Everyone has Agency! Feat. Katie Schroeder

If You’re Unwilling to Learn Nobody Can Help You: The Truth About Agency and Cultural Fits

Katie is staring at Jason from the other end of the truck because he just started recording. Is she okay if he keeps going? Yeah, but he didn’t even tell her a topic this time. Okay, it’s about agency. And she has her agency to decide if she wants to keep doing this podcast.

They’re going to talk about agency. Now these two topics have been on Jason’s mind. These podcast topics get filtered. They’re not random. The one they just did before this one, talking about feedback, was a topic that Jason personally desperately needed, which is helping him on his lean journey and everything he’s learning.

This one tonight is specifically Jason getting some advice from Katie when it comes to him internalizing the failures of others and the concept that everyone has their agency. Jason tells this story quite frequently that Frenchie, Katie’s uncle, told where grandpa was watching a horse race and yelling at the jockey and just getting after him and railing on him and stupid, cuss word, cuss word. Frenchie was like “The horse has something to do with it too, right? It’s not just the jockey’s fault.” That story has always stuck with Jason.

Agency, it’s a key term. Maybe that’s too much of a churchy religious term, but Jason would like to talk about what it is because he read a quote the other day. He thinks this is from Zig Ziglar. The quote basically goes: if you are unwilling to learn, nobody can help you. But if you’re willing to study and put in the work kind of generally, then nobody can stop you. The topic has been on his mind and he wants to talk about it today.

The Ability to Act and Choose

Katie’s looked it up. She put it on the Google there. It’s just a thing or person that acts to produce a particular result. Just the ability to act. The ability to act and produce results. And choose. Here’s the reason that it has bearing. Jason’s a teacher. That’s it. He’s not a director. He’s not really even a business owner. He’s not anything. He’s a teacher. He creates content. He distills content down. It bothers him when people don’t respond.

He’ll tell you why. Because at the end of the day, one of their core values is that they’re results driven as a company. They have human beings. Human beings do all of the things that they do. It is their job at Elevate to get as many people as possible to actually respond to training and to want something better so that they will perform at higher levels so that the company, team, or organization, or family, or whatever, will achieve higher results.

Jason knows he’s not getting to a question. He’s just wanting to see if Katie has any insight. That happens to them at church. That happens to them in their family with their kids. That happens to them at work when they’re training a large group of people for superintendents or whatever. They have their agency. Jason’s got two questions for Katie. Number one: how do you affect the most change knowing that human beings have their agency? And what do we do with maybe the frustration when people don’t respond? What would be a productive way to respond in that direction?

When people fly to boot camps, they want training most of the time. Very rarely does somebody come when they don’t want it. If somebody signs up for a certification training, unless it was given to them for free, which is a really bad practice, most of the time they’re there because they want to. They’re ready to take the next step.

Are these people mostly coming from like their companies are paying for it? Their companies are paying for it but it comes at an expense. They know that it’s not an easy thing. The other side of this is when a company says “Okay, these aren’t people that are just hand-selected ready to go to these trainings, we want everybody in the organization to get better.”

The Scarcity Mindset That Keeps Toxic People on Your Team

Back in the day, but now we’re in an economy of scarcity. Somebody comes to a boot camp, they usually want to. They come to a certification training. They’re going to carve out two days. They’re not going to just do that because they were told. And pay money to go do it.

If a company says “I want everybody in the company to head in this direction,” we already know that from a numbers game, generally, and it’s not always this way, but a third of the people are bought in, a third of the people are big old question mark, and a third of the people are not bought in.

The best practice typically is to spend time with your most bought in people, not from an ignore everybody standpoint, but you give them the most attention, your questionable people will be bought in, and your dissenters will at least become questionable. Then there’s usually about 5%, 10%, maybe even 15% of the people that either self-select or have to be removed.

Now we’re in an economy of scarcity where the advice of “Let’s just cull the organization” doesn’t always work. In some situations we have people in positions that quite frankly will do an okay job but we have the company owners and leaders, they want to be remarkable. What do we do? Katie thinks this is a difficult situation where as a company owner, if you’re not willing to incentivize the growth, then you need to be able to be honest about that and scale back unfortunately.

Jason usually uses Paul Akers as an example for this. People will watch his videos and read his books, which Jason loves. That’s the first main book that he ever had. But they’ll say “Oh my gosh, everything just magically works.” But he literally had to toast half of his organization. Katie says Gary Vee is the same way. It was all like hugs and cuddles and then he had to fire some people that were not cultural fits. If you grow slower, so be it.

Let’s stay with that topic. When an organization thinks about what’s going on, half of Paul Akers’ employees, that’s in Jason’s mind 50 people, that means 25 of them left. What they have is a situation where, Jason works with some really top-notch people. They’re willing to do the right thing. The numbers aren’t the same in this instance.

When we’re talking about there are people in these organizations that either quit or get fired, we’re talking like 5 out of 60 or 5 out of 80. The numbers aren’t proportional. Paul Akers lost half of his employees when he did this cultural change. Now he’s in an environment where he has one of the most remarkable lean facilities in the world and people fly all over the world to see it.

Katie was just thinking “Oh, we have this economy of scarcity.” That’s a thought. “Oh, I have to put up with people that aren’t a cultural fit, people that are not good for our brand, people that are not good for our organization, people that are toxic, because I can’t get anyone else.”

And so now you’re willing to infiltrate your team with toxicity. You’re willing to do subpar work for your clients because you’re so scared that someone else is going to get the job or get the bid or get the project that you’re willing to put up with crappy output from workers when that’s your scarcity mindset.

You don’t need to be so “I gotta get the next job, the next job, the next job.” Why don’t you just focus on getting a team that’s highly successful, not worrying about the fact that you’re going to have to fire a couple of people that are not good cultural fits and trust the process that using best practices will be beneficial to you?

Katie’s worked with other companies before that don’t do the right thing. They let people stay on the team that really devalue others and really hurt the organizational health and the morale and the practice and everything. That never works out. She’s worked with companies where they’re like “This is who we are and you’re out.” And it works great. Katie thinks it’s important for anybody, especially if you’re a smaller business owner, don’t live in a scarcity mindset. You don’t have to put up with workers that are not going to fit culturally.

It’s one thing to say “Hey, this guy needs to be trained or this woman needs help and I can see that there’s the potential there.” And it’s quite another to just keep allowing someone to poison everyone. It’s really easy to see. Within a month or two you’re going to see that this person’s not a cultural fit and you need to let them go. Don’t live in scarcity and keep them around like “Oh, well, maybe nobody else will come around and then I’ll be short-staffed.” You’re already stressing, worrying, overthinking it, and overcompensating for them. Get rid of them.

That Dog Ain’t Going to Hunt: When Someone’s Just Not a Fit

Basically the situation that we’re dealing with is that if somebody, and this is what they say in Texas, that dog ain’t going to hunt. Sometimes, and up until now, up until this podcast, Brian was telling Jason that if somebody’s not getting it, it might be the way that we’re training. So they have to look at that. There are good pedagogical, good connecting ways to train where we use techniques that the person wants to connect with from a training perspective.

Jason’s point is if somebody knows what to do intellectually, they’ve had it demonstrated, they’ve been guided through the process, and now they’re in the enabling part and they’re still not doing it and grabbing it and finding a motivation to do it, the best industry advice is they’re not a fit. And that’s Katie’s advice as well.

Jason’s been in the space of “Okay, we’ve got 60% of the organization that will do what’s supposed to be done. We’re going to make a ton of progress but we have this dead space of inaction in 25% of the organization and they’re just not responding.”

His first thought is “What am I doing wrong?” So they keep going and they attempt and they do it differently and they roll in this direction. Then sometimes it just doesn’t stick. What Katie’s saying is it just is what it is. She doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with saying someone isn’t a fit.

The Blood Type Analogy: Non-Cultural Fits Cause Inflammation

The other thing is Jason thought of this the other day because he has to donate blood sometimes for medical reasons because his body produces too many red blood cells sometimes. He had to donate blood so he was thinking about blood types. How many blood types are there? Are there four? Are there more than that? There’s probably a lot. Six or seven.

There’s different types of blood. O is the universal one? O negative. So there’s A, B, AB, and O, and then there’s the negatives of those. Jason’s AB negative. If anybody wants to kidnap him and harvest his blood, that’s his blood type.

If Katie were going to receive a blood transfusion, she would have to have the right blood type or else she’d have an allergic reaction. Jason likes this analogy because the allergic reaction would cause inflammation and that inflammation would then cause your cells to have an inability to transfer oxygen. That inflammation would spread. It would cause restriction in your blood vessels and basically you would have a risk of dying and having a really severe reaction.

If you get stung by a bee and you need an EpiPen, why do you need an EpiPen? That’s like the inflammation that would close off your throat. The EpiPen is going to counteract that. When you think about this, when you have a non-cultural fit in an organization, it’s going to cause inflammation. It’s going to cause friction. It’s going to cause dissension. It’s going to cause a hurt for the normal blood cells, the normal employees.

It doesn’t mean that the other blood was bad. It’s just a different blood type. These people that we’re talking about, God love them. Their mother loves them. We love them. They might not be a fit for the organization. They’re just a different blood type. It doesn’t mean you throw the blood away. It means that they have to, you can administer that to a different patient. They can go to a different company. Katie agrees with that.

Recruit, Hire, Train: Never Stop Getting the Right Blood Type

So really when they get to a point, let’s say they have a company right now and let’s say they’re doing training and they’re getting pretty neat results with most of the people. Let’s say they have two or three, or let’s say maybe they even have 15, maybe there’s a ton of employees. They have 15 people that are not responding to their training and there’s a current workload and those employees are needed for their current workload. What do we do? Katie says that’s really tough where you’re dependent on them and their subpar behavior.

The one thing that Jason keeps saying, and he wants Katie to check him on this, see if he’s wrong, but he’s seen this work, so he’s not asking if it works, he’s asking is this morally or theoretically right: focus on your top end people that are doing the training, really beat them up and then continually hire. So recruit, hire and train and start filtering those cultural fits into your organization and never stop. Katie thinks that’s probably the best thing to do.

From an agency standpoint, meaning that people are agents into themselves and they make their own choices, Jason thinks that what they do in boot camps is they help wake people up and just find their passion. Katie doesn’t think that’s what they do. They provide training. Companies will provide benefits in secure environments but at the end of the day, what she heard him say is it’s really not just a job. It’s not the bare minimum requirements. It’s what the vision of the company is.

The last thing maybe advice Jason would give is that the company has to have a vision of what it wants to be because then the ownership, the leadership has to then communicate that or gets to communicate that and then people can either respond or they don’t respond.

Like Jason and Katie are married. If they weren’t heading in the same direction, it would be hard to stay married. They both believe that we’re heading for an eternal union with certain perks. They believe they’ll be with their family forever. They believe they’ll be with their kids. They believe that eventually it’ll all work out. So any of the trials and different difficulties that they have along the way, it’s worthwhile.

But if they weren’t, it would be a lot harder. So in a company it’s like the same thing. Jason thinks the first thing we have to find out and maybe this is something that we consider with hiring is are they headed in the same direction?

This company right here, we are headed for excellence. We are a lean company. We want really good production. We’re going to be safer than anybody else. We want to elevate everybody’s position. We will never stop growing. We will never stop improving. Then we need to find out are those employees on board or are they not?

Katie was confirming that Gary Vee talks about how there was a time when he had to cut some people out because they were not heading where he wanted to go. She was thinking about how Simon Sinek talks about how it’s one thing to have a vision for your company but each individual worker has their own vision too.

Somebody may feel like it’s all about the money and they don’t really care what the vision is. They’re willing to work if they’re compensated even if they hate the job or whatever. Some people may be looking for more of a camaraderie type family. Everybody has a different motivation.

So Katie thinks it does go back to in your hiring processes, it’s not just “Oh, well, you’re a warm body, fill the position.” That kind of thinking gets you into these positions where you’ve got people that are not good cultural fits.

It’s Just Data: Stop Internalizing Other People’s Failures

Really going back to the previous podcast, Jason’s really glad they talked about this because going back to the previous podcast, it’s just data. He doesn’t need to assign an emotional response to how somebody else responded. It’s just data. Is the training effective? Is the response being understood and received properly? And then is it just the way it is? It’s just data. If employees aren’t responding to training, if they don’t have the same vision, then we just take action from there.

Jason was hoping this podcast would turn out really nice. And he thinks it did. Gary Vee said himself, and he’s the most cussing, frank, get rid of people, in your face guy in the world, there was a time where he babied people when his organization was new. Then he got to a point where he’s like “Okay, we’ve grown up enough and this has to stop.” And then he made the cuts.

So we have a couple of options. We can scale more slowly from the start. We can chop off a limb. Or we can be super sweet and identify and get real clear on where everybody is and do it at the right time as we recruit, hire and train and find those cultural fits, basically get more of our own blood type.

Katie thinks the other thing too is with the scarcity mindset where “Oh, I am going to have to hire people,” are you as an employer setting boundaries or are you just like “Well, I’ll take anybody”? If you have those boundaries set and the expectation is clear, then even, Katie’s just thinking, if you have a guy on your team that’s a hard worker and he gets it done but he’s a complete a-hole, that’s not a cultural fit. You need to let him go. It’s not worth what it’s doing to the rest of the team.

You need to have clear boundaries. Jason would say you need to let him go if that’s something you value, is having a good culture. If they prioritize just production, if the company doesn’t care about their culture, they don’t have to fire them. Katie would just say to that company that’s not a very nice culture. Nobody wants to work with a complete a-hole.

Jason was just saying if you value your other employees, one shining star that’s a complete jerk, you shouldn’t be allowed to set the tone. Just to recap, how well the training is, is data. How well the benefits and the culture is, is data. And it’s also something that we can improve on. The processes in our company is data. How we’re bidding jobs, the structure of the systems is data.

If after the training, the systems, the processes, and the environment are shaped, and the culture is shaped, and human beings are choosing, because they’re not a culture fit with the same vision, to not respond, it’s just data. We can either chop off our limb. Scale more slowly. Or we can wait until it’s the right time. Either stay a little bit small, grow a little bit more slowly, or recruit, hire, and get the right people in.

But either way, it’s just data and reaction. Data, reaction, or data and choices and doing the right thing. And the right thing according to what we want our company to be. This has really cleared some things up for Jason. But he’d say what the current condition is, he thinks we internalize the failures of others and we really get frustrated about it. We kind of want our cake and eat it too.

Back to the point of the companies that make a difference in their own desires and the companies that don’t. If you want your cake and eat it too, you’re like “I want to keep all 80 employees but I want to be excellent.” That’s not really, if you’re going to throw a birthday party, you got to share the cake. If we want an excellent company, we’re going to have to make some hard decisions.

Katie thinks it’s not data, reaction. She thinks it’s data, action. Take that data and be empowered to now move forward the way you want to move forward. You don’t have to be reactive to employees that are subpar or not a good fit. It’s about action. It’s about the bold moving forward in an empowered space. If your project needs superintendent coaching, project support, or leadership development, Elevate Construction can help your field teams stabilize, schedule, and flow.

FAQ

Q: What does it mean that people have their agency?

Agency is just a thing or person that acts to produce a particular result. The ability to act and produce results. And choose. Human beings do all of the things that we do. It’s Elevate’s job to get as many people as possible to actually respond to training and to want something better so that they will perform at higher levels. But people have their agency. They make their own choices. If you’re unwilling to learn, nobody can help you. But if you’re willing to study and put in the work, then nobody can stop you.

Q: Why is the scarcity mindset keeping toxic people on your team?

You think “I have to put up with people that aren’t a cultural fit, people that are not good for our brand, and people that are toxic, because I can’t get anyone else.” So now you’re willing to infiltrate your team with toxicity. You’re willing to do subpar work for your clients because you’re so scared that someone else is going to get the job. That’s your scarcity mindset. Why don’t you just focus on getting a team that’s highly successful, not worrying about the fact that you’re going to have to fire a couple of people that are not good cultural fits and trust the process?

Q: How is a non-cultural fit like the wrong blood type?

If you receive a blood transfusion with the wrong blood type, you’d have an allergic reaction. The allergic reaction would cause inflammation and that inflammation would cause your cells to have an inability to transfer oxygen. That inflammation would spread, cause restriction in your blood vessels and you’d have a risk of dying. When you have a non-cultural fit in an organization, it’s going to cause inflammation, friction, dissension, hurt for the normal employees. It doesn’t mean the other blood was bad. It’s just a different blood type. They can go to a different company.

Q: What are the three options when people aren’t responding to training?

Gary Vee babied people when his organization was new, then he got to a point where he made the cuts. We have a couple of options: (1) Scale more slowly from the start, (2) Chop off a limb, or (3) Be super sweet and identify and get real clear on where everybody is and do it at the right time as we recruit, hire and train and find those cultural fits, basically get more of our own blood type. Focus on your top end people doing the training and continually hire. Recruit, hire and train and start filtering those cultural fits into your organization and never stop.

Q: Why is it data, action instead of data, reaction?

How well the training is, is data. How well the benefits and culture is, is data. The processes in our company is data. If after the training, systems, processes, environment and culture are shaped and human beings are choosing to not respond because they’re not a culture fit with the same vision, it’s just data. Take that data and be empowered to now move forward the way you want to move forward. You don’t have to be reactive to employees that are subpar or not a good fit. It’s about action. It’s about bold moving forward in an empowered space.

On we go.