How To Cast A Collaborator, Not Hire An Employee

Steven Krein: Hi, this is Steven Krein. I'm here with my podcast partner, Dan Sullivan, for another great episode of the Free Zone Frontier Podcast. Hi, Dan.
 
Dan Sullivan: Hi, Steve.
 
Steven Krein: I thought the topic that we've outlined for today is fascinating, which is really a mindset shift. about thinking about hiring differently as entrepreneurs think about cost and other things that I think have been ingrained in the process of hiring and how to maybe think about the whole thing differently and a concept for your upcoming book.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, just a little background on this. I have someone I'm great friends with, Jeff Madoff, who lives not very far from you in New York City. Yeah, he's 10 blocks up. Yeah. And Jeff and I share some background. And one is we were both born in the 1940s in Ohio. And he was born in the city of Akron. And I was born in a small town and grew up on a farm about 90 miles from each other. And in the 40s, I was 44, and Jeff, I think, is 48, 49. I'm not sure of the date. I met him through Joe Polish, Genius Network, because Jeff was the person who interviewed the key speakers at Joe's major annual conference, and he would interview them. When I was the guest and he was interviewing me, that he was really, really a great interviewer. I mean, asks the kind of questions that nobody else asks and is really, really deeply interested in what it is that you're doing differently as an entrepreneur. And so we went through that and then we come to New York quite frequently. So I would always make a point of having breakfast with Jeff or for having dinner with, you know, and Jeff would do the same. I just found that he was someone that I had just a lot of interest in common. But two things started to develop. One of them was obviously entrepreneurism. And the other one was theater, because I had originally in my teens thought that that would be a good career for me. And I've got good theater skills. I've got artistic skills. I'm plausible on stage as an actor. I've done directing. I've done producing. So Jeff right now is in the very, very advanced stages of creating a musical play, a musical called Personality, which is the story of Lloyd Price, who is arguably the first crossover artist to put rock and roll on the map. And that happened in the early 1950s. So Jeff had done a documentary film on Lloyd. And then he says, you know, this would make a great musical. And all the music is written, of course. And these were top 10 list hits, a lot of them in the 1950s and 60s. And so he put together a play, and he told us about it early in the stages. And so the opportunity came up to be an early investor. And we've had three rounds, and Babs and I have invested in all three rounds. Started in New York, first presentation, then outside Philadelphia, West Philadelphia, Malvern. And then we just had a summer run at Chicago, Jeff did. And now the next one looks like it's going to be the UK, and that'll be the final step before it comes to Broadway. And it's gotten hit reviews, everything's like it. Jeff and I have a podcast that's called Anything and Everything, just to limit ourselves. And he just dropped a line. He says, you know, the problem with entrepreneurs is hiring. And a lot of entrepreneurs don't do it well. And even if they do it well, they don't like the activity. And he said, I think that it has to do with the mindset that they think they're hiring, when in my entrepreneurial company, and also obviously in theater, I see it as casting. You're not hiring someone, you're casting someone. And that's what triggered, and I said, Jeff, that's a book. That is a book. And so I just put together a little outline, showed it to some people. I've gotten uniform excitement about this idea, and I thought it would be a nice topic for us to discuss today.
 
Steven Krein: Well, Dan, my reaction when I first read it on the Impact Filter was what I think has been consistent for the last 25 years in Strategic Coach. I even remember the movie theater exercise. I remember the conversation about unique experiences in Coach too and so many of the things that you've used theater as a metaphor for, but everything has always been about the experience of your customers or your clients or your members or thinking through Front Stage/Back Stage. I love the idea of pulling it almost like a macro reframe of how it all comes together, and starting with casting versus hiring, I think, completes the picture. I don't think it's a new concept. I think you've just taken what is a couple decades of concepts that support this and put a little bow on it by calling it casting. I even remember from one of your prior books, the metaphor of Disney and talking about how Disneyland thinks of its team members as castmates and things like that. So I think there's something very powerful about coming back to this and almost recontextualizing, perhaps, everything about not just the hiring process as casting, but all the other concepts you've introduced over the years. The most impactful one that comes to mind is Front Stage/Back Stage. We use that metaphorically every day whenever we talk about something that shouldn't have been seen as that. That's too much Back Stage. Or can we improve the experience and focus on Front Stage? So it really goes together well. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: So when I look for a new book idea, you know what I'm frequent in my book writing process and activity. I've just crossed 50 since I started being an entrepreneur. I've written, or was part of a team that wrote 50 books. And the thing that really struck me is the shift in mind, because what's missing, I think, in a lot of hiring process, and you mentioned it just when we started the podcast, you said, entrepreneurs really have an attitude that what they're acquiring is a new cost. When they hire someone, they're taking on a new cost item on their balance sheet. And I think right off the bat, the attitude that I'm taking on a new cost kind of frames how the relationship is going to be.
 
Steven Krein: Not just the relationship, even the thinking about allocation of budget, about talking about the role is just completely different when you think about it as a cost versus an investment.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. So right off the bat, you know, when you just get the context of casting, not hiring, is this something that you would talk about with your team?
 
Steven Krein: Yeah. I mean, I think if you're trying to convince people to think about it differently is different than you just talking about it differently. The reason I said it was a nice bow with this idea of Front Stage/Back Stage is I think people understand or have come to quickly understand the metaphor without it being or sounding too cute, if you will. I think the idea of casting, if you just evolve it a smidge more, that means that it's a whole number of people working together, you all of a sudden break out of what I think is sometimes misunderstood or underappreciated, which is people are never going to work alone and they're never going to work in a silo. When you have a job and you describe it as a job and responsibilities, it's almost like you're describing their singular work. You're not describing the role of the entire cast.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, you're looking at them as an isolated individual.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah. I mean, I think it's a great mind shift right away to start talking about it differently.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And we have another tool, which it really got clear to me that it was theater related, and it's called the 4x4. And I'm going to rename it called 4x4 Casting. Actually, Gord Vickman, who's our podcast manager on today's session, all of our sessions, he responded to a, I'll use the word job offer, and we put it in an Impact Filter and we send it out to the agencies and we send it out to our team members, and actually I think it was a personal relationship that actually ended on the Impact Filter. And I just described that we're looking for a project manager for our entire podcast, everything related to putting out the podcast. And I do about 150 of them per year. And doing the detailed work of podcasts is very difficult for me. It's a very difficult thing. Doing the actual performance is very easy. Coming up with the idea is very easy. But all the follow-through and the structuring and logging in and putting them on the internet so that people can access them, that's not my role. And I described all of this in our Impact Filter. And so he responded. I think we had in final analysis after we screened a lot of people, we had three candidates. And when Gord came in, he was the only one that I actually talked to because one of the questions that people had had for the final candidates was, well, which of Dan's podcasts do you like most? And Gord was the only one who had ever listened to any of the podcasts, which was a nice screener for us. So I only got to meet Gord. But before Gord came in, I did another sheet. And it's called the 4x4, and it's four things. What attitude do I want to see in you as an individual that would please me? And what kind of results would I like you to see, just as a general statement? And then this is how you can be a hero to me in the first six months. And this is how you can drive me crazy so that no matter how good you are, I'll fire you because you drive me crazy. He came in, he says, I sort of figured that I'd probably get the role. And he says, so I just looked at your Impact Filter and I looked at your 4x4. And I want to tell you, there's six or seven things, that maybe it was 10 things, I'm going to get this done in the first six months, which he actually got done in the first three months. And it's been clear sailing ever since then, because I told him exactly what the project was, exactly what the role was. I gave him a complete overview of everything and how important it was to us. And then also I said, now, for you to be really great and for me to be happy with what you're doing, this is how you have to relate to me.
 
Steven Krein: So by using the 4x4 framework of describing the role within the context of your teamwork is a big shift for, I think, a lot of people, which is not just to talk about it again as an isolated job, but as a role that is going to require, almost as a non-negotiable, teamwork that they need to understand before they join. And I'm also thinking about this as somewhat useful for recasting people as well. And I want to say recasting, meaning it's not just for new cast members, it's for existing cast members and an opportunity to re-acclimate everybody to the framework so that when you bring somebody new, they can easily swing into it being a new cast member. Because oftentimes your current team doesn't even think of themselves as a cast.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. The thing, you know, if you were thinking about recasting people, it's not just about them. It's about the play that the company is putting on. I want to give you a big picture of what we're about in the world as a company and who it is that we're creating value for. And I think in most companies, that's for management. Management has that type of conversation. In our company, the receptionist has that type of conversation.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah. You're introducing, I think, a conversation that will cause, I think, a lot of clarifying questions to be asked by people. I do think for a Quick Start, it's a great shift for a Fact Finder. It might create a whole bunch of questions that in a good way are going to have to be answered.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I mean, we've done a lot with it, and you mentioned several of our tools, but how have you gone about this? Because it strikes me, I've known you for more than 25 years, and it strikes me that you've always been very, very performance-minded, you know, from the standpoint using it as a theater performance. You're always very, very attuned. and very, very alert about just what's the impact that we're having. And in your case, you got two big audiences. You got a funding audience and you got a participating entrepreneurial audience. And it really struck me that you've always been very alert about this.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah, I mean, I think the Front Stage/Back Stage metaphor is probably the one that has a daily recurring relevance to what we do. We put on virtual workshops, we put on office hour events, we have showcases, we do expert master classes. We do a lot of things that I think force us to continually use the Front Stage/Back Stage metaphor for engaging with our large community and the question of does this belong Back Stage or Front Stage or something that you wish wasn't shown Back Stage which you don't want shown Front Stage or stuff that you want to improve for the Front Stage I think is a regular continual improvement of our processes. I think the idea of casting, it's another word for teamwork. It's another word for collaboration. But I think the idea is that I think we're living in a world now where you just can't work alone anymore in an organization. So I think this could be very helpful in, and I'm thinking about our funder community, of organizations that are not necessarily used to this kind of collaboration, where you could talk about and introduce them to your team in a way that illustrates a little bit more of this concept by talking about how much it's a part of the fabric of your company or our culture, collaboration, teamwork. To me, it's just another skin on part of what I think we're doing anyway, but it's talking about how we work together as a team, not just what we're producing, but how we're working together.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. One of the central concepts in Strategic Coach is Unique Ability and then Unique Ability Teamwork. OK, so periodically I'll be in a setting where one of our team members introduces me as his boss or her boss. And I don't say anything. I always hate that, you know, I don't say anything in the moment, but afterwards I'll say, you know, that may be how you're looking at me, but that's not how I'm looking at me. I said, I've got a particular Unique Ability, falls into basically three areas. I'm a good coach. I'm good at coming up with new thinking tools, and I'm good at communicating through books and podcasts. And I said, and that's what I focus on. And if you followed me around for 90 days, 95% of my time was focused on those three areas. So I just see myself as a team member that has this particular Unique Ability, and I'm surrounded by other people who have different Unique Abilities, such that if I didn't have their teamwork, anything that I do wouldn't make any difference.
 
Steven Krein: So how might that show itself in one of your engagements with your team members or your A-team member?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, first of all, that I communicate with the tools.
 
Steven Krein: You speak tool language.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I speak the language. So I never ask anybody to get engaged with me in any project I'm doing unless they receive a document like the Fast Filter. And I say, I got an idea. This is the best result for the idea. This is the worst result. And if the idea works, these are the five success criteria. These are the boxes you check off if it's done right. And they get that before we have the meeting. And then I say, what's your response to what I put down there? And right off the bat, they come in, they say, I'm totally bought in to the best result. And I see some other things that could be worse results. And I've got some questions about the success criteria. But they walk in the room, it’s not me as a superior, giving them, giving them a job as an inferior. I'm simply saying I'm involved in a project and I'm sending this to you because I think you got some unique skills that are really crucial to my being able to pull this off. And I just want to know if you're interested.
 
Steven Krein: You know what, Dan, as you were just describing that, and I'm looking and thinking about what you've written up in this Impact Filter about the idea, I think the biggest thing is not having it just be about hiring, but it's all about even your existing team as well. We are not a bunch of individuals working in our own things, that we are a team, we're a cast of people. And I think the theater metaphor is the easiest way for people to understand that regardless of what they're doing on their own, it really doesn't matter. It's all about how we're all producing something as a team. Yeah. And so I think it's about the word hiring is maybe it feels a little only on the front end of new hires. And I feel like this could be a great tool for even the existing team and optimizing the existing team to work better together. There's an interesting thing about this being useful, both at the beginning stages of engaging with somebody, you mentioned Gord as an example, but I think the ensuing teamwork that's required on a regular basis needs a reframing as well.
 
Dan Sullivan: It was very interesting going back to my relationship with Jeff Madoff because I've been a constantly talking partner to him as he's developed the play at all stages. And I remember when we did our workshops, it's right on the west side, you know, just off Times Square. I think the theater was between 6th and 7th Street. But it was at the 50th Street level in New York on the west side. And a small theater, and that's just done for what are called workshops. And this is the first time that a play in the making has gotten everybody there. All the actors are there, all the crew is there, the backstage crew, the musicians are there. They're not in costume, but they know their scripts. And you put on two performances and you're given by the Union rules in New York, you're given 72 hours to have two performances, and this is restricted to members of the media and potential investors being the audience, okay? So the story of Lloyd Price with Personality is, the first part of the play shows Lloyd as a young boy, you know, 16, 17 years old, and the second part is really about him as an adult. And then the two actors who play the main character have to really sync because you're asking the audience to make the jump that this person here is the same person who's older. And that's part of theater is to get the audience to make the jump in their mind, you know, and the actors looked differently. They didn't look like they were related. But the two of them did a really great job of doing the transition. That was the first thing, and that brought in investment money, and it's a start-up. You know, it's basically a theater start-up. Works just like any entrepreneurial start-up. Then they got an offer from a theater, a community theater, west of Philadelphia in Malvern. And they said, here's what we'll do is you won't get paid for this, but what we'll do is we'll create all the costumes for you, we'll create all the scenery for you, and we'll do a two-week run. And we went to Malvern. And we saw it twice. And what had happened, because actors have to be about the business of having jobs, and there was a complete jump of the two actors from the young Lloyd Price to the older young Price. And the older guy was amazing. I mean, he was just unbelievable talented, just totally got what the story was about, just totally got the character. And the young one was very talented. He was a really good actor. He was a really good singer. And he was a really good dancer, because you have to do all three in a musical. And he didn't get what his connection was to the play, and he didn't get his connection, what his relationship was with the older version of himself. And you couldn't have faulted him on talent, but you could really fault him in not fitting in.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah. That's why the word casting is an immediate jolt to how I think a lot of people think about themselves in jobs and companies. Yeah. All right. It's not about your individual role. It's not about your individual representation of what it is. It's about the context of everything else that's happening around you. Yeah. And that example you just gave about his limiting view of it affected his performance.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. So much so that when they made the jump to Chicago, which is now a major theater, you know, 12-week run, the equivalent of Broadway in New York—nothing's the equivalent of Broadway in New York, but the theater district, big theaters, and this was a very prominent theater—that actor didn't make the jump. They said, no, we need a new actor. And the one they got in was, he had all the qualities that the other ones were missing regarding teamwork and understanding his role. The main actor just jumped to another level. And I was talking to Jeff about the lead actor. And he said, he's the glue that holds the whole play together. He goes around, talks to everybody else. He talks to them, you know, about how their teamwork on stage and everything. So he's just operating on a totally different level.
 
Steven Krein: To put a little bow on this, I think the Free Zone community, I think, constantly thinks about collaborations. And I think that one of my learnings about educating my team and educating collaborators on what it means to be good collaborating partners, not just inside the company, but with other organizations, I think this also could be extrapolated out to casting among collaborators. Every collaborator has a different role to play in the end result everyone's trying to get achieved. And for us, I'll use the example of, you know, collaboration around Moonshot between founders and funders and the important roles that are being played by different partners and collaborators and founders and funders. And so I think this also extrapolates out, not to borrow it for the broader Free Zone conversation, but I think it does have a relevant role in external collaborations as well.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, it's kind of funny. I had a podcast with Peter Diamandis. He didn't bring up this subject directly, but when I think about the conversation, he said the profound change that companies and corporations are having to go through right now in the technology world, because most corporations and most companies don't have any entertainment value. Yeah, I mean, it's the difference between Microsoft and Apple. Apple has always been pure theater. The founders of Microsoft, you knew they were smart, but they weren't entertaining. They weren't interesting. And Steve Jobs would cast these huge visions of the future. When they were bringing out something new, the technology world worldwide would stop, the investment world worldwide would stop. And he'd just wander out on stage, it was a one-man act with a massive amount of backstage to it, and he says, I don't know if any of you knew that I got fired from Apple. And I was out there for two or three years. One of the things is I got really, really interested in music. And I hear a song I liked, and I try to go to the store and buy it. And bummer, in order to buy the one song I want, I had to buy 10 or 11 other songs on the same album. And he says, I didn't want to hear the other songs, I just wanted to hear this song. And then he said, and then I started looking into how the records are made, and I found out that the musicians only, gee, on a dollar sale, they make maybe five cents. And it's their creativity that's there, you know. And then he says, I was looking at the technology world, and these MP3 players were created. And then I was looking at the fact that Napster was actually putting songs, just individual songs, up on the internet. The only problem was they were stealing them, and there was no business model there, but they had gotten the idea. And then I noticed that one of the real problems, there wasn't a really good platform. So I said, we have a really good MP3 player called iPod, and the internet exists, and we've got a really good platform. So here's what I'm thinking about. We're just going to invite all the artists in the world just to put their music as singles. They can put it up as albums. They can put their complete collection, but you'll be able to just pay a buck for a song, and we'll give them the majority of the money. And what do you think about that model? And then he says, oh, by the way, it's available the moment I finish my talk here. You can buy it. And it's just pure theater, you know, just pure theater. And you can see the difference because Tim Cook, who's done wonders with Apple since Steve Jobs died, but he doesn't have that theater quality.
 
Steven Krein: No, but I think that benchmark that you talk about Steve Jobs had, I think, has created, especially for entrepreneurs, a way to think about how important the Front Stage opening of the box is and the presentation is and the whole experience is. And I think that translates really well with this idea of casting and casting for your team and thinking about from hiring to maximizing your existing team and getting everybody to work better together. I want to be mindful of time and think about what's your biggest insight? You've taken this obviously into an idea for the book with Jeff, but what's your thinking from having this conversation today?
 
Dan Sullivan: I think my biggest takeaway from it is that you do yourself no harm as an entrepreneurial company of thinking yourself as a theater company. And one of the things is it'll get you really interested in theater to see how theater actually works. Probably I'll increase a lot of entrepreneurs going to theater, you know. It could be the local church group, that's theater. It doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be Broadway. But the other thing is to adapt some of the breakout chapters that I've already thought of, that it's you're casting for roles, you're not hiring for jobs, but then one of the deciders on your part isn't going to be, do they have the qualifications? Do they test really well on all the technical skills? But is this a sort of individual who's going to really fit in with the existing team? And will this person's addition to the existing team actually improve the team? Yeah. And I think that's a totally different framework for entrepreneurs, period.
 
Steven Krein: It is. It's a simplifier, quite frankly, of, I think, a very complex issue of running a company, which is how does everybody work together? And sometimes, many times, it's not about the individual capabilities. It's about the teamwork and how well or not the team works together and as a cast. So I think it's great, Dan. It's one of the simplifiers. Sometimes your tools are multipliers. This one's a simplifier so that you can multiply. Yep.
 
Dan Sullivan: Before you leave, I've got one question that we're going to produce this book. I mean, I've got all the evidence I need. Plus the publisher wants us to produce a fourth book as the first three are selling 5 to 7,000 books a week right now. So amazing. They're great books. Yeah. So I know this is going to be a book, but you have 500 plus start-up entrepreneurs. If the book is published, will you buy them?
 
Steven Krein: First of all, is there going to be a short book for this too?
 
Dan Sullivan: I think that's what we may do first is just run it through the quarterly process. So we have sort of the bones and the muscles that we add enormous amount. And Jeff brings all this because he's got decades of theater stories and theater experience, you know, and I've got decades of entrepreneurial experience where we can do it so we can combine these two worlds. My feeling is since we've got a really good process for just developing a short book-
 
Steven Krein: Yeah, I think it should be a short book. It would be interesting about having it as a short book, which I always think is for the entrepreneurs who just like the bottom line. What's interesting is I gave some people the 10x Is Easier Than 2x, the big book. And then I had the 10x Mind Expander, which is really the short book, you know, lead up for that. And what's interesting is I've heard back from a number of people that the short book delivers the framework, but the title and the cover of the second book is the answer to the whole thing. So their companions is where I was going with it, which is I think the short book is the great intro and is the mindset shift and the bigger book really doubles down and triples down on it. So I think I would love to distribute the first book and then the second book, but I think the idea of helping people reframe. But I don't want to forget that I like the idea of us being the fourth in the series, because I think the idea of it supporting 10x and supporting Gap and the Gain and supporting the overall thinking of the trio really is what will make a big difference.
 
Dan Sullivan: Good. Thank you.
 
Steven Krein: Take care.
 
Dan Sullivan: Thanks, Steve.