Most leaders don't realize how much of their time ends up being spent fixing problems on their team until it starts costing them their best people.

If I could go back in time in my career, I would have spent a lot more time with the A players versus trying to fix somebody that's simply not driven.

Adam Block is the chief revenue officer over at Motive, helping scale the company to serve more than 100,000 customers and over a million drivers.

That but the leadership lesson he learned along the way surprised him.

The people that suffer the most in that situation are actually the best people.

You're not getting the attention anymore.

In this episode, you'll discover why the way most leaders spend their time is actually backwards.

The mistake that pushes top performers away and what great leaders do differently to keep them.

If you're going to hire the best possible people for a role, they will demand that they are surrounded by Also with the best leaders have to be transparent or they're going to lose the hearts and minds of their team members.

It's time to lead the team.

Welcome back to Lead the Team.

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Enjoy.

Adam Block, Chief revenue officer over at Motive.

Welcome to lead the team, sir.

Oh, Ben, so great to be here.

Thanks for having me.

Something you used to believe about leadership that you no longer believe today.

If I could go back in time in my career, I would have spent a lot more time with the A players versus trying to fix somebody that's simply not that.

Either they're not driven.

Right.

They're not innately driven to succeed or you're asking them to do something where they're not really an A candidate for that position.

The people that suffer the most in that situation are actually the best people.

You're their best players or the A players.

They're not getting the attention anymore.

And so if you want to take an A player and make sure that their altitude continues to rise, you got to spend time with him or her.

And so that's probably the thing where I started my career wanting everybody to be great to over time hiring people that were great and making them better.

That's, that's probably been my, my biggest Shift.

And once you made that shift, Adam, what happened for your teams, what happened for your career in the organization?

It's incredible.

People want to work, especially the best, right?

You take the best of the best of the best and Motive has many of those.

We do, I mean we're large enough now.

People can make millions of dollars.

It's, you know, so, so you're talking about people that are very senior now.

By the way, that's not the only roles we have, right?

We have, of course, mid market, we have roles where you can have a whole career at Motive, which is also very fun.

And that's unusual for a lot of companies.

You can't, you don't have a lot of companies where you can start, say as an SDR and move your way all the way up to, you know, seven figure income.

So, so here what I've noticed is that the best teammates expect excellence from their other teammates, right?

They do.

They, they're running a deal team, they're running an account and they're not okay with mediocrity.

And so if you introduce mediocrity, they are demotivated because that's our role as leaders, is to make sure have what they need to maximize potential.

So that's been the interesting observation for me is that if, if I'm going to hire great people, the best, if you're going to hire the best possible people for a role, they will demand that they are surrounded also with the best.

Let's take a step back for a moment because your perspective comes from helping scale, one of the fastest growing companies in the physical economy.

Motive innately is an AI powered operations platform that to your point, is built for the physical economy.

And we are creating a mechanism for organizations to be safer, more efficient and more profitable.

And so organizations that are very large, that have complex operations, think construction, manufacturing, you mentioned some field services, the public sector, sector, agriculture, they have very dangerous work that they are doing.

They're also moving around very high valued assets.

And they have workforces that are complex, many of which are third parties and a mix of current employees, partners, et cetera.

And so our AI is proven and industry tested to be best in class to allow safety, operations and finance teams to manage all of these people and equipment and one single integrated system.

And it's a, it's a big problem to solve.

These organizations are representing more than 50% of GDP.

Whoa.

So what, so you've had this, this string of success, but what you what help?

What helps you guys achieve success early on, sort of, I guess it grew the company, but didn't it strain the systems?

I mean, does success break systems?

It's a great question.

So motive started about 12 years ago, and the organization predominantly was focused on trucking, just the trucking industry.

And then there became a compliance mandate by the federal government called an eld, an electronic logging device that took compliance from being manual to being automated.

And that was our focus.

Right.

Predominantly SMB, small owner operator trucking companies.

And as time went on, not only was it something where larger and larger organizations were interested in our technology, and of course our platform grew to include safety and equipment monitoring and asset tracking and spend management and a variety of other things that larger organizations are having big problems with.

But the problem was also much wider than trucking itself.

Right.

So we were just talking about all these different industries.

And so you're exactly right.

The initial focus of being SMB focused grew to not only being many of the world's largest companies and mid market and enterprise and everything in between, but also in different industries.

So the problem set was a little bit more universal, but yet had to be tailored to solve problems for those individual organizations.

Yeah.

So what broke first inside that you guys had to go fix?

Was it the culture of all the people you're to bring in to support?

It was all this tech customization?

Was it your ability to lead?

Because I mean, when you're, when you're leading a small group of people in a smaller company and different, smaller organizations, that's a lot different than serving the Fortune 1000.

I think the biggest change was indeed product.

Right.

I mean, if you have a single product that is going to do a single thing for a certain cohort of organizations, then it takes vision from product leaders, executives and the board to invest in having something that's going to solve problems that you're hearing about from your customer base.

Right.

And so, so many organizations pretty much stay focused on their base, whereas we were presented with an opportunity to do more.

But it required significant investment from our organization.

You were going wide, so you had gotten so good at serving this one market and you're like, hey, we want to go after all these other different types of companies.

I mean, you're on the revenue side, right?

So you're probably yelling from the mountaintop, let's grow this thing.

What, what was the conversation like internally when you brought that to the operations and the tech people?

And they're like, wait a minute, our system does this.

We don't do all these other things.

Well, it's a great question.

Luckily, wasn't really something that, that the revenue team brought.

It was something that the customers brought.

Okay, so you know, I think it was Steve Jobs who famously said, you know, we want to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the product set.

And that's exactly what motive did.

And so before we set out to build the world class enterprise organization that we have today, before we went international, before we introduced our solutions for public sector, we had to have the product set that was going to solve the problems for the customer.

And so it was a big decision to not only invest in infrastructure and architecture and integration layer and the analytics and reporting to serve larger organizations that had broader sets of requirements, but also these other industries.

Right.

I mentioned that we weren't just trucking anymore.

So imagine you have a suite of solutions that solves these three issues and yet you're being asked to solve failure.

50, 60, 70 different challenges for organizations, but they are in different industries.

That was where we became a platform play.

It is where we had to invest in market research.

It's where we had to invest in our feature set frankly of an organization.

And we even rebranded the company.

I mean we used to be keep chucking and then we became motive because we were, we wanted to be a little bit more universal or a lot more universal, I'll say.

And it's, but it's, it's really hard as you know, to do this kind of thing, especially when you have both hardware and software if your product is not, if, if not best in class, at least in the mix of being very, very good.

And in our case we are indeed best in class for a lot of

what we do, it seems.

So it takes a lot of investment to do that because you've, you got really good at doing this one niche product and then you're going to go and you're going to solve all these other problems.

It sounds like it's got a lot of investment.

There's just a lot of, there's probably a lot of stress involved with, with your internal systems.

What was the thing like, like looking back, what was the thing that helped you guys expand in these ways or make that pivot?

Because a lot of companies I think would, you know, fail at that kind of thing because I guess you're changing your cultures.

I mean, I'm imagining back when you like before the rebrand you probably had sort of like a trucking vibe culture, right?

People spoke this, the language of the trucking world.

And now you're going to add all these other different industries in there.

How did you guys make it happen.

Well, luckily motive was doing great as keep trucking.

So I'll start there.

It wasn't that why change if things

are going so well then?

But, but growth had slowed.

I mean to be, to be very clear, right.

And so the biggest change the organization made in our company history was making the decision to go upmarket, right.

And serve our enterprise customers.

And so as you can imagine, when you're built for commercial mid market SMB, you have certain systems and processes.

The way that you pay commissions, the way your territories are built, the way that your operations are, what the talent pool that you have and the marketing approach.

So that was the biggest transformation of the organization certainly from an operations mix and from a talent mix was making that decision.

You are right.

The technology graveyard is littered with organizations that have tried to go from down market to upmarket.

The technology graveyard is littered.

Yes, it is right, isn't it?

I mean, you guys knew that before

you started doing this.

It, it's, I, I, it was not trivial, right?

It was a big conversation with our board and with our CEO Schwabe, who has been absolutely magnificent in this transformation, the build into who we are today.

And he was the number one cheerleader.

You know, we are going to do this.

We, we, we had had this demand, right?

This, this, this big influx of interest from large organizations to help them solve their big problems.

And we had to make that decision.

We had to resource it appropriately.

But it's been a slew of things.

I mean motive simply does not look the same as we looked five years ago.

I mean it's, it's a, it's a bit cliche to say that, but, but the truth is that our revenue mix is very different.

Our customer mix and who they are is very, very different.

Even the talent pool that we have and the folks that we have within the organization are very different.

But operationally we don't do virtually anything the same as what we did five years ago.

Looking back before the big expansion and transformation, what do you believe or what was something that you or the other leaders had to change belief wise in terms of what you believe beforehand versus what you've become?

It's a fun, challenging and painful question to answer.

I will say, by the way, I

love that it's fun, it's painful and it's challenging to answer this question.

It's all the things that people that truly love leadership appreciate, right?

And so there was, of course you can invite people into an organization that can stay status quo, right?

Hey, there's not A market for this.

Right.

Or we have, we have tapped out a number of amount of capacity for what is the demand for our product set.

Right.

And we had been kind of held in that spot for a short period of time because we had been very reactive.

Right.

So you had a certain number of capacity and we'll say sales capacity and post sale capacity to be able to manage a certain amount of things.

But it took some vision and a bit of bold execution to challenge that and say we can do more if we introduce our approach and value to more organizations over time.

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Adam, what surprised you most about scaling revenue at that level?

You have to evangelize a little bit.

Folks have to do things differently.

And what I mean by that is if you think about work.

So I'm in the revenue organization which is comprised of a lot of functions, but it's predominantly sales.

That's, that's the majority of it.

And so sales reps are usually focused on comp quota, territory and team.

And interestingly, we had to change all of that.

And we had to change all of that many times because when we went from having, we'll say for enterprise, where you have much larger quotas, where folks have higher ote, where the tenure and the experience is much higher, and you went from having say 10 to having 30, to having 75, to having more than 100, we had to rebuild all of those pieces each time.

And it took some flexibility from others and some understanding.

So I think that was a big challenge, but also something that I am so thankful for.

Our operations team and our strategy team and frankly just the folks that join Motive.

I mean we've, we've had such an amazing set of individuals that have stayed with us through that transition and had success, success throughout that transition.

So finding those people and having them committed and vigilant through this process is incredible.

But that's the, the, the when you talk about change, some change is just a lot heavier than other change.

And this is something that was constant for us.

I love the fact that you Picked the very colorful word evangelize.

What were the actions of evangelizing that you, that you found yourself tapping into day in, day out?

There are all those big changes.

So that's very easy.

The very human one to one connection with people.

So if you have a change you're going to make and you announce it broadly and you expect people to buy in, I'm here to tell you it ain't going to happen.

Right.

It has to be something where if you plan appropriately and you communicate to each set of individuals on a very intimate level and you have an opportunity to explain the why behind a change and answer their real concerns and the real questions and sometimes pivot, I'll be honest, sometimes we.

The truth was the feedback, it was better than the original decision, right.

So we would change something.

And so I think that is the trick here.

Too many leaders get stuck and I'm going to make this change and I go in and announce it and I assume that people are like, hey, get in or get out.

Right?

That's.

It's just that if you want people to buy in to the program and to believe in what they're doing and believe in the leadership, that very regular, you know, I'm going to sit down and have a coffee with you type of interaction with individuals on the team cannot be overstated.

So when you started scaling rapidly after the pivot, what worked early in your scaling process that no longer worked later when you guys got really big?

Well, we've had to modify our approach to the market a few times in this process.

So it's interesting because I feel like it's been constant, but it wasn't any one component.

But I will give you two that come to mind that were pretty big.

One was the way we segmented the teams.

So it's hard when you take the biggest companies on the planet, right?

Think Halliburton, think FedEx.

Right.

These just extraordinary Amazon huge organizations.

Yes.

And they are one of 100 accounts somebody has.

Right.

That's just not going to work, practically speaking.

So the first thing is we had to figure out how to separate out the jumbos, if you will, to make sure they were getting the right attention.

And this isn't just for sales.

This is for the solution engineering, it's for the business value organization.

So, like maybe you were treating everybody the same company wise.

And then you get these much bigger.

You got to prioritize, I guess, the level of service.

These, as you say, the jumbos, they probably have all kinds of requirements.

So how you Reserve the other ones be different.

They do and they go through a very long evaluation period in even procuring our technology.

And so it's a full time job because it's so consequential.

The problems we're solving for these organizations are massive and it's a big investment.

They have huge operations with billions of dollars in assets that they want to protect, that they want to make sure they have mitigated risk, they have loss prevention, that they have safe organizations.

Right.

Many of them have unions.

And so there's just a lot going on there.

So.

Good.

Because even like the sales and account representation team, they're going to have longer sales cycles.

There's going to be more technical details.

You're not going to be talking to one person at the customer anymore.

You're going to be talking.

You got to know like 30 or 40 people inside your customer.

It's a different leadership and employee mindset than you would have had early on.

You just knew the new the one person.

Absolutely correct.

Remember we started off in S and P which is the complete other side of the market.

And so, so we had to figure out the right resourcing profile.

I would say not just individual.

Right.

Because again we're not just talking about sales, we we're talking about the way we approach the market, we approach the customer and then we support them once they've chosen to buy.

And that was the second piece for us that was a big decision was to modify the way that we supported customers long term.

We had traditionally had a little bit more of a support organization that supported the customers.

We eventually had customer success but we decided to combine sort of an expansion sales organization with a customer success team and called account management.

You again, you start with the customer experience and then once you got that fixed, you're going to retain the customer and once you've retained the customer, they're oftentimes going to buy more and bring their friends.

And so we were able to make those big changes.

It took time.

But the truth of the matter is that different profiles and complexities and industries of customers and have different requirements and we haven't gotten it perfect.

But I will say our retention is fantastic.

Our customers generally speaking are very happy.

We are selling more than we ever have before.

So we're going to keep our eye on the ball here.

But those evolutions, they were not simple, they were not always popular inside the company when we would make those changes right away.

But, but it was thoughtful and time has proven that they were the right moves.

I mean that's a, that's the, I suspect that one of the hardest things that I'm hearing about scaling at your, at this quick level is it's like hey, it's not the, the technical, we got that, we got the customer buy in, we got that.

It's the mindset of the people of hey, we're going to, we have to operate differently, we got to think differently as a company, you know, as we get bigger, you know.

But then I think that's also true in the sense of when you are a more transactional sales.

We have, right, we have great customers that are very, very small.

But as you get to be more complex, as you are more multi product with these organizations, as they're spending much more, they expect a higher return.

And so we now are not a feature function only.

I mean we have again wonderful world class technology for our customers.

We truly do.

And it is meaningful and impactful for our customers and the communities that we serve.

But it has to be proven, we have to be able to show them you are getting XYZ value out of this program whereas really in a commercial sale you're not doing that as much.

And so is it working really?

Yes, it's working and we're moving on versus hey, no, no, this is an ROI play for us.

We like working well is like table stakes.

That's right.

How are you impacting our business?

Man, I love that.

And well, and what's unique about our industry, one thing that's, that's very different I think about our industry specifically is that people, customers and prospects in the market, they will take our product and they will install it in their live production environment and they will compare others right alongside of it.

So and they will go around and it is a, it is a production pilot, it is a production trial.

It's not a demo, it's not something that is, you know, download some data and let's check it out.

They're able to do that.

And so you, you, you can prove that your technology works and you can prove that you're cool to do business with.

Right?

You can do all those things.

But what is your partnership level?

Because inevitably they're going to want to change configuration.

They're going to have certain integrations that are required.

They're going to have different needs, locations, whatever it may be.

And so when you are going through a live production trial, you have an opportunity to present yourself and what you're going to be long term as a partner to that customer.

And motive does that extraordinarily well.

On purpose.

I mean, it's very intentional.

Yeah.

You're like, okay, you don't believe us.

Seeing is believing.

Here you go.

It's tricky.

Yeah, but it's wonderful.

I mean, we love doing it.

It's so unusual.

Right.

It's very hard to put Azure and Oracle Cloud and Google Cloud and AWS right alongside each other in live production and see how they're operating.

It's just very, very challenging for a lot of technologies to do that.

In our case, we're able to do that and it's.

It's a great way for folks to make sure we're the right partner.

How much more fun did your job get when you started investing your time?

Well, one, hiring as many a players you could get, but also investing your time and making those A players better versus always back to the old school of, hey, we're going to try to get every single person up to speed even if they don't want to be.

Be motivated.

Well, the team knows I love to have fun, so I'll start there because that's an interesting word, is fun.

I bring a lot of humor to work.

I don't know that my work became more fun, though.

I think the work became very demanding.

Right.

I mean, it's something now where I'm constantly.

It got harder, but the right way,

deploying resources to give people more of what they demand.

And that's great because we're having a big impact on each other and on our customers and frankly in our technology, on society, because we are saving lives.

I think it's important too in how you do what I'm saying.

There is a reluctance from many leaders, especially when they're more junior or when they're not as effective, to avoid tough conversations.

And if you are going to get the most out of any individual, the ability to play back to them, this is what's going well.

It could be a meeting, it could be a QBR and deal review.

It could be.

It could be a planning session for whatever it may be.

It could be discussion with product about whatever it is.

Right.

This is what's going really well.

These are the things we want to hit the repeat button on.

These are the things that you're doing that are extraordinary.

But these are some of the things that we really need to coach to.

These are some things that we need to see change.

And what I've noticed is that some leaders will do one of those two.

Either they'll jump immediately to here's what you did wrong.

Right.

And that's demotivating.

Or they'll just tell somebody, here's what you did.

Right?

And I've had graphic designers and still do, who, who are on our team, and they are wonderful at demanding this.

They'll say, I need to know what you don't like about this.

You an artist.

They want real feedback.

So when they go around.

And yes, their work is high quality, but it's missing the mark, a lot of people are just impressed.

That's so incredible.

You can do this thing right.

And so they were instrumental in teaching me how to be an accountable leader and play back to somebody.

Here's what's going well.

Here's what needs to improve.

We're going to own our outcomes, good or bad.

We're going to do it together.

But leaders have to be transparent or they're going to lose the hearts and minds of their team members.

I love that this.

This interview to me is like, turned into, like a playbook on how to work and keep your A players.

And what.

What does it look like?

Because there's.

Because there's like generational differences.

There are personal differences.

There's a lot of differences, or people want.

But A players in general want that kind of feedback.

They want to be included.

And you said they want to be surrounded by other A players.

And that demands your attention as a leader.

And bringing it back to your first point, if you're so busy working on parts of the team that aren't working effectively, these other A players are just going to take a walk, you know, somewhere else, or they're going to get frustrated.

You've got to really.

And I think a lot of times there's like a mindset that some leaders have.

Well, my A players are doing great.

Why would I want to mess with them?

Right.

Just let them.

I'm going to let them just run and have all this freedom and do what they want to do.

And they say, just keep doing what you're doing.

You're doing great.

But it's not necessarily constructive feedback.

And they're just letting them go.

And they're spending most of their time sort of fixing the parts that are broken.

And I think your emphasis is really important right now.

Well, let's.

Let's talk about it for a moment.

Right.

So it starts at the moment that you meet somebody, which is typically during an interview process.

So you can sell them the company.

Right.

Or you can interview them and make sure they've done the job before, whatever.

And what I try to do is explain to folks where we are and what the role requires and secondarily, we try to make sure that they are a fit for that type of work.

Right.

And that they're driven because we can inspire, coach, lead, teach.

But it is really hard to motivate somebody.

That's something that has to come from within and not every single job requires it.

I'll start there again.

I'm predominantly talking about sales or leadership, but if we can't find evidence of those things, we.

What's to make me feel like it's going to exist later?

So we try to set that bar right.

In the beginning.

We talk a lot about resilience, accountability and discipline.

Rad.

Right?

Resilience.

When you are.

We're all going to hear.

No, we're all going to.

Something bad is going to happen, you're going to have an outage, something's going to happen.

Right.

And so are you going to bounce back?

And are you going to bounce back with a renewed vigor?

That's resilience.

Accountability, of course, we mentioned a moment ago, is owning your outcomes good or bad.

And then the discipline is something that is probably the hardest and that is doing the hard things even when you don't want to.

And so if you are going to equate it to people getting the right type of treatment, a players getting what they need.

What we're talking about is no different than sports.

Every sports team practices every one of them.

I don't know of a single NFL or NBA or any practice that half of them are terrible.

Right.

Like, why is it that they are so bad?

Yeah.

And so it's because it's not practice that makes perfect.

It's perfect practice that makes perfect.

It's challenging people to improve.

It's bringing an attitude of resilience, accountability and discipline daily.

It's consistently.

And there's a lot of repetition in leadership.

Right.

We know that.

Right.

There's a.

It's, it's, it's, you know, it's not by accident.

You can have a philosophy, but if you don't bring it again and again and again, it's not going to matter.

And so I always find that to be really interesting, that if you go through the motions, that's great.

Right.

You're on the field and you're playing the game.

But that doesn't mean that you're a great team.

If you're going to be a great team, you're going to expect the people around you to be in the right place to catch the ball and to make the right moves, or else you're simply not going to have people positioned success.

Wow, man, that is really helpful, I think, for leaders to really challenge themselves to be thinking about right now.

Where is your focus from the hiring all the way through the development?

And where are you spending most of your time?

I imagine if you've got like a pie chart and think about your day and who you're working with on your team and what you're working with them on, that says a lot about what the future is going to be like for you and your organization.

Yeah, like I spend my day predominantly doing three things.

The first is I have different functions that I'm responsible for in the organization.

So I have to spend time with each leader or set of leaders to, to make sure that they're getting what they need.

I'll start there.

Right.

If you, if going back to what we said a moment ago, if you just think something's going to operate on its own, that is a risk I am not willing to take.

Right.

I want to make sure that they get what they need from me.

And my role is one where I can move resources, I can change policy, we can change course, etc.

In order to meet folks where they are.

The second area is on revenue generation itself.

Right.

So I spent a lot of time with customers, spend a lot of time with prospects.

I think CROs and you know, we've got over 5,000 employees at motive.

More than half of them report to me.

And so if you are a chief president of a company, if you are a chief revenue officer of a business and you're not spending time with customers and you're not spending time with prospects, you're not spending time with partners, that is a huge mistake.

And there's way too many of them out there that do that.

It is not something that Oliver understand.

But I am here as a resource for our customers and the folks in the market to make sure they're getting what they need and answering their questions.

And because I own the entire life cycle of introduction to motive all the way through to being implemented and then being successful as a customer, long term with customer success or account management or whatever it may be, it's important they have that connection when they need it and when they want it.

And then the third one is challenging status quo.

We do a lot of things differently.

Quarter over quarter, better intentionally.

We're testing something.

We're going to make some change.

Maybe we'll, we'll do something with an investor.

Maybe we will do something to change the way we think about AI internally or with our own product.

So Though if it's not falling in one of those three buckets, it usually is is outside the priority list.

Man, I really feel like every leader should have those three buckets.

Even there, if they're internally focused, they always have.

Even if you're internally focused, not externally focused, you're going to have a customer.

You got to spend time with them.

Functions and functional leaders inside organizations, they've got customers, right.

And they oftentimes they're not talking to each other.

It's like it's a great way to do that.

And how many people and leaders I'm thinking about you out there, how many of you have challenging the status quo legitimately on your list of things to do regularly?

Probably not many, but the world organization would be better off if that was a specific item on your to do list.

That's right.

I think there is a lot of folks that get bogged down at administration and I work very hard to delegate those things and sometimes it's very important.

Get me wrong, it's, it's not that it's, you know, it's a busy work.

That's not the point.

It's that if you bought, if, if you focus there, it's going to eat up so much of your time.

And so I am surrounded by people that are way better at that work than I am.

And, and, and we talk about that as, you know, what is your a skill set and what is my responsibility to my customer, to our stakeholders and, and to our employees.

Right.

What my responsibility to them isn't making sure the administration is, is polished itself.

I mean, yes, it's a big piece of it, don't get me wrong.

But it has to live within my org.

It's making sure that folks are getting what they need to be successful in their, in their role.

That things are resourced properly, that things are operating in a way that allows them to be successful as an individual and it's professional.

So if you find yourself.

I think it was John McMahon who is a multiple CRO guys, the guy who came up originally with Medic Med pick.

I have a lot of respect for him.

I think when he first became a leader he talked about the inbox and outbox and he was a great salesperson.

I think this was way back in the day, maybe a PTC if I'm not mistaken.

And he talked about the physical inbox now box, by the way, you know, papers are stacking up there was, this is not email.

This was, this is an inbox here.

People are stacking paper in there.

All day.

You read his book, the Qualified Sales Leader, or listen to his podcasts and stuff that he does with John Kaplan.

And he, he takes.

He would come in at the end of the day and take the inbox and just dump it into the garbage.

That's what he would do.

And he would just say, I'm not paid to respond to all this.

And if they came back a few times and he realized it was important that he would respond appropriately.

Now that's a little extreme.

And.

But the idea is not wrong, right?

Where, where you've got to prioritize things that need the most attention.

And there are other leaders that have said the same thing.

I mean, Jeff Bezos would talk about senior leaders like myself who are going to make a few decisions a day that are highly consequential.

We, we need you doing that versus making a thousands decisions a day.

We can find other ways of doing that.

So.

Yeah, and it's so good for leaders to hear that because you're in an environment and all technology leaders in this industry that is really geared towards being reactionary.

Cause there's so many changes, there's so many things happening.

The technology's changing.

You could just sit in your office and just react to email all day and become like a, like the top customer service leader.

Right?

Versus proactively thinking about your vision and what you want to create and reserving your leadership judgment.

Truly focus on those, man.

And that's a real talent.

And it's probably a habit more than anything that you gotta hone.

It sounds like you're making it work.

What's your party thought for our listeners today?

Adam,

the way you show up is visible to everybody in the organization, right?

So if you participate in something, we were just talking about it, you know, customers or a policy, the way that you show up in front of your employees, in front of your customers, in front of your investors, in front of your friends and your family.

Everybody's watching.

Okay?

So.

And you signed up for it as a leader.

That's what you signed up for.

So people say lead by example.

I think you lead with attitude and your behavior, right?

The way you're actually doing things, the decisions you make, the way you're communicating your actual belief in something as opposed to blindly buying into somebody else's way of doing it.

All of that is visible and will drive loyalty.

It will drive the results of the business.

And so don't forget that, like, you are constantly under review by those around you.

And it's what we decided to do as a leader.

I mean, it's, it's, it's our role.

All right, leaders, you know what to do.

Go show up.

Adam, thanks for joining us on Lead the Team, sir.

Thank you, Ben.

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