Growing Lean
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Growing Lean
Becoming a Leader: Antonio Garrido's Journey and Techniques
Leadership, as Antonio puts it, is a craft honed through self-reflection, trust, and truth. We delve into the critical role of self-reflection for leadership success and discuss practical strategies to foster trust and truth in the workplace. Antonio emphasizes the importance of a leadership development journal, a tool he advocates for effective daily self-evaluation. We also discuss the wisdom derived from evaluated experience rather than just time served, and why hiring and firing should align with core values.
But the journey to leadership is not a sprint, it's a marathon requiring determination and the right guidance. Drawing from his personal experience as a father of four, Antonio compares the determination of babies learning to walk and talk with the determination needed for success in leadership and business. He underscores the importance of having a coach to guide you on your path to success. Wrapping up our enlightening conversation, Antonio highlights his generous offer of free resources available on his website, including core values, business assessments, and health checks. Connect with Antonio Garrido and tap into his wealth of knowledge to refine your leadership skills and accelerate your career journey.
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Welcome back to the growing Lean podcast sponsored by Lean Discovery Group. This is your host, dylan Burke, also known as Deej. I'm very happy to be here with Antonio Garrido, three times author and founder and president at my daily leadership. Welcome, antonio.
Speaker 2:Hi Dylan, thank you very much for the invitation. I'm excited. Thanks for the opportunity to have a chat.
Speaker 1:Of course we're very happy to have you here. So, to get us started, can you give us a little bit about the history of yourself and your background and how you ended up where you are today?
Speaker 2:Okay, well, I'll try and keep it short. It's probably interesting only to me and my parents. I suppose so when I came out of university a million years ago because obviously you can tell I'm fairly ancient but when I came out of university I was originally an architect. So I thought that's what I was going to be. I thought that's what I was going to do, and careers, as you possibly know, dylan, are slippery fish, and one thing led to another, and it was entirely by look rather than by design.
Speaker 2:I found myself moving up a couple of roles, a couple of organizations, and I found myself heading up a department and that, for a couple of years, worked for a really, really tremendous leader who then asked me to go back to university and get an MPA or some kind of business management, business strategy degree, because he thought I was destined for better, bigger and better things, rather than being an architect, which, to be frank, dylan, it was probably a smart move. I wasn't a terribly good architect. I wasn't very accomplished. I did win a couple of awards and did some pretty interesting stuff around UK, mainly one in Spain, but anyway. So I then found myself running divisions that then turned into running businesses, so I ultimately ended up running what you might call Fortune 60 companies, or top 60 PLCs, with thousands of employees and billions in revenue, and worked along the way for some tremendous, tremendous, tremendous leaders, helping, you know so, helping businesses grow, and so on.
Speaker 2:And then about 12 years ago I'm nearly at the end, right. So about 12 years ago, we decided, my wife and I, for reasons that probably take me about five minutes to explain, so just go with it, right and a matter of faith we decided that we would buy a company in Miami and go and live in Miami, because we were you can tell by the accent that you know, maybe not the name, but you did that very well. My father was from the Greek, but by the accent so we're British. But we went to go and live in Miami to set up a, bought a company there which we grew very, you know, quite rapidly to probably the third largest business development sales training company in the world possibly, and then a leadership company. I wrote two books for that organization. My daily leadership is the book that this kind of talking about.
Speaker 2:Today. That's for another business of ours which is all about leadership development, trying to keep those two businesses separate. And here we are today. So that's so. I basically started off as an architect, worked for a bunch of companies, ended up running some very, very large companies and then started my own companies and we have about five.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Thanks for that, and it's a common thing I hear is that it's important to understand what you're good at, understand what you may be not so good at, and choose the right path for you, and it sounds like you experimented and found the right path. I love that.
Speaker 2:Well, I think, when you, when you, when you figure out what you enjoy, you can tolerate a bit more difficulty, and you can. You know, you, you work maybe harder at it.
Speaker 1:I lost your audio there. I can't hear you.
Speaker 2:Oh, I can hear you perfectly fine, there you back.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 2:Okay, so I was saying that if you I think it was Mark Twain or somebody very wise said, if you find out what you really, really enjoy and do that, then you'll never work.
Speaker 2:So I don't know, I was a decent enough architect, but I was a much better leader and much better coach and much better business owner. I think my father always used to say to me because I've run these very, very large companies and, as I mentioned, he's Spanish and he's very philosophical and he we had this thing going for a few years where he would say how's work? And I say, how terrible, I've been fired. Of course I'd never had been fired, but but I was working for these very, very big organizations and he believed that you should always have your own business. And that was his belief. And he would say to me, when I said I was fired, he would say, terrific, because I'd make mean, you got to do your own thing. And he would say that it's better to be the head of a mouse and the tail of a lion, which I kind of get what he meant by that.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, that's why I guess we started our own business and we have a few now and yeah, but yeah, that's how it is Awesome, and can you tell us a little bit more about my daily leadership and kind of like, what's your business strategy for that?
Speaker 2:Yes. So whilst I mentioned I worked for these tremendous, tremendous leaders, one of them really kind of set my whole career on the path of. It then took and I think it's important and I think that maybe I'll share with you an exercise that all of your audience could probably do quite easily. But I think this exercise I'll tell you the two pivotal points that changed my life and made me a significantly better leader and made me a significant better business owner and helped me grow businesses More than anything else I can imagine. So so if anybody's minded to do this little exercise, when we grab yourself a piece of paper and a pen, I think it'll be helpful. So when I mentioned earlier that I got one of these super duper big jobs which, quite frankly, I wasn't I shouldn't have got Anyway, it was politics, it just made sense at the time and it so anyway, I got the role and a couple of days in there was a note on my desk, a handwritten note, because this is told you, I'm ancient, this is before email and all of that kind of stuff and the group chairman asked me to go into his office and I thought I've been rumbled right in two days. They've already figured out. I'm not the guy for the, for the job, but that wasn't what he was for.
Speaker 2:I sat down with him and he asked me this question. He said have you ever worked for a terrible boss? Have you ever worked for a bad manager, bad leader, bad owner? Right, and I'm hoping that you know, whilst I don't want anyone to have worked for a bad manager, a bad leader, I'm hoping that everybody at least that's listening, or you know your audience, can imagine what one of those looks like. Right, we kind of know intuitively what a bad boss looks like, even if we've never worked for one. So, anyway, I said yes, but I had, I had worked for a, you know, a bad boss.
Speaker 2:And he, he gave me a piece of paper in a pen and he said well, just write down what are the characteristics of a terrible boss. Just write down what does? What does an awful look like, what does absolutely dreadful look like? And I can't exactly remember what I wrote, but I probably wrote something like a micromanager plays favorites, inconsistent, unclear, non-specific, right? You can just imagine what, what it might look like if you were to sit down and write what does a terrible boss look like. So I wrote five or six things, still slightly confused, but slid the piece of paper back to him. He looked at the list and went yeah, that's really good, write me a few more. So then I wrote three or four more other characteristics of a terrible boss and then slid it back. He said give me a few more. And then you know, these days AI could give you the list in five seconds, right?
Speaker 2:Chat GP nine five seconds, but this was back in the day, right. So then I wrote probably had now a list of about 12 things. Okay, he said yeah, that's absolutely terrific. That's exactly what what terrible looks like. I said, okay, good, he said now, will you do me a favor? I said, yeah, of course, whatever. What do you need? He said, well, stay for your around here. Well, you're running this business for us. Can you absolutely give me a solemn promise to never, ever do any of the things on that list? Right? So I said yeah. He said I can keep it with you at all times and if I ever see you in the corridor or you pop into my office or I pop into your office or see at the board meeting or see in the canteen, have that list with you, because I probably want to talk to you about it, you know. So what did that do? That was my first introduction into, if you think about it, what I did. Was I designed my, I designed my own job role, didn't I? Because it was the opposite of those things.
Speaker 2:Here's the tricky thing, though. The tricky thing, dylan, is how do you know when you're being inconsistent? How do you know when you're playing favorites? How do you know when you're doing the things on this list? So the first thing is here's what terrible looks like. Go the opposite direction. The other issue, then, is how do you know when you're doing those things?
Speaker 2:And here's the point, if any of your listeners are leaders, owners of companies, senior managers of organizations, big or small, here's what rarely happens, Dylan. It's fairly rare that someone come to knock on your office and say hey, dylan, you got five minutes, just want to chat with you about something. You go yeah, of course, come in, you know me. Open door policies, sit down, what's on your mind? And then it's fairly rare for somebody to say well, dylan, I've been, I've been kind of tracking you, been watching what you've been doing for the last six months, and I thought I just wanted to tell you that I think you're doing a terrible, terrible, terrible job. That doesn't happen very much, does it? Doesn't happen very often. It's really difficult to get the bravery to tell you you know, when you boss the God, an ugly baby, right, it's really tricky, tricky to do. So. People don't tell you that, right? So let me ask you this, dylan what percentage of the time do you think your people tell you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. What do you think?
Speaker 1:Probably not that much, so it's not a hundred percent.
Speaker 2:Now there is zero, but it's somewhere. Let's be generous and say 75 percent. 75 percent at the time. They're telling you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Well, they're actually telling you and we talk about this in my first book they're actually telling you, as a version of the truth, that they think it's in their best interest to have you believe, and so what we've got to now do is figure out if you're doing any of these things on this list that we talked about. It's unlikely that anyone's going to tell you. So how are you going to know? No one's going to say, hey, Dylan, you know that list you showed me about terrible yeah, number, you're doing number three again, right? It just doesn't happen, right? So what have you got to do? You've got to be the best leaders. It became very clear to me pretty quickly after having started this list and listening to some of the leadership lessons that my boss was sharing with me, right, Making me into a better leader all the time. And we have to grow self-awareness because people don't tell you, right?
Speaker 2:I saw an interview once, very, very quickly, with George Bush Sr. You know the first Bush president, right, and he the president of the United States. He had stopped being the president and he was in a pro-am golf tournament and he just he just walked off the 18th green and somebody shoved a camera in front of his face and said, hey, Mr President, how was the golf today? And he stopped for a second and he thought and he said it's amazing how many games of golf he's lost since leaving the White House, right? So whilst ever he was the president, everybody let him win. Why? Because he's the bloody president of the United States right Now he's known. Now he's kind of like a nobody, not a nobody. Of course he's dead now, but at the time, you know, he was no longer the president, so everybody just played their normal game of golf and they wiped the floor with him every time.
Speaker 2:So it's tricky because we don't get to the truth. So that you know your job as a leader is to close that truth gap that 75% of you're getting To get that. How'd you do it? Well, you've got to have a strategy for trust, You've got to have a strategy for truth and you've got to build your own self-awareness. Well, how'd you do that? Well, you start by. You start by grading yourself every day and you start by writing these things in the journal. You know, yeah, gratitude and all that kind of stuff and I mean a leadership development journal, not just a to-do list. Right, we talk all about it in the book and on the website and all that kind of stuff but start saying to yourself here's what my objectives are for today, my key objectives, maybe one thing, maybe two things.
Speaker 2:Here's why here are some thoughts about that. I'm giving you at the absolute 50,000-foot level, right, Not going into need to tell at this point, but then at the end of the night, at the end of the day, then review yourself, right, Give yourself a score. Now there are already some people who have switched off and go you want me to journal every morning and every evening? Yeah, I do, In the same way that you brush your teeth every morning and every evening, right? Some people say, well, can't I just journal here? Can I all save it up and I'll do it all on Sunday? Well, you don't do that with your teeth because your gums will bleed. Right, You've got to do this self-reflection every day.
Speaker 2:Here's what happens when you start to say here's what I'm going to do today, with some kind of morning momentum, and then at the end of the day, you say here's what I did today, whether any gaps. You also say you know, if I were to grade myself, if I was to give myself a leadership, if my people were to do my leadership report card right, Like my school report card, what would I get for today? And let's imagine. Then you say, yeah, probably a B minus for today, maybe even a B plus, A minus. Whatever, Whatever today's grading is on your report card.
Speaker 2:What that then forces you to do, Dylan, is to say, well, what should I have done, or should I not have done, or could I have perhaps done? Or if I had said this differently, would that have been a better outcome? What it forces you to do is think well, if it was a B plus, what would I have had to have done to make it an A plus Right? What that is is daily reflective practice, because wisdom comes from an evaluated experience, not just time served right Evaluated experience. The best leaders spend the most time evaluating themselves. It builds that self-awareness that we were talking about.
Speaker 2:What then happens when you do that with enough density is then in the moment somebody asks you a question and you think to yourself ah, I'm gonna have to grade myself later on this afternoon for what I'm just about to do or say. So why don't I give a world-class leadership response to that question, right? Why don't I give best in class or world class? Why don't I give a really good future me Tonight, me, your future, Antonio, in four hours, Antonio will thank me if I handle this well now.
Speaker 2:So, by doing enough reflective, right that hindsight leads to situational insight and that it's situational insight, so you do better in the moment. In the moment leads to foresight, so that you can guide the business better and avoid all of the icebergs and all of that kind of stuff. So, daily journal so write down what terrible looks like. We've got to build your self-awareness because people aren't gonna tell you. Get a strategy for truth. Get a strategy for truth. Allow people to really understand vision, mission goals. Make sure that you understand your own core values and the core values of your organization. Hire and fire to those core values. Start writing these things down. Write in a very organized way, gratitude as well and all of that kind of stuff, and be very intentional about improving, because wisdom comes from evaluated experience, not just time served. Did that?
Speaker 1:help? Yes, 100%, and I really wish some of my previous leaders would have listened to this, because most of my previous jobs and I have been in a few because I think you need to firstly earn enough and you need to have enough of a strong leadership, and I've only found that I could get one of those. I can't earn a lot and have a good leader from my previous experience and it's quite a tough thing and that's the reason I left those jobs is because of poor leadership and I wish they had, like better tools to understand what they were doing wrong and try to get better.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know who said it, it wasn't me. I mentioned it in the book and we talked about it a little bit. People typically join a business but then leave a manager right or leave a boss.
Speaker 1:So you join the business.
Speaker 2:You know you want the role and the business and the brand and all that good stuff, so you'll join for that reason. But then you leave because you've got a bad boss and the number of horrific leaders because we've been coaching leaders now for 12 years or so and a very, very large organizations and very small organizations and the number of just car crashes that we see in the boardroom is just staggering and staggering. But anyway, if that wasn't the case, I wouldn't have a job, so I'm okay with that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%, and I'm also okay with it because it's given me a lot to learn, because I've always known, since I was young, that I'm going to own my own business one day. I'm not quite there yet. I have had a few that Unfortunately, it went the wrong way and we had to call it quits, but I know I'm going to be there one day and I've got all this knowledge of what not to do in terms of being a leader and I'm so excited. It's motivated me to be the best leader possible and I'm really excited for what's to come and using those skills that I've learned, I love that.
Speaker 2:I think that's great. But whenever on a Sunday we would go to my dad's house or to have Sunday dinner because I mentioned Spanish, right, it's a big family guy and everybody would come on Sunday and have Sunday lunch he would go around the table and he'd ask everyone this question where have you failed this week? And if anybody said, well, they hadn't failed anything this week, he would say that's a week wasted, right, because if you haven't failed, you haven't learned anything, right. And Mario Andretti, the race car driver, said you know, if you're not terrified going around the corners, you're not going fast enough, right. And so so we are big proponents of some you win and some you learn right. So so long as you learn the lesson, fail, fail fast, fail forward right. So long as you learn the lesson. So if you're not making any mistakes and you are the smartest guy in the room, then you're hiring wrong 100%.
Speaker 1:And yeah, of course, the mistakes were. They weren't like, I mean, with nice sorry, that's a South African word and I got myself into a bit of debt. But I've 100% learned from it. I don't I don't consider them failures. I'll I consider them learning experiences. And I think that's that's very important to understand.
Speaker 2:It's critical and and and everybody I'll just mention this as well because it's such a critical point that so I have, do you have any children? You're too young, right? No, no, no, I don't. I have four.
Speaker 2:And so I've seen, you know firsthand, children learning to walk and talk and read and write and use a fork and tie shoe laces and all of those things driver, car, all of that stuff, right, and when you see a kid that's about one, about 11 and a half months, when you're a dad, one day you'll thank me for this.
Speaker 2:But before kids move, before babies start to, you know, crawl and then walk, your life is so easy because they are where you last left them, right, until they start to walk. They are where you just last put them down. But when they start to move, life gets tricky. But what's my point? My point is that about one year old, a baby goes it's time to it's time to walk. And if you've ever seen a baby try to walk or write or read or use a fork right or tie the shoe lace, they never get it right. Never get it right the first time. In fact, it takes hundreds of times right, and a baby never tries to pull itself up, fall on its bottom and go. Walking is not for me, forget it.
Speaker 2:It's not for me, right. They never do. What do they do? They just pick themselves up and they go again, and they go again, and they go again and they never, ever, ever, ever stop until they figure it out, never, ever. And they don't get discouraged, they just go okay, let's try again, let's try. And it's not by encouragement, no one's saying, because the one they don't even can't even talk. You don't say to them try again, they just go, let's try again and forked and write. Writing is tricky and speaking is tricky. That's my point that if it's important enough to us, we become very determined. Little buggers, right, and we were all determined. If you can walk and drive a car and read and write and you can clearly talk right, then you have the determined gene stamped on your DNA somewhere. So never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever give up 100%.
Speaker 1:I love that analogy of the baby and I think it's also quite ironic because when, sometimes, when people fail and people get upset, oftentimes people say don't be a baby, don't be a baby, but you should be a baby, you should be a baby.
Speaker 2:I love that, dylan. That's brilliant. I'm gonna do that. My next blog I will give you. I will give to Dylan Burke. I will give you credit, that's. Amazing, I love that baby I'm gonna block, I'm gonna write that blog tomorrow. Yeah, baby, I love it, do be a baby. You know, I've told that story like a hundred 500 times. No one's ever thought that that is genius man.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Um, so we are a bit over time here. I really enjoyed this. I kind of got lost in it. I didn't look at the time, but, okay, if you could give one piece of advice to business owners and leaders, what, what would that be for them to?
Speaker 2:Get a coach doesn't have to be me, me. Get a coach the. The person that taught you to walk and talk and read and write and walk and use the fork and drive Was the best coach you've ever known, and that was your mom or your dad or somebody who loved you when you were a child. Get a coach, you'll go faster, further, quicker, easy. I have a coach and my coach is a fourth generation nuclear submarine commander. Well, submarine commander. The father was nuclear and his father was diesel and his father diesel. But if anybody tells you they're serious about growing their business and and they don't journal and they don't have a coach, don't believe them 100%, amazing.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for that and thank you for being on the show. So what's the best way for? What's the best way for our audience to reach out to Antonio Garido, if you have any offers for them to take advantage of, or if they just want to know?
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. If anybody goes to our website, which is all the W's my daily leadership Com, there's lots of free resources on there. There's core values, downloads as business health checks, there's assessments they can take. There's lots of stuff on there. So have a look at wwwmydailyleadershipcom or write to me direct, right, it'll get to me, you know, eventually will. I promise it'll go through our, go through our filters, but just mention Dylan and It'll get to me. I promise Um, which is just Antonio at my daily leadership, and any question, there's no dumb ones and we will Genuinely do our best to help you Amazing Well.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, Antonio. I've really enjoyed this.
Speaker 2:Me too. Thank you, dylan. Let me know how you're getting on.
Speaker 1:I will do.