150: Building a High Performance Culture with Wayne Mullins

Profit by Design

Hi, Profit Designers! As we at Tap the Potential gear up for a number of special, upcoming projects, we’re taking this time to bring you some of our most popular episodes from the vault! We hope you enjoy it, and we’ll be back with new episodes for you very soon!

Vision, mission, and values. Holding yourself accountable to the same standards of performance as those around us. Differentiating between your normal, and someone else’s. All this, and more, as Wayne Mullins joins Dr. Sabrina and Mike to discuss “Building a High Performance Culture”.

As someone who hates structure, Wayne found it liberating and found that it allowed him the head space to not worry so much once he learned to become more rigid and structured in his personal life. There’s a ton of wisdom to be heard in this podcast, you don’t want to miss any of it! You will probably want to listen to it a few times!

Wayne Mullins is a passionate entrepreneur committed to creating remarkable experiences, and building a team at Ugly Mug Marketing that produces extraordinary results for their clients. He has been called “the guru’s guru,” as he regularly called upon for advice from Inc. 500 CEO’s, New York Times Best Selling Authors, to Silicon Valley startups. However, his passion is helping entrepreneurs challenge their assumptions, create value from places they’ve never looked, and having more freedom than they previously believed possible. He has worked hands-on with clients in over 100 different industries, and from every corner of the globe.

Ugly Mug Marketing, which Wayne founded 10 years ago, has won the praises of some of the leading influencers in the business world, such as, Neil Patel (Founder of QuickSprout & Kissmetrics), Chris Voss (New York Times Best Selling Author of Never Split the Difference), and Ari Weinzweig (Co-Founder of Zingerman’s).

Wayne’s work directly influences more than one hundred thousand entrepreneurs annually through his blog, books, and training programs.

Profit by Design is a Tap the Potential Production in collaboration with Small Business Consulting Group.

Show Highlights:

• Wayne explains the concept of “context switching”, a concept from Todd Herman, who teaches a program called The 90 Day Year. Concept switching is when you’re working on a project to be completed within a specified block of time, but something else comes up that needs to be addressed. So you switch over to that, and when that fire is put out, you jump back over to the project. After a period of time, you realize that you haven’t accomplished anything because you’ve spent so much time jumping back and forth.
• In the middle of the switch, there’s another concept called “Attention Residue”, as explained by author, Cal Newport in Deep Work. Attention residue is the lag between jumping from working on the first project to jumping into working on the urgent situation. Attention residue takes time, energy, and effort between working on those two contexts, and is detrimental to productivity.
• Wayne is an avid reader and researcher, and often borrows ideas that he finds particularly compelling, and gives as much credit to the author or originator as possible.
• Vision, mission, and values: if you don’t prioritize and make time, energy, and effort for these, then it directly impacts and influences the culture that you create.
  • Vision: where you’re going, and where you want to end up at in some point in the future. Looking 3 years into the future helps you set the destination of where you want to get to.
  • Mission: the plan of action. What are we going to do to bring that vision to life? That’s what drives and motivates us.
  • Values: core principles, the things that we believe in and that will stand as guideposts along our path, to ensure that in the pursuit of our vision, we aren’t losing our way. We’re staying true to the course that we have set out.
• Feeling like you have to go back to the basics, back to square one, is one of the biggest frustrations of the entrepreneur.
• Very early on, Wayne had the pleasure of coming into contact with Ari Weinzweig, Entrepreneur and Co-founder of Zingerman’s Deli. In a personal conversation, Ari divulged that he considered himself the “CRO” of his company. When asked what that meant, he explained it as “Chief Reminding Officer”, as he considered it his responsibility to constantly remind his leadership and his team about where they were going, why they were going there, and why it was important.
• Dr. Sabrina explains that not only do they have immutable laws at Tap The Potential, they also have General Operating Principles, as inspired by Josh Fonger, of Work the System.
• Wayne discusses the Enneagram of Personality profile and the nine different personality traits, as discussed on the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast.
• The nine different personality traits are nine NORMALS. Wayne was struck by how what’s normal for him is not necessarily normal for someone else on his team.
• The difference between intentions and actions, as Wayne heard on another episode of Andy Stanley’s Leadership Podcast, is that we judge ourselves based on our intentions. We judge others around us based on their actions. Where we might give ourselves a pass because we intended to do something but didn’t, we judge others based on they didn’t get it done today, and why didn’t they get it done today.
• Wayne shares an unsettling story about Dan Kennedy, and the impact it had on him to do what he says he’s going to do, and when he says he’s going to do it. The actions that we take every day, or the actions we don’t take every day, is what builds our lives, our businesses, and our careers. Wayne explains his takeaway from Marshall Goldsmith’s book, Triggers.
• Measuring performance and bringing balance to opposing forces.
• “The Field of Play” concept by Charles Coonradt, in The Game of Work.
  • Terminal out of bounds - stealing, lying, cheating, etc
  • Operational out of bounds - things that are more infractions. You’re out of bounds but you’re going to get a warning, and need to step back into bounds
    • Wayne mentions his own “Ugly Mug Expectation Guide”, that applicants review during the hiring process.
  • End zone - where you want the employees to get to
  • RRR (Results to Resources Ratio) - Goal Setting / Performance Measurement System
• John Doerr outlines another form of Goal Setting / Performance Measurement System, called OKR (Objectives and Key Results), in Measure What Matters. John happens to be one of the first investors of Google!
  • Profit goal
  • Fulfillment or service goal
  • Future work goal
  • Creates a peer-to-peer accountability
• Wayne outlines his various meetings structures.
• When you set goals for a year’s period, it’s so far in the future that we tend to delay and put off until it’s too late to make progress toward those goals to actually reach it by the end of that year. In The Twelve Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months, by Brian P. Moran, Brian says that you should treat every 12-week period as if it were its very own year. Your question then becomes, what can you accomplish within the next 12 weeks?
• Here’s why you want to encourage healthy conflict!
• Considering the costs of hiring A-players - it’s not an expense, it’s an investment.

Links and Resources:

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Register your A-Player team members for Tap the Potential’s Leadership Bootcamp