There’s an adage that says, “If the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, you’re out of business.” No doubt you heard about ‘The Great Resignation,’ the mass exodus of workers leaving their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic amid strong labor demand and low unemployment. Anthony Klotz, a professor of business administration at Texas A&M University in May 2021, coined the term. In this episode, Cameron will offer his thoughts on the Great Resignation, specifically why he thinks it’s positive.
In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
- Why Cameron believes it’s time for employees to stop working for bad companies.
- How to grow a business when faced with a founder who constantly reprioritizes?
- Why is the outcome always more important than the process?
Resources:
Connect with Cameron: Website | LinkedIn
Get Cameron’s latest book “Second in Command: Unleash the Power of your COO”
Subscribe to our YouTube channel: Second in Command Podcast on YouTube
Get Cameron’s online course: Invest In Your Leaders
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I heard a saying years ago that if the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, you’re out of business. Think about that when it comes down to the Great Resignation as well. It is that it’s up to us right now to make the changes inside of our business so that we can attract and retain these great people, versus having to react to it and think something is wrong. I think it’s great and it’s about time.
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I’m sure you’ve heard people mentioning the Great Resignation. In this episode, you’re going to hear my thoughts about it. I think it’s time that it happened. I’m glad people are quitting. What are your plans as the employer to get ahead of it? Think about this statement for a second. If the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, you’re out of business. You’re all going to love this episode. We’ll see you on the inside.
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What are your thoughts on the Great Resignation? That was a question by Jerry Larsen. I think it is about time that so many employees quit working for shitty companies, doing shitty jobs, and having to drive 40 minutes there and 40 minutes back for the privilege. It’s about time that they quit. It’s going to be hard for average companies to survive because these employees are going to get to go work for great companies based in other parts of the world.
I was talking to a company the other day who’s based in Ohio, he just lost one of his key employees to a company based in Luxembourg. He didn’t even know where Luxembourg was. He had to look up where the hell is this country that he just lost an employee to because the world is now very flat and COVID accelerated that.
It’s about time that we had the Great Resignation. A lot of people felt very trapped working at very average companies and saw no other way out. I also think that there is a little bit of a swing back right now where employees are also realizing they don’t have all the cards because some of the big companies are doing some layoffs. That’s healthy that we have the Great Resignation happening in times of maybe a bit of a recession coming, which at least balances out some of the equilibrium.
I heard a saying years ago that if the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, you’re out of business. Think about that when it comes down to the Great Resignation as well. It’s that it’s up to us right now to make the changes inside of our business so that we can attract and retain these great people versus having to react to it and think something is wrong. I think it’s great and it’s about time. Other questions around culture or operations? Devin, you got a question.
As I mentioned, I’m trying to build more structure and foundation. I guess another point would be what your strategy is when you’re constantly trying to grow new systems, and then you’re being met with a founder who is constantly diverting you away from that in your effort to make weekly meetings or every other week meetings with the team. They come to you and say, “Great idea, but throw that to the side. We’re focusing on this now,” and having a culture where constant reprioritizing causes strategies to go to the wayside.
You’re getting to the stage where the company needs to start evolving, and where the company can’t be the way it was. You’re moving from being a teenager to an adolescent, and the company needs to evolve a little bit. Our job is to show the leader that it’s time to evolve. I would caution you to be careful about systems for the sake of systems. We need to put systems and processes in place that are easy to put in place, that allow us to make our employees happier, that allow us to make our customers happier, and that allow us to make more money and profit. Otherwise, those systems can bog us down when we need to still be small and entrepreneurial.
You are still a six-person company that can be nimble and entrepreneurial and wing it, but he needs to decide or you and he needs to decide how entrepreneurial you need to be, how much bobbing and weaving are you going to do, versus how much can you get more organizing systems? There’s a bit of a balancing approach.
I’ve always said that it’s about outcome over process. At the end of the day, if I see a great employee who I know I have to hire, f*ck the interview process, I’m going to hire the great employee. Ray Dalio said that if you see a snake in the grass, you don’t write an SOP or you don’t write a system or a playbook to kill the snake. You pick up a stick and you bash it over the head. I’m a very big fan of systems. I’ve built lots of franchise companies. Building 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, Gerber Auto Collision, Boyd Autobody, and College Pro Painters were all about systems and easy-to-execute systems. Those systems allowed us to scale, but we would also short-circuit a system very quickly if it allowed us to get to the outcome quickly as well.
The Great Resignation: It’s about outcome over process.
Ultimately, I’m trying to put in place, touch base, and connect with the employees that we have. I think it’s important to make them feel valued. I’m connecting with them on a weekly basis to say, “What’s working? What’s not? What can we celebrate? What are you struggling with?” I’ll have these on the calendar and then he’s like, “Clear your calendar for two weeks. You’re not meeting with anybody. I need you to do this now.” I’m like, “That’s taking a step backward.”
You know where you’re going with then is the Invest in Your Leaders course. This is not supposed to be a pitch for the Invest in Your Leaders course, but in that, there are two modules that would be powerful for both you and your CEO to both watch. It’s me teaching the content. The one is on doing coaching. It’s how to coach your employees and how to do delegation.
Here are the core modules that’ll be helpful for him, Coaching, Delegation, Time Management, Project Management, and One-On-One Meetings. Those are five of the twelve modules in the course. Even Running Effective Meetings would be very helpful for him to devour that content and for you to devour that content. That’s going to give you the foundational blocks to scale and keep it entrepreneurial as you do.
I appreciate that. Thanks.
