Priorities, People Management and Hurricanes Crisis Management – A Knowledge Bomb

Show Notes

Have you ever heard people hide behind their left of center or right of center political or religious views as an excuse for not properly managing people? Clay Clark interviews Lee Cockerell, who managed Walt Disney World Resorts and 40,000 employees and 1 million customers per week on how to properly manage people.

Do you bite your tongue regarding religious and political beliefs when managing 40,000 people?

  1. I keep them to myself. At the time I worked for Disney. Now I work for myself. Just live your personal values and work hard.

Lee, you’ve written and talked about the importance of surrounding yourself with great people why is this so important?

  1. It is the number 1 thing. I do not think that there is anything more important than your team because your team is your brand.

Talk to the listeners about firing people:

  1. My philosophy is that if you hire people to work in your business the only thing you need to worry about is their performance and nothing else.

Lee, when you were managing 40,000 employees and over 1 million customers per week, how and where did you spend your time and how did you stay on top of everything?

Lee, you’ve written that, “One of the main reasons people don’t improve is that they are not honest with themselves.” Can you explain what you mean by this?

  1. Self-awareness is allegedly one of the hardest things for humans to accomplish. I never wanted feedback and was defensive. People do not want to work with defensive people.

NOTABLE QUOTABLE – “Become an expert in something!” – Lee Cockerell

Lee, you wrote, “Until you value yourself, you will not value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it,” what does it mean for someone to truly value their time, what does this look like?

  1. I was never home. I wanted to show everyone how great I was. The show was all about me. After about 15 years I realized I was mistreating people and being autocratic. When I realized this and change i found that my leadership abilities increase and people actually listened and learned. When I found out how to teach and not just be a boss people started to thank and love me.
    1. NOTABLE QUOTABLE – “The only thing you can take with you and leave behind is your legacy.” – Lee Cockerell

Lee, you were able to get 40,000 employees on your team to produce excellence, can you talk to us about the importance of training, education and enforcement when it comes to producing excellence?

  1. Enforcement
    1. Do not put it in the system unless you are going to enforce it. Just like with children.
    2. You should worry about safety and education in your business.
    3. The only 2 ways people use to make a change in their life is education and crisis.
    4. NOTABLE QUOTABLE – “Don’t Get bored with the basics.” – Lee Cockerell

Lee, ultimately processes, systems and checklists needed to be created for every aspect of a business, and when mishaps arise, as business owners we need to be asking ourselves what is wrong with the system rather than focusing our time on an emotional witch hunt. Why is this so important for organizations to focus their energy on looking for the parts of the systems and checklists that need to be improved when mistakes arise?

  1. I am not sure what happens. We always want to attack the thing or person that is right in front of us. You have to step back and ask yourself “why did this happen?”.

What is the hardest part for new managers in holding people accountable?

  1. It’s a new thing for a lot of people and something that they have never done before. Management is about control. When someone doesn’t do their job you have to step in and say something.
  2. “No one is going to like you because you are like mom. Manage like a mother.”

NOTABLE QUOTABLE – “If you cannot have hard discussions or make hard decisions then do not have kids or be in a leadership position.” – Lee Cockerell

Visit www.leecockerell.com to learn more.

Business Coach | Ask Clay & Z Anything

Audio Transcription

Get ready

to enter the thrive time, show on Talk Radio, 1170 at the risk of offending everybody except for people that are heavily moderate, which is code for not telling people what side of the aisle you actually vote on. This particular business coaching podcast is about hiring and firing people and how that is held. The decision to hire and fire people should or should not be impacted by your, by your religious or political beliefs. Okay, so we’re working on this. Lee Cockerell, who I’m interviewing today on this podcast are gonna. Hear him. He’s the executive vice, former executive vice president of Walt Disney world resorts who wants managed over 40,000 employees and a million guests. He’s the guy who is not a trump supporter. He is somebody who would be trending left of center. From what I can tell from his facebook posts, I am somebody who’s libertarian, which means I’m trending far right of center. Both of us would fire somebody who willingly decides to not do their job.

Okay, so if someone knows what to do, both of us have the world view that we need to immediately tell the person in question what our business coaching concern is with candor, and then we need to ask them, did you know that you know what to do or did you simply choose not to do it? I mean did. Did you, did you not know what to do or did you simply choose not to do it, but you can’t be somebody who led your extremely right of center. I’m Judeo Christian worldviews block the obviousness of when it’s time to fire and you can’t let your extreme left of central of left of center trending socialist worldviews keep you from firing people. You can’t because if you do, you’re going to lose. So I’m going to role play these scenarios and clay stairs. You can tell me if you’ve ever seen this kind of scenario.

Here we go. If we open up our Bible in the book of Genesis, God explains that Adam should not eat from a certain tree. Eve shall not eat from a certain tree. They do. He kicks them out of the garden. Yes, so somebody who believes in that story, in that book called the Bible then has a business there, right of center, they’re a Judeo Christian. They then say, Hey, I’m Mr employee, you shouldn’t do this. The employee does it anyway, and then they somehow never fire people ever because they think that it’s the Christian thing to do, to have limitless forgiveness. Even though the Bible demonstrates time after time after time, through the stories of Adam and Eve, to the story of the talents, to the story of Noah, to the story of the amalekites that people who are wicked or choosing to do wrong should be punished or removed from that situation.

Why do so many Christians or have you ever seen that we’re a Christian person, will just not fire somebody and use the religious worldviews? That justification what? Why does it happen? Yeah, well, it’s, it’s fear. Obviously fear of being rejected, but the idea, the reason why we use the Christian thing is because we don’t want to be personally held accountable for our decision, so I’m going to blame on my religion. I’m going to blame it on something else because we don’t want to be held accountable and it just makes it a whole lot easier to go to sleep at night. Now, chuck, the, I’m sure you’ve worked for somebody who’s left of center. They’re a very liberal. They’re very a socialist and their worldviews. They believe everyone needs a not only a hand up, but a handout and there somebody who advocates the 30 hour work week, the Bernie Sanders, $15 an hour worldview, and then when they go run a business and they go, wait a minute, if I pay everybody $15 an hour and I don’t fire anybody and everyone gets free healthcare, the math doesn’t.

Yeah, you’re gonna have to charge you four times market price for your product or service and you’re also never going to have an operating team because everybody knows you’re not going to fire anybody, so nobody will do what you tell them to do and then they will begin to hold you hostage. When you need them to do things. They’ll say, no, and it’s the worst two ways I’ve been there. It’s the worst situation to be in. So for the rules on how to hire and fire properly, I would highlight command that you would download my book. Start here. It’s an Amazon bestseller. You can get the book for free at thrive time. Show.com. We have a very exhaustive in depth, uh, portions of the book where we quote Jack Welch quote Ben Horowitz. We quote some of the top managers in the history of the world, Rockefeller, Carnegie, they’re all in their colon Powell, but yet one of the top managers in the history of the planet is Lee Cockerel. This guy wants manage 40,000 employees and a million guests per week, and he’s still with us on the planet earth and we’re interviewing him during, during today’s podcast so he can explain to you what role your religious or political views should play in the aspects of hiring and firing people. He goes on to also explain to us as management philosophies and how to become the most effective manager you can possibly be. Without any further ado, our interview with Lee Cockerel.

Hello.

Plus, in a nonpolitical way, how do we deal with firing people? How do we know it’s time to fire

is my point of view on that. And by the way, when I give my opinion about politics, I have, I get a lot of views from Tulsa.

Absolutely.

Actually some good ones too.

So there’s both sides. Every community. It’s funny,

but uh, my philosophy is if you hire people or they work in your organization, the absolute only thing you really need to be worried about is their performance. You don’t need to be worrying about what religion they practice, what sexual orientation, where they’re from, what language, what color, what level of education they have. None of those things. Performance is what the organization, if they’re producing for the customer. And, and I always say to myself, first of all, it’s none of my business. My business is to make sure that they perform and do their job and take care of our guests and have expertise and skill. And we keep working on that and we will monitor their behavior just like a. and they have to behave a certain way. We’re putting on a show and you know, they can’t tell inappropriate business coaching jokes and they can’t, uh, say inappropriate things and again, had sexually harassed women and, and uh, its performance. And that’s why I say when you’re clear about what the performance looks like in your organization, it’s not your fault that people don’t perform. It’s their fault and you can work with them, you can talk to them, you can spend six months meeting with them, you can send them to school, you can send them a d, anything they need, but if they don’t come around, eventually you got to pick a time when it’s not going to happen. And that’s when you got to make the hard decision.

You said one of the main reasons people don’t improve is that they’re not honest with themselves. What do you mean by this?

Well, self awareness is probably want to. They say it is. I don’t know that it’s one of the hardest things for humans to sell themselves. What they’re good at, what they’re not good at, how they come across to people and the language they use and misunderstandings that happened because we’re not listening properly and we didn’t know what they want to say when they came in there. They only listen to what they did. So we didn’t kind of dig deeper and I think self awareness is pretty hard and I didn’t have good self awareness early in my career because I was so insecure because I’ve grown up kind of in a dysfunctional family and didn’t have a college degree. So I was always being defensive, which is I was thought I was perfect, you know, and every time somebody tried to give me feedback I didn’t want to hear it. And when you, when you deal with defensive people, people don’t like to work with defensive people, but we finally just give up on them. And so, um,

what do you mean by dysfunctional family? Somebody out there says, what do you mean by, I mean, talk to me about some of the dysfunctions that you grew up with because I think a lot of people feel like a guy like you, he probably has a degree from a fancy college matriculated on people. I like. People think you must have had a silver spoon talked to you on how you grew up, your education. Talk to me about some of this. Some of the dysfunctions that you were speaking of.

There are people think I was born in a castle,

right? I’m telling you. That’s where I ended up. Not where I started.

So I grew up in Oklahoma, in Oklahoma, Bartlesville area and dewey and I’m not far from Tulsa and we were poor. We lived on a cattle farm and we had no indoor plumbing. Of course, when you’re a kid you don’t even know. That’s the problem. It’s just life. And as we grew up, my mother was married five times.

Yeah.

Yep. She made a lot of bad. She was young. She was trying to survive her own dysfunctional upbringing. She was one of these people do. Trying to insecure, got married very young one, two, three. Then finally got make better choices. Mary guys that had money. I got my name. I got adopted twice. I got my name, my name was Norwood deal when I was born and it became legal lemons and then it became leacock or when I was 16 and I went to college [inaudible] number four, had money and then I flunked out because I didn’t go to class. I didn’t have good study habits and my family never focused on studies and education like I’m sure you do with your kids and so I went in the army and that’s where I learn. I was a private in the army and then I got a job as a waiter at the Hilton when I got out of the army and I worked my way up and I didn’t have a great job until I was probably in nine. I mean it really good. So I look 34, 35, 36 times. I had learned. Then my career took off pretty well at Marissa and I did well. Got To be a vice president there and then I went to Disney, got recruited because I was an expert in food and beverage. That’s what they want and that’s what I tell young people to become an expert in something. Even if I got fired at Disney, I could always go back.

Why did you get promoted at work? Where you the 14th? Did you leave early?

I’ll tell you the reason I got promoted and I think it’s the reason most people are successful in life and you are like this. Having a positive attitude and being organized, doing what you say you’re going to do, following up, having credibility, reliability and that’s what that time management system did for me. But I have a positive attitude because when you don’t have a college degree you better have a positive attitude or nobody’s going to give you a chance. So when they said [inaudible] I was, yes sir, stay till midnight, yell no problem. And then work Christmas Day, Easter, Mother’s Day and yeah, no problem. And every time I said no problem and about a year and a half I got promoted. So I think half the people have problems in their lives and attitude. They underestimate what they can achieve. First of all, they want to blame their mother. I was born, I had this, I grew up there, blah, blah, blah. The teachers didn’t love me and you, that’s the worse thing you can do. Can you talk about self reflection? But I mean, it’s, don’t underestimate what you can achieve in your life. It’s all happens way after high school

and uh, and we talk about valuing yourself and underestimating what you believe that you can do. You want to rope until you value value yourself. You will not value your time until you value your time. You will not do anything with it. Talk to me about the importance of valuing yourself and your time. Talk to me about that.

Well, not really. My career. I just worked all the time and it was home. I’m sure I missed my son’s first steps of insecure I wanted to get. I wanted to show everybody how great I was. So it was all about me. I wanted the bonus and the cars. I wanted all this stuff. Um, I, uh, it was all about laycock hello and, um, I, I didn’t believe in myself. I didn’t believe I could be anybody. And uh, so finally through about 15 years into my career, I started to understand that I was being defensive. I was offending people. I was being too hard on people because I didn’t trust anyone in my life. And, uh, I started studying leadership and management and I start kind of understanding who I was. I knew my grandmother and mother would kill me if they knew I was behaving that way.

They just treating people, being autocratic. And I slowly changed and one of my confidence got better because I started to see that when I would teach a class or I’d give somebody some advice, they really appreciated it. They’d come back to me and thanked me for that. Even when I had a heart discussion with somebody, they come back saying, thanks so much. Nobody’s ever told me that. And so I just got better because that, that’s a form of feedback. And when I got positive feedback and built my self confidence, I get better and better and better. I would say today I have full confidence in my ability to help other people see the light and to be able to do things better and kind of point out some of their false that maybe they don’t. Nobody’s told them for and so I really have. I switched from being Amino boss to being a teacher and when you’re at a good teacher, people love you.

That’s what mothers do. Mothers teach others too, and when you teach, you never forget that teacher back in your life that made a difference in your life. They forget you, but you never forget that. That’s what I always remember and somebody said what he want to be remembered for. I said, I want to be remembered as a teacher and that’s going to be my legacy and the only thing you can take with you and leave behind when you die is your legacy. Attitudes affect people. How did you affect your family? How do you affect individuals? It affects your great, great grandkids will never meet you. Do you know that your family, your kid, your business coaching clients are going to teach your kids. They teach their kids and my mother was married five times. I’ve been married. Once I’m getting the family average down. We changed the culture of our family. We changed the culture. I’m going to tell you, I grew up in Oklahoma, you know, I heard it was pretty rough in the fifties and sixties around bigotry and racism and I heard all that stuff and Priscilla and I had a big conversation Daniel would never hear and one of those words in our house

can. I ended up one thing real quick. There’s a movie called blazing saddles. Have you seen the language in that movie? I’m really, really was degrading to African Americans, but it was totally acceptable. I mean, when did that movie come out? When did blazing cells come out? I mean that was, I don’t know,

would have a long time ago.

Chip looked it up real quick. I want to see that because that was socially acceptable. As, as, as recently as when? Nineteen, 74, 19, 74 now. Oklahoma always adapts to the styles and trends of the world, like clothing, fashion, music. About five years after. So 1974 in Oklahoma was like 1980 in Florida, you know, it’s like 1985 in New York, you know. So I mean you grew up, you, you saw that, but yet it is. So you had to kind of reprogram your mind because you grew up an estate at the time that really thought poorly of minorities. Can you talk to you? How are you heading to reprogram your mind about how to think about people that weren’t pale and male?

Because I went in the army, so that was a whole different ball game. You’re all depending on each other in the army and it’s black and Hispanic and I’d never met a black person but I went in. There are really no. We went to segregated schools in Ardmore, Oklahoma High School. We didn’t know, never unless they literally lived on the other side of the tracks. So only black lady down there was a lady that came and did iron named for my mother. And um, so I think the key to mind. Look, I, I, I got out, got, saw the world, I went to Washington DC, that’s about as diverse as you’ll ever see anywhere in the world, and I worked there for three years and I worked in Chicago and I worked in New York City and I worked in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. All these big cities are quite different because there’s people from everywhere there.

And so all of a sudden when I was a waiter, everybody I worked with was black, Hispanic, or maybe most of them didn’t have a college degree. They started with. So those became my friends. We started going out together, we started dating each other. We started to go for drinks after a hard day’s work. And then I, I’m in the hotel business is extremely diverse frankly. I think any service businesses actually. And uh, because a lot of low entry jobs, there were people get started. And I think when you live, when you get out of your village, you know, if you stay in your village, you think everybody looks at everybody in the world like you. And that’s all you hear his opinions of people just like you and when you go live in big cities. And I lived in Paris and I lifted. I’ve traveled to 44 countries now and there’s no bad people.

I was in Russia last summer. The people are great. I was in Vietnam, they were great and I think the governments are terrible. Oh right. I don’t have any regard for any government. It’s the people, the people, just good people. They have kids and they have strollers and they’re trying to do a good job and they were pleasant and nice and I sometimes think we get mixed with the how we talk about a country versus their people and it’s government issues and war and atomic weapons and stuff. But the poor people in America and the poor people in Asia, they want to do is make whatever they make and sell each other and have a sour so I can buy food and pay them.

Disney one could argue that Disney world had become kind of like a country and you were sort of like the benevolent dictator. And Mr Eisner was like the, I dunno, he was the darth vader of the whole empire. I mean, so you guys had built, I mean you had a million guests every week at Walt Disney world resorts and you talk about when you’re managing 40,000 employees, the importance of training, education and enforcement. So I’d like you to go line by line training, education enforcement, line item. Let’s start with enforcement because that’s probably the part no one wants to talk about enforcement after you’ve trained and educated your people. Talk to me about the importance of enforcing the policies and how you did it.

Well, I think the biggest issue is don’t put it in unless you’re going to enforce it because you send them a text message. They don’t think you’re serious and it’s like your kids, you’ll see as they get older. How old are they now?

Oh, well my oldest is 13. My son is a good one right? There you go. 13, right?

Yeah. They’re going to challenge you as I get older because that’s what the brain does. It starts to push back and started. He’ll be older and wants to have his own time. He wants to do this and he’s going to want to go do something you don’t want him to do and you’re going to. I think the families were the same two things I think parents worry about the most when you should worry about in your company as safety and education. Those two, Kate’s you know your son’s going go on and do a lot or your daughter a lot of things, but you’re going to consider safety first and then you’re going to do a good job of educating her to know that these kinds of things are not things you want to get involved in and these are not the Nikes, great planet, the people you want to associate with because I can tell you at the end of the day, there’s only two ways people make decisions to change in their lives. One is crisis and one is education. You can either have a business coaching crisis with your daughter or son or you can educate them over and over and over again until they. They get it. It goes in their heart and they know they don’t want to disappoint you and a lot of parents give up too early. They don’t push hard and just my mother must have said the same thing 10,000 times and it’s in my brain.

Same training over and over at Disney like your mom did with you. I mean, why did you every single week go over this? I mean you had to feel so at some point, like when you’re doing your walk around management and you’re having your team meetings, you’re holding your team accountable. You had to feel like a broken record at some point. Why did you never ever stopped consistently saying the same things over and over?

It’s like your kids, you may say, if they don’t hear you, they’re not paying attention and I think I always tell people, it’s kind of the analogy is when you have children, you’re starting to teach them. Say, excuse me, thank you. Please excuse yourself from the table before you leave or when people come to our house, look them in the eye and shake their hand. Don’t hang on to my leg and if you have many times you have to tell them that because then one day somebody says, you have the nicest children. You Go, you don’t know what we want.

Sure.

Hard. And at work, you know that at work when people say you got the greatest team, you, I’m sure you can say you don’t know what I go through,

right?

Sorry. You got to. Don’t get bored with the basics. You got to preach the basics over and over and over. That’s kind of what church is doing it

the basic templates with on the show notes. Don’t get bored with the basics. Now, lead processes, systems and checklists. As we move into our final couple of questions for you, uh, whenever a checklist. I know, I know this is almost a spiritual thing when a crisis arises, the way Lee Cockerel deals with issues, my friend is that you’ve preached it, you’ve taught it, you’ve lived it. You immediately ask yourself, how can we systemically fix this problem as opposed to going on an emotional witch hunt? Could you talk to me about why processes, systems and checklists are not being focused on and why people would rather focus on attacking people?

Well, I think it’s usually we don’t get emotional and we want to attack the waiter or are they a housekeeper or because it’s right there, right there, and really I had. I had to learn. I did that too. I mean I had to learn to go back and dig deep, deep, deep, deep. Find out why this happened. Was it cut? She wasn’t trained. Was it because we weren’t clear when we hired her about what we expect their behavior to be like, was it because we picked the wrong person? Was it what? What happened here to make this happen and not who did it, but why did it happen and you’re going to do that with your kids. You’re going to go back and say, okay, now why did this happen when she was 15 and didn’t talk about, did we miss something? And then you go back and you try to fix it again.

And checklists are that way. You know, we practice at Disney two or three times a year for a crisis. We have a company puts us through the call three in the morning, you’ve got to get up, you got to go open the command center and they put us through a drill for five, six hours and make sure everybody knows what to do. It can be a shooting, it could be a, a storm, it could be nine slash 11. They could be a tornado. I mean, and so we practice practice, practice. So I can tell you on the day of nine slash 11, we executed perfectly. We all knew what to do.

Hurricane hit three hurricanes in one lump. You had three. It was a record breaking year in a bad way. And your, your team actually gave you a, uh, a sculpture of Mickey Mouse wearing a rain slicker as a commemorative way to celebrate. But talk to me about how your team, 40,000 of employees, how you guys reacted when you had three hurricanes, devastate the Orlando in Florida area.

You need to know, you wake up, you’ve got 20 seconds to get to the room. You all preplanned and you’ve got a plan and you’ve got to execute it 20 seconds. So that’s how I think about things. We never know how much time we’re going to have and so we’re ready and we know where. I know where the fire extinguisher is, my house and where the alarms, alarm system and I know where they’re, you know, where the valve is for the water so I can turn it off, not having to look for it and wonder where it is and that’s what checklist. And you’ve just got to be anticipating. Worst scenario and prepare for it.

Lee was the check lists. If you think about Walt Disney world resorts, last time I took my family to Walt Disney world, um, we were there and there’s the area up front. What do you call the area outside of Disney’s Disney village? I believe the Disney village. Am I correct

down at the downtown Disney or the shopping?

It was downtown Disney. So it’s like when you’re not inside Disney world yet, there are still restaurants.

It’s called Disney Springs. It’s gotten a lot bigger than

will you go in there and the food, if you order French fries, let’s say. Um, last time I was there we ordered hamburgers and French fries and all of them were pretty close to the same size. They all tasted good. And because I’m a dad, what I do is I let my kids order and I’d take a bonus fry from each of my kids, go my dad tax, you know what I mean? You take your dad tax, which is 10 percent of each kid’s fries. And they all tasted great. I mean, it didn’t matter. We have five kids, so each one of the French fries I pulled from all tasted great. So I just want to tap into your genius on this. Um, how do you keep hamburger’s all about the same size? All the French fries, tasting all about the same. When you have 40,000 employees, what role do checklists play in something as maybe simple or complicated as providing consistent French fries and hamburgers?

We have production charts that we know how many. We got one restaurant there. It does 8,000 burgers at lunch. And we know through the forecasting, the approximately how am I going to have. We have those made to size. We, the friars must be at 350 degrees before you can fry them. We have a special way we handle them when they come in frozen. So we store them without dropping them so they don’t break. That’s why they’re all the same size because when you’re, when you throw them around and break them, like smack them, then you get these little burn wounds in your. Then the guy at fry’s him, he knows what he’s doing and then we got the guy who sold some and you got assaulted and we can only hold them for 12 minutes and then we got to dump them. If they’re not hot season and salt and it’s. It’s a matter. You can either serve good fries are bad. For us it’s a choice. Think about it

is. The final question I want to ask you today is you talked about being one of your books. You talked about the importance of being your own Shakespeare, Shakespeare and when you walked through Disney world together, we walked in and the volcano went off at a certain time walk. The music’s playing the music. It’s like a magical music, you know? Then you go into the different restaurants and they all smell a certain way. It’s intentional scent or smell. It makes you want to eat the caramel corn. It makes you want to eat the French fries you makes you smell the, the, the, the burgers being cooked and everything is intentional and you’ve got a guy going up and down the path every. I’m not sure how many feet or how many yards he’s assigned, but the. It’s never dirty. It’s never dirty. He’s always. Cleaning is always cleaning is cleaning. She’s cleaning, they’re clean, they’re greeting. You. Talk to me about how the business coaching importance of being your own Shakespeare and what you meant by that when you wrote about it in your book.

Well, when I wrote the book, I was thinking about Disney. Walt Disney said, you know, if you want to educate people, you tell stories and if you want people to remember, tell emotional stories, and I really come to the conclusion a long time ago that if you don’t go through the heart, you cannot reach the brain. You’ve got to train people in a way that they get it. They understand it’s personal. And business coaching storytelling is a powerful thing. As you know, you guys do that all the time. Uh, and uh, so writing your own story. When I was at Disney about 1993 or four, I wrote a story, the perfect trip to Walt Disney world and I tried to go through from the time they call us on the phone, what the operators would say, how nice they would be, what they would do when the car arrives in the portico, share the hotel.

The bellman would open all the doors and compliment the kids on the Atlanta braves hat or whatever. And we would look at the license plate to know where they were from so we could talk about that. And then when they went into the front desk, uh, we wouldn’t really pay attention to their children and blah, blah, blah. We just wrote the story of the whole visit when they get on a bus, the bus driver would, how you would greet him. He’d give the kids a bus pass, a little driver’s license, and then we just went through every step. I’m tried to write, here’s what it would look like if we were perfect. Now we weren’t perfect. So we use that document as, okay guys, everybody, you know, which part of the story is yours and you start working on this because we want this story to come alive.

We want to be reality. And that it was just an interesting one. I’ve worked with a few companies now who are writing their own story of when you walk in to the administration office at security guards, dams up. Well, that’s part of the show. He stands up, he comes around. So it’s good morning, shake your hand, takes you there when you get to the receptionist. She said she down, she must asked you if you’d like a. So there was some water or coffee, we didn’t leave anything out of the script. We want everything to go and we want it to be that same way every time. We want that consistency so we write the stories, kind of like a job description, but as soon as story for them, like you’re putting on a play and every night the props that need to be in the same place and so you can think about it in your own life with your customers.

If you can write a story for them to tell them what’s going to happen with you and how the experience is going to go. You use that story to train your employees and then the guests are going to get that same experience every time they walk into your place and when you think of something new, you added to the story and the rewrite it. It’s just a real interesting because I think a lot of people want to do a good job, but they don’t go into enough detail to tell every single person in the bathroom cleaner. This is your part in the story. The greeter at the front door, this is your part in the story, the guy in the park and doing the landscaping. This is your part in the story and we want you all to understand you’re in this story. You are part of this.

Each one of you either makes the guests have a great experience or not. If you don’t do your part right, story doesn’t come off right, so that’s how we use what was the philosophy of it’s probably better to write the story and then you know, which tried to do and then you’ll know when you’re not doing it. When you got the story you can say, well, we’re not doing that. It says in the story, we’re supposed to do that. Well, why aren’t we doing that? Let’s get back to and when you have a consistency and it was a lot of fun to do that. Just for fun

to let the business coach ask you his final works with a lot of business owners who I think management is something that. I mean it’s kind of like step one. People really struggle to make a product or service people actually want step two, they struggled to market that business, you know, try to get in front of people and step three is people struggled to manage people. And so eric, I want to get your final question on behalf of a lot of clients you’ve coached and from the small business owner’s perspective, what is your final question for the wizard of, of management for the magical management man who managed 40,000 employees, one customer and himself while steering married to one woman and being a great father. What question do you have for Mr Lee Cockerel? Yeah, so like I said earlier, lead, we have a lot of clients that are trying to get to that spot in their business where they’re duplicating themselves and so back to that new managers role. Whenever you’re talking with new managers, what do you see as the hardest part for them about holding people accountable?

Holding people accountable is a new thing for a lot of people. They’ve never had to do it before and I don’t think we explained carefully before we hire them. What the role of a manager is the role of a manager is to keep whatever they’re responsible for under control, so if they’re responsible for a store that includes friendliness, cleanliness, bathrooms are clean. We don’t. We’re ready to open the store in the morning and everything’s folded properly in the tables. The cast members don’t have. Their phone management is about control and a lot of them when people don’t. And same. I would say the analogy with kids when they don’t do what they’re supposed to do, the manager’s job is to step over there and say, listen, we talked about this. This is the way it’s got to be. This is the reputation we want. This is what we’re trying, and I think it’s just a matter of clarity.

Said, Oh, do you really want to be a manager? When people asked me, I said, do you want to be a manager? And they say, yes. I’ll say, are you crazy? This is going to ruin your life. You know people are going to disappoint you. They’re going to come to work late. Am I going to do? And you’re going to have to deal with this and you’re not gonna have any friends. Everybody’s going to like you because you’re going to be like, mom, I didn’t like my mother when I was 15, 16, 17, because she wouldn’t. She was tough. And

mom, that was powerful. No one’s going to like you because you’re going to be like, mom,

manage like a mother. That’s what I tell them. And if you don’t you you won’t have success. You’ll be disappointed. And so make sure. Here’s what I tell them. If you can’t have hard discussions and you cannot make hard decisions, don’t have children, and don’t be in a leadership job.

It was pretty, pretty direct listeners out there who want to know more about you getting in touch with you potentially your podcast, the courses you’re offering, the books that you have available. What’s the best place for our listeners to go to next to learn more about you? The elite cockerel experience.

They can go to my website, [inaudible] dot com and it’s a brand new site and finally got it up to where it works on mobile and rebid it and everything’s on there from my podcast, which comes out every Tuesday. It’s 15 minutes on these subjects where you and I just talked about. It’s a, my books are on there and my seminars, uh, anything that I do goes on there so at least I’ll know where it is. It’s in one place.

So take a look at that, check it out of his league. Cockerel.com to learn more about these courses. His podcasts is books. Lee once manages the mouse house. You manage 40,000 employees, 1 million customers yourself. And you stayed married to one woman the entire time. My friend. I mean you came from a family where your mom was married five times. You married once that you’ve really decreased the marriage rate by quite a significant number there. So thank you for being on today’s show. It’s an honor to call you my friend and have a blessed day.

You take care.

Take Care of Boston. Yep.

Oh, just knowledge bomb after knowledge, checklists, crisis management, how to manage people. Lee Cockerel is a wonderful wizard of management. I encourage you to check out his books. You can buy them on Amazon.com, or if you want to see video interviews with Lee Cockerell, you can join one of you can be one of the 2,500 vip limited edition members of the thrive time show community. We only allow 2,500 business coaching subscribers at any given time. Again, we only allow 2,500 subscribers at any given time and you could join the community. And what does that include? You can come to an in person workshop. Um, you get to have unlimited access to all of the thrive time show videos, the big library of thousands of thousands of videos taught from millionaires and gurus and leaders in their respective industry. Also, you get to have exclusive access to email us your questions to [email protected], and we will answer those on the program. It’s $19 a month. It will absolutely change your life if you implement what you learn and not any further ado. Let’s end this show with the boom free too.

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