Patrick Ewers, Author of Radical Delegation, on the Power of Positive Alacrity and Delegating Tasks to Improve Focus and Efficiency

Transcript

Patrick, welcome back to the show.

 Patrick Ewers 00:02:37

Yes, thank you.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:02:38

Yeah, super excited to do this for everybody who didn’t listen to you were on episode 96 before, and to be honest, one of my favorite episodes, and for everybody who didn’t listen to it, or it’s been a long time since they’ve listened to it. Patrick and I originally met something like, I don’t know, ten years ago randomly at this conference, and I had just sold my last company, and I was looking to try and figure out what I should do next, and I bumped into this person in the audience. Turned out it was Patrick. I didn’t actually remember who it was, but, Patrick, you gave me this advice that stuck with me and kind of influenced the next stage of my career, which was I was trying to figure out what to do next. And you said, you have a network. You have a network of people who run into problems all the time and are thinking about the same sorts of things that you are. So you should just reach out to your network and just tell them, hey, I’m looking to start my next company. If you run across a problem that you think is a meaningful problem that you’re not going to solve, but you would love it if someone solved, you should let me know and just seed that idea with your entire network.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:03:49

I thought it was such incredible advice. I did that. That’s how we came up with the idea for fellow, and that’s how the company started. But I didn’t know. I never knew who to credit that idea back to. And then years later, maybe seven years later, you came to do a session for Kraft, who’s an investor, great venture firm, and you were doing a talk for all the founders about so many things but relationship building. And I’m like, oh, my God, it’s the same guy who I methadore ten years ago. So, anyway, you’ve had a remarkable impact on me.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:04:20

We had you on episode 96, one of the best episodes of the podcast. Everyone should check it out. So today you’ve written a new book, and I’m so excited to dive in. But you’re one of the best in the world there is around building relationships. You coach a ton of executives from some of the best companies in the world. So lots for us to talk about today.

 Patrick Ewers 00:04:42

Isn’t it interesting? Because that’s the memory you have of me. And yet when we look at what we’re going to be talking about today, it’s all about freeing up time and productivity. Right. And I think it’s important today that we find a way to connect it to basically the reason why you remember me in my work.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:04:58

Yeah.

 Patrick Ewers 00:04:59

So let’s make sure. Remind me to do so if I forget.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:05:02

Yeah, yeah, for sure. One of the things obviously, you help us do is like, focus on leverage and being more productive. And so we’re definitely going to talk about all those things and dive into the book. But we typically ask guests on the show to talk about mistakes that they’ve made in the past. And so you’ve shared one in the last episode, but wondering if, you know, since the last time we met, have.

 Patrick Ewers 00:05:24

I made more mistakes?

Aydin Mirzaee 00:05:25

Is there a new mistake? Are there, you know, does Patrick Ewers ever make mistakes? What’s a recent one that comes to mind?

 Patrick Ewers 00:05:32

I feel like a person who runs from one mistake to the other in many ways, and we could probably fill up the whole time we have on uncovering some of the mistakes we’ve had. A, but I have a very personal one to share this time. And luckily, it is around relationships. Again, many of us are currently feeling the squeeze in some form or the other. Things are weird. The economy isn’t running as it used to, et cetera, et cetera. And so I convinced myself that I wanted to go out and ask a connection of mine, a client, actually, of mine, for favor. It’s actually relatively lightweight favor, but something in my stomach felt a.

 Patrick Ewers 00:06:07

That it wasn’t the right time, that the relationship hasn’t matured to a point where I could ask it. But because of certain pressures and existing situations, I decided to ask a favor anyway. Sort of just ran with it, and it ended up being very, very detrimental to that relationship. The person wasn’t willing to do the favor and be felt really almost disturbed by it. Now, long story short, like, one could argue, well, should he react it this way, yes or no? But to me, the point is, that’s not the point. The point is that I chose to do so, and I did so against basically my gut. And so the thing that I learned from that is to basically, I didn’t even have to learn it. It was just a reminder of, you gotta stay true to your gut, you gotta listen to your gut.

 Patrick Ewers 00:06:58

You cannot overrule it, no matter in what mode you ingested, how hard you want to press things. If it doesn’t feel right, listen to it. And that was really painful because it was somebody I cared about. And that really basically knocked down that relationship quite a bit. And if he’s listening, I want to just say, I’m sorry.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:07:17

Yeah, well, thank you for sharing that. I think you bring up a really good point around the trusting your gut. It’s usually not a very obvious feeling. Right? Like, it’s kind of like a subtle feeling that makes it in the moment, it feels a little bit, maybe not normal, but it’s very hard. Like I’ve made the same mistake in the past as well, and many times and I keep making it. But when I’m my best self, one thing that I do remember to do is anytime I have that feeling, I just like snooze that email for another 24 hours or something like that, just to give myself the bandwidth. But you’re right, you’re kind of in like I’m in this mode of inbox zero, trying to get through everything and just responding to stuff quickly. And sometimes the pressure of doing that can override your gut feeling and it can get tricky.

 Patrick Ewers 00:08:06

Aydin, if I can throw one on top of that, not only should you pause for a certain period of time, be 24 hours or something else, the other thing I would do is basically do not send the email, but call the person.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:08:19

Yeah, that’s true, right.

 Patrick Ewers 00:08:21

Just say, hey, is there an even smallest chance that this email might be misunderstood? The answer is most likely yes. And the likelihood that it will be misunderstood if you are actually on a Zoom call or meet that person in person is very small. This is all based on science done by this guy called Albert Murberein. He was a UCLA professor and he basically did research around the three ways in which we communicate. The three channels. There are only three channels. One is the content, the words we choose the words you would write into that email. The second thing is the tone of your voice.

 Patrick Ewers 00:08:55

And the third thing is the body language that you’re sending when you are connecting with somebody. And of that, basically 90% of it is actually your facial expressions. Now question for you, Aydin, is how do you think they are distributed in relative importance? Do you happen to know that?

Aydin Mirzaee 00:09:11

That’s a good question. I think facial expressions were probably the most important. Maybe you probably get the most signal from them.

 Patrick Ewers 00:09:19

Well, give me percentages. How much for the words, how much for the voice? And how much for the facial and body language?

Aydin Mirzaee 00:09:26

Ooh, tricky, tricky. Okay, so I’m going to say, yeah, the content or the. Or the voice. I would just give it, you know, maybe 30%. I would give a third. A third? A third, how’s that?

 Patrick Ewers 00:09:38

That’s a cop out. But okay. The answer is actually really intriguing. It’s basically the words you choose is only 7%.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:09:46

Wow, that’s low.

 Patrick Ewers 00:09:47

The tone is 38%. And 55% is your facial expressions. And this is one of the reasons why people still meet, right? I mean, this is why you have a business that you have, right? When we meet with people, when we basically send our signals through all the channels, things go better. And that’s why I’m saying, hey, you know, sometimes when you have that gut feeling and you’re about to send an email, just say, would this go better over if I just call the person and hop on a quick call? So I don’t know if that was all right for me to jump in, but you fired that in my brain when you mentioned that.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:10:16

Yeah, I love it. It’s a great reminder, and that is a very large portion. So I think that if anything has the possibility of being misinterpreted now you know what the high bandwidth way of communication is. So definitely keep that in mind. So, Patrick, I do want to dive into the big topic at hand. I think especially post pandemic executives everywhere. We have a large audience of executives, founders, CEO’s, C levels, vps all throughout. And everybody’s trying to figure out how to gain more leverage, become more productive.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:10:52

And it somehow feels that even though for a lot of us, we’re now doing hybrid or remote work, we don’t necessarily have a commute as much anymore, it seems like we should have more time, but somehow it feels like we have less and it’s difficult to handle. And so when I found out that you’ve written this new book called Radical Delegation, the topic seems amazing. This is stuff that you know the most about. So why don’t we start with, like, why did you write this book, and who is it for?

 Patrick Ewers 00:11:21

The answer to the question starts with basically the company that I founded almost 15 years ago, right? Mindmaven. I’m the CEO and founder of it, and it’s a classic executive coaching company, although I would challenge everybody, find another coaching company that is more tactical and pragmatic as ours. The reason why we can claim that is because we have a very simple mandate, and that is that we are trying to help people achieve their fullest potential by focusing on relationships. The interesting thing that then comes up is that people ask, well, why relationships? Why would you focus on relationships? Can you do other things? And so on and so forth? And the answer is actually quite simple. I would argue that despite the fact that you have a huge network, you don’t know a single person who’s been able to reach the top without help from others. Right. It’s a state that doesn’t exist. It’s one of those few universal truths, or at least something that seems like universal truths about how life works, especially in the business world.

 Patrick Ewers 00:12:18

Yet if I were to ask those people that you would just think of, hey, are you doing enough to invest into relationships? Chances are that almost every single one will say, no, I should be doing more. Now, the neat thing that I believe to be true, the huge benefit that you and I have is, or privilege, I would argue, is that you and I have, is that we get to interact with some of the best problem solvers in the world. We deal with startup entrepreneurs and then CEO’s and founders and so forth. And so the weird thing is that we get to work with these people, yet they don’t seem to be able to solve this one problem. They can’t reach the top without focusing on relationships, yet they’re doing it. Not enough. So why is that? Right. And the answer to that is actually kind of common sense based.

 Patrick Ewers 00:13:03

It’s based on some fundamental aspects of the human condition, and that is that the things we have to do to take care. First of all, everybody would agree, most likely, that relationships are important, right? That it’s usually universally accepted. But the things we have to do to take care of relationships are almost never urgent. And we’re living in a world that is becoming more, especially since COVID more increasingly urgency driven. And so long story short, what we discovered is basically the only way you can actually become good enough on managing relationships is by tackling the importance versus urgency problem. And radical delegation is basically exactly about that. It is about how to free up time over a day a week and how to increase your ability to execute on the ideas you have, especially experiences you want to deliver to relationships you care about. And through that, not only become more successful or actually have the only path to reach your fullest potential, but also live it and do it in a way that brings a sense of not having to sacrifice everything that’s important to you.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:14:08

Yeah. So the importance versus urgency matrix. So that’s the Eisenhower matrix, right?

 Patrick Ewers 00:14:16

That’s absolutely right, yeah.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:14:17

So I guess it starts there. But one thing that I wanted to ask you is you’ve specifically chosen the word radical in delegation. You could have just called the book how to delegate or something like that. Why the word radical? Or what does that word mean in your book?

 Patrick Ewers 00:14:34

The thing we try to express is that it’s basically a departure from what you usually would hear when it comes to delegation. Most people would think that delegation is basically giving something that you had to do to somebody else and then that person runs with it, meaning they use their own brain, it is their project, it is their responsibility, and you basically rid yourself completely from it, which is, by the way, a fantastic way of running and growing and scaling a business. You cannot do it without that. But the interesting things, especially for senior managers, let’s say CEO’s or founders, is that basically you can do that to a certain extent, but then you hit a glass ceiling and that is that you cannot fire yourself from the role of CEO because that’s your role. And all of a sudden people find a dead end in terms of finding more scalability or more ability to leverage within the office that they’re leading. Basically, the book radical delegation is really focused on freeing up 12 hours or more a week by changing the way you work with a resource very similar to an assistant. We call them EMS, and that stands for engagement manager. But it’s focused on how do you basically can integrate with these resources that at that stage you not only can afford, but basically, it’s almost like a management mistake if you don’t hire such a resource and learn how to basically be really tight and really connected with them, to allow yourself to free up time that is currently stuck in things you’re doing that isn’t valuable, that isn’t providing forward momentum on the vision that you’re pursuing, as well as allowing you to do the things you want to do a ton more.

 Patrick Ewers 00:16:13

Especially those things you think are going to help you get to the point you want to go are going to basically make you feel more successful on your path.

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Aydin Mirzaee 00:17:14

So ten to 12 hours a week sounds phenomenal. I’m sure there’s some people listening and saying, wow, if I could only free up ten to 12 hours a week, that would be amazing. Maybe some people are in disbelief that it can happen. How would you go about figuring out what kind of things you should delegate and how you can free up that kind of time? Is there a process by which that when you first start working with a client or you’re coaching somebody that you can kind of get to the list of things that should be delegated.

 Patrick Ewers 00:17:45

So basically an example that is sort of a proof point of why you can free up that much time.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:17:50

Yeah.

 Patrick Ewers 00:17:51

Let me give you a simple one, because it’s nicely spanning this chasm between freeing up time, which is awesome, but also relationships. Aydin. Right. I assume you meet a ton of people, not just because you’re the host of this awesome podcast, but because you are also leading an organization. Right. And you would probably agree with me that it is a good experience for somebody who has had half an hour longer with you to get a follow up email from you afterwards. They would appreciate that. Right.

 Patrick Ewers 00:18:18

But see, if you are very disciplined, let’s say you do it 30% of the time you meet with somebody, not even 100%, but just 30% of the time. In today’s world that we’re living in, with all this urgency going around, you’d be world class. Absolutely be world class about it. Nobody’s doing it anymore. And so if you were to want to go to 100%, it actually would mean that you are sending signals to people that you really care about them that a lot of people aren’t doing. And in my world, that can only be a good thing. So what we have to think about is realize three facts about that follow up email. First one is that nobody has ever valued you for writing an email, has never happened and will never happen.

 Patrick Ewers 00:18:58

They only value you for sending it. Right? Number two, you can talk four to five times faster than you can actually type. And number three, you can talk wherever you are, while you can only type if you haven’t a keyboard right in front of you. The methodology of how we integrate somebody like you, for example, with this resource of an EA turned into an EM, an engagement manager, is by basically having a dictation solution. This can be AI based right now. Like Whisper, for example, is fantastic, but it basically ships a recording of your voice, of that follow up email that you want to send to the assistant often comes along with a transcript. Whatever it is, it’s not perfect. The assistant then basically takes that and puts it into your draft folder, cleans it up.

 Patrick Ewers 00:19:47

And if you had ten meetings throughout the day, by the end of the day, you would have ten emails sitting there and all you would have to do is read, click, send, read, click send, read, click send. The point that I’m making is if you were to basically commit through raw brute force discipline to doing this follow up program, it would take you probably ten minutes per meeting if you are thoughtful about it. If you are doing two liners, then you might as well not send the email in the first place, in my view, because it’s not impacting the relationship in any meaningful way. So ten minutes of your time, so that’s an hour and a half a day, if you had ten meetings or something like this, can be now reduced to about a minute, 1 minute. And that is an order of magnitude efficiency improvement that you’d be basically hard pressed to find anywhere else in that said office that you’re leading, be it the founder, be it the CEO, be it the partner at a firm that you’re at. And so we could stop there because that is actually like sort of the time aspect. But, you know, you said it’s also about relationships. And so let me take it one step deeper.

 Patrick Ewers 00:20:50

And this is what I care so much about, why this methodology of radical delegation is just so powerful. When you dictate something, you have a lot more bandwidth because you’re using your voice. You can be more thoughtful about where sending. So, for example, what I aid and regularly ask people to do, your clients that I recommend to clients, is that when you write a follow up email, when you dictate a follow up email, add one sentence, just one sentence in that email about something you’ve learned in that meeting. Why? Because you learn something in every meeting, clearly. And it’s one of the most powerful ways in which you can make people feel good. Right. And so now imagine you make that a habit that you always look for.

 Patrick Ewers 00:21:27

Something that you’ve learned should be relatively easy. Now, you’re following up every single time you meet with somebody, and every single time you put something in that makes people feel good. The reason why I think that’s so powerful is basically founded in the quote by Maya Angelou. I’m sure you’ve heard about it, right? She said that people will forget what you said to them. They will forget what you did for them, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel. So if you want to be successful in business, focus on becoming absolutely killer and delivering amazing experiences to people that matter to you. And this is just one way of doing it. And so this is one playbook that I just sort of like, gave you.

 Patrick Ewers 00:22:07

And we came up over the years that we’ve been doing it with over 50 different playbooks of how you can basically leverage, get leverage out of your assistant. Well, actually, you can achieve three things, either leverage or deliver more and better experiences, or a combination of both. Did that sort of answer your question? Was that a good example?

Aydin Mirzaee 00:22:25

Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s a great example. And again, this is both things. So this is a thing that would be great for everybody to do. Most people probably don’t do it, or at best, like you said, do it 30% of the time. This is a way to consistently do it, and it just gives you these superpowers. One of the things that came to mind, as you said this, is, is there also a solution for text messages? Like, one of the things that I think about is I’m always so terrible at responding to text messages and so can someone do the same thing for text messages? I also think about just going to social events and wanting to thank my host the day after to say thank you so much for having us over and just sending those sorts of texts. And sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:23:10

I think it’s a good practice to do. I love it when other people do it and I get those sorts of texts. And I’m wondering, does this only work for email or there’s also a hack to do it by text?

 Patrick Ewers 00:23:20

No, it works for almost all ways we communicate, as long as there’s a reasonable and not too kludgy way to collaborate with another person. Similar to Texas Slack. I don’t know if you guys use Slack.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:23:33

Yeah, we use Slack internally.

 Patrick Ewers 00:23:35

You might be in some slack communities that are outside of your firm, and so on and so forth. For example, it’s very easy to do inbox shadowing on Slack because they have a draft folder. And basically, for example, for leaders of slightly larger organization, where Slack is a center of knowledge and where people share experiences, it’s a fantastic way to show presence as a leader by basically having unnecessary comments, meaning not required answers on things that people said, like they voiced an opinion, shipped an idea or had an idea, and basically all of a sudden the CEO shows up and says, you know what, I like it. And it’s connected to our values in this way. And I appreciate that you are saying these things because it shows me that you’re upholding our values and that can be written all by the Em. The only thing that’s valuable here is for you as the CEO to send it. That’s the thing. So you can do it in slack.

 Patrick Ewers 00:24:28

It gets a little bit more complicated with things like WhatsApp or texting. But I, for example, have an email solution that also allows me to text. And so that one, not only is it capable of accepting comments, meaning besides the emails, my Em can make comments about why they decided to write what they wrote. Oh, I’m kind of running into another playbook. And that is basically the concept of inbox shadowing, where you get your em to actually answer emails for you, but also just into the draft folder by moving things that they don’t know how to answer into something called please handle, and by certifying everything else into something that is called FYI or a folder that is called FYI, where they certify that nothing in that folder will require you to do anything. It’s just updates and knowledge. And just to get back to the original question of like, how do you get so much time freed up? Well, think about it. If you spend 2 hours a day in email, like many of our listeners today, I would assume would be in that situation.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:25:29

Yeah, least 2 hours.

 Patrick Ewers 00:25:30

With working with the right em, you can free up 60% of that time. So that’s an hour and a half every single day. So we’re already talking about six to 8 hours right there for the week. Right. That is already almost a day for some of us. And that was just one playbook of all those that we got. But I feel bad because I feel like I didn’t quite answer your question. You said, how can I basically send dictated emails as text messages? So part of what I’m excited about, Aydin, is that it doesn’t all have to be just with an EA.

 Patrick Ewers 00:26:02

You don’t just have to have an EA to do this concept of delegation, if you will. For example, I don’t know if you’ve played around with it, but it is getting so good that it’s actually feasible that you basically can quickly talk a text message to a person. If you have an iPhone, you press on that microphone icon. And even a guy like me, who’s clearly coming to you with a bit of a german accent, it gets it right in many, many cases. And so what I do is that I have a habit that when instead of, I already have this habit of doing what we call a meeting debrief or a email dictation after a meeting. And this is the key thing, Aydin, to the answer of your question is I trained myself and all of our clients basically to literally have this like, habit built in where you just have to pull up your phone and say something after a meeting. And in your case, you have to just. And that is actually, that habit is the thing that makes it happen, not a willingness to do so.

 Patrick Ewers 00:27:00

And once you have that habit, you can basically go and make that habit, be pressing on that microphone symbol and then do it. But basically, you’ll get to a point where you feel literally uncomfortable if you walk away from a meeting and you haven’t dictated something about what you appreciated about the meeting or what you learned, so you don’t need any a is basically, what I’m saying is there are ways you can do that with today’s technology. We’re in an amazing time right now.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:27:27

Yeah. So I think that does a really good job of explaining and giving everybody just an example of ways that you can reduce the amount of time that you spend on certain tasks. And the thing we didn’t talk about, which I think about a lot, is just the interruption time. So, yes, that task is only ten minutes. And I find that when I talk to a lot of my friends about the idea of getting an EA, the idea of getting help, an engagement manager, like you called it, is that they’ll say, well, yeah, those tasks, they only take five minutes. I’ll just do it myself. But it’s just the interruption where you are doing something very high value and strategic and you have to pause from that and go do this. Switching of tasks, people don’t keep in mind what results that has.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:28:13

And also, things always take longer than you think. You think it takes five minutes, but when you go to do it and come back and before you know it, you know, the five minute tasks took 20. And you get to the end of the day and wonder how come you didn’t get to all the things you wanted to get to.

 Patrick Ewers 00:28:30

I’m so curious, Aydin. I wonder how many of our listeners right now have this feeling where they had a really busy day and they felt really productive at the end of the day, but they look at it and they’re saying, well, what did I really get done? Of what I would call my top priorities, or of those things that I actually feel very strongly, like, again, in this gut level, are the things that will move the needle most. And it’s because of those things, oh, I can get this done. I can this done. I can this done. It’s basically what many people would call the death, right? The death of a thousand cuts, the death of a thousand paper cuts. And that’s exactly what radical delegation is about. Imagine a world where you only.

 Patrick Ewers 00:29:10

Where all of that is removed because there’s no value in you doing it. Like, if you look at that example that we just talked about, the follow up email, the only value you’re bringing to the table really is thinking of it and knowing what to say. But everything else around it can be outsourced almost to 100%, all the way to the point where you still have to read it and then click send so that it becomes your message. And this is really important, Aydina. That way it stays authentic, it stays genuine. You’re not becoming one of those fake inflationary networkers out there that are basically doing things that are even more damaging to the relationships than they’re helping because you’re sending mass emails or you’re having the assistant write the whole thing. Or, and this is a problem that we’re seeing too, is that people are now reverting to using AI to answer emails for you and in most cases not in your tone or there’s at least still today I sense them. I can tell that this was not the, Aydin didn’t take the time to write that email.

 Patrick Ewers 00:30:10

He used technology. What does that mean about how he feels about me?

Aydin Mirzaee 00:30:13

Yeah, these are all very valid points. Obviously, using AI is getting better and better. But you’re right. Like, at the end of the day, the point of this is not to check a box, it’s to make a meaningful impact. And so you really have to think about that as the primary driver.

 Patrick Ewers 00:30:31

Yes. You just triggered a thought in my head that I think we should really express to everybody listening today. And that is like, look, I’m not against AI. I love it. Use it to make you better. For example, a tip that I have for everybody, when you use AI debates, you have an answer to an email, write two or three words into it that are yours. Change it a little bit. Put things in that are like particularly you.

 Patrick Ewers 00:30:54

That way you can still argue it is your message and not, you didn’t give agency of the message away to some system that really doesn’t care about the person you’re reaching out to. Maybe add, and this is your other thing, add a sentence, a quick sentence to it about something only you know, you and that person you’re reaching out to. There’s so much tribal knowledge in our brains that AI will for a very long time not have access to because we still have to wait for Elon Musk to come up with a brain chip to do that. But that’s my tip, is use AI, but basically always keep the relationships forefront and center. Yeah.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:31:27

So I 100% agree with this. And all of us, as we’re all using AI, we’re going to be able to tell. You can kind of read something and in your head think, yeah, that’s chat, GPT. Humans are smart. We can tell when something was used and something was genuinely written, at least for now. At least for now, we can get there. So the other thing I wanted to talk about, so we’ve talked about the difference between an EA and an engagement manager. So an engagement manager is literally also about empowering your relationships, making those sorts of relationships strong, stronger.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:31:58

Is that it? Or is there more to the difference between these two roles? And they are the same? Right. But you’re just saying, like, an engagement manager will do more than an EA. And really that’s what you want.

 Patrick Ewers 00:32:08

Oh, for sure. Right. The way I look at it is this. Let’s take the example of a CEO of a company. On one hand, you have the EA sitting right here. On the other hand, in the office of the CEO, you always would, often would find a chief of staff. The EA is known to do traveling and schedule. The chief of staff is often working on independent projects that help the office of the CEO, but isn’t actually helping the CEO, him or herself.

 Patrick Ewers 00:32:36

And so there’s a gap in the middle. And that gap is basically being filled by that Em. And so the way I often think about an Em is it’s basically a person whose job is to free up as much time as possible for you on all fronts. And by the way, we do nothing. See that there needs to be an artificial barrier between personal time and professional time. Let that EM help you also on time that you spend on things that are personal, like getting your car to the service or something like that, because you only have 24 hours. And if we can free up time wherever we can, and that time can be used in a better way, be it that you do more outreach to people that might actually help you generate more revenue, or be it that you spent more time with your children and you do that in a more meaningful way. To me, those are all massive victories in that sense.

 Patrick Ewers 00:33:22

And so the EM helps with freeing up time, but also helps with improving your ability to deliver amazing experiences to people around you by an order of magnitude, allowing you to, since we said it costs you a 10th of the time to produce an email that’s not just for follow up emails like how often, Aydin, do you run around? Maybe you’re jogging and you think of people that you want to reach out to, but you can’t do it right then and there because you’re jogging outside. So you pull out your phone, you dictate that email real quick, and basically it takes you 30 seconds to basically send something that would have taken you ten minutes and you’re reaching out to people you would have otherwise not. And sometimes those people you’re reaching out to end up getting you a deal into the door that you otherwise never would have seen. And that can be the difference between a fantastic outcome and an okay outcome.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:34:13

Yeah, I think this idea of taking constant voice notes, voice memo. Some people like to write things down, jot it in a notebook somewhere, or, like, in an apple notes or something like that. But, yeah, the concept of the voice memo is super helpful. Is something I do. You talk about doing it on a run. This is something that I do often where I’m on a run, I have an idea. Either I’m going to reach out to someone, or I’m going to look into something, and I if you don’t put it in the voice memo, it does disappear. Like, you think that, oh, when I go home, I’ll remember to do those things, but then, for whatever reason, you can’t really remember.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:34:49

They’re very fleeting. And so, yeah, I think this is a really, really great habit, and this.

 Patrick Ewers 00:34:55

Is one of those things. We also don’t necessarily need an Em with today’s technology. Right? Like, it could be as simple as a Slack channel on your Slack app, where you just dictate these things in. And the neat thing with Slack, for example, is where. Hey, I love that about Slack. Slack has this functionality where you can dictate the voice and it records your voice and you can listen to it again, but it auto transcribes it as well, and so it becomes your idea channel. The thing that becomes powerful when you do have an Em in place is that that person can start doing things with these ideas, put it into a database of ideas, or categorize them, put them on a list of topics to discuss with your team members, people that report to you, and so on and so forth.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:35:38

Yeah. So one thing I did want to ask you, so, obviously, everybody should go out and get radical delegation. We talk about some of the playbooks. Like you said, there’s 50 other playbooks. And the other thing that’s great is, you know, at mind Maven. I mean, this is what you do. You coach executives. You can also coach ems that people hire so that they can also be on the same track, and you can do, like, dual coaching between the both of them.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:36:05

So what I wanted to say is that, yeah, you guys have really figured this stuff out. One question I will ask is, what about hiring? When looking to hire an Em, one of the things that I’ve heard people in my friend network talk about is, well, what if we hire someone, invest six months of time, and. Or, like, even a year, and that person leaves. And sometimes you invest a lot, and it takes. The ramp time is very long for them to be able to get to write the way that you write or really be able to work together well. And because the ramp time is so high and there’s a chance that maybe the person doesn’t stay for a long enough time to realize the ROI. These are the sorts of things that I’ve heard from time to time, and so I wonder how you think about that or how mind maven helps solve that.

 Patrick Ewers 00:36:58

So, first of all, I have a pretty strong reaction to what you said. Seems like what you’re saying is people that you talk to say, hey, I don’t want to fix that hole in my boat where water is spraying in because I might get another hole in the future.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:37:13

That’s such a great answer. I love that. That’s good.

 Patrick Ewers 00:37:16

It almost doesn’t make sense. And you have to stop people talking like this.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:37:19

Right.

 Patrick Ewers 00:37:20

Don’t fear the future. But I wanted, you know, that’s not helpful advice. So the helpful advice is this. Two things. Number one, the neat thing is about how an EM works with a manager is basically that there’s a very, very tight knit connection. But that tight knit connection comes through asynchronous interactions that feel like synchronous dictations, as an example. And so a lot of people think there’s so much upfront investment to get this person to be useful. I have to have these meetings every day to teach them how I do things.

 Patrick Ewers 00:37:50

And that couldn’t be farther from the truth, because if you have this approach of dictating, you can basically teach the person organically. So, for example, in inbox shadowing, the person basically writes an email, and it is slightly wrong. What you do is that you basically switch it over from ready to needs work, and you dictate the feedback, saying, hey, this isn’t quite right. I actually want to be a bit more thoughtful with the advice. This person is actually important to me, even though he doesn’t look important. But I went to college with this person. So here’s what I want to say. It takes you still, like, only 1015 seconds to say that.

 Patrick Ewers 00:38:27

Maybe 30 seconds, it gets shipped back to the assistant. The assistant can then basically fix it and then puts it in. But because they fix it, they are also learning, and they’re learning in 30 seconds of your time investment. So you have lots of little learning experience in the beginning, and you always start small. You don’t, like, switch everything on. You start with the things that you find most valuable and the ones where you need the least amount of trust. And then you go and build that trust up as you go and allow that person to become more and more and more powerful for you. What I’ve seen in my career of doing this is that literally there are some ems that are capable of taking over the role of the CEO for a week or two when the CEO is in the hospital as an example.

 Patrick Ewers 00:39:10

Literally they got so into the brain that they can emulate the way that person things to a level that is absolutely scary. But for that CEO, it’s a dream come true. It’s like what we call the magical state. And who doesn’t want to have the magical state where you basically have a partner that’s running with you and is capable of making almost all the same decisions as you are. And what most people don’t realize, it’s easier than you think. So that was number one. And then number two is as part of what you can do is when you’re now dictating things and you notice that the person is doing something differently or is doing something new that you like, what you would dictate is basically you say, this is a preference document update request. You basically have that person write your preference document.

 Patrick Ewers 00:39:58

My preference document is, I think, 30,000 words long by now. It’s a book. But the neat thing is when I have somebody, you’d be surprised how fast they’re up and running again by just them reading the book. That in combination with what I just basically described, it’s sure it sucks when they leave, but the dip is a lot less worse than you think. And here’s a third thing that I tell you, and this is maybe the most powerful thing, what people don’t realize is that the role of an Em for somebody who maybe was an EA is, in almost 99% of the cases, in a massive upgrade. Why? Because almost every EA out there is underutilized and undervalued for the brain capacity they actually have. They are some of the smartest people we have in our workforce. We don’t celebrate them as such, but I still think that’s a fact.

 Patrick Ewers 00:40:49

And they’re just so underutilized. And the reason they underutilize this is because they don’t have a chance of doing more meaningful things because they have lack of context. But if you dictate everything you learned about somebody after a meeting through what we call a meeting debrief, and that gets them processed by that EM, including introductions that they can run for you to the point where you only have to have the idea of the introduction and click send to making sure that promises that were made to you are actually kept. And if they’re not being kept, that they’re being followed up. No effort for your part. All on the EM. When you do that, this person gets so much access to context of how you think that they are more empowered to do things. If they’re in your inbox, they know what’s going on and all of a sudden you see how powerful they are and all of a sudden they start really enjoying their job.

 Patrick Ewers 00:41:36

The likelihood that they will leave is very small. And then look at the history of most eas have the longest tenures in terms of staying in a job than any other job. The white collar job category that I know eas are very often very happy with being the person who’s in the background helping somebody else. That’s often how they define themselves. That’s what makes them happy. And so all I’m saying is by investing into that person via the Em way, you’re more likely increasing the likelihood that that person will never leave or is with you for ten years. And so the risk of that goes down even further. It was a bit of a long answer, but was that roughly what you wanted to hear?

Aydin Mirzaee 00:42:16

Yeah, I think it’s a great answer. And, you know, sound bites for me. Most eas are underutilized. They have a lot more capacity, and the more you invest in them, the more value they feel, the more they can contribute. Back in, there was some subtle recommendations on what to look for when hiring an EM, because these are folks that value very highly, helping others, and they don’t need to be in the forefront, and they like being in the background, knowing that they’re the people that helped make things possible and help others. And so those are possibly some characteristics I would imagine that, that you would look for 100%. Yeah. So, Patrick, I know we’re coming up on time.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:43:00

This has been an amazing conversation. A few rapid fire questions for you. The first one is, what is something you wish managers would stop doing?

 Patrick Ewers 00:43:10

Writing emails? I just want them sending them.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:43:13

Love it. That’s a great answer and also great summary from our discussion. And what would you have managers everywhere start doing?

 Patrick Ewers 00:43:22

There’s one asset that almost nobody uses, and it’s the asset of a positive thought. So what I want everybody to do is develop the most powerful relationship management habit you’ll ever come across. We call it positive alacrity, but it’s basically based on this. It’s basically, whenever you think something positive in your brain, it doesn’t have to be massively positive, it just has to be slightly north of neutral and you genuinely believe it. You test, is this something I actually feel that positivity voice it right then and there. It could be something as simple as you’re walking along the hallway to get some coffee or something, and you see a co worker has glasses on and they are, let’s say a purple rim. And you could just tell that person spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to pick those. And you’re just like, as you walk by you and you think they fit to their face, it’s like, I wouldn’t wear them, but it looks good, right? Just say, hey, are those new glasses? They look good on you.

 Patrick Ewers 00:44:18

As you walk past. I can guarantee you when you do this, it costs you nothing, literally nothing, because you’re already walking in a direction, but you just made somebody else’s day in a big way. Like almost guarantee that person is going to go home and share with their partner what you just said. And isn’t that one of the best gifts we can give other humans? And the thing is, you don’t have to do you have that thought? We have these thoughts all the time. Let’s shut up because this was supposed to be a rapid fire, right?

Aydin Mirzaee 00:44:46

Yeah, I love it. But it’s great advice. I love this idea of positive alacrity. And another amazing tip from you for this podcast. So many different learnings today for everybody out there. If they want to find the book, it’s radical delegation. They can also visit mind Maven, your website to learn more. You guys always have such great content, so just filled with amazing content that everybody should go out and check out.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:45:12

And yeah, with that said, Patrick, thank you so much for doing this. Thanks for coming back on the show.

 Patrick Ewers 00:45:17

This was fun. This was absolutely enjoyable. So thank you so much for having me.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:45:22

And that’s it for today. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Supermanagers podcast. You can find the show notes and transcript at www.fellow.com app supermanagers. If you like the content, be sure to rate, review and subscribe so you can get notified when we post the next episode. And please tell your friends and fellow managers about it. It’d be awesome if you could help us spread the word about the show. See you next time.