When I first started, you could as a leader, lead by what I call line of sight. You can sort of keep track of everything that’s going on, and that will take you to a certain point in your organizational growth. You don’t necessarily have to empower the team, and you can have a successful small business, but eventually it will start to constrain your growth, because you can only see so far as a leader.

This podcast is brought to you by Fast Slow Motion, a team of expert consultants that have helped hundreds and growing businesses build scalable systems on the HubSpot and Salesforce platforms. To learn more, visit fastslowmotion.com. Welcome to the Fast Slow Motion podcast, where we teach you how to build a business you love while enjoying your life. In our podcast, we talk key learnings, cheat codes, hacks and principles that have served us on our journey in the hopes that they serve you as well.

I’m your host, Sam Donaghy, and today I’m joined by Jeff White, FSM’s Chief Delivery Officer. Jeff, it’s great to see you, and thanks so much for joining us. Hey, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here. Absolutely. So, Jeff, you actually play a rather critical role here at Fast Slow Motion. You lead all of our delivery teams, right?

So what that means is they all report up to you, and they report up to you in a hierarchy of project leaders and client directors. Right, so you’re essentially a leader of leaders. And that’s why I’m really looking forward to talking with you today. Things like, you know, how to promote a culture of leadership through all layers of an organization, as well as something we think is a pretty critical skill for business leaders to master, right?

If they want to be able to scale. And it’s something that you call second order leadership. But before we dive into that, I’d love to hear more about your role here at Fast Slow Motion. So can you tell us a little bit more about what you do here? My role as the Chief Delivery Officer for Fast Slow Motion. And I’m responsible, really, for ensuring our client’s success.

So I do work with the client directors and project leaders and the rest of the team to ensure that we deliver an awesome client experience. And I’m aware that you attended a graduate school for leadership as well. So you’ve always had an interest in leadership in some form or another. There was a time there where I thought maybe I should be a pastor.

What I found in exploring that calling was that as I went, this graduate school for leadership and what I found as I was around other pastors, it was clear that that was not my calling. I get nervous speaking in front of people, and just some of the the rigor required to be a pastor didn’t align with who I am.

And there was an opportunity there to switch degree programs and to a master’s of Christian leadership, where we spent time studying leadership principles and really giving a lot of depth to ideas around leadership. And that did closely align with my personal calling. And even though I didn’t know at the time, it has served me well over the years.

Could you talk to me about some of the challenges that you personally faced in your time as a leader? Two things come to mind as challenges. The first is I’m a bit of a perfectionist. This affects me not only as a leader, but also as an individual. You know, as an individual contributor. I want things to be perfect and that can really slow me down.

Maybe sometimes to a debilitating degree. I can remember as a project leader, I might be slow to advance the change for a client because I couldn’t get comfortable enough. I wanted it to be perfect and that perfection is really not achievable. It’s something I’ve had to really focus on. Sometimes done is better than perfect. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good.

And so I’ve had to really learn to identify when I’m holding things up, when I’m the bottleneck because of those perfectionist tendencies. And then back into what’s an acceptable level of analysis that needs to be done before we make a decision? Or how do we get this across the finish line, even if it’s not perfect, knowing we can always come back and work on it again.

So that’s been something personally that’s just shown up over and over in my own journey that I have to constantly pay attention to where I’m creating the bottleneck for whatever project. There are also some other challenges I’ve had, for example, one that comes to mind and I think this is this one’s true for a lot of leaders, is really learning to be direct with team members primarily internally.

You know, we were in the services world implementing CRM solutions. It’s true. There’s while we have to be direct with our clients, but that’s a challenge. I want to be nice. I’m a little more passive in those scenarios. I’ve had to really be intentional about developing that skill and having the important conversations that need to happen when they need to happen.

And I’ve really learned that that, to be clear, is to be kind. And that connecting those two concepts really creates a lot of freedom for me personally and allows me to have conversations and be more clear with team members what the expectations are, the outcomes we’re looking for. It’s been a growth area for me as well. I truly love that.

Jeff. Okay, so Jeff, you know, you mentioned how Fast Slow Motion helps businesses build great systems and processes. And we talk about that, you know, a lot on this podcast because we know how critical it is for success. But systems and processes are all about more than technology, right. You know what we tend to hear from business owners and entrepreneurs who are in the trenches of trying to build great businesses.

Is that one of their biggest struggles is how to grow from a small business where you know you’re wearing all the hats, to one where they can scale up people in teams to take on those responsibilities, but still deliver a great product or service. So the question I have is, you know, where should they even start? I would say first that it’s very hard to grow and scale a business.

So if you’re feeling challenged, if you’re feeling overwhelmed, that’s a very normal feeling. And sometimes as a business leader that’s trying to grow in scale in business. Hearing that it’s normal, for it to be hard is really helpful. So I just want to encourage you, if that’s your situation, it is normal. It is. It is a hard challenge.

I would back up and just say everything rises and falls on leadership. That’s a quote from John Maxwell. It really captures the importance that a leader plays in any endeavor they’re in. And one way that that really plays itself out tactically is that your team will do twice what you do wrong, and half of what you do right.

You, as the leader, set the standard for what’s acceptable in the organization. So as you start to grow and scale and you think about – how do I implement systems and processes as a leader, you own the responsibility of being a model of how to leverage those systems and processes. It’s incongruent to put in place a process. And then as a leader, exempt yourself from the process, you know, it erodes trust, and it communicates that the process doesn’t actually have to be followed.

As you think about, “How am I going to grow and scale the business?” Starting with yourself as the leader and recognizing that the team is really looking to you to understand what is acceptable in this company, in this organization, as the standard. And then a concept we’ve adopted here at Fast Slow Motion is that everyone is a leader. And really talking to your team about the contribution that they make to the overall mission.

So we communicate frequently about our overall mission to be a blessing to business leaders as they grow and scale their business and really want the team to feel empowered to achieve that mission as they work with the clients, even if they don’t have responsibilities for direct reports or other team members, they not only are responsible for their individual work quality, but also the attitude they bring and share with the other team members, their encouragement, etc. and the same when they are working with clients and I encourage them that they bring to our clients as well.

So what that means is across the organization, empowering the team is critical to your long term success. So with this idea in mind, you know Fast Slow Motion where everyone is a leader, how does that mentality help a company scale? I think that’s a helpful question to explore a little bit, Sam. When I started at Fast Motion, there were 8 or 9 team members who were now over 100 team members.

And so seeing that growth and that scale, it would have been very challenging if the team wasn’t empowered. And so when I first started, you could, as a leader, lead by what I call line of sight. You can sort of keep track of everything that’s going on, and that will take you to a certain point in your organizational growth.

You don’t necessarily have to empower the team, and you can have a successful small business, but eventually it will start to constrain your growth because you can only see so far as a leader. So from the beginning, if you’ve been intentional, as you grow in scale, the team now can make decisions rather autonomously with checks and balances for the benefit of the whole company.

And that not only creates a win for the company, it also creates a win for the team member and the client. And it has allowed us to grow and scale over the years. And it really comes down to our team’s ability to lead themselves and our clients. And I’m kind of thinking of like the leader who might struggle to let go in that scenario, right?

You want to get to the point where you’re not working in the business, you’re working on the business, right? As a CEO or as a leader. Does it take a certain attitude or sort of mindset to be able to let go and empower your team? I think it does, and I think it happens over time, or – it’s a skill you can develop is a better way to say that – I see my job as supporting the team.

So I want to ensure our team has everything they need to be successful in the endeavor of delivering an awesome client experience. So I really focus on supporting the team. It can be challenging because what happens is the team member may make a different decision than what I would make in any given scenario. And that can be very challenging as a leader because you have to really ask yourself, number one is that okay?

And it requires that I check my ego at the door. What I know is that our team wants the best for both FSM and our clients, and I have to trust that they are more knowledgeable about the scenario and the situation than I am. And so sometimes their decisions are different than what I would make in the same situation.

But I think that’s okay. And I think that we are in a better place because that is happening. It means that Fast Slow Motion is not limited to me or John or anyone to individual capacity because as a team we’re significantly stronger. Love that. Yeah, I get the sense the team grows into a much more well-rounded unit because of the freedom that they get to do that.

Jeff, I suppose it’s one thing to talk about encouraging leadership, as you mention here, empowering the team, but it’s another thing to depend on the people that report to you to act as leaders and still deliver that great outcome. How do you make sure those things are happening without having to be involved in the day to day tasks?

You know, stepping away from that bottleneck, as you mentioned. There are a few ways to make sure that the right things are happening. The first thing that comes to mind is the way our incentive plan is structured, at Fast Slow Motion really aligns everyone’s incentives alongside the business. We really want our team to think like business owners, you know, try to structure the incentive plan in every role to align that thought process so that that’s one.

Because that idea that we do want the team to think like a business owner is ingrained in how we operate day to day at Fast Slow Motion. We work really hard to empower the team member that’s closest to the client or the vendor or the partner to make the decisions related to their area of responsibility. We try not to hold that or centralize that decision making.

And that idea is built into our culture. The third way we ensure that is what I call coaching that can summarize quite a bit of activity. We conduct one-on-ones with all of our team members and their leader every month. So coaching happens there. But that meeting is really intended as a check in and we get a direct feedback near real time shortly after an interaction.

We run reports in our system to ensure we’re responding at the right frequency. So we audit what’s going on. It’s not an oversight. It’s a support type of coaching where we want our team to be successful. For them to be successful. They need coaching. I need coaching and I still get coaching. But that idea that we all need coaching and accountability permeates the organization.

We have systems and processes to ensure it’s happening. So, Jeff, can you actually talk us through what exactly second order leadership is? Second order leadership is the idea that we are not focused on just achieving the outcome, as leaders were responsible for that. We do have to ensure the business objectives are achieved. The things that as a business, we’re set out to do, the products we provide are high quality.

The services meet the client’s needs. We have to achieve those business objectives and outcomes. But as a leader, we have the opportunity and it is an opportunity. It’s not a requirement, but it’s an opportunity to ask as we achieve those outcomes. How do we leverage the process of achievement to ensure that the team that we have entrusted to us also experienced growth in their careers and their skills and their opportunity, so that at the end we not only have the outcome, but we have a team that’s grown by way of achieving that outcome.

Let me ask you this, Jeff, how far down does the concept of second order leadership actually work in an organization? Is it just for the people who report directly to you, or can it work all the way through an organization that has multiple layers of management? It can work all the way through the organization. I would say it’s modeled by the leader.

So the team, like I said, they will do what they see you doing and you will set the standard. So looking for those key opportunities, there’s a lot of literature out there in the productivity space on how to delegate tasks. How to be more efficient. And those things are extremely valuable. There’s Michael Hyatt’s five levels of delegation.

Rory Jaden’s procrastinating on purpose. There’s a lot of content about how to do more, efficiently or with better focus. And that’s really helpful. But I think the place that those fall short is they tend to focus on the benefits to the leader. If I delegate tasks as a leader or projects, even then that means as a leader I can do more.

And that’s certainly true. Like I said, we have to ensure we achieve the business outcomes. But I do also have the opportunity to say, okay, in setting out these projects or tasks, what are the needs of my team? Where are they in their skill sets and careers, and how can they most contribute? How do they get the most out of doing the work that the business has to get done to get where it needs to go?

So by modeling that concept or that set of questions about what are the second order consequences or opportunities to achieve growth for the team, the team starts to take that on and also model and say start to think, okay, well, what work am I doing that someone else can or will be doing? So there is the efficiency thing as a leader.

But there’s also the question of okay, as I bring other people in to this task or this objective that I’m trying to accomplish, how do I do it in such a way that they experience success and growth of their own lives and career? So lose the focus from solely the leader and solely the outcome to the team.

That’s involved and the growth that they’re going to experience. So it’s kind of like that domino effect. Yes. By thinking this way, you ultimately end up not only with outcomes, you know, the project you are trying to accomplish, but also with the team that now has the skill to do even more so that as the business grows and scales, you’re not only getting the mark on your outcomes, but you’re building a team that can consistently hit the marks.

So it’s leadership, but it’s scaling leadership throughout the whole business, right? It’s permeating through the whole business. As you scale up. Yes. It’s so interesting. And so can you give me an example of what a healthy second order leadership would look like? Yes. We work, for example, with a lot of clients that are implementing our software. You know, they’re doing a CRM implementation project, and an effective leader is going to look at that project and say, okay, as a business, we need to implement systems and processes to support our growth, whatever tool so that that you’re implementing and they’re going to go through the evaluation process, go through the implementation process, post-launch, support, enhancements.

They’re going to go through the entire process and achieve that outcome for the business. And likely they won’t be the only one involved. They’ll involve key stakeholders depending on the size of the company, it could be various stakeholders, but they’ll likely bring in other team members. And so second order leadership asks that question in the software implementation project.

How am I going to empower the team in a way that matches where they’re at in their level of growth, their skills and ability? That growth exists at the edge of our comfort zone. So how am I going to empower the team? And sometimes that may mean allowing a junior team member simply to give input and be a part of that project.

Seeing the project from front to back may be the experience that that team member needs. It may also be, you know, the other end of the spectrum is allowing a team member to run the project front to back. And what I’m going to do as the leader, how do I set them up for success? Again, we’ve got to have that out and we got to get to success.

How do I set them up for success? This can actually be harder than doing it ourselves. So I may need to set up individual weekly sessions where me and this team member sit down and talk about the project and what’s going on. So I didn’t abdicate my responsibility. I’m not dumping a project on somebody, but I’m setting them up for success with intention.

So now when we get to the end of the project, they not only achieve success, the business hasn’t only achieved success, but they’ve grown as part of the process. Now, as a business, we face another challenge, which we will. This team member can take over some of that leadership responsibility of the next challenge and maybe bring another team member alongside them.

And the model self perpetuates. I love that. Like you said, it can be harder initially, but in the long run it’s going to benefit you by making that choice, that decision earlier on. What’s the opposite end of the scale? What does it look like when a business doesn’t do second order leadership very well? That’s a little more challenging to unpack, because I do think it’s possible for a business to be successful and not be intentional with the leadership.

So it is possible to have a successful business that doesn’t have this intentionality behind growing the team. If I think through how that might show up in a business, some things that come to mind would be the way I like to think about it. Is relying on being lucky instead of good. So you’re counting on the hero model, an individual contributor or a team lead, and that software implementation, project or example just happening to make all the right decisions and get to the outcome for the business.

And that does happen. There are a lot of high performing individuals out there, and they make an impact on the businesses they work in. And so it is possible to achieve outcomes. The other thing that I think happens is the culture starts to adopt this idea that the leader has to make all the decisions or is the primary decision maker.

So even if they’re not making the decisions, the team’s asking, well, what would the leader want me to do? Or I heard the leader say this two years ago in this scenario, and they’ll quote it to your other team members. Well, you know, the leader said X. And so the leader becomes the bottleneck in that situation because the team doesn’t feel empowered.

Again, you can still have success. You can still grow. What I think ultimately, though, that that’s sad for me as somebody that cares a lot about, like I said, helping people is that in those organizations and cultures, the opportunity for the team, the team members, the individuals to grow has been missed or has been left to chance. Instead of having intentionality, they’ve left it to chance.

And it doesn’t have to be that way. So, Jeff, was it hard for you to let go of some responsibilities in order to give your team opportunities to grow? I work with an awesome team at Fast Slow Motion. It should be super easy, but because I’m a perfectionist, it’s very hard. And I think like a lot of leaders, regardless of the size of the team or where your company’s growth stage is, that we only do so under duress.

So you get to a point where you’re overwhelmed or you can’t work anymore. You can’t work another night later, or on the weekend you get to a place where you’re tapped out and then you say, something’s got to change. And I’ve had to get to that point several times in my career before I say, okay, well, what could change?

And I look around and there’s usually something that I’m doing that someone else or a team of people either can or should be doing. I’ve actually held on to too long. For example, there was a time in the growth of our company where I was reviewing almost all the contracts that went out. That worked for a time.

It was the right decision when we put that process in place. But at some point it became the wrong approach. I had to recognize that. And it was a slower journey than it should have been. So we put in place a different process where there’s a team of people that reviews those contracts as they go out, and we have a process to manage the system to support it.

It’s very scalable as we grow in scale. We might not have to change that aspect of how we do, reviews. But that’s just one example where it took me getting to that point of duress before I stepped back. But when I stepped back, it wasn’t just, man, I gotta just dump this on somebody. I’m too overwhelmed.

It was how do we put in place a scalable system that not only gets that outcome down, but also lets other people that are actually better at doing that work closer to the details of the contract, do that work and contribute and grow from it. So, Jeff, we talked about systems and processes earlier. What systems and processes do you need in order to implement and really maintain second order leadership?

I think largely it’s a level of intentionality on the part of the leader. For example, they may see an underperforming team member that may or may not report to them, and the initial reaction may be to get in and solve the problem. But a second order leader is going to stop and think about it a little bit and say, okay, how do I not only address the performance, but empower their manager or a leader to skill up in addressing an underperforming team member?

So it’s an actual opportunity for the company. So it is definitely a state of mind. If I had to define a system or process around it. I think the first is to define that first order outcome. What is the actual objective you’re trying to achieve? You have to be clear where you’re going in order to get there.

And then the next question would be to stop and consider, how do I get there in a way that maximizes team growth? So firstly, be clear about where you’re going. Second, have some intentionality about how you’re going to get there. And then as leaders, there’s a whole lot of content in the world on this. But we have to communicate the plan so totally in the first two steps, being clear about where we’re going, how we’re going to get there, and then making sure that everybody that’s involved has a clear understanding about where we’re going and the plan to get there.

And then I think what’s key is to figure out how we are going to audit the performance. Is that going to be, for example, a software implementation project? You don’t want to wait until the end to find out you’re going to miss the mark. What are the checks you can put in place along the way to ensure it’s progressing like it should, or if it’s something that happens consistently in the business, having a check or an audit to ensure that the team is performing like they should.

So looking for ways to audit. And if we circle back a little bit to that idea of coaching, we don’t want to audit in a way that demoralizes the team and feels like big brothers always watch them. We really want them to feel supported and have access to whatever tooling or checks we put in place so they can honor themselves and really ensure that they’re doing the work to the best of their ability.

Because we all make mistakes. So that coaching is really important. Jeff, what advice do you have for a business owner who’s currently dealing with, you know, some form of dysfunction or a lack of leadership throughout their organization? How can they get their business back into a healthy place? So there’s a lot of things that could be dysfunctional in a business.

So there’s a wide spectrum of things that they need to do. So we’ll focus on maybe just a few things that come to mind. The first is to consider going back and listening to episode five, where Martha, one of our project leaders, talks about vulnerability based trust and really getting at the heart. She gives some very practical exercises you could do as a leader to create a more trusting environment, and that can serve as a foundation for getting healthy.

Another step you can take as a leader that’s really practical is to ask yourself this question. What failure of leadership on my part has led to this outcome? It’s very easy to blame poor performance on external factors, or to blame another faulty culture on an internal team member who’s toxic. It’s very easy as a leader to give our agency away.

And I think the thing I love about this question is that it makes it our responsibility as a leader. So what failure on leadership on my part has led to this outcome. And by identifying that failure. It allows us as a leader to go address it. As long as it’s somebody else’s fault or responsibility or the market was down or whatever happened, as long as it was somebody else’s responsibility, there’s nothing to address but that unhealthy ness or that dysfunction.

There are always places. As a leader, we can lean on. And so asking that question really gives you your agency back. And it can be a difficult question to answer. It can be very challenging but can produce a healthy outcome. So first, starting with the vulnerability based trust Foundation in your organization thinking through as a leader, how am I contributing to the situation we’re in?

And then also talk to someone. And I know that sounds overly simplistic, but simply talking it through with somebody that’s not as heavily invested in the outcome can often bring a level of clarity and put an issue or dysfunction or problem into perspective. So there’s there’s peer groups you can join. You can simply call a friend or a colleague.

Finding someone to share the challenge with can be extremely fruitful. Even though it’s sort of simple, as leaders we tend to isolate ourselves and we think, oh, nobody else is experiencing this type of performance challenge, or everybody else’s business seems to be growing, and mine’s mine’s on a decline for the past 12 months or whatever. The challenges we tend to think we’re the only ones.

And as soon as we start to talk to someone, we see, not only are we not the only one, but usually there’s a very clear next step we need to take. And by talking to someone, it really unlocks that for us. Jeff, thank you so much for being here today on the episode, If thoroughly enjoyed hearing from you.

You’ve dropped so many nuggets that I’m sure everybody listening will find value in. And Jeff, you know, we always love to wrap up each episode with a quote that really encompasses what we’ve been discussing in the episode. So do you have a quote on leadership that you’d like to share with us? Yes. Grow your people. When I was in school for leadership, the main professor, we had Doctor Rick ready to give him credit for this.

He really would end the classes summarizing. Grow your people. And again, I thought it was overly simplistic when I first heard it because we were studying leadership theory and reading all the books you would expect, but it really comes back to grow your people. Second order of leadership is really about growing your people. That’s what I’d leave you with.

That’s it for today’s episode. Thanks again, Jeff, for joining us. For our listeners. We hope that the concept of second order leadership will be valuable to you as you grow your business, because it’s been a critical part of our success here at Fast Slow Motion. Remember to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast platform, or you can find archived episodes at fastslowmotion.com/podcast.