The Communicative Leader
On The Communicative Leader, we're making your work life what you want it to be. Do you need years of training or special equipment? Not at all my friends. Simple, yet thoughtful changes in your communication can make great strides in displaying your leadership ability. And why the heck should you care about leadership communication? Well, communication is the yardstick others use to determine whether or not they see you as a leader. Ahhh don't be scared, I got you. We will walk through common organizational obstacles and chat about small, but meaningful communication-rooted changes you can integrate immediately. No more waiting for the workplace to become what you hope it will. Nope. You, my friends, will be empowered and equipped to make those changes. Let's have some fun! Can't get enough?
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The Communicative Leader
Reducing Friction with Leadership Communication: Insights from Ryan Chute
This episode features Ryan Chute, who shares transformative insights on effective leadership communication, the importance of removing friction in the workplace, and the significance of differentiation in a crowded marketplace. As leaders, embracing a mindset shift from survival to thriving is essential to foster a culture of collaboration and enhance the employee experience.
• Friction in communication as a barrier to growth
• Identifying and addressing blind spots in leadership
• The role of storytelling in differentiation
• Shifting from survival mode to a thriving mindset
• Core values and motivations for effective leadership
• Building trust and gratitude among teams
• Leadership as a collaborative rather than authoritarian endeavor
Hey leader! Thanks for listening. For more leadership communication tips, check out https://www.thecommunicativeleader.com/
Welcome back to the Communicative Leader. Today, we have a fantastic guest with us. Please welcome Ryan Chute from Wizard of Ads. Ryan is a powerhouse of insights. He combines his rich background in retail with his expertise as a strategic marketer. Get ready to dive deep, as he shares some invaluable strategies on leveraging communication to minimize friction and maximize impact. It's what we're all looking for, right, my friends. So whether you're an entrepreneur looking to sharpen your skills or just curious about more effective leadership communication, ryan's experience can leave you inspired and equipped with some thought-provoking takeaways. So let's have some fun.
Dr. Leah OH:Hello and welcome to the Communicative Leader Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges by me, . My friends call me Dr OH. I'm a professor of communication and a leadership communication expert. On the Communicative Leader, we're working to make your work life what you want it to be. Ryan, thank you for joining us on the communicative leader, and I was hoping you could start by sharing a bit about your journey. So you had early experiences in retail and now you're a strategic marketer with wizard of ads, so kind of what also led to this focus on helping small businesses well, you know, I'm super grateful to to be able to lead an eight-figure creative consultancy agency right now within the Wizard of Ads, but it wasn't always that way.
Ryan Chute:I started off in a retail gulag. It was the bad bosses and the questionable practices, the toxic work environments and the weaponized fear, shame and guilt that I I mirrored. You know it was is what you know and and what you what you learn from, and I thought I was doing the right thing, um, because I didn't know what I didn't know you know, and I became a really, really strong manager, um, and an equally bad boss strong manager and an equally bad boss. After getting summarily fired for generally bad behavior. I had an existential crisis.
Ryan Chute:It was this situation of if this is bad, over-performing but making people angry and creating all this friction.
Ryan Chute:What was good and I didn't want to be average, I didn't want to be good, I wanted to be great and it really hit me hard.
Ryan Chute:So I started kind of exploring what it was that was causing my problems and I come to find out that this is really all about friction, and friction and communication and the things that I'm doing, intentionally and unintentionally, from the things that I thought were right to cause myself to be a weak leader as strong as a manager as I was. So today I get to create these divergent sales and marketing strategies for clients, but I do it by looking at two big things One is removing that unwanted friction and the other is looking for that divergent communication, that thing that's going to stand out amongst the crowd so that we can actually do something that gets noticed, not just blends in with the fabric of the business or the community or the marketplace that you're in. And it was that early friction that has me so hyper-focused in on your brand is a culture you know and culture is your brand. And when we really elevate the employee, experience is your brand and when we really elevate the employee experience, including the experience that we give ourselves.
Ryan Chute:We have this opportunity to deliver a better buying experience and ultimately, the buying experience and the employee experience are the marketing and the advertising that we do to accelerate our profitable growth as a big brand, to accelerate our profitable growth as a big brand yeah, excellent.
Dr. Leah OH:Thank you for sharing that, and I really love, in your experience and what you're sharing. You show the impact of social modeling right Of when we're showing this, even if it's not intentional, you know, it's that idea of you never want to be their leader who says do as I say, not as I do, Because those actions speak so loudly, and so I really appreciate you sharing that and then changing it and turning it around for all of those who you work with and who work for you.
Ryan Chute:Yeah, yeah, I didn't realize it was such a big deal until I knew better.
Dr. Leah OH:Mm-hmm, yep, yep. And then you can look back and cringe and say that's okay, I've done the work, I'm doing it differently now.
Ryan Chute:Well, that's what makes us who we are today.
Dr. Leah OH:Exactly.
Ryan Chute:And affords us the opportunity to stand above the crowd.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, yes, so you were mentioning friction, and that was my next question, because I know you talk about this idea a lot, so I was hoping you could define it for us. So what is friction in this context?
Ryan Chute:And then the second part is how is this, or how can it be, a barrier to profitable growth for small businesses? Well, the friction really lies in the laws of nature. You know, when you, when you think about friction, you think about that. The rough bits on a flywheel, the things that are, are slowing things down because there there's bumps along the way, there's roadblocks, there's barriers, there's pitfalls, and that that all is the friction that we deal with, and sometimes it's self-inflicted, sometimes it's intentional, sometimes it's unintentional, Sometimes it's back to those old habits that we learned from our daddy, and a lot of the time it's not done with ill intent, but it is done because we think that's what produces a result.
Ryan Chute:One of the biggest parts of friction is compliance. Now, I'm not talking about the compliance that keeps people safe. I'm talking about the compliance that we demand from people when we don't have them doing the way we want them to do it. What we're doing is we're being really lazy about what it is that caused that friction in the first place. What did we not communicate? What did we not say to help people do the things that they need to do to be successful in the job that we're asking them to do? So, when we think about it that friction causes resistance, and resistance is what's slowing things down and that slows down profitability, productivity, effectiveness, efficiency, that that compliance that we're demanding only produces one result, and that's defiance. And defiance effectively leads to the quiet quitting and the other kinds of things that we see every day that Gallup polls has been reporting on for over 40 years, saying, hey, guess what Productivity hasn't changed? Well, it's because we're following rules of a factory from 200 years ago.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, yeah. It is really incredible that we've largely not taken many steps to change that.
Ryan Chute:Yeah, yeah. Well, it's because compliance feels so darn good you know, it gives, it gives the person, the leader, the authority, not the leader, but the authority, the um. The dopamine hit you go. Oh yes, yes, see, I got what I wanted there, right. And what they don't realize is the silent killer of the customer, the employee or the customer who is, who is disengaged.
Dr. Leah OH:Exactly, and I think this will probably tie into my next question, because you talk about blind spots and you say that sometimes these are kind of what leads to that friction. So what are? I imagine there's, you know, a couple that you continue to see. So what are some of these common blind spots? Continue to see, so what are some of these common blind spots? And once you're kind of aware of them, what is it that we can do to sidestep them?
Ryan Chute:or you know, better insulate ourselves from these bad practices? Well, you know, that's a good question. Blind spots, bottlenecks and breakpoints those are the three big B's that are always getting back at us, and it's you know. There's a couple of ways that you can figure those out. One you can hire somebody to look at it from an outside perspective in, and that has a fair amount of worth, because we can't often see the writing on the bottle when we're inside the bottle, right? So we have this notion that we really want to help people and that we're of good intention. Well, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and that's the blind spots I'm talking about.
Ryan Chute:Compensation is a perfect example of a blind spot. When you're putting a person into a survival position through a commission-only structure, for example, and then not providing them with the appropriate lead volumes or measuring them with the appropriate sample size, of not performing. When you're measuring me off of completely bad data and not giving me what you're required to give me, which is the lead flow that I need to be successful. So when we start to look at the cumulative effect, a lot of businesses say, well, I can't afford to pay my guys this much. Well, change your business model and stop treating your employees like a bank. Change your business model and stop treating your employees like a bank.
Ryan Chute:If you want an environment of survival-minded employees, then you have to accept what you're paying for in that model, which is deviant behavior and doing things for their benefit because their job is to survive.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, yeah, that's a good example. Are there other blind spots that you see outside of compensation or others that kind of pop up that you realize having this conversation again?
Ryan Chute:Yeah, well, that often is the case is because we as adults very rarely understand how people learn, so we don't teach people properly or at all, and then expect them to somehow know that stuff from some other situation that we chose not to hire them from in the first place we chose not to hire them from in the first place.
Ryan Chute:It's. It's the classic unicorn hunt, you know, going around and trying to find the unicorns that are going to, they're going to run your business and solve your problems, when the only unicorn you can trust is yourself and the others are manufactured unicorns. You know, you, you have to create those unicorns based on what you stand for and what you stand against, what your true commander's intent is, because not everyone's, you know, singing off the same song sheet. So all of that matters from my perspective as a marketer, because all of this has to do with are you going to be able to have a business that accelerates in growth? Because I promise you, the marketing we do is going to accelerate your lead flow, and the reason it is is because we're going to tell a true story in an entertaining way, about what you do. That's different.
Dr. Leah OH:Yes, yep.
Ryan Chute:And you have to do something different to talk about something being different.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, yeah, excellent. And when you're talking about that really kind of antiquated but still pervasive pay structure, you attract a certain type of person and, like you said, it is typically someone who really likes to compete and is good at it, but they don't tend to like to stay around because they're competing for what's best for them, like you said, preservation. So even if we think, ah, this person gets it, they're not likely to stay, they're not likely to be part of that more collaborative, long-term nature.
Ryan Chute:Well, you've just hit the nail on the head. It really comes down to the two fundamental dualities of life of survival mode and thriving mode. When you're in surviving mode, you're competing. You're competing for resources, you're competing for rank, you're competing for keeping up with the Joneses. And even when you start to thrive, you're still in that survival mindset, even though you may be thriving. So it's not about wealth or profit, it's or income. It's about how you think about life.
Ryan Chute:And look, I'll be the first to say that I have lived my entire life as a survivalist. And I have because that was the world I grew up in 100% commission, sales, performance-based. Everything has to kind of lean on you. This is why I'm terrified of providing for my family every single day and doing a good job and keeping up with those proverbial Joneses. Thriving mode is a collaborative mindset. It is one of those things where, unless we have the strong desire to break ourselves away from, for all intents and purposes, our ego, we're not actually going to see thriving in our world, because the ego is constantly whispering in your ear hey, he's trying to steal your sale, or your wife, or his TV's bigger than yours, yep.
Ryan Chute:Right.
Dr. Leah OH:Yep, exactly, exactly. So one word you've mentioned a few times is differentiation, and I would love to dive into that and thinking. You know, from your perspective and what you've been doing one, how important is it for small businesses to really differentiate themselves, differentiate themselves, and then maybe after that you can talk to us about. You've mentioned storytelling, we've talked about communication it's my happy place but how do we then kind of use our communication, our storytelling, to help?
Ryan Chute:to show others how we're different, how we're unique, right? Well, listen, everything we've been talking about is about communication and is about telling a compelling story, because if we're not different, if we're not doing something distinctive, then we're just saying the same story that everyone else is already saying. No one's going to pay attention to the same thing. There's this bouncer in our brain. This bouncer's name is Broca, and Broca is the part of the brain on the left side of the hemisphere saying hey, if you're not new, interesting and different, you're not allowed into club imagination where all the cool kids are hanging out.
Ryan Chute:Now club. Imagination has no facility for words and neither does our decision-making facility. All of that orients in the emotional side of the brain, the right side of the brain, and then is backfilled and justified with logic on the left side of the brain. So why am I saying all of this? This all matters because when we start to tell the stories, we start to set up our business owners ahead of time. I'm giving the preamble for the business owner to go. Well, what is actually different about me? And it has to be more distinct than the differences, that everyone is right. All the goth kids wanted to be different. Yeah, like all the other goth kids right.
Ryan Chute:So bless their souls. It's this trying to find your identity thing and you try this costume on and that costume on and see what fits. Well, the real difference is what makes me stand 600 feet above the competition? Well, there's a few things. There's generosity and gratitude. There is honesty, integrity, trustfulness. There is that willingness to help people. You know, the people who stand out above the crowd are very often the helpers, the people who who faced danger and put themselves in a vulnerable position with courage. Right. We honor and and admire courage every single day but, you can't have courage without vulnerability.
Ryan Chute:Right, they're two sides of the same coin. And why does this matter? Because if you're going to stand out in your marketing, in your advertising, with your employees, as a business, as a leader, all of it makes a difference when you decide what to stand for and what you decide to stand against. And that's the real first step. Here is the biggest shift from going from manager to leader is recognizing what you believe in and standing for it. Now there's a big difference here. This is a crucial moment that we're talking about here. The moment we're talking about here is the difference between a belief and a value.
Ryan Chute:Now, nobel Prize winning physicist, niels Bohr. He once said that the opposite of a profound truth is very often another profound truth. What most people don't realize is that for every proverb that exists on the planet today, there's an equal and opposite proverb. So we live a world of duality surviving and thriving Most people. Maslow himself says that 65% of people live in this survival type of thinking and that only 35 ever see some level of of thriving, even if they're currently in an abundant situation, because they're struggling to hang on to it. Well, that matters for your customers, that matters for your employees and, frankly, it matters for yourself, right?
Ryan Chute:Because we very often ignore ourselves in this communication cycle and when we're talking about values and beliefs, a belief, then we can agree, is an equally interchangeable thing. I believe that justice and mercy are equally valid virtues. But if I'm the accused murderer, I want mercy and if I'm the victim's family, I want justice. But what happens when the victim's family murders the murderer? Right, those are beliefs and they're valid beliefs.
Ryan Chute:We're not dismissing beliefs, but they are worthless because they're interchangeable. They're interchangeable because they come with no consequence, willing to sacrifice the things you're willing to struggle for, the things you're willing to give up and the consequences that you're willing to put on yourself when you don't hold true to your consequence, to your value right, and when you don't hold true to that value, what does that mean? It means that if I don't stand for it in other people, I don't stand for it myself Now in your business context. Operationally, you can build a business that represents all of that right. You can say here's the things I believe in, here's the things I don't believe in, here's what I believe the customer wants and here's the thing that I'm willing to punish myself with if I don't deliver for that customer and operationally you can deliver that consistently without having to show everyone the magic trick. Right, magicians don't tell you how they did the magic.
Ryan Chute:Right, this is no different than business. We're not telling them how we did the magic trick, we just do the magic trick.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, thank you. Such an eloquent response, ryan. Thank you. That was really helpful in understanding that and giving me a new way to think about differentiation.
Ryan Chute:Yeah, yeah, it's super important because otherwise you're just putting table stakes on the table. You're saying that you have good hours and good people who care about your needs and all of the normal stuff, that is, you don't need to say the minimum standard anymore, right? Yeah, you don't say, to say the minimum standard anymore, right, yeah, you need to say something more than that.
Dr. Leah OH:Exactly Like you said, that's a story that's been told over and over and it's time to think about a new story that will be memorable.
Ryan Chute:Yeah, yeah and lying in that, a memorable story isn't a factual story that educates a person about the thing you do isn't a factual story that educates a person about the thing you do? We have a client where there's two people sitting in a truck at night. It's a home service company that stays open late. Well, the way we tell that story is the one person says something, the second person says something, and then it's just free reign from there. We're going to go crazy for 30 seconds and say something goofy and then circle back to a natural resolution. It always opens the same way, it always has the second response same way and then goes off the rails and then, always finishes.
Ryan Chute:So this is consistency in communication, but it's also repeating that same thing over and over again to embed into the customer's brain which, by the way, you can do in training to embed what your values are and what you want the employees to remember. Tv ad at 1143 at night, immediately clicking to 1144 as the ad starts so that the eye is drawn to the time block that's in the bottom in a dark van inside on the parking lot. And that's storytelling, the key to powerful, powerful communication and storytelling the mechanics of it, which are excruciatingly hard to get right. You have to be the story, not tell the story right.
Ryan Chute:We don't need to tell a story about the guy who did the thing. We need to be the guy who did the thing in the moment. So people immediately the theater of their mind pulls into it and goes, oh yeah.
Dr. Leah OH:Yep, I can see that and I appreciate too. You talked about the fact that we can train people this way, because I think so often as an organizational scholar, onboarding is completely fumbled. It's a miss, it's overlooked, it's assumed that, like you said, people are going to come in and they're going to know these things, and then we shame them for not knowing them. So I appreciate you kind of acknowledging that as well, that the same way that we work with clients and other stakeholders, we can treat our people with that same care and concern.
Ryan Chute:Absolutely. And look, I came into the wizard of ads as an operational consultant. I understood sales, I understood how to make a business really efficient, to drive forward and get out of the way of marketing, and I adored the marketing component because everything I'd done before was hyper transactional and and only had so much shelf life. Well, when you start to do this across all of your channels, the exact same things. What I learned in advertising that customers need to hear the thing three times a week, every single week, for for four weeks, before it gets tired and you have to do something else. That's the same thing that your employees need. Guess what your employees are on a four week cycle that needs to hear your thing three times a week for it to go back. And, by the way, if your message is boring just as much as your advertising is boring, guess what you're going to get Zero salience, low retention rates, low recall rates because you didn't do anything or say anything that stood above the crowd.
Dr. Leah OH:Exactly yes, and so I think this is a nice connection to this idea of mindset. So I think it takes an organization that has embraced a different mindset to treat employees like a valuable stakeholder, and certainly we can do this with external stakeholders. But I know that you spent a lot of time thinking about the importance of the right mindset, so I was hoping you could talk to us about mindset shifts and what you encourage others who are looking to grow their businesses. What do you mean by that and how do we get there?
Ryan Chute:Yeah, oh my gosh, there's just so much to unpack there. One is understanding the motivations of human beings. I've distilled it down to the 10 big motivators. The second is what I like to call the leadership trifecta, and that was pulled from three different sources of information and then studied across multiple disciplines, because oftentimes they live in silos.
Dr. Leah OH:Right, right, the oh we love silos in academia so much, so much so unfortunate happy place it's it.
Ryan Chute:It is. It is because we, we fail to see the bigger picture. When we, when we focus in on on the one thing, what one is, the psychology of the self, obviously, and and what we're, what we're internalizing in our mindset, is that's the first thing we have to get right. And if you look at it like the hierarchy of needs and you spin the perspective to how that fits against the tribe, right, what? I think I can't remember Dave's last name, but he wrote the book Tribal Leadership and he talks about the five levels of the tribe. Then we have Jim Collins who talks about the five levels of leadership, and then we have Maslow talking about the five levels of the individual hierarchy of needs. Well, when you distill down that information, bucket it into the survival and thriving mindset, what you see is that all of them are the same thing in a group, in an individual and in a tribe and in the self. Now, james Shuler talks about this in his Three Levels of Leadership, which is an excruciatingly hard book to read but is a useful device for me to have figured out. These three things are all living together. Right, we're failing to see the big picture here. And when we put them together.
Ryan Chute:First we have to get our mindset right and we start off with subsistence living. We have this, you know, as a tribe, that's, you know, no leader at all in the tribe. It's basically rough, hard living In Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's the basics, basics, basics, right. It's almost rough, hard living In Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. It's the basics, basics, basics, right. It's almost pre-survival In an inner city, it would be.
Ryan Chute:You're not a member of the gang yet, right, because level two would be the member of the gang. You're dealing with a warlord, a crime lord, a gang boss. You're being controlled. You usually have some sort of tyrant operation in your business. It's bad bosses, it's just really bad, just bad bosses, who one either don't know any better or do and are just assholes. And we have to figure out which one's which here and decide whether you stay or go. And then we have this belonging section in Maslow's hierarchy which is no different than the aspirational leader, the aspirational manager who wants to do right for their employees, who is trying, may not be succeeding all the time, but is doing the job. And then we elevate up within the tribe, within ourselves and within the individuals who we immediately affect, to something of esteem, something where I thought esteem was ego for the longest time, when esteem is actually. You're doing something of esteem.
Ryan Chute:What I learned when I correlated that information with some of the research that Steve Foran did in his book Surviving the Thriving the Ten Laws of Grateful Leadership, was that we have to shift at some point in time to truly thrive from a me mentality to a we mentality.
Ryan Chute:And until we shift to the we mentality, which means abandoning the ego, right, yeah, then we're actually not going to be thriving at the level that we even thought was possible, level that we even thought was possible. Now we, we imagine these things as as like oh, wow, there's wonderful companies, like, like Zappos, who've done these amazing things, but that's not for me, like that'll never be my company, that'll never be me. Well, it actually could be, but it takes a lot of, a lot of self work. You know, and and and understanding one big, big, big, big big thing, and that's that you have to meet people where they're at. You're not going to aspire a person into your thriving mentality. You need to get down in the trenches with them at survival mode and relate to them and fight with them to bring them up with you as a leader. And that's what true leadership is is showing them the way right. Leaders are only leaders because they have someone who follows them.
Dr. Leah OH:Exactly.
Ryan Chute:So do something worthy of being followed.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, yeah, and good on you, ryan, for reading all of those literatures those are. You get a lot of literature there that you've put together in really meaningful and insightful ways, and I can see I mean it's very, very easy to see why you're enjoying these successes and making this impact, because, again, you've done that very hard work.
Ryan Chute:Yeah, yeah, it is.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, yeah, it is, and it's like, like I said, the trick is, what are those tips for them in terms of tailoring their communication, their style or the messaging?
Ryan Chute:Yeah, look, the very first place that I always go with these things is getting clear on what you stand for and what you stand against. I did a study across gosh hundreds, thousands, easily thousands. I'd have to go back and look at how many there were. There were so many. Basically, I just scooped up all of the core values and principles and guiding principles and mission statements and silly stuff that you see posted on websites all over the place that really truly mean pretty much nothing but sound pretty and collect dust on a wall somewhere.
Ryan Chute:Ultimately, what those taught me was that there actually comes down to only three simple buckets helping people win, being trustworthy and living gratefully. Gratitude, frankly, surprised me a bit, and when I started to really study all of these things that were able to fit in one or two of these buckets at any given time, what I came to realize was that we're making things so complicated on ourselves when what we really need to understand is what our true intention as a commander is commander's intent. Now, I was in the military and I understand the notion of commander's intent, and that's about alleviating yourself of the burden of autocratic control and authority and replacing it with flexibility. To control an authority and replacing it with flexibility. But I'll tell you, any boss who I know would say I can't trust these idiots, right? These people are hardly like man, there's no way. Well, that's because you haven't been given the recipe to trust them yet, and the recipe is helping people win in a trustworthy and grateful manner.
Ryan Chute:Simple, full stop. What does that mean to you as a boss? So, step number one if we can agree that those three things encompass every possible virtue trait attribute that you could list and post on a wall somewhere, choose which ones that you stand for and which ones you just believe are convenient for the time, given the circumstance and situation, and then devise punishments, consequences and outcomes that are self-imposed when you don't live up to them. You have the backbone of one being different and two self-imposed creating an environment for your employees to be able to stand behind your belief structure, and when they do, they're going to deliver a better buying experience. And when they deliver a better buying experience and you deliver a better employee experience, guess what? We have the recipe for a killer brand.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, exactly Magic right.
Ryan Chute:Simple as that. It doesn't get any more complicated.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that, and so let's complicate it for a minute. With some of the noise and friction and that you mentioned you had you experienced a lot of in your early career. So I'm thinking about deception and some of these other persuasion or influence strategies that sometimes don't quite feel above the bar and I'm wondering, you know, what are some insights you can share about that time and, more importantly, kind of encouraging others to lean into a more transparent and, you know, person-centered approach.
Ryan Chute:Yeah, super easy, super, super, duper easy. Centered approach yeah, super easy, super, super duper easy Survival and thriving, surviving, thriving. Am I doing this to preserve for myself? Am I manipulating in a way to preserve something for myself, protect myself, protect my resources, protect my reputation? Or am I doing it for the greater good? Am I doing it from an abundant perspective, from a gracious perspective? It from an abundant perspective, from a gracious perspective, from a gratuitous and a grateful perspective, surviving and thriving. Where am I coming from when I'm saying this, doing this and and making this decision? And then number two is why are they doing it?
Ryan Chute:right are they in surviving mode? As a customer, as an employee, your customer's job is not to uh lay down and and buy what you sell them yep your customer's job is to survive.
Ryan Chute:if two-thirds of your customers and employees are all in survival mode at varying levels, what are we doing as bosses, as leaders, as true um beacons of hope to actually serve the person at the highest level? Put it through the simple litmus test how am I helping the person win in a trustworthy and grateful manner? That's how you empower people too. Question about the customer they're dealing with the employee, they're dealing with the co-worker, or the choices they're making about your money and how they discount or give away or whatever right.
Ryan Chute:How they respond to that person in a compassionate and empathetic way, right or in a self-serving and aggressive or contrary kind of way. All of these fall into the duality of life. It's not 58 things, it's one of two things. If it's negative, it's almost certainly going to be survival thinking.
Dr. Leah OH:So address the survival thinking, not not only within yourself, but within your people and all stakeholders that are involved, and you shift into solving problems in an empathetic and compassionate way Yep, which then, in turn, creates such a better environment for those who are looking to make purchases in these areas and, I would imagine, would lead to a lot more repeat purchases than the oof. I didn't feel good about this. I felt pressured into this, you know, crossed off the list for anything going forward.
Ryan Chute:Absolutely and equally as much for your employees, for retention, if you're asking your employees to betray themselves and their value system and their belief structures. This is an age-old problem when it comes to technicians in the home service space. You're saying, go out there and be a salesperson and they're like, yeah, no, I just want to fix the problem.
Dr. Leah OH:Fix it, yep.
Ryan Chute:And you're asking me to charge too much money, and you're asking me to do this and asking me to do this and I don't feel right about it.
Ryan Chute:So I'm going to go install new air conditioners in new home builds and for commercial unions instead, and that's because we've asked them to betray themselves with devious practice, not practice that serves the customer at the highest level.
Ryan Chute:Well, when we can reconcile that serving a customer at the highest level is selling, it's selling because we've won, gone through the process of properly understanding their needs, the environment's needs and the system's needs that we've only presented the thing that actually is the problem, not trying to sell them a bunch of nonsense they don't need. Is there other things that they need eventually and will spend money with us on? Absolutely. Do we need to escalate that unnecessarily for the benefit of us in sacrifice for the long-term sale? Absolutely not. And when we reframe, helping people win means closing the sale, not just having a conversation about what needs to be repaired and then show them a path where you're actually serving the customer at a very high level for the money that we're asking for. You know that value doesn't matter at all until what you have to sell them is worth more than the money that they're going to give you, or not.
Dr. Leah OH:Exactly. Yeah, I really appreciate that shift. So, ryan, let's think about leadership. I mean, we've certainly been looking at leadership through our whole conversation, but in this way, I'm just kind of thinking about contemporary expectations from stakeholders for small businesses in particular, and thinking you know, what have you seen or what do you recommend when stakeholders are saying I want you to give back to the community or I want you to lean into eco-friendly approaches? So you know what do you coach businesses in this regard now, in terms of their kind of responsibility to lead in different ways?
Ryan Chute:Well, you know, I think it really boils down into the old Adam Smith Keynesian mentality of economics, and perpetual growth was a nonsensical notion developed in the late 1800s to serve nations at the highest level and not to serve the actual populace.
Ryan Chute:And while there is merit in some of that economic belief, there's also a whole bunch of absolute nonsense, and I have a fairly solid foundation in economics so I can say this with a fair amount of confidence.
Ryan Chute:Ultimately, what it boils down to is let me give you a story instead.
Ryan Chute:I have a client down in Florida and she and I were talking about one particular market in Florida and she goes. A year earlier we had been talking about what's the most you feel like you could pull out of this market each year, and it was like 24, 25 million and we could probably push it to 30 if we had to. And a year later her and I are talking at our strategy meeting and she's like we've actually done an analysis of this marketplace and we found that the diminishing returns for our operational build, our infrastructure, was at $20 million, that we're actually starting to go backwards in our profitability trying to chase this extra $4 to $10 million. So we're going to stick to $20. And I go, I love what you just said and I go, that's that's. I love what you just said and I love what she said because what she recognizes if we got $24 million one year because there was some hurricane or something great. We made a bunch of money but we're not going to operationally stretch ourselves beyond the $20 million mark.
Ryan Chute:And we'll just, we'll just, you know, pull the pull the levers to to do things that go extra here and there, but we're also not going to collapse under the weight of our business when we end up only doing 18 in a softer year. So, ultimately, this is what true economics of a business look like. There is a threshold of diminishing returns. Everyone talks about break-evens and profits and top-line revenues, and that's all great, but it can't be excluding the conversation of diminishing returns. And this holds true in the marketing budget you place and the staff that you have, the trucks that you order, the inventory that you stock. All of these things affect whether or not you're going to be successful.
Ryan Chute:Or not all of these things affect whether or not you're going to be successful or not, and successful at the true definition of success. Because once you have that model down to a rinse and repeat, guess what? You can move into another town and get another piece of property that does the same kind of profit level. So it's not about not getting more money, it's about doing it in the most profitable and efficient of ways for everyone's benefit. Because it's not just money we're talking about here, it's the energy and the time.
Ryan Chute:If we don't have energy and time inside the equation, we really miss a huge part of what people actually care about.
Dr. Leah OH:Exactly yeah, from every end right, because your client will feel it, all of the employees feel it, their families feel it. That ripple effect goes on and on, it's not sustainable. Yes, exactly.
Ryan Chute:And again, a perfect example of a blind spot, when we're only factoring money into an equation which is an externally driven force, which is a dopamine driven force. What that means is that you're excluding the employee's energy and their ability to recharge their battery, their time that they have to spend with their kids or their wife or not, and all of that is a part of the equation, not just money.
Dr. Leah OH:Exactly so, ryan, I have two final questions for you, and these go hand in hand, and this is the way that we end all episodes of the Communicative Leader. So I'd like you to think about, you know, whether it's a challenge, a pragmatic tip. You know advice in terms of leadership, communication. So first, for our titled leaders out there are folks who are managers, directors, supervisors and then the second part is you know employees of all ranks across industries.
Ryan Chute:Yeah, well, the very first thing that this question makes me think about is the notion of leadership. Leadership is not about title or authority. Everybody is a leader, and when we start to take that perspective of everyone is a leader, we can create a pipeline of unicorns ordinary people that do extraordinary things. And the big challenge here is figuring out what can we do to keep it simple, and the first is to understand what are the true core motivators of people and then to play to those motivations.
Ryan Chute:A great book to read is Daniel Pink's book Drive. That really orients to that. I believe that there's 10 major motivators, both positive and negative, and there is an equal and opposite demotivator that it associates with those. And until you have those 10 right, then there's really no point in trying to focus in on all of the other fluff that this world throws at us at any given time. And then two regardless of who you are, regardless of what rank or status you have or title that you have, filter everything through how you're helping people win in a trustworthy and grateful manner, and you're always going to have a litmus test that's going to determine whether or not you're walking the virtuous path or not, and that will allow for natural empowerment, not just you, but your wife, your kids, your family, your friends, all of it.
Dr. Leah OH:Exactly, and I really appreciate that advice because I, time and time again, find that the best advice is the simplest advice. We're not weeding through a treaty of 33 things we need to do in order to start it's. Here are these three things.
Ryan Chute:The brain is. The brain is literally designed to cope not not to thrive, but to cope. And the way to thrive is to find ways of keeping it so simple that you can cope with it.
Dr. Leah OH:Yes, yeah, yep, I appreciate that. Well, ryan, it has been a true pleasure chatting with you today. I've learned a lot. I've really enjoyed this conversation, and I know that our listeners will as well.
Ryan Chute:Thank you so much. This has been a real treat, thank you.
Dr. Leah OH:All right, my friends. That wraps up our conversation today. Until next time, communicate with intention and lead with purpose. I'm looking forward to chatting with you again soon on the Communicative Leader.
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