Permission to Suck: Embracing Failure | Gone Phishing

Podcast Episode Summary

Joining Connor Swalm in this episode is Kyle Christensen, a business strategy enthusiast, to discuss the importance of giving ourselves the freedom to fail. They reflect on personal experiences of falling short, and Kyle shares insights on how to establish clear expectations as an employer or employee.

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Full Episode 011 Transcript

Connor Swalm:

Welcome to Gone Phishing, a show diving into the cybersecurity threats that surround our highly connected lives. Every human is different. Every person has unique vulnerabilities that expose them to potentially successful social engineering. On this show, we'll discuss human vulnerability and how it relates to unique individuals. I'm Connor Swalm, CEO of Phin Security, and welcome to Gone Phishing. Today I am joined by a friend of mine, Kyle Christensen.

Kyle Christensen:

What's up, my buddy? How are you, man?

Connor Swalm:

I am doing amazing. Never a bad day in my life. And if that changes, it must have been a really bad day.

Kyle Christensen:

Can I say how cool that thing is? I get warning like 100 times, man.

Connor Swalm:

You can't. A lot of people have worn it. By the end of whichever conference we bought these two, we had like half of the conference wearing it.

Kyle Christensen:

Yeah, my girlfriend stole mine.

Connor Swalm:

I can get you one. Just send me your home address. I'm not phishing you out of it, I swear. But Chief Accountability Officer, do people really call you that?

Kyle Christensen:

I actually fell into it a little bit. One of my clients started calling me that because I help all my clients build strategies. In those strategies, you build out their org charts, accountable charts, and the one differentiator between myself and a lot of other business coaches out there is I stick around and I beat the drum. I keep the discipline going. So they put me on their org chart as the chief reminder officer. This is like four or five years ago. Then I told a couple of clients that same thing. So they copied it. One of them put me as VP of Get Stuff Done, and another put me on the org chart as Chief Accountability Officer and it kind of stuck with it. Everyone has a business plan. Everyone has some idea of what they want to do with their business. But the only way to turn that into results is with discipline. And I think that's where a lot of people start to get lost in the direction of their organization, because discipline is tough, especially for us entrepreneurs.

Connor Swalm:

Discipline is very tough. That's why I weigh a little more than I'd like to, you know. That reminds me of the Mike Tyson quote: everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

Kyle Christensen:

Or in the A-Team, it was "make the plan, work the plan, time to forget the plan."

Connor Swalm:

All plans start with the best intentions, but if you're not committed to those lofty goals or ambitions, you're going to lose focus. I have a feeling that wraps into what we wanted to talk about today. For those listening, this is a slightly different topic than normal. Kyle is a business coach and helps people achieve results. Today, it's a concept I had not heard until roughly 15 minutes ago. It's called derring-do. So what does that mean?

Kyle Christensen:

I saw it from Jim Collins. He did an interview series where he was interviewing random people, kind of like what you are doing right now, Connor. In what he found when interviewing Aerosmith, the band, was he was asking them about their writing process and how did they come up with weird songs like "Love in an Elevator"? They had this process that they called their "suck meeting." In a suck meeting, they would just write down stupid ideas, one word, two words, whatever, and throw it on the table. They wanted to create a process in their writing where they didn't have to be inhibited or limited in any of the things that they wanted to have come out of their mouth. Because to write, a lot of times we're afraid to make decisions because of some level of validation or expectation that we put on ourselves or that we get put on by our community. If we think of the old adage that Winston Churchill used to say, "perfection is the enemy of progress." So, in really thinking about that with Aerosmith, whether this was cognizant or not, they needed some level to go, put the idea on the table and let's just see if we can come up with some words. We call that the Dare to Suck meeting. Jim Collins actually turned that into an entrepreneurial practice, which was: there are no bad ideas. There's actually just more lack of try.

Connor Swalm:

I've been in some meetings where I think I could challenge that. I remember the days of Purple Heinz Mustard, so there are absolutely bad ideas. Ideas that should maybe make their way into the dare to suck meeting, but they should never make their way out for sure.

Kyle Christensen:

Just brainstorm and throw it at the wall. Let's literally throw the ketchup at the wall and see what sticks.

Connor Swalm:

This reminds me of a quote from Adventure Time: "Dude, sucking at something is the first step towards being sort of good at something." The whole sentiment is, when you first start anything, you're not any good at it. That should never stop you from starting.

What is something you've messed up in the past that you don't want to mess up again?

Kyle Christensen:

There's one thing that always has really beat me up over the years, and it goes even back to my days of doing turnarounds for retail. For me, what always sucked was when I know an employee is failing due to lack of mentorship or expectation setting, and not because of my inability to mentor them, but because I just didn't have my own intent or I didn't really know at the end of the day what they were truly doing. A great example is when I started to take over the first MSP I was helping run. A lot of the people that I came into the environment with didn't really have job descriptions, job roles, or job expectations. They were just, hey, show up, work some tickets. If it gets assigned to you, go ahead and knock them out. I've always been an accountability guy, but it's really different when there's a lack of target, a lack of direction. We can say KPIs all we want, but sometimes you could say, hey, I'm going to measure you on how much purple Heinz ketchup you consume in a week. But does it drive the company forward? Having this bottom-up analysis of if this employee is doing something that I expect them to do can get really lost in translation on, is it even worth our time and effort? I don't know about you, but I've had jobs, especially in the beginning, where I had no idea why I was doing what I was doing. I'm sitting there going, this is a waste of time.

Connor Swalm:

Yeah. Oh, I've had a lot of those.

Kyle Christensen:

And the employees feel that way too. Where it really gets gross is when you have a situation where you almost have to fire the employee or let them go because they're so lost now down the road that they can't go back to redemption.

Whenever I have my clients bring me on board, I have to set the expectation that part of the restructure that I'm going to bring them, there's going to be 15 to 20% attrition.

Connor Swalm:

Is that normal or is that high? I don't know.

Kyle Christensen:

I don't know if it's normal or high, but it's happened every single time I've done it, and I've done it a lot now. Usually the excuse we give ourselves is, oh, well, it's easier to hire somebody new than to correct the bad habit, which it is. That is the unfortunate nature of this problem. But it always feels horrible because, you know, when you're doing it, that it's kind of my fault that they're getting fired or that they're being let go or I'm managing them out.

Connor Swalm:

Something that I just started saying is if I have one-on-ones with a lot of my team members, I say, basically, if you don't help me set expectations, I've already set them for you. So if you want your input and your abilities and where you think this role should be going at all factored into what I expect, I need you to impress that upon me or it's already going to be impressed upon you. So far, I haven't been doing that very long, but so far that's come with wonderful outcomes because the worst feeling is when that employee feels lost and then you feel responsible for that. In reality, if you're a leader, a lot of your employees failing should fall, rightfully so, back upon yourself and all of that could have been prevented with proper training.

Kyle Christensen:

The opposite can also happen too, where you start to manage in fear of holding them accountable, where you do some of the work for them. You become their safety net. You become your own worst enemy in that instance. So to answer the question real high level, I don't want to ever manage again without clear direction. I want to manage people only if I know what the top-level objective is so I can work everything backwards so I don't have to sit there and go, okay, what's my hypothetical judgment of if this employee is good or not.

Connor Swalm:

A clear direction and clear expectations?

Kyle Christensen:

Yeah, that's pretty reasonable, right?

Connor Swalm:

If anyone's ever applying to a job and you're listening to this podcast right now, you should absolutely ask your potential employer what's expected in this role. What are the key performance indicators that my productivity will be judged based on? If they don't have a solid answer for that, it's probably a red flag. If they haven't put enough effort into it, you're just going to run into some rocky roads at some point.

Kyle Christensen:

There's a good chance they're going to manage you with a moving target because you have to move them and have to change it. They're going to hire some business coach at one point, who's going to tell them, hey, your KPIs suck, let's go change everyone's job description.

Connor Swalm:

Which nobody benefits when that happens.

Kyle Christensen:

Then it feels awkward. Your own self-esteem and your own drive and passion start to wane. What have you messed up in?

Connor Swalm:

If I sat here and told you how many things I've messed up, we'd never get off the chair. I'll go through it real quick. First house I ever flipped, I think I was 19, maybe 20 at the time. I created a contract, an agreement, a draw schedule with my set of contractors. I was basically acting as the general contractor. Here is where this applies to everyone's life. I made an agreement. Me and the other party completely agreed on the agreement, not only the compensation but the timeline, the work that was listed in this agreement. We were off to the races. We get about four months into this project together and the contractor comes to me and says, hey, I need a bit of the money stipulated in this agreement early, even though I haven't done some of the work. That's called a draw schedule. As you complete work, you get some money. Complete more work, you get some more money. That's how you make sure your contractor is not going to run off with the entire bit of cash and that everything's moving according to plan.

Me being me, also 19, I've never done this before. I was like, oh, yeah, no problem. Here you go. I think it was like a $3,500 check. I go home, talking to my dad, and I tell my dad basically what had just happened. He just starts laughing. I was like, what are you laughing at? He's like, oh, you're never seeing that money again. This is 19-year-old me. I go, you don't know what you're talking about. Totally. And it's like, okay, sure. As if that story was getting read to a child at bedtime, the next day, my contractor stopped answering my texts, my emails, my phone calls, and I never heard from him again. He literally took the money and ran. I had to go back to that property on Christmas Eve to do the work that I had just paid this guy to do, which was to install trim, hang doors, and put the door handles and door jams into place and cut it out. I had to go to a house on Christmas Eve and do that. Never did that again, not once. I got into some tricky scenarios after the fact with some other contractors who were clearly robbing Peter to pay Paul. I was like, nope, I learned the first time I did this. I was lucky enough to screw it up so badly I lost $3,500 that I'm not doing this. Either I'm finding a new contractor or you're going to do this as agreed to initially. Every single time they went away and did what they were asked to do. So set expectations. Everyone, let's just do that and you'll be in a really good spot.

Kyle Christensen:

It's funny, we're kind of on the similar path, right? We both had something where we weren't clear in what we were expecting and we drew it. We felt like at the end of the day, it hurt. Like you fire the wrong employee, you hold the wrong thing accountable, your own results don't trickle up, you're not putting money in your pocket.

Connor Swalm:

Yep, absolutely. Any last second words of advice?

Kyle Christensen:

Honestly, at the end of the day, when it comes to this, perfection is the enemy of progress. That Churchill quote, more than anything, I think is the biggest thing that especially as IT providers, technology professionals, we can keep in mind because we always try to go after the perfect solution because it always has to be perfectly right. But we lose progress and that progress ends up being on our shoulders as the owners. Don't fall into that sinkhole.

Connor Swalm:

Perfection is the enemy of progress. You heard it here. Maybe first, probably not. Winston Churchill said it. Anyways, everybody, thank you for listening. Once again, I am Connor, CEO at Phin, joined by Kyle Christensen, and you've been listening to Gone Phishing.

Thanks so much for tuning in to Gone Phishing. If you want to find out more about high quality security awareness training campaigns, how to launch them in ways that actually engage employees to change their habits, then check us out at Phin Security at phinsec.io. Thanks for phishing with me today and we'll see you next time.