Your Business Style: The Muddy Fish vs. The Clean Fish

Muddy Fish or Clean Fish: Understanding Your Business Style

Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results. Our topic today is - Are you a Muddy Fish or are you a Clean Fish? I wonder.

1. So, a muddy fish. Are you the kind of person that is fast-paced and outgoing? You're not very detail-oriented. You're results-driven. You like things new, trendy, flashy. You tend to be on the business development and visionary side of the business.

2. Or are you a clean fish? You like the water clean. You like systems and processes and predictability and consistency and high-quality. You're not necessarily the front-of-the-house person like those muddy fish. You're more a back-of-the-house person, a clean fish. You like things well planned out very systematic so you can be very predictable and deliver consistent high quality results.

Which one are you doing? Because you will find that there are pros and cons to both. Muddy fish you are usually great at the front of the house, clean fish you are at the back of the house. Which one are you? I want to hear it.

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Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results. There's a difference between responsibility and authority.

You will delegate authority, but never responsibility, right? At the end of the day, you're still in charge of your team. Your team screws up a year from now, it's on you. Now, authority is, okay Dan, I give you the authority to make this decision.

You bring us to this point in the project and so-and-so will take over from there, so-and-so will take over from there. But the result or the achievement or lack of of that project would still be your responsibility. All right, so you're on the hook for it.

The goal is to build their authority so they can take initiative and they can run or lead parts of that project.

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Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

Some confidence, they go to moderate to high confidence, and they go to high confidence.That's your job. Your job's on the top row. As their leader, their trainer, their coach, you need to make sure that they start out here and end up there.

If they are not high confidence, then you can't trust them to make the right decisions or the right course correction as it goes along. And you'll always be drawn back into it. So your job is to make sure they go from low commitment to high commitment.

So the more specific you can be, the more that they get training, the more they get SOPs, the more they get instruction, and the more that they know what right looks like,the more their confidence level will go up.If you get to that green quadrant and they are still a hot mess, or they still can't make decisions as a team, that's on you.

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Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

We are specific is the degree you can let go and be a coach. If you haven't prepared them, they don't know the system, and you become high supportive, you are asking for a train wreck. You are asking for big problems because then they're just gonna be like, oh, oh, okay, we can do what we want now. And then they'll misinterpret what needs to be done.

So in the third quadrant, when we get into yellow, it's low directive, but it's high supportive. This is little tweaks and little course corrections, right? Again, you're pointing out what you like, that's right. You're doing some coaching on what you see that is wrong. And when you do that, it's two to one, two compliments for any question.

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Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

You do take in their feedback, but you're making the decision. You're the leader, and it's important that in the beginning, you take full responsibility. You say, here's our scope of work, or here's our project. I've taken in, we've all contributed, here's where we're going.

And you know, speak now or forever hold your peace, great, now we get started, okay? We're still high directive, but we now wanna have high supportive behavior. We wanna catch people doing things right. You will see more and more, you compliment people on what they're doing right, they're gonna do more of it, right? And if you have kids that taught them how to walk, right, they all started out bad. We all look like a bunch of drunken sailors, but what did we do? We complimented them on everything, and our kids kept trying, right? Because we kept rewarding anything that they did.

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Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

When you had to explain what you wanted to another person, what you don't want or what you want. But what we want to do going forward is we want to do both.

So I would like when we start our meeting today for everyone to have lunch before we get going. But what I don't want is I don't want lunch to go past 1 o'clock. Now you at least have guardrails, you have some measure of expectation.

So think of a time when you have to explain something to somebody else,something you want, you know, whether it's on your team or if you can't think of anything, even personally, write down what you want and what you don't want from that situation. Write down what you want and write down what you don't want from the situation.

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From High Directive to High Supportive

Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

Now we get started, right? We go up to where it says coaching. We're still high directed, but now we're high supported as well. So they get started, you're still directing their activities, but just capture this in the top right hand corner, you're looking to catch them doing things right. You're looking to catch them doing things right.

That's opposite. What's that? That's opposite. Yeah, yeah, you're not looking for the wrong yet, you're looking for the right.Because your team will perform on what they've gotten right, not what they're continuously getting wrong. Remember, everybody knows when they got something wrong. Right? You know, you screw something up, we all know, like, oh man, that didn't go over very well. But we don't always know when we're getting it right. Like, is that what you were expecting, right? So you gotta catch them doing things right.

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Low Supportive Behavior

Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

In the beginning, they're gonna say, all right, I'm in, I get it, just like today's meeting.

All right, I get the idea, we wanna be a team, but we've never been a team like this before, so tell us what being a good team looks like. So we're gonna be very high directive in the beginning, and we're gonna have low supportive behavior. It doesn't mean we're not gonna be supportive, it just means we're being directive first.

It's kind of, you know, I've made the decision, here's how we're going, right? Like the agenda, I'm being directive about the agenda. If it's anything against you guys, but you hired me to put together an agenda, I did it, right? Took in the input from Rob and Rich, what do we want this meeting to be all about? And then I decided what we're working on, right? Okay, good.

Like and follow this podcast so you can learn more. My name is Carl Gould and this has been your #70secondCEO.