soft skills. The number one soft skill was how they express gratitude, they cared about the individual. You think about the leaders that you’ve worked for overtime, the ones that you would walk over hot coals for were the leaders that you knew cared about you and because they cared about you, you cared about them. At the end of the story of all our research, the message that we hope to get out to organizations and businesses is don’t leave all this good thinking and good practice at work, take it home. Take it to your personal life.

When was the last time that you sat down with someone you cared about and asked them about their lives and where they wanted to be in 2 to 3 years and how could you help? When was the last time you dropped a little thank you card in your kids’ backpack or wrote a love letter to your partner or spouse or thanked the coach or a teacher? Those principles of gratitude that engage your employees extraordinary well in the workplace work in your personal life, too. One last data point that I loved studying at the University of California, when people are happy and engaged at work, they’re 150% more likely to be happy and engaged in their personal lives. As leaders, whether it’s a team or small or large organization, we have an obligation to send our people home happy, that they believe what they did mattered. That they made a difference and when they made a difference, we noticed it and we celebrated. It’s good for the company. It’s good for the employee. It’s good for the community.

I want to pause over here because it’s an important point, people take and need to take note. I will share a story I had with somebody, I spoke to someone and this is the question he asked, “Is it possible to separate your work? The way you do work, you’re dealing business or how your day goes versus your family. He was trying to say that he’s happy in one versus the other and if it’s possible to be such a person I said, “There’s only one person and you cannot separate how you are on this side of the spectrum versus the other side.” With the data which is fascinating, people should understand what you shared which is automatically your personal life is more different and much better 150% because it goes both ways. You can’t separate yourself from work and life, it’s one thing. You could prioritize it, you could have the balance and that’s a whole different conversation. Physically you as a person, you can’t separate it.

[bctt tweet=”When we’re on our deathbeds, we’re going to have more regrets about the things we didn’t do as opposed to the things we did do. ” username=””]

You have one life. People that are different at home than they are at work are disingenuous. To think you can separate the two, at one point it was possible because you work 9 to 5 and as soon as you left work, no one could get ahold of you. We all have smartphones, everybody works 24/7 as the old country song says, “It’s 5:00 somewhere, let’s go have a drink.” You text somebody, you expect them to respond right away. The fact that work is life and life is work has blended together completely now, you’re absolutely right. That is why I love the millennial generation, they want purposeful work, they want work that’s going to have an impact and make a difference, and they want their work to matter because they want their lives to matter. Once you’ve figured that out and you understand that, you can recruit better, you can engage better, you can inspire more and you can get more done. I love your take on life Meny. You and I will have a coffee someday and get along swimmingly. We see the world the same way.

I want to dive deeper into some practical no-nonsense advice for our readers and how to go about it. Before I do, I want to ask you a follow-up question on the discipline you mentioned before. You have done research. At this point, years of research and years of real-life experience working with leaders, what is the number one reason a lot of those leaders fail? Which of those five disciplines do they mess up the most?

It’s managing to the one. Most leaders fail because egos get in the way, they want to be the smartest person in the room, they’re afraid to be wrong. It ties closely in creating a culture where you can challenge everything. My father was my great friend and my great mentor and he used to say, “Listen Ches, you never want to be the smartest guy in the room.” He says, “Luckily for you, you can walk in almost any room and you’re not going to have a problem.” Particularly, new leaders feel they need to justify the promotion and they consider themselves problem solvers, “I’m going to solve the problem. I’m going to fix this.” They’re always on the lookout for problems. The issue with that is if every time you walk into a room and you’re looking at everything that’s going wrong, nobody wants you to walk into the room, because we’re all stupid.

This is a practical thing that your readers can do, we found an amazing leader in Dallas, Texas, Carlos Aguilera. He grew up in a business where it was much that way, leaders were quick to point out what you did wrong and slow to point out what he did right. He explained that he said, “They were quick to criticize and slow to recognize.” He said, “When I became a leader, I set a goal not to be that leader.” Here’s what he does practical and simple, he puts ten coins in his left pocket every day, ten pennies and he sets a goal to have ten positive interactions with his people every day. The way he keeps track is he moves a penny from his left pocket to his right pocket. I challenge your readers to do that, ten is a lot and you can’t be holed up in your office. You can’t necessarily be with everybody all day, you can text, you can email, you can call on the phone, and you can drop a note in the mail. There are lots of things you can do that will allow you to move one penny from your left pocket to your right pocket. The question I have for you is after having done this for a few years, he works for Avis Budget Rental Car in Dallas, when he goes to the airport kiosks or the hotel kiosk, what do you think the immediate reaction of his team is, positive or negative?

Positive.

Exactly, he’s not there to beat them out. How do you think their reaction is when he’s got to coach them up when they’ve made some mistakes? Do you think they’re open to his coaching?

Of course.

Absolutely, because he’s got this bank of goodwill. A simple, practical thing I challenge your readers to do, put ten coins in your left pocket and see what happens. Harvard Business School did a study, a positive culture and all the wonderful things that come with a positive culture in productivity and engagement and turnover and so on, the ratio of positive to negative has to be at least 5 to 1. Five compliments for every criticism, that’s the power of negativity, you need at least five. What’s your ratio? How do you impact that ratio? Carlos didn’t know about that study. I guarantee you he didn’t. What he did know is that when he was grateful and when he thanked his people for all the little things that go right every day to keep the doors open, things got better. It was that simple to him, he didn’t overthink it.

Hopefully, we’ll get some of our readers to report back how it’s going. I’m going to ask you a follow-up question to this, a lot of times I speak to leaders and probably you speak to leaders as well on this topic and some of them will say, “If I’m the Mr. Nice guy and if I’m the person that’s always giving, I feel that I’m going to start to be taken advantage of.” How do you draw the line of tough leadership because you’re running a company and still be the person with kindness?

Leaders say that often they’ll take advantage. I don’t believe that, that’s a weakness, that’s a myth that a lot of leaders hold on to that somehow nice guys finish last. Huber Joly, I spend some time with him in New York He’s the CEO of the turned around Best Buy. He gave up his CEO position to go onto the board. Here’s the way he explains being nice and it’s not soft, he said, “I may be naive, people come to work wanting to do a good job and sometimes they make mistakes.” He says, “My leadership style is I assume positive intent. I assume people want to do a good job.”

Maybe there’s 1 out of 1,000 that woke up that morning and said, “My goal is to screw up and make everybody miserable.” He says, “Those people are rare.” Think about that. Is he being soft? Is he being taken advantage of? He turned around Best Buy, the whole organization with that philosophy. People that equate kindness with weakness don’t understand the power of kindness, being kind is knowing your people, knowing that you care, that’s not weak. That’s a strong leader, that can be vulnerable to what their employees need, what the company needs and how to marry those up. If there’s a person that’s taking advantage of your kindness, that’s a management issue and you should address that. That’s not a weakness.

I personally learned a lot. People know that I say this pretty often, that one of the main advantages of me doing the podcast is that I get to learn this amazing content before everybody else. Thank you so much for that.

You’re going to have ten pennies in your pocket before anybody. I guarantee that.

I want to get in another question and speak a little bit about, because this is a topic that’s important to you. You speak about it in different books and talks. You speak about which is the concept of recognition, how to lead with recognition and how that part of your great leadership skills on a daily basis. Talk to me a little bit about how you came to realize that this is such a key factor for a leader and also some practical advice on how leaders could achieve that.

[bctt tweet=”People that are different at home than they are at work are disingenuous. ” username=””]

To me, we never studied a great culture, a great team, a great leader where recognition or the next level of recognition is gratitude wasn’t present and that they embraced it and expressed it deeply. Recognition is one of the most powerful tools that any leader has in their toolbox because it’s a powerful way to communicate what you value most. We celebrate what we value. Back to the International Space Station, random acts of kindness go such a long way to emotionally engaging people into your relationship, into your products and services and into your customers. That emotional connection to work is key and how do you get people emotionally connected? You thank them. It’s ten pennies. I’ll tell you one other practice, I’m doing a lot more executive coaching, the one-on-one, we preach to the masses, we minister to the one. I encourage them and this is old school, a handwritten note, it’s a simple expression of gratitude. It’s a simple expression of recognition that people don’t do anymore. It’s gone out of vogue.

I guarantee you though, if you and your readers think about the last time somebody gave you a little handwritten note, that it meant a lot to you. It’s a different way to communicate, it’s an uninterrupted conversation. It’s the work of the hand, put a stamp on it and mail it to their home. I guarantee you that if you start to write, and here are my challenge three thank-you notes a week for three weeks. You will be shocked at the impact that it has on your relationships that people know that you’re seeing what they’re doing, that you value what they’re doing and you took the time to say thank you. To me, that’s recognition on a personal level. It costs little time and next to nothing as far as expense and yet the emotional feedback, the emotional engagement you get is 100 times the effort you put into it.

It’s interesting on this point of recognition. It comes from the lack of knowledge or not seeing it in action. We do a leadership forum where we teach leaders on different pieces of leadership. We speak about different things we do in our company at Ptex and one of the things we do is a company huddle. One of the parts of that company huddle is we do a high five, which is recognizing somebody for doing something out of the ordinary. People will always ask me, “Then you give them a gift card?” I say, “No, I recognize them in public in front of everybody for what they did.” People confuse gifts with recognition. It could be making sure everybody knows this person did something out of the ordinary, and it’s as simple as that.

I do think there is a place for gift cards and trophies and so on, it plays an important role because those are our tokens, those are symbols, those are remembrances of achievement. At a deeper level though, it’s exactly what you talked about. You don’t have to monetize every relationship in the business place. In fact, those that do, end up with much of a mercenary workforce, “I’ll do it because there’s a gift card there.” It becomes a mercenary coach at which some businesses want. Sales organizations will often be transactional and that’s a lower level of recognition. What you’re talking about is gratitude and people wanting to feel valued and that high five shout out, that’s gratitude.

Let’s close with the four rapid-fire questions. Number one, a book that changed your life.

A book that is changing my right life is by Robert Glazier called Elevate. He talks about being spiritually engaged, intellectually engaged, physically engaged and emotionally engaged. I couldn’t recommend it more.

Number two, a piece of advice you’ve got that you’ll never forget.

From my dad, “Be kind to everybody, you never know what they came from. You treat everybody with respect, everybody matters.”

Number three, anything you wish you could go back and do differently? 

No.

Number four, what’s still on your bucket list to achieve?

I want to take my wife to Australia and New Zealand. I’ve heard many wonderful things about that culture and the beauty that lies there. We love to travel. We love cultures, that’s on my bucket list and to meet Roger Federer.

Chester, thank you so much for joining us. I know your time is valuable and that is why in the name of our readers, we will forever be grateful for sharing some of your time with us.

Thank you, Meny. You call me anytime. This was great fun.

Thank you.