The Inner Chief

In this episode we meet Ted Prodromou, America's #1 LinkedIn Coach, and talk about perception, connecting properly with purpose, and standing out online.

As you will pick up from this episode, Ted has bounced back from many setbacks, and offers up a number of immediately actionable tips for super-charging both your LinkedIn profile, but also your online presence and online etiquette in general. So get that pen and paper handy, log into your LinkedIn profile and be prepared to put your best foot forward!

A special thanks to Alex Mandossian for recommending Ted.

You can connect with Ted Prodromou on LinkedIn.

You can find Ted's books on Amazon.

Key Quotes from Ted

On the LinkedIn platform as a whole:

• The last three to six months, LinkedIn has been rolling out updates like crazy. And they really are pushing it as a content management platform, content distribution. So you post a video on there now, and it goes out to first, second and third-level networks. First-level is people who have accepted invitations with each other; so when we connected, your network became my second-level network. And then there's the third-level network behind that. So now, content you post isn't only seen by people you're directly connected with. It's seen by everybody, and it's pushed out to Google and Bing now, and all the different other search engines.
• 83% of people will look at your LinkedIn profile now before they take a meeting with you. I'm always harping on telling people, "You need to complete your profile to make a great first impression!" What impression does that make of your company if somebody comes to your website and it's like, horrible looking? Or like a third-grader put it together or something like that? Same with your LinkedIn profile.

Profile improvements: Profile picture:

• They've made the images fit better, but with your cameras today, you can take a great picture. Stand in front of a blank wall and have somebody take your picture. Don't crop out a photo of you at a wedding or something or with a busy background. This is your professional image, people are out there looking at you.
• Say you're going to a meeting, you're trying to sell a $20,000 coaching package to a client. And they just looked at your profile and it's you half-drunk in a wedding somewhere and you got somebody cropped out and it's all blurry. And then you come in and say, "My charge is $20,000." And they go think, "Who is this guy?"

Profile improvements: Professional Headline

• One of the things, the professional headline they call it, is right under your name. And by default, LinkedIn takes your current job title and sticks it in there, but you can edit it to make you stand out.
• If you search for an executive coach on LinkedIn, there are literally millions of people with executive coach in their title. And almost all of them will have their job title, like executive coach at XYZ Company. That doesn't make you stand out. People are scrolling on their phones now, most of the time, so you have one second to get their attention.
• So I always use the USP, unique selling proposition. What problem do you solve and who do you solve it for? Get that into your headline and they'll click on it and learn more about you. I have the keyword phrases in there.
• One of my clients was a financial advisor, so I helped her create it. It said, "Would you like to retire with the same standard of living you have now or better?" That just got people's attention.
• Treat it like a sales letter, or an article. The headline of the article or a book. What's going make you pick up a book at the library and read it? The title. We're all in sales, whether we're working for a company or not. To get the job, you got to go in and sell yourself.

Profile improvements: Summary

• Tell your story. Don't put it in the third person. It's more conversational and people really get to know you and like you faster. If you're writing in the third person, it's pretty stuffy.

Company Pages

• They revamped the company pages recently, they've been evolving over a year. Now they have places you can post your products. They're called showcase pages so a company like Adobe has lots of different product lines, so you can create a showcase page for each major product line and then people can go there and have conversations about what's going on with that product, like Photoshop. But the company pages show up in Google search results, so it's a good way to get your name out there.

Posting Content on LinkedIn

• My strategy is to post a lot of other people's content, such as other LinkedIn experts' from their blogs. And people ask, "Why are you sharing your competitor's information?" And I reply, "Because I thought it was a good article and a great tip." I learned this from Dan Kennedy years and years ago when I was learning marketing, when I was failing as a coach, he always said, "The pie is big enough for all of us. You don't need to go after your competitors and destroy them."

• And one of my wife's co-workers, her husband came up to her and said, "Wow, Ted is all over the internet, man, he is just crushing it." And I'm just laughing because I wrote 20% of the content I'm sharing and 80% I'm sharing other people's. I've got it all automated through a programme called Sendible. Just pumping content out there with my name associated with it. So even if I share an article from Forbes magazine, people perceive me with Forbes magazine because they see my name with Forbes. It's all perception. But consciously, they're thinking, "Oh wow. Ted's really, he's posting 10 or 12 times a day on social media. He must be really famous and really know what he's doing."
• Post as much as you can, but don't sit there and blast. Sometimes I'll connect with someone on LinkedIn and I'll see them all of a sudden, they're posting six or seven times an hour. That's too much. I do six to ten posts a day on LinkedIn throughout the day. I wrote four books now so I hired someone to go through the manuscripts and they created social media posts from excerpts from the books. And then I have those in these queues in Sendible so that they're just always going and recycling. Each post comes back about every three or four months, because I've got so many posts queued up now. But otherwise, I actually blocked out time to start writing one article a week.

Writing an engaging LinkedIn Article

• One really good trick, there's a site called quora.com, and people are asking questions about everything there. And I have a friend, he gets all of his LinkedIn consulting from answering questions on Quora and speaking engagements. And the articles only need to be about 500 words anyway.
• And don't make it all like you're perfect. I share a lot of vulnerabilities, things that have happened to me, big failures in my life. I share all that, and I send out to my email list, you wouldn't believe how many people reach out.

Accepting LinkedIn connection requests

• Everyone has all sorts of philosophies about accepting certain people or should they try to reach out to certain people. I kind of filter out people if their profile looks not great or they didn't even put a job title in. I won't accept them if they don't have a picture. And not to pick on certain people, but a lot are SEO experts and marketing experts, I don't accept theirs, because they're just going to try to pitch me something. I know they're trying to grow a business and stuff but they're not going to add value to my network. Just think about that. Who are all these people connected with, would their connections be valuable to my network?
• If it's the CEO-level or C-level, a lot of times, they don't really log into LinkedIn very often. Only 24% of LinkedIn members log in more than once a month. Now they're almost at 600 million, so that's still a lot of people that are active on LinkedIn. But with LinkedIn, if it's the CEO that you're trying to get to, you can send an InMail to them, but don't just say, "Hey, I want to connect because I want to work for you." You have to compliment them and get creative of what's going to get them to accept your invitation. Open the conversation on other social networks.
• I've seen a new trend on LinkedIn. I don't know if you're getting this too. We all have that experience where you connect with people and say, "Hey, thanks for connecting." And then they try to sell you something, a long sales pitch. Now they're starting to do that in the invitation to connect. Like, they're not even waiting to connect, they're already trying to sell me before I say, "Sure, I'll be your friend." I can't tell you how many times people ... at least three times a week, people send me a message. "Hey, do you need help with your LinkedIn? We are a LinkedIn lead generation firm." I'll reply and say, "Did you read my profile?" They'll say, "Yeah, I read my profile." I'll say, "What do I do for a living?"

Resources mentioned in the episode:

• Contribution to an article on predicted LinkedIn trends for 2019 on Digital Marketer (Ted's piece is two-thirds down the article)
• Snappr, a great resource for taking a high-quality LinkedIn professional photo
• Book recommendation: How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie
• Book recommendation: Leadership and Self-Deception

For more info check out www.chiefmaker.com.au/96

Our High performance teams series now enters part 12, and the second episode of the Culture pillar, where I talk you through how to tighten the bonds between the people in the team, and in you and the team.

IN THIS EPISODE WE COVER BUILDING TRUST WITHIN THE TEAM MEMBERS AND HOW THIS CREATES NOT ONLY A SENSE OF BELONGING, BUT RESULTS IN HIGH PERFORMANCE.

There is a lot of research now that shows that the best high performance teams know each other really well. Not just the quality of skill and the individuals' abilities, but they all say they know each other really well away from the office.

To form a team that's really going to make an enormous difference in the world, you've got to have people

you can trust, and so you've got to tighten the bonds and get to know them deeply.

In this episode, I outline:

– How a personality modelling activity will help you understand others and communicate better with them;

– Other fun games to find out more about colleagues' backgrounds;

– The 5 why's method so as to peel back the onion layers and find out what makes them tick.

Stay epic

In this episode we meet Cliff Gale former Managing Director of Lite n' Easy for over 20 years and talk about passion, respect for your people and keeping the soul alive in your business.

Cliff bought into Lite n' Easy after he saw a two line ad in a paper in its very early days. He then led the business for over two decades and grew it into one of the most successful businesses of its type.

Key Points from Cliff:

• Know your business inside out
• Treat your people and customer with respect and recognise their efforts
• Keep the business emotive and build its soul
• Focus on the things that count and profit will come
• The difference between givers and takers

A special thanks to Sarah Chamberlain from The Real Estate Stylist for recommending Cliff.

Key Quotes and Points from Cliff:

"You know, because we don't see it all the time, it's great when also when we see you like that, it makes you feel like you care. You care about the business, and you care about us." I said, "Well, I'm glad you said that because I do. That's it." I was so, yeah, passionate about the business. I was so focused on making the business successful. I was never focused on the profit of the business. The business was a very profitable business, but I knew that if we got all the blocks in place, that the outcome would be profit. So I never had to worry about that at all, and it was much more fun running the business by just being able to do things properly and for me to be myself there.

I prided myself on the fact that I really carried myself very similarly in my workplace as I did out of my workplace. I didn't have a suit. I never wore a suit at work anyway, but I never felt like I put a suit on when I walked in the door. I never wanted to be seen like that, and I don't believe I was ever seen by that either. I was just Cliff in there. I was seen to be the driver of the business. Yeah.

Look, we had to pay people the right amount of money. That was a core ... I learned that as well. You had to make sure you're paying people a fair and reasonable amount for the role they did, but I learned, and I'd learned this emphatically, that a lot of why people continue to work for you and wanted to do the right thing by you, and I guess that was something that I always felt a lot of people really wanted to do the right thing by I me, was because I treated them with respect in the business. I ran the business morally correct. We were generous in the way we ran the business

I looked at my business very simply. If we traded people right, they would basically give it back to you. In this world, that might sound very, very simplistic but I think it's very, very underrated. I think the value of just doing the right thing by people, and of course, look, there's mentoring on the way of your staff and all that sort of thing. Yeah, there was all that stuff that was involved in the business as it kept growing. We had logistical issues. We had all sorts of production issues, but I reflected on the sense of why the business was successful, because people basically wanted to do the right thing.

We then found by just focusing on what we did and doing it very, very well ... and that was a very important part of I guess why the business was so successful. We didn't try to be all things to everybody, but we tried to do everything very, very, very well. I reflect one time and thinking about you one time, we might even get as big as Jenny Craig or one of those sorts of business. I think in the end, we're probably 10, 15 times bigger than Jenny Craig as a business. I guess that's one of the nice things I reflect on. I reflect on the success of the business. And, yeah, look, as I said earlier, success generates profit, of course, but my feeling is not about the profit. The profit was always considered to me to be an outcome.

People wanted to be ... wanted to work at Lite n' Easy. I wanted to employ what I referred to as givers rather than takers.

Givers are the ones that were prepared to just hang around the end of the day till everything think was all finished and all done, and the takers were the ones that, in the interview, they started talking about their wages and when they'll be getting ... when their first review was and things like that. We're able to identify very early in our recruitment process to try to identify people that were, what I called givers.

Because I was so passionate about the business, at times, I would really micromanage into an issue, but I was really, really conscious that if I micromanage something, I only did that because it was either a serious problem or it was one that ... but I didn't want to skirt around the issue. If it was serious enough for me to get involved in, I wanted to find out all the ingredients of what created that problem for us.

We would then come to ... by getting to the root of the problem, and that was really important to me, we would then come to an agreement that this ... moving forward would be done differently. That's, I guess, what it was all about for me. But I guess reflecting on what you were getting at there, Greg, micromanaging the business was in some ways a bit of a call for me, but I was very focused on not doing it unless it was really, really important. I found it was sometimes when it was extremely important, but I got out really quick.

I mean, one time, we had a particular problem. This is, I guess, with an idea of the size of the business and giving an insight into me personally. The business, this was probably in about the 12th, 15th year. The business was probably turning over 50 or $60 million a year and I had an issue. It couldn't get resolved so I spent eight hours one day in the freezer just helping manage something that I wasn't happy with.

Now, that's an absolute extension of micromanaging, but it was ... it reflected the passion that I had at the time. Did I do that regularly? No, I didn't do that regularly. Did I walk home at the end of that day with frostbite, genuine frostbite on my feet? Yes, I did. Did it take me six months to get over it? Yes, it did. And was that intentional? It certainly wasn't, but it was just a ... it was really, really important to me to show everybody that this thing could be resolved. Now, that might sound a screwy story, but that was just part of my psyche to do stuff like that.

Do not underestimate the core things that ... core needs that people have in life, people being ultimately employees, people that work for you, the core needs of wanting to be appreciated in their roles, wanting to be shown respect in their roles. There's lots of media in the last year or two that's really highlighting the problems of harassments and all sorts of things like that. I was very, very, very conscious of ... as I said, I ran the business ethically correct and all that sort of thing, but I believe we've probably gone a little bit too far in the other way. There's been too much focus on profit outcomes in business rather than maybe building the process along the way through empowering people, through effective delegation.

Just, I guess getting back to basics, getting back to what made you feel good with an early boss that you dealt with? What were the things that ... What was a boss that you respected, and what did they do? What did they do themselves when you were working for them?

For more info check out www.chiefmaker.com.au/94

So , IN THIS EPISODE WE COVER THE POWER OF HIGH PERFORMANCE LIFECYCLES AND HOW TO USE THEM TO AUTOMATE THE PURSUIT OF EXCELLENCE.

The pursuit of excellence lies at the heart of all great performers. It means mastering your craft and continually working to improve yourself. It also means leading your team to work collectively to improve itself. The long term benefits have an incredible compound effect on your ability to get results and rise above the pack.

Executive Performance Lifecycle: (P2R2) Prepare, Perform, Recover, Review

I outline:

– the Prepare, Perform, Recover, Review (P2R2) Lifecycle and how to use it as an executive performance tool

– How to lock this into as a system that drives performance

– How to optimise each step

– Some tricks to stay focused and embed the system in the real world

Stay epic

In this episode we hear from Geoff Lloyd, CEO and MD of Perpetual Limited.

ABOUT GEOFF

Geoff joined Perpetual in August 2010 as Group Executive of Perpetual Private and led the development and implementation of the growth strategy for this business. He took on the additional responsibility of Head of Retail Distribution in September 2011 and was appointed Managing Director and CEO in February 2012.

Geoff was previously General Manager of Advice and Private Banking at BT Financial Group following the Westpac Group merger with St.George Bank. Before the merger, he led St.George's wealth management portfolio. He held many senior positions at BT Financial Group, including Chief Legal Counsel and Head of the Customer and Business Services Division.

Geoff is the Chairman of the Financial Services Council, an Advisory board member of The Big Issue and the Patron of the Financial Industry Community Aid Program. He is a Patron of Emerge Foundation and is also Chairman of the University of Technology Sydney Law Advisory board.

Key Questions and Answers from Geoff (curated for clarification and brevity):

What did you learn from the police force?

In the police force, I got to learn a lot about people and what I still take with me is that you don't judge too quickly. Take the time to step back and see what else might be going on, what's driving an outcome, because what you see is normally just the surface of a thing. When it involves people in complex environments, there's always emotion. So that's something I've tried to take with me where I don't judge too quickly, stand back, ask questions and observe.

What did you learn from your first move interstate to Sydney with ASIC?

It was the first time I learned about stretching myself out of what you might call a comfort zone, and how it can lead to just so many unforeseen, unplanned, unexpected outcomes. And so for me, that was probably the first time I've learned that as you actually stretch yourself and take real risk, it is not just a little bit that comes from that. It is quite amazing and you really don't know what you can achieve until you've tried.

What drives you internally? You're this,very aspirational man, you want to grow again and take your game to another level. What drives that?

I've learned for a long time that there's always evidence of how you can keep getting better and you just don't know what you can achieve. And so having that mindset, of being curious…if you aren't finding evidence and keep getting better, then you're going to plateau. And so for me it's about that looking forward, being curious. If I don't have a 110 percent passion and energy for something, it becomes 50 percent and so I need to be operating at that level to truly find rewarding outcomes, whether it's philanthropic, social, business or family.

Do you have in moments when you doubt your abilities? What do you in do in those moments to keep going?

Yeah, I do. You know, if you don't, if you can't look in the mirror and get a bit paranoid, then you're probably not able to really find evidence of how to keep getting better. I've tried to find different times in my career where I've hit inflection points and probably the most successful times the more paranoid I get.

You've got to have enough confidence to know you're going to be able to follow on to what the next challenge is… I get energy from others. So, getting access to and making sure I've got the right network, that's really important. But equally I've always had this philosophy that you've got to hire the best people you can listen to them, trust them, invest in them and then make sure you're having some fun along the way, you know, because it's, it's a very serious game that we play.

If you can get that sort of talent around you then your job as a leader is really about being their guide and helping guide them rather than do or carry out the activity. Great leaders are able to step back and be able to motivate people through how they give them that guidance and help set direction and boundaries.

Why did you switch from General Counsel into other more broader roles and how did that lead to CEO level roles?

I actually started to think differently about my career and stretch myself beyond being tall and skinny in a career or a profession to being broad. Think about it as the goal is to grow skills and experience over the next three to five years rather than, I want this job or that job. I think if you just go off the job titles, you might never know how good you can be and how different the work that you can do will be

Did anyone give you any feedback to you personally that, that really rang true for you? That was important for the young Geoff Lloyd to hear?

BT was a very driven meritocracy, with enormous amount of opportunity. So running too fast can happen and it happened for me. And so learning about not stepping on others around you, but picking others up around you is what you're going to be judged for.

And, that it takes time. Actually there's no shortcuts to hard work. I've tried lots of them. it's just about hard work. It's actually about focus and it's about making sure that you're true to yourself. Don't try to be somebody else. I've worked for some great leaders and I've picked up their characteristics and often said, 'oh, well, if I can be like that'. And you can't be, you can pick up those characteristics and learn from them. But then you have got to be you again. Today we would talk about authentic leadership. You just have to be, you.

How was the final step to CEO different?

The step was quite different because as much as I've worked in large organizations, ran much bigger teams in the past than at perpetual, when you become the CEO, there's nobody else that's coming. It's words that we've used around the executive team that 'nobody's coming'. It's us. You know, you run two and a half thousand people in a bank, there's always somebody else who can ask or the decision can go to. So the big gap is…Nobody's coming.

Does 'Ownership Precedes Victory' resonate with you?

I think you've got to have courage or otherwise you're not going to keep challenging yourself. If you don't you're not going to keep challenging your team, you're not going to take the right amount of risk and you won't see the other sides of the benefit that can come with that risk. So make sure you've got the courage is the key, that conviction of something you've started to create change. Maybe that's the words that gravitate more with me.

How do you stay focused?

I suspect that at perpetual I will be remembered for at least two words. Hopefully it's clarity and focus. I think complexity kills businesses. I'm a big believer in that a quality businesses can't do lots of things. What are the few things that you can do incredibly well and be the leader at.

And then once you become a leader at anything, it's very hard to stay there. Everyone's coming after you. For us at perpetual and for me it's about clarity on a few things. Do them really well and then move to the next few things. Try not to be distracted by a long list, we try to prioritise on what we can do and then draw a line under number three. And you know, often the team will hear me say, just tell me the top two. Actually, I'm not interested in the top three.

We also had to try to focus on what we're not going to do and write that down because a lot of businesses are good at telling you what they do, but if you can articulate what you're not going to do, it brings more clarity to that focus around what you're going to do

Where do leaders in the middle and senior management waste their time and effort?

I think often getting too much into the detail because if you're a leader, you've got to have sort of three hats. You've got to do work, improve your work and lead your team. And you've got to have, at least a third of each of those….So you've got to dedicate time and focus to leadership, not just doing. And I think it's easy to go back to the doing. You know, I had somebody put it in my mind a long time ago, a phrase called 'being a guide, not a guru'.

I think as you become more of a leader and your sole job, which is mine, is leading, not doing. So the job is to guide people not to be the technical guru. It took me a long time to learn that. As a lawyer, you want to be the smartest person in the room when it comes to the topic on 'x of the law'. And that's not your job as even the general counsel, because my job was to hire the smartest people in the room, trust them, invest them, listen to them, guide them because it was their job to be that smart. It's not mine. And so that stuck with me for a long time. So maybe they should be more of a guide than a guru because your job is to hire the gurus as a leader.

How important is it for young people coming through and in middle management and senior executives to have a network?

I think it's vital. You know, I also chair the Financial Services Council now, a leading industry body and one of the things we've reintroduced is a group called 'the circuit'. I call it the 30 somethings and it's actually about bringing interesting topics to a forum of 40 to 100 of all of our members staff.

What was the most important thing you learned in Harvard?

How bad Australians are at negotiation. I think that was a really big part of that program and you know, just seeing our cultural norms. We are ranked in the bottom five countries in the world in negotiation!

You've been CEO here for six years now, and the share price has gone from $19 to just shy of 50 which is a remarkable period of growth for the company. How important is it for individuals to build a track record, perhaps not as spectacular as that, but to keep thinking about change and transformation?

I've worked with a gentlemen named Andy Meikle who has left a couple of thoughts with me over the years and one was, you know, high performers create a track record that you can leave on the table and they can leave the room and it speaks for itself. It is important to be able to think about not the way you would tell the story, how the story would tell itself. And that doesn't have to be about share price growth.

What is the difference between Change and Transformation?

I had this view that change is what happens to you. Transformation is what you do to yourself. So with change, you react to your competitor, you're reacting to, it puts out a new product, you react. Transformations are where you have that honest, courageous look and say we're going to go from x to y and it's going to be tough and we're going to have to have clarity, courage, and control which are three woods, we used a lot. Clarity of what we would or wouldn't do, control because the market is going to tell us what's wrong and we also needed to keep the courage to hold the course because we couldn't possibly plan for everything to that level of detail.

How would you define a GREAT Chief?

I think it's someone who is able to bring passion and energy to the way they communicate to people and the way they support and develop and grow everyone around them. It means you've able to motivate, support and nourish people in your community.

What is the final message of wisdom and hope you think is vital for the next generation of executives?

I still believe that there's no shortcuts, it's all about hard work. But remaining really very curious, have curiosity in your life and you can define what that means and make sure you've got the courage.

Recommended Books by Geoff Lloyd.

Repeatability :

https://www.amazon.com/Repeatability-Enduring-Businesses-Constant-Change-ebook/dp/B0070YQQI4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1520487587&sr=8-1&keywords=repeatability

Founders Mentality:

https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Mentality-Overcome-Predictable-Crises-ebook/dp/B01BO6QMC8/ref=pd_sim_351_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=WSXZ3BEMWMND0FWN22E7