Why Success Is Not Your End Goal

Why Success Is Not Your End Goal

Sean: And it is a very tough thing to do to over-communicate all of that, your documentation, purpose statements, and making sure that your people understand it. Now here comes the hard part when people do make mistakes and they do cost you money. How do you react to that?

Sean: What is the best reaction for a business owner to an employee or someone in grassroots, perhaps who knows the parameters? You’ve made sure this person went through the academy. Yeah, they learned the parameters, they learned how to do it, and they made a mistake that could be attributed as a fatal mistake. You lost a client, you lost some money there. Now you’re definitely, definitely not happy with that. How should we react?

Len: You know that’s a great question. It’s a tough question, right? Because I think the answer is that it depends. What I can tell you is this: There are correctable mistakes and there are uncorrectable mistakes. Right? So within law enforcement, one of the non-correctable mistakes is your ethics and your truthfulness. Right? If you are not truthful, if you are not trustworthy, if you are not ethical, you cannot be in this business, right? If you make mistakes because of that, then you cannot continue. That is not something that you can fix in somebody, at least in the short term. You know, people are either one way or the other. Right. So those are things that can’t be fixed, you know?

Len: On the flip side, an error in judgment when the intention was good and the intention was well placed, can be fixed, right? We can teach better judgment. We can’t teach integrity, right? So in law enforcement, there is a significant line that separates, right? You know, you make a mistake and you know, you drive too fast and you wreck one of your vehicles, whatever, that could be, that could be a non correctable mistake. If it’s just something that you do all the time and you’re just not learning, or it can be, you know, you just got distracted. And that can be corrected, right?

Len: You lie on the stand. You lie in a report. You do something that shows a lack of integrity. That’s a done deal, you’re done, right? So you have to decide for yourself where that line is. I can’t tell you where that line is. That line is going to be different for everybody in terms of what can be fixed and what can’t be fixed. But what I like to focus on is intent, you know.

Len: And this is something that I’ve learned from law enforcement. A lot of what we do has to do with intent. Sometimes you can make an error that’s so egregious that intent doesn’t matter.That you should have known better and that is something that maybe you can’t come back from. We just had a case here in Colorado where a truck driver, who would get what was deemed to be reckless, ended up causing four fatalities in a pile up on a highway. And you know, there’s no indication, now I’m not intimately familiar with this case. I’m not involved with this case at all or anything like that. But in just what I’ve read, there’s no indication that this person was criminal in that they intended to hurt anybody.

Len: But their mistake was so egregious and they should have known better based on what was shown in court. And so he just got sentenced to over 100 years in prison, one hundred years in prison for an accident that caused a lot of death and pain for people. And so, you know, the line is different everywhere. But I do like to, especially in a business sense, I do like to focus on intent. Right? What were you trying to do? Did you make a mistake that cost me money, but you were trying to do the right thing? You were trying to satisfy the customer. You were trying to, you know, do things correctly. You know, to me, those are more correctable than, you know, you falsified your expense report or you tried to cheat to get a customer or you did something that is, you know, not in our nature against a competitor to try and make them look bad – so that those are things that you know, are different. So I think the answer is it’s different for everybody, but focus on intent.

Sean: So we ‘re talking about complacency in a company, a team and how we’re going to kind of prevent that. But the question now in your book is that entitled “Be Vigilant.” Are there steps to – when you mentioned the signs of being complacent earlier, which has allowed with hubris success, being overconfident? Are there steps now for us to apply being vigilant, so that we can overcome these early detected signs of complacency as young and as early as they are?

Len: Yeah, absolutely. So let me just take one step back. So let me just officially, we’ve talked about it. Let me just officially define complacency. So complacency is an unawareness of potential, or real, or future threats that is born out of overconfidence, self-satisfaction and smugness. Right? That is complacency. The opposite of complacency is not paranoia. So you shouldn’t get scared that well. So what do I have to do, like walk around looking over my shoulder all the time and being scared?

Len: And that’s not the opposite of complacency. Like you mentioned and like the book, the title of the book. The opposite of complacency is vigilance, and the difference is this and this gets to what you’re asking. The difference between paranoia and vigilance is that paranoia is based on fear, whereas vigilance is based on awareness. And so everything that I talk about in the book at a root level comes down to how do we build more awareness and intentionality into our lives, into our business in terms of what we’re doing?

Len: Some of the things that you can do right away to help you do that is, you know, number one, focus on threat awareness. You need to understand where all the threats can come from. You know, I talk in the book about how hard it is for my wife and children or anybody who has somebody in law enforcement to go out to eat, because anybody in law enforcement or military is the same way. We are very aware of our surroundings, so we don’t want to sit somewhere where we’re vulnerable. We want to be able to have an eye out on where all the dangers could be coming from. Not because we’re paranoid, but just so that we can see it. You have to build that awareness within your organization, within your whole life. You have to understand that if you think that you know who your top two, top three competitors are, and you feel comfortable with that, you might be missing something. Where could those threats be coming from? What other industries, competitors, geographies, government? What threats are going to come from government regulation, environment, economy, worldwide pandemic?

Len: These are things that we have to have to be thinking about. I don’t know. Have you ever seen it? I don’t know that much. You know, you guys, if you saw the cartoon, The Road Runner, there’s Wile E. Coyote, right? So I talk about,don’t let yourself get into the Roadrunner effect where you are so focused on one threat Wile E. Coyote is so focused on one threat, the Road Runner. That threat is never where his danger comes from. His danger always comes from somewhere else. Right. That he doesn’t see coming.

Len: And that’s our problem sometimes. You know, if we’re coke, we get so focused on Pepsi, right? If we’re, you know, if we’re Microsoft, we get so focused on Apple, right? You have to be able to build your threat awareness and institutionalize it. So have people who have responsibility for looking out for where those next threats are coming from? Right. If we’re in the solar industry here in the United States, did you see that Tesla is going to be your biggest competitor or are you just focused on other solar companies? Right? So that’s one thing.

Len: Another thing that you can do right away to help you build in this increased awareness, especially if you’re experiencing success, is this idea of debriefing. We do debriefs religiously and law enforcement and military and all sorts of things.

Len: And the trick is this, a lot of companies will and a lot of people say, Yeah, we do debriefs all the time. But the reality is they do debriefs when things go wrong, when things have gone wrong, they’re looking for who to blame and how to make sure that doesn’t happen again. But when things go right, how often do you debrief projects, events, situations that go right? The reality is that a lot of times things go right, but they could have gone “right-er”. Are little micro micro failures and that macro success that you ignore because of the success, by debriefing successes, by making sure everybody has a say, by making sure everybody knows that we’re going to debrief afterwards, people remain aware and people start picking up on those little micro failures so that they don’t become macro failures, which is a lot of what complacency about.

Len: A third thing that you can do right away is focus on your metrics. What are you measuring? Are you measuring the right things, right? Are you measuring things that are what would be called vanity metrics, things that make you feel good? Or are you actually measuring the things that lead to success, and lead to you understanding when problems are coming? A lot of times we have either too many metrics or we’re not measuring the right things. And if you can measure the right things, not only does it keep people aware of what’s going on. It also gets back to what we’re talking about with incentivizing people the right way and making sure that they understand what they should be doing, right? By making sure that we’re measuring the right things that makes people think about what should I be doing? Because this is what we’re measuring, this is what’s important.

Sean: Yeah, for sure. Wow. So I love that these are just so practical. These are metrics – these are steps that a lot of companies can do actually to be able to prevent complacency from creeping in. I want to know that as CEO or as the owner of the business, and complacency does creep in usually. So I was telling you earlier in the pre-show that I’m at a place right now where I keep on delegating my authority and allowing my generals in the company to be the one to decide. In short, I have practiced what we were talking about earlier, giving them the autonomy of using their own judgment and discretion to decide what to do in a certain situation.

Sean: Now I’m in a position where now more than ever, I have a lot less on my plate. And it frees me up, and I could use this time to just do whatever the heck I want as CEO for my personal lives. How do I, or all the business owners who are to actually, keep at the edge of our seats, not in paranoia, but in vigilance, in our own lives, in our own habits? What’s the mindset that we have to have? And what are some of the key things that we got to do to make sure that we’re a, Len’s going to tell us that everything that we became complacent?

Len: So yeah, yeah, I love this question. I love this question because I think what you’re getting at and I think what I hear from you is, you know, when I hear about where you might be becoming complacent. I don’t think about you becoming complacent in terms of the business that you have – that business, that you have people running, You’re in danger of becoming complacent in life. Right.

Len: And you know, when you talk about what the mindset is, the mindset that I tell people is, and this is why this is so important. The goal, the end goal is not success. The end goal is keeping it. So becoming successful is not the pinnacle. It is the start. How do you keep that success in business and in life? Right. So you’re at this position now where you have a successful business and you have taught people and you’ve given people the right skills and the right autonomy to be able to run that successfully.

Len: So now what’s your purpose? Right? So how do you remain useful to your family, to your friends, to whatever relationships you have? Right? How do you push beyond? How do you look at where that next step, right? The goal is not success, keeping it is. And success is not money. Success is happiness. Success is productivity. Success is purpose, right? And so, you know, you said, you know, after 10, 11 years, I think you said you finally came up with a purpose for your business. Right? You have to start spending a little bit of that time thinking about what is your personal purpose? What is your purpose in life? Because what entrepreneurs have a tendency to do is define themselves as their business. But you are not your business. That is not your legacy. Your legacy goes beyond that.

Len: And that’s what you have to figure out is, what is my legacy? Do I want to create another business? Do I want to create ancillary businesses as I come out of this? Do I want to be a philanthropic person? Do I want to be, you know, the best father, or the best husband, or the best partner or whatever? I can be right? What is your purpose that goes beyond that business? Because it sounds like you’ve done a great job to set that business up for success. And now it’s like, what’s the next stage for you?

Len: So this applies to personal life as much as it does anything. We have a tendency as entrepreneurs also to further our business at the detriment of our personal relationships. Our personal relationships become second seats to what we’re doing. And so, you know, here’s a great opportunity to evaluate that for yourself. Where do you stand in there? Like how do you feel about that? What do you want to do about that? So, you know, the way to not be complacent is to continue to ask, why? Why am I doing this? Why am I here? Why am I moving forward? What am I moving forward towards right? And where could the threats come from? If you do that in your personal life, in your business, life will always continue forward.

Sean: That’s something I should take. And by the way, it’s not so because of me. I can’t take the credit for this because of the great people working alongside me. Yeah, definitely. I have to give the credit to them.