Why Success Makes You Vulnerable to Complacency

Why Success Makes You Vulnerable to Complacency

Sean: Hey, you guys. Welcome back to the show, Sean here, in the Leadership Sack podcast. And for today, I have a guest who is super exciting because not only is he successful in business, he is also a keynote speaker. He’s an author. And he wrote a book and I’m about to buy it in a few minutes after this recording

Sean: He is CEO and president at ManageCamp Inc, and he is a reserve sheriff’s deputy. If you don’t know what that means, he’s actually a volunteer police officer. Why did he do it? He’s so successful. Why would you want to become a police officer to serve your country in a very risky way or an edge way? You know, police life is not really what is considered safe. These are the questions that we’re going to be asking and tackling for today, as well as a lot of topics about being complacent in your work, especially if you’re a successful businessman, entrepreneur, or maybe you’re successful in your career already, and you feel like I’ve hit it, I’m at the top of my game. What else is there? How do you overcome being complacent when you are there? Hey Len, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Len: Hey, Sean, thanks. I appreciate it, that was a great intro.

Sean: All right. So I guess I want to start out with how we usually start out in the show, and that is what got you where you were. What got you where you are today? I mean, you mentioned that and I found out that you’re a businessman. You’ve had this slew of success under your belt already.  and then now being a police officer? I mean, these are things that are, for me, super interesting. Why would you choose these paths after you found success already?

Len: Yeah, I mean, listen, it’s been a long and winding path. And, you know, kind of everything has kind of led to everything else is kind of the way life works, right?

Len: So I started out my career in consulting and then I moved into marketing, and branding, and I worked for Coca-Cola, Nabisco and Campbell’s Soup, and I was going to a lot of conferences. And then I decided I couldn’t find any conferences that I actually wanted to go to. I was going home dissatisfied from all the events I was going through. So I started my own company, ManageCamp, where we produced the annual brand ManageCamp Conference, which is an annual marketing and branding conference that we’ve run for 19 years.

Len: And along the way, I’ve worked with a ton of bestselling authors and keynote speakers and just, you know, the best and brightest minds, and brands around the world. And all along I always felt like I wanted to write a book, but I never kind of had an idea that was good enough. That would be something that I would want to have at my conference, which is what I always kind of used as the benchmark.

Len: And so, you know, I kind of shelved that idea. And then about seven years ago, I decided I wanted to give back to the community. I wanted to do something that had some purpose and meaning in my life. And this opportunity came up to become a reserve sheriff’s deputy, which, as you explained, is basically I’m a police officer that does it for free, and I had to go through a full academy. I had to go through 440 hours of field training, I’m patrol certified. I go out there, I do the same job that a normal deputy does. I just don’t get paid for it, I do it for free.

Len: So my wife questions the psychological evaluation they get on, she’s thinking maybe I wasn’t valid. But I love it, I really – like I found this passion in life that I hadn’t experienced before. And so it’s just I love going out there and helping people and protecting our community and all that stuff. But, you know, I came at that job with the lens of, you know, almost 30 years of business at the time. And so, you know, as I was going through academy and I started seeing these parallels, I thought law enforcement was going to be something completely different for me,, but I started seeing these things that I could apply back to my business and personal life that I was learning.

Len: And one of the biggest things that I learned was this idea that complacency kills, and it’s something that we talk about in the first day of academy and we talk all the way through, because it’s a real danger in police work because a lot of time, most of the time things go right. And you can let your guard down, you can become overconfident. And I started thinking, You know what? Complacency kills businesses. It kills brands, it kills entrepreneurial ventures, and it kills relationships. And so I started becoming kind of obsessed with this idea of complacency and understanding it and looking for those things that we did day to day in law enforcement to help us fight it.

Len: And then I was thinking, “Well, gosh, this can translate back to business. You can translate back to life and personal relationships, marriages, relationships with your family.” And then I was like, “Man, now I’ve got the idea for a book that I would want to hear about.” And so that’s where the book came from. It’s called “Be vigilant strategies to stop complacency, improve performance and safeguard success.” And it’s all about, what is complacency? Why is it so dangerous to you? Especially, someone who is experiencing success is especially vulnerable to complacency. And how do we understand it, identify it and fight it with vigilance? And so there’s 10 specific things that I talk about in the book that you can do right away to start fighting vigilance in your own life or your business or whatever you do.

Sean: And we got to do this again one after reading the book right?

Len: Yeah, absolutely.

Sean: I’m super excited. I’m downloading it, putting it on my Amazon Kindle later on. So that is, and you mentioned complacency was a concept that you touched base on the very first day of academy police training.

Len: Yes.

Sean: And what we’re like, I’m sure you got that light bulb moment on the moment that you realized these are the same principles that we should be looking at or practicing in business. Or some of the top three things that just sparked that idea with you that are parallel to what you were learning in the police academy. About complacency, the top three things that are the same as if it was in business.

Len: Yeah, well, in business and in life, right? And so what we learned about complacency is that number one, the more successful you are, the more vulnerable you are to complacency. Right. So you look at people, you look at businesses, you look at relationships. And that was light bulb number one. I was thinking to myself, “Man, how many times do we say, how could they have fallen so far, so fast, right? How can you know, blockbuster have messed it up? So bad? How could Kodak? How could Sears? How could Circuit City? How could all these businesses that were so big, like too big to fail? How did they miss it?” Right. And so obvious to us right now? How did that happen?

Len: So that was like, I mean, and you say, how did this, you know, these friends that, you know, I’ve had this long marriage and happy marriage, and all of a sudden they’re getting separated or divorced. How does that happen, right? I start saying, Well, gosh, that relates back to this idea that the more success you enjoy, the more vulnerable you become to complacency. So I was light bulb number one. Light bulb number two was this idea that complacency is born from overconfidence and self-satisfaction. Right. And we see it all the time and we see it. You know, there are things that we do because we think we’ve got it figured all out, right? We understand our competition. We understand our business. We’ve been doing this for years. Nobody knows it better than us. That’s the danger point, right?

Len: Once you start thinking like that, that’s when you become vulnerable. And so that was light bulb number two. I was like, “Man, because this is, you know, in law enforcement we talk about, you know, something simple, like doing a traffic stop and we might do ten thousand traffic stops and never have a problem. But with that success, then the danger is that you become overconfident instead of watching where everybody is and watching hands and doing the things that you need to do as you’re walking up to a car, you saunter up.

Len: Instead of being aware of where you are in relation to the light behind you in the mirrors you’re not paying attention to. When you’re talking to the driver, you might lean in and put your elbows on the window or something, and they might put their hand out and you might reach into a car and shake a hand. Right? All things that we’re taught not to do because they put us in danger. But you do that enough times with success. And you can convince yourself that you’re successful because of the things you’re doing, as opposed to the fact that you’ve been lucky. And so that was kind of light bulb number two, is that this idea that overconfidence can breed this thing? So you want it three light bulbs on it? You didn’t give me this question ahead of time. I don’t know.

Len: But, you know, I think light bulb number three is how quickly things can turn, you know. And this is what we see in the academy because we watch videos. We, you know, we watch some pretty hard things to watch, you know, things that start out as seemingly innocuous and seemingly safe that can turn on a dime. And all sudden, someone’s getting shot, the magnitude of how quickly things can go from right to wrong. And that’s kind of like one of the things I talk about in the book and a saying that I tell my kids all the time is everything goes right until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, it often goes really bad. So just because things are going right doesn’t mean they’re always going to go right. And that was kind of that third light bulb that says, “You know what? This is something that people need, that I need, that I need to find out for myself.” And then because I needed it, I knew that I could translate it to other people.

Sean: Got it. And how does like – so you mentioned that complacency happens when you’re successful when you’re overconfident. When does that usually creep in a business? Does it start from the executive board? Does it start from SEO and does it get trickled down all the way to everyone else in the organization? Like how does it happen? What are the signs that it’s happening?

Len: Yeah. So you know, to me, those are two separate questions, but you know how it happens – so complacency is insidious. It will come at you from all directions. Complacency can come from the top down and it can come from the bottom up, right? And one of the things I talk about in the book is that Bottom-Up complacency, because that’s that’s something that’s that we don’t often think about, right? A lot of times we think at our level like, Hey, let’s not be – complacency and being complacent has become a throwaway word in our culture. We use it. We’re like, “Hey, let’s not be complacent out there.” But nobody ever talks about what that means or what you’re supposed to do about it. Right?

Len: The reality is that there are things that we can do from the top down that create complacency from the bottom up. Right? So let me give you an example. Say you’re running your business, right? And you treat your employees at the street level, the people who are doing the work, the people who are interacting with your customers or clients, whether you’re got a retail store or service business like you do. Right. You don’t give them autonomy. You tell them exactly how they’re supposed to do their job. And if they step out of line or they do something different, they get kind of smacked down a little bit, right?

Len: If you do that enough, they’re going to stop looking for ways to do things differently. Right. They’re only going to pay attention to the things that you have told them they have to pay attention to. You know, think about when you’re walking through a home improvement store here in the United States, we have Home Depot or Lowe’s or something like that. You know, if the employees are only if the employees who are stocking shelves are only told you stock shelves, this is how you get paid. This is how you get evaluated, you stock shelves, if you’re slow stocking shelves, you’re going to get docked. We need you to stock sales faster. How likely are they going to be to help me as I’m walking down the aisle and I look confused?

Sean: Not so likely. Yeah.

Len: That’s exactly right, because it’s not in their best interest. It’s not in their best interests. Now who’s best suited, though, to be able to report back up that we might have some problems in our aisles in the turns away we’re stocking things, or pricing things, or we’re creating confusion or making it hard for our customers. Where is that information most likely, or most appropriate to come from the same people, right? So what happens is we can incent them to become complacent, to not pay attention to outside stimuli, and to not look for changes in the system. Right. So that you can then have bottom up. So what happens? Nobody at the bottom reports anything that’s wrong up to the top. So what happens at the top? We develop overconfidence. We think everything’s going great, until little down the road, we see people moving to our competitor. We see our sales per aisle dropping. We see little things that start popping up that seem like they came out of nowhere, but what they came from is complacency. So where it can come from, it can come from a lot of different places. It can come from the bottom up. The top down, the top down can create the bottom up. It’s all over the place.