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Use Stories to Turn Your Audience into Teachers
For the Joker Club
There is no better way to teach than through the power of stories. Indeed, the right story can live on for millennia. Just think of Aesop’s Fables. Aesop was a storyteller and a slave.2 He lived more than 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece. He had lessons he wanted to impart, and he did so through memorable stories. His stories were so easy to remember and share, they were passed down by word of mouth. We love stories. We understand stories. We remember stories. And that means it’s easier to share, or to teach, stories. Stories have the power to turn any audience into a roomful of teachers.
Write Stories about The Joker Club
When You Learn to Teach, You Teach Yourself to Learn Teaching others is also an accelerated way to learn. Even thinking we might be called upon to teach can increase our engagement. We focus more intently. We listen to understand. We think about the underlying logic so we can put the ideas into our own words.
If you try to teach people everything about everything, you run the risk of teaching them nothing. You will achieve residual results faster if you clearly identify—then simplify—the most important messages you want to teach others to teach.
These messages should be not just easy to understand but also hard to misunderstand. A. G. Lafley, the former CEO of Procter & Gamble, called this the “Sesame Street Simple” rule.3 Don’t go for the overly sophisticated message. Don’t go for the one that makes you sound smart. Go for the straightforward message that can be easily understood and repeated. Make the most essential things the easiest ones to teach and the easiest ones to learn.
AUTOMATE Do It Once and Never Again
The checklist is one type. Here are a few others: An employee uses daily planning software to make it easy to prioritize their day. A manager creates an agenda for their weekly meeting to ensure they cover the most important topics. An entrepreneur brings a slide deck to each pitch meeting to make it easy to remember the most salient points to cover. A teacher gives his students a list of writing tips to make it easy to write a great essay. A parent creates a chore calendar that makes it easier for the kids to remember who is responsible for what each day.
Of course, this is just a partial list. The idea of a cheat sheet is simply to get things out of your brain so you can do them automatically, without having to rely on memory.
How can we use technology to automate the things that really matter in our own everyday lives? Essential Domains Effortless Automation Your health Schedule your annual physical as a recurring appointment on the same day each year, and your dentist appointments on the same day every six months. Sign up for regular delivery and automated payment of your recurring medicines from your pharmacy. Set your phone to turn on “nightlight” mode two hours before bedtime. Your relationships Set up regular calls or get-togethers with the people who matter most. Set calendar reminders for friend and family
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Your fun Block off one hour each day for something that brings you joy.
Blocking off time for the things that matter may sound simple in theory. But in practice it can be difficult to do consistently, because reality gets in the way.
If nonessential activities are automated, they too continue to happen without you thinking about it. Take, for example, subscriptions that renew automatically. We always think we’ll remember to discontinue them, but we never do, and we end up being charged for months or even years without knowing it.
Buffett wrote, “We did no ‘due diligence.’” On the basis of his prior experience, he concluded he “knew everything would be exactly as Wal-Mart said it would be—and it was.” A two-hour meeting and a handshake? With no due diligence! Think of the time, money, and effort saved, based on the simple fact that one party trusted the other to be true to their word. It’s an example of how trust can be a lever for turning modest effort into residual results.
When you have low trust on teams, everything is hard. Just sending a text or an email is exhausting as you weigh up every word for how it might be taken. When the response comes back you may experience a jolt of anxiety. Every conversation feels like it’s a grind. When you don’t trust that someone will deliver, you will feel you need to check up on them: remind them of deadlines, hover over them, review their work. Or you won’t delegate anything at all, assuming you’re better off just doing it yourself. The work can start to stall altogether.
You can’t have a high-performing team without high levels of trust.
Trust Is the Engine Oil for High-Performing Teams We all know that you need to add oil to a car engine in order to keep it operating. But not everyone understands exactly why. It’s because inside the engine, the many fast-moving parts can create friction when they rub up against each other. The oil is the lubricant that keeps those parts sliding smoothly, instead of wearing each other down.
Sounds a lot like what happens on low-trust teams, doesn’t it? Inside every team are many people with interrelated roles and responsibilities, moving at high speeds. Without trust, conflicting goals, priorities, and agendas rub up against each other, creating friction and wearing everyone down. If the team runs out of trust, it is likely to stall or sputter out. Trust is like the engine oil for that team. It’s the lubricant that keeps these people working together smoothly, so the team can continue to function.
The Hire That’s Worth More Than a Hundred Other Hires The best way to leverage trust to get residual results is simply to select trustworthy people to be around.
Warren Buffett uses three criteria for determining who is trustworthy enough to hire or to do business with.3 He looks for people with integrity, intelligence, and initiative, though he adds that without the first, the other two can backfire.
Steve now understood that investing wisely in recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding once could reduce his risk many, many times over. His new hiring criteria mirrored the Three I’s Rule. In the end they hired a man who had no experience in the automotive industry; he’d run accounting for a law firm. But he was a complete fit on integrity, intelligence, and initiative: a self-starter with an unimpeachable ethic and the ability to figure out problems on the fly. Or, put more simply, they really trusted him. Austin has been a valued member of the company for years now. Even after the business
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When you can say these four little words, “I trust your judgment”—and mean them—it’s like magic. Team members feel empowered. They take a risk. They grow. Trust is strengthened. And then it tends to spread.
Who we hire is a disproportionately important decision that makes a thousand other decisions. Each new hire may well influence future hires, gradually shifting the norms and the culture over time. Often, there will be pressure to fill a role immediately, as the vacancy creates a short-term headache. But while hiring quickly may lighten the load at first, hiring well will lighten the load consistently and repeatedly, saving you many more headaches in the long run.
High-Trust Agreement Results What results do we want? Roles Who is doing what? Rules What minimum viable standards must be kept? Resources What resources (people, money, tools) are available and needed? Rewards How will progress be evaluated and rewarded?
PREVENT Solve the Problem Before It Happens
But what we often fail to recognize is that some tasks that seem “not worth it” in the moment may save us one hundred times the time and aggravation over the long run.
To break this habit, ask yourself: What is a problem that irritates me repeatedly? What is the total cost of managing that over several years? What is the next step I can take immediately, in a few minutes, to move toward solving it?
The goal is to find the most annoying thing that can be solved in the...
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This system was soon adopted by some hospitals in the United States and has resulted in a 71 percent reduction in code blues and an 18 percent reduction in deaths. A physician explained why RRTs proved successful: “The key to this process is time. The sooner you identify a problem, the more likely you are to avert a dangerous situation.”
