Transcript of Your Values are Either Destroying Profits or Building an Empire - Robert Glazer

Welcome to the Proven podcast, where we don't care what you think, only care what you can prove. On this episode, we talk to Robert Glazer, someone who has built a company that has won the award 30 times as the best place to work. From Fortune to ink to entrepreneur magazine, they keep awarding it. So what's the answer? Well, it comes down to values, something I never thought. He walks us through and he even challenges my own values on this episode. It's a ride. I recommend hanging on tight and playing along.

The show starts now.

All right, everybody, welcome back to the show. Robert, I'm excited to have you on here.

Charles, thanks for having me.

For the four or five people on the planet who actually don't know who you are, let's explain a little bit who you are, what you're doing, and a little bit about your book.

Sure. I have that disease called serial entrepreneurship. I've started a few different businesses, the largest of which is a global partnership marketing firm called Accélération Partners that I'm chairman of. However, as I was building that firm, we tried to do some things differently, culturally, and from a leadership standpoint, we won over 30 best places to work awards. I started writing a lot and talking about things that we were testing and doing. That has led to a second career as an author and speaker and a lot of focus on leadership and development. I've really double-clicked on this concept of core values, both for organizations and actually, more interestingly, for individuals as a way of really understanding what is important to them. I think the world right now, you'd agree, we are very tribal. I think people are joining teams and doing things that doesn't make sense and do signaling and feel... And that's all from a lack of grounding in values that would make you say, No, no, no, no. That's not me. I agree with that or I don't agree with that. And it's not about the teams, but it's about a consistent set of values you can align to your decisions and the communities and things that you believe in.

So when you talk about core values, it's a hot term right now. Everyone's talking about core values or- Everyone rolls their eyes. It's the same because we're used to those stupid pictures on the wall with the landscapies and like vision and the birds flying and all that. Has someone who's done this and has been a successful you are, how would you define core values?

I appreciate you saying that. I feel like I'm a little bit of self-deprecating lawyer because I say the same thing here. Look, 90% of that corporate core value stuff is BS. Enron's core values, as they were going under, were integrity and respect and whatever the other one was. Then the funny thing is people go to individual core values, they laugh at all the company stuff and roll their eyes. Then if you look up core value exercises, you will find tons of one-word lists. That's equally as garbage. I'm with all of you. When I talk about it, I'm like, Look, throw out all of your definition. Here's my definition of actionable core values, and I think that's the difference. They can never be one word in my book because that doesn't work. We can talk about the two most popular one-word ones, which are family and integrity and why those aren't core values. But core values are simply the non-negotiable principles that guide your behavior and decisions. Historically, people have been willing to lose their life over their values. It's your red lines, if you're honest about them. So a couple of qualities. They are intrinsic, not aspirational.

They reflect who you are, not who you wish you were. A lot of people are trying to pick things that they want to be. No, this is like, who are you? What's your operating system? They're consistent. They show up. A core value should show up the same way in all areas of life, work, relationships, and personal decisions. And they're clarifying. They help you make better choices about who to spend time with, what work to do, where to live. It's this instruction manual you weren't given at birth. The reason for it is that they are fundamentally formed during those formative years, probably 8-20 20. Actually, for most people, absent some dramatic change later in life or dramatic thing, you can derive all of those core values back to your childhood because that's when your moral intuition is forming, even if your reasoning isn't there yet.

There's a lot to unpack there. Why is family integrity not considered values? Then also, if these are formed between 18 and 24- Probably 8 and 20.

8 and 20.

Who I was between 8: 00 and 20: 00 is no up to the same person I am now at 48. I'm a fundamentally different human being. I've got two challenges there. Okay, why are these not core, which I agree with you, but also, are these permanent now with these values that you're talking about?

That is the number one question I get asked, so we'll go into that. Sorry, I remember the second part. What was the first question?

The first part was why is family integrity? It's probably the answer by the second part.

Yeah. Let's start with the second part first. What happens is, yes, you have different priorities, you have different decisions, but you have this same compass, whether you realize it or not. As I explain to someone, I have a find a better way and share it core value. That's why I'm on this podcast. What I thought was the better way at 20 isn't the same as what I think is the better way at almost 50. However, that is my orienting philosophy. When you look at people's core values, and I've done this with thousands of people, and we can play the opposite game, and I can ask you, and we can play this live, is 99. 9% are for or against. It was either something that was really important to you and you were doubling down on, or was something that did not sit well with you and was a point of pain that you might have turned into purpose, and you determined, I will not be like that. I will not do that, and I will do the opposite. It is so clear that these driving forces come back to those times. I think when people say, No, I'm not the same, or it's changed, there's usually a couple of things that have happened.

One, you didn't have the right core values in the first place. You're not clear on what they are to see the consistency. Two, you might have the right core values, but you're not living it, so you're feeling pretty shitty because you're out of alignment. Or three, it's actually been a change in priorities and not a change in values. I think a lot of people aren't clear on what that value is to see the through theme. So that's A. Integrity. I've heard 10 different definitions of integrity. For some people, it's sell the truth. The other is it's live up to your ability. When I ask people, and it's one word, I don't know how to judge myself on that. We'll talk about the core validator, which is the four-test rubric for if it's a helpful core value. So when I say to people, What does integrity mean to you? If I say, Charles, you're like, Now take it down to this root, really important thing. It means you do what you say and say what you do, or it means you always tell the truth, or it means you live up to your best, and that's the thing that actually would carry across all aspects of their life.

Similarly, with family, I think family is a priority. It's not a value. It might be it wasn't at 16. Also, I'm not sure how that helps you in work or how does family help you with your friends. When I do that same second-level thing, Charles, you just told me family is a core value. Explain what family means to you. It's the second level thing where it means you've got your people's back, you always show up and you're there, or it means commitment to a community. Those, again, are much more helpful answers to how you show up as a leader and a friend and a family member and That's the real thing. I got to tell you, some people's definition of a family is you have your family's back no matter what. That's not mine. I don't excuse the drunk uncle at the wedding who's doing really inappropriate things and just be like, Oh, that's just Uncle Harry touching all the girls on their butts. But honestly, that's what I'm saying. People have really different destinations of family. Some believe you defend family to the death, no matter how horrible they are to you. It's important to understand what people mean by that.

I think there are placeholders when you use core values in the sense of single-word things, like family, integrity. What you're saying is, How do I treat family? How do I treat the people I love? How do I interact with those things? I think it sounds like that's the- What is the thing about family that I actually value?

What is my non-negotiable about family? It's always showing up. It's always having people's back. That is the same way that you show up as a leader. It's the same way you show up as a friend, and it can give you that rubric. I've used in one of my keynotes an example of, Hey, if your definition of family gets to, you should always show up, as a friend, your dad's father dies and you're really busy and you're not sure if you should go to the funeral, you should go because you're going to feel horrible about yourself. I had a guy come up to me after my speech with that hypothetical answer and say, You know what? I actually think my core value is similar to that. I missed a funeral 10 years ago, and I think about it almost every month. Because if that's what you value and you go against that, you're going to feel... We can talk about the inverse test, but the test of a core value is that when it's violated, you feel horrible. You feel bad because it's the opposite of something you care about.

That's fair. It's a different definition. It's a different filter point. When you do this and you work with clients, what are the first steps that you do when you're walking through this? Because again, in order for you to win 30 awards on the best places to work, there's obviously something that's actually working. You're doing some very core thing.

This actually started... So once I figured this out, and for myself, which totally changed my life, and we built this into our leadership development, we started doing classes and teaching them how to understand their personal core values. They were confused at the off-site. They're like, Wait, we're not doing the company core values? I'm like, No, look, I think that you are going to show up as a... If I'm trying to help build you into the best leader I can be, you are going to show up as the most authentic leader If you build your leadership style from what you truly value and care about, and you can communicate that to people. In the book, In the Compass Within, there's a story, there's a process. It actually starts with answering six questions. If we don't get to all of them, if you just go to robertglazer. Com/six, they're all there with a little video. But these six questions are behavioral-based questions designed to pull out highs and lows from your life and help you look at consistent themes. I can give you a few examples. Let's do it. Yeah.

Let's do those six.

We'll do all six. All right. In what non-work environments are you highly engaged? Don't say, When I worked at Charles' place. Why? When I was given a team, when I was given independence, when I had clear rules, when I had ambiguity, what is it that made it so great for you?

When you talk about engaged, the first question is, what non-work environment you feel engaged, how would you define engaged? You're excited to be there. Flow.

Flow. Yeah. Flow. There's no clock. You know the stuff that we all do? We don't care what time it is, and we just would do it even if someone didn't pay us. That's the flow. It's probably a good proxy. Got you.

When you've asked leaders about this and you've asked team about this and you get this, what are the answers that you're like, No, you completely missed the mark. That's not at all what I'm asking about, but this is actually what I'm asking.

Well, what it was, not why it was. Again, because same thing, what professional roles? The next question, did you do your best work? When I worked at McDonald's, that's not helpful. But if you said, Look, I did my best work when I was out in front of people and I was building relationships and I was greeting them, and I When I was sitting behind a desk and just dealing with myself, that starts to get to the types of environments and situations. The third one, which I always love, is what advice and qualities do others come to you for? What do they come to you that you're uniquely good at solving for them? Deep one, what would you want said about you in your eulogy? Then this is the one that we can test a little bit. I can hijack the weight of one of your core values, but the negative opposite question are super interesting. When were you disengaged in a personal or professional setting? Then here's the one we can role play a little bit. Actually, if people watch the video, they'll see if I do this right, your facial expression when we nail this.

But I'll also ask you this one, ready, Charles? What qualities in other people just drive you crazy or that you struggle with?

Complete lack of situational awareness.

You said that deadpan. No self-awareness, can't read the room. I have no sense of how they show up in the world.

If you're in line at Starbucks and you and I have been in line for eight minutes, and then you get there and you're like, I wonder what I want. I should be able to pick you up and move you. You've had five minutes. Pay attention. Lock in. That's what it would be out of my mind.

All right, so you're in the airport line. Now, for those of you watching on videos, I want you to watch Charles' answer, and I want you to watch his face, which usually comes before. You're in an airport line. It's like 20 minutes long. Everyone's there and waiting quietly. Some guy walks up, pretends to be looking the other way, and just walks into the front of the line and starts a conversation with you. How do you react to that?

If some random person completely... He would have got me off target. I'm like, What are you doing?

Are you okay? He's playing dumb. He's walking right to the front of the line like he doesn't see the entire line behind you.

Yeah, that would normally get me to move him because I wouldn't like what he would do to the people behind me. I'm like, You get to move now. I will address this so everyone else can order. That's normally what I would do in that situation. I'm like, All right, you're done.

Or you're at a cocktail party and someone is just talking about stuff that's clearly offending everyone around them, and they have zero sense of what they're saying. What does that feel like to you?

I don't know if I can say this on a recorded.

You just proved my point. You don't have to say anything. Your face told me that we are on the right track. It's a good thing. You probably have a core value that's something like, and again, awareness. That's weak. But what about a core value? Like, read the room, right? I have a bunch of people I know with that core value, which sounds like that. You know how to say it. You know when it's not being done. You wouldn't see yourself. You wouldn't be like, Dude, awareness. But you'd be like, To the guy in line, Dude, read the room. We're all in line here. What makes you think you can walk up to the front of the line?

What triggered for me was, I was like, You don't get to take advantage of other people. You don't get to do this. The world doesn't bend in. You be in service to all of it.

You said triggered. The opposite of a value is triggering. That's a good example. If you had started making that list, you would have had a bunch of things that maybe indicated did the opposite of core values.

It's interesting because people ask us all the time. This isn't mine. I'm standing from someone else. This guy goes, How do I become happy? I've tried my entire life. I want to be happy. This is a journey of happiness. The guru guy looked at him and he goes, Is there any happiness in that pursuit? He's like, No. He's like, How about this? If you want to be happy, stop doing all the shit that makes you want to happen. Therefore, the only thing that will be left will be that. It sounds like that's the approach with the opposite of the values is going through and say, Okay, this is the stuff that triggers me as non-values. Oh, if I remove all of those, I'm going to be left with what actually resonates with me.

Right. The opposite is true. You have enjoyment in helping to bring awareness or bring group to people. It's what you do well is getting people to probably acknowledge the situation around them and bring them together and have awareness. The problem with the opposite test is sometimes people can't articulate correctly what the inverse is. They want to use it as a shortcut, which is why I like going through the full process because it helps when you have the mirrors where you're like, Oh, this behavior is the opposite of this behavior. It goes together. And by the way, I'll try this with you, too. My guess is you grew up in a household in someone who either stressed self-awareness or someone who is completely unaware of how their behavior impacted other people.

It's close because I've done a lot of work. And before we get into this, people, therapy is the gift you give yourself. Please go to therapy. It's very helpful for you. For me, mine comes down to effectiveness. I value effectiveness above all else. For me, if someone's in line and they don't know what they need to order, you're being ineffective. If you're cutting in line in front of all these people, I'm like, You have now violated effectiveness. I adore effectiveness. If we're going to go with a little Freudian here, it's because I was a Latchkey kid. I grew up and I wasn't a single parent at home. I was raised by my dad. He wasn't around a lot. I had to very much take care of myself. Okay, what is the most effective thing I could do to make sure that, A, I don't die, and B, I can play Nintendo as much as human many possible. So everything was about efficiency. So one of the things I adore more than anything else is efficiency. So I think that awareness comes from me adoring efficiency.

Yeah, it's efficiency and independence. And again, you just improved what I said. It tends to come from something. And we have a hard time. People, when they're doing this work, I see them choke up and they say to me, I'm like, so where's the root of that? Because if you tie it to the root, then you know it's real. And they're like, But I loved my pair. And I'm like, Look, I want you to change this sentence. You can say, I love my parents, and I was alone a lot as a kid, and I needed to figure this out. And by the way, it's now my superpower, and I'm good at it. But being honest about where it came from is super helpful because look, as a leader, you're going to struggle with people that are ineffective and waste time and can't figure out what to do. And the more you can tell them that, the better.

Absolutely. So versus the vision, family, integrity, now we're locking into what what actually moves and what drives you. If you've got someone, and we'll just keep ripping me apart because it's easy, if you've got someone who values efficiency and values people who are creative, and I go, Listen, I know there's a problem. I have no problem, there's a problem. I love that, but you got to bring me two answers to whatever the problem is. If not, you I'm going to work with it. Right.

That could be a different core value. You might have a core value of solve the problem or be a problem solver. Yeah. Yeah, minding to protect the time.

Be efficient. Let's protect time.

You would want to communicate to your team, Look, team, you guys know I'm about problem solving. I don't want you to not come to me to problems, and I'm happy to think with you. But when you come to me, have done the work with a couple of proposed solutions, and if I disagree with those, we'll talk about it. But don't come to me just to complain about things. I'm not the leader for that. Right. And by the way, wouldn't that be empowering to you as a leader to say, look, you're just laying your rule book out there for other people and being like, here are my red lines.

I do this. I say, listen, you're not allowed to bring me a problem unless you bring me two solutions. If you do bring me a problem without two solutions, you get to find a new job. I remember there was one problem. One of the companies I ran, they came in because I have the same addiction you do or disease, which is the serial entrepreneurship. And they came in, there was a specific problem. And the two solutions they gave were wild. They're like, okay, would we think we should take, whatever, peanut butter and put it on a flamenco. I'm like, What? And then they told me the problem. I was like, Yeah, I got no idea. They're all right. Let's brainstorm it out. But they knew they had done the work beforehand, and we had that going. I've built those in, and it's changed my org. I'm curious for the people you've worked with, and not only in your organizations, and also the organizations you've worked with, what are some of the core things like that that move the ball game? And let me give you another example. Whenever I have meetings, there are no tables.

I'm sorry, there are no chairs. It's a non-negotiable. There are no chairs. Therefore, we're having standing meetings.

You've already. Because it's more efficient.

Yes, it's efficient. We've already put it on a memo. We've already got it fully debriefed. We're like, Okay, everything knows what's going on. We've already had our questions in advance. Now let's hit the meeting. Let's rock and roll. Because we create this efficient and it just speeds things up. It's something I stole from Jeff One pizza, two pizza meetings or whatever it was.

Yeah, I think, and my guess is, you have your personal values, you have your company values. The company values are very infused by the personal values. I think, look, everyone to our early thing around a lot of the virtue signaling and not tied to values. People are spending way too much time trying to appeal to everyone. You should say the things like someone once told me with my keynote speeches, If no one hates it, no one will love it. It can't be a warm cup of tea. Sometimes the guy who helps me draft it and I go, feels warm cup of tea, he knows that's the worst insult. What you're trying to do is signal to the world, Hey, 2% of the people that would love working here, to me, it's like universities. Universities don't pretend to be something they're not. There's a real difference between a rural small liberal art school and a huge University of Florida campus school. They are both great schools for the right kids. I think too many leaders and too many organizations are trying to signal a lot of common denominator stuff rather than saying, Here's what we're about, here's what I'm about.

If you love this and want to join that, great, this is my leadership style. If you're not someone who likes to look for improvement efficiency and you like to drag, you're not going to like working for me. That's a fair thing to say.

But also, I think, having the importance of, yes, I might have this efficiency. I'm driven by this. This is who I am. I need to bring someone else in who people can go to or can get in my face because this isn't a dictatorship. Be able to get in my face and say, Listen, I'm missing a couple of by doing this. Let's have some pushback. And having you be able to say, Listen, this is what values to me, but my ego doesn't run the org.

The org itself- Values, they need to be in harmony. They don't need to be in unison, and they can't be in opposition. If you have someone on your team who is the direct opposite of five of you, if they're the opposite of efficiency, I call that a danger area. This is the same as a relationship. We can dance around that. We know Charles is going to come in with the efficiency play, and I'm the slow guy play, but it works. It balances it out. But if we have four more of those, one is like Charles is like spend freely, and this person is like save. It's going to be too much energy consumed. We are looking for things that can exist in harmony, but it's okay if an organization has a few non-negotiables. Any organization you're leading is probably going to have something around efficiency or problem solving. And if you're not a problem solver, if you're a problem creator or a problem solicitor, you're not going to survive. And the best thing I could do is tell you that and go direct you to another place where you will be happier. I don't think there are absolutely good or bad cultures.

I think it's very much like schools. I'm about to take another kid out to look at colleges. I'm trying to find the one that's the best fit. There's not an objectively good or bad. There are ones that his sister would have loved that he would hate and vice versa.

Absolutely. It's interesting you say that you brought off University of Florida, Florida State, or FSU. I played baseball growing up poorly. I had a 92-mile-an-hour fastball, and I knew the strike zone was next to the guy who kept hitting with the ball. But these guys wanted me to go, and I went up to FSU to check it out. And I knew that if I went to FSU, it wouldn't work for me because I would just eat and be drunk and do all that. And I don't even drink, but I would just party the whole time. That's not going to work. Luckily, my father saw that and he was, No, you're going over here because you just don't have that discipline and control there. So knowing that there's imperfection, imperfection, and there's perfect things for different reasons. So when you show up in these environments and you're trying to connect with people and you're trying to walk them through this value cord, you're trying to have them find their compass, where do they lose track? Where do they completely fall off and where do they fail?

It's funny. I got a similar question recently. I think, and I have two answers to that. One, I will tell you, I spent six months doing this work with no resources, arduous. I spent years perfecting the process. I've created a book, I've created a course, I've created things, whatever. People just want the one hour solution. It's hard. That's the failure. I think they fail macroly in looking to cheat around. How do I find out my most important principles in life and not being willing to invest a little bit of time in this? The Other major area of failure, as I said in the definition, is these are not aspirational. When I see people really struggling, they're trying to figure out things that they think they want to be or should be, and they're not willing to be honest about who they are. I'll give you a great example. For example, my find a better way value. I'm restless, constant, never-ending improvement. I generally know that I need to be more patient and present. But actually, impatience is a skill set of mine. It would be I can want to be more patient because I think any strength overused and any value overused is a weakness.

So trying to fix anything at all time will make improvement in nothing. So I could say, look, it's a goal of mine to be a little more patient. But patience isn't a value. Saying that I want patience as a value to counteract something that is a problem, that's not true. I lead with impatience. I lead with we should do something about this problem, probably similar to you. That's where I see people really get into trouble, where there are things that they think they should be saying or they look good at marketing, but they're not truly who they are.

I don't know what that word is. I think it's Sanskrit. It's I don't know what that is. I think that's Sanskrit. I haven't figured that word out yet. You and I are very similar. But I think to your point, having the honesty, it's like, Guys, patience isn't my gift. It's not. I tell people all the time, if you're expecting proper grammar and spelling to come out of Nope, it's just not. So I text people, they're like, That's not even a word. I'm like, Yes, but you knew what I was trying to say. That's not a gift I have.

But you probably picked a partner who is patient. It's funny how the opposite thing comes into play.

Ironically, yes, people who spell very, very well being the partners because I was like, I don't know how to do that. I outsource my weaknesses, intentionally, consciously or subconsciously. That just plays the game. When they actually invest the time, which new one does, everyone wants to take the magic pill, Perfect example. People want to lose weight. It's not complicated. Be racist. If it's white, don't stick it in your mouth. That's that. Secondly, 45 minutes of walking every day. That's it. Get your 10,000 steps in, you're going to lose weight.

And lower your caloric intake. Calorie Calorie deficit.

Calorie deficit, walk 10,000 steps a day, do this and this. Do that for the next three months, you are going to purge. Or regrettably, you had some family stuff where someone couldn't eat for a week. That works, too. Not recommended. Very bad. When they go through this and they actually invest the time, what's the outcome they get from doing these tests? Because we hear this all the time, take the Miles-Briggs, which can be completely manipulated, or take this one.

This, to me, is just the ultimate personality. Here's what they get. First, they want alignment. They're also rushing to alignment before When they really have clarity, someone sent me this list yesterday. He's like, These are my values. Man, this is so me, and it's so clear, and he had that epiphany. Okay, once you have the clarity, then it's super easy to look across those big three. My relationship, my partner, my community, my work, are these things aligned? People I'm spending time with, the people I'm doing it with, am I in a dead-end relationship? One of the things around, I'm not trying to get people to break up, but when you think about dating sites these days. They are all, as we said before, interestingly, when you lead on married people, they are opposite on a lot of these personality tests, because there's some harmony. Dating sites, the problem has been, it's like finding your clone or your best friend. We both like this music and we like to ski, and we like whatever, but we don't share values. We don't look at the world the same way. We don't have the same operating system. That's a really important look for people, and I think it's been really clarifying.

We had a leader on our team who was doing the core values years ago. I was coaching her. She actually came back to me and was excited about him. Then she had this weird five-second look on her face. I was like, What's wrong? Are they not right? She's like, No, they're totally right. I just realized she was in the middle of going through a divorce that my ex is the opposite of three of these. My answer was like, That's not surprising. That's hard, but it's not surprising.

It determines a lot of our relationships, business or anywhere else. When you're coaching someone and they finally do the time, they put the effort in and they actually get the compass and they get the values and it locks in and they have these awarenesses, what is the implementation factor for there? Because again, you know me from biodeficiency.

Implementation factor is really confident decisions, big and small. I'm going to walk away on this. If you looked at my life, I walked away from a lot of things and I started doubling down on other things that were clearly aligned. When I talk about the big three, the partner, vocation, and community, the one that people keeps coming up is community. They're like, You know what? I really overlooked my community. I'm a we-should-all-get-along-and-share perspectives person, and I live in a just political town where everyone has a red or a blue sign, and this just isn't me, or I'm in groups that aren't aligned with me, or I have friends who are bringing me down. I think the community one is the one, because environment, it's really hard to display the opposite behavior that your environment is playing. Willpower is a resource that's diminished easily. The best way you can maintain willpower, if I don't want to drink, then I don't want to live in New Castle, England, where everyone goes to the pubs at 2: 00 every afternoon. I want to live in Park City, Utah or Boulder, Colorado, where there's a bike club at night and there's a hiking club and there's a whatever.

I think the awareness of the environments that people have put themselves in has been one of the biggest outcomes of this work.

Have you seen people finish the values and go, Oh, wow, I'm violating community be, I need to physically move. Because the breakups happen all the time. When I work with people, they happen fast. It's really simple. It's like, this isn't my truth. Because for me, I'm used to these being your truths, but I like values as well, where people literally go, I need to move.

I had a company I was coaching and the leadership. I could see this woman on the right. I could see her epiphany that she needed to move. But remember, community means different things. Sometimes it is where you live, and it's defined by that. But it could be what activities you're doing, where you're spending time, your religious organizations or not. It has a few different definitions. But I definitely saw this woman, she had the... Now, I don't know if she moved, but she had the, I don't live in the right place, epiphany in this discovery process.

I have found with the stuff that I've done that because I'm used to this being known as your truth, once you know your truth, congratulations, you're going to get higher high, but you're also going to get lower lows. I'm like, I'm sorry. I gave you awareness. This is what happened now.

Well, and let's not pretend the synonyms, making decisions based on your values or truth, they cost you something. They cost you money, they cost you friends, they cost you relationships. But these decisions, they feel good in the long run. You can justify them. You look better over time. The decisions that people make that are based on appeasement or virtue signaling or what's easy in the short term, those just get worse and worse over time. Because we live in this 24 by 7 X Twitter world, and so it just seems easier to quell today's fire sometimes by doing something that we fundamentally don't believe in. And those are the decisions that age the poorest.

And people do this all the time. They're like, Hey, I'm going to sacrifice my dreams for a temporary feeling right now. I'm like, What are you doing? I want my dopamine hit. I'm like, Grow up. It is what it is. With food, food is a great example. I love ice cream on levels I can't possibly tell you. However, I don't want diabetes.

You know that if you ate it Five times a day, your future self would not be very happy with you. I'd be dead.

I have to be able to sacrifice the now for the future. That's a hard thing for a lot of people to do. Once they have access to their values, does that become easier for them?

I think it becomes a lot easier. Again, the decision isn't easier, but the clarity is easier. If health and vitality is a core value of yours, like mine, it's easy to make that decision. I understand why I'm doing it. Also, it really helps I think about we have some family values. One's responsibility, one's health. I always say, my kids are older now, but when I was talking them younger and someone wanted to skip meals, it was like, that's not healthy. Or when someone wanted a fourth brownie, it was like, that's not healthy.

Four brownies is not healthy? This is a much more brownie.

Tell a 16-year-old boy that. But instead of saying that's a rule, what doesn't work well with kids is arbitrary rules. That's a rule or we don't do that. Doing it this way is the why. It's not just arbitrary, but that's just not a healthy choice. We talk about this a lot.

This is who you are. It's a human being. Are you a healthy person? Or you're not a healthy person? Is this aligned with who you are? It's the joys of living in South Florida, which I'm not in at the moment, is Miami is very different than West Palm Beach. I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't do drugs. That just knocked out Dade County for me. Really simple story.

Exactly. You don't want to put yourself in that environment. You're either going to do two things. You're one, going to do the opposite of what everyone's doing. You're going to go to the bar and not drink and be like, This isn't fun, or you're going to go to the bar and drink because everyone's doing it, and you're going to be like, I really didn't want to do this. Willpower is consumable. Putting yourself in environments that go against what you actually want is not really helpful. Absolutely.

When you come in and you talk about your family having values, and you're teaching kids these values, I think there's a lot of people who sit back and go, Okay, how do I get my kids to How do I get my kids to... Because again, their brains aren't even fully developed until they're 22, 23. It's still raw dough at that point.

Another popular question. If you're talking about the book and this full framework and the core validator doing all of these exercises, I really like that for kids that are graduating college, 22 plus. I think getting kids on their individual values when they're younger is harder. I think maybe you start with family values, right? And collective identity. And I like doing those more simply, not my whole test. Like glazers are or glazers aren't. I like when people... Like, glazers tell the truth, glazers show up, glazers don't lie, glazers don't wine. These are mantras that 8 to 18-year-old kids can remember and understand pretty simply.

I like glazers don't wine. Clearly, that is not part of my tribe, because my tribe, we have mastered that part. When you're doing that and you're going through it, how do you hold people accountable to their values? Because we're talking about carrot versus stick. How do we get someone to say, Okay, we know that in your situation, the glazer is your family. We don't lie. But someone comes up and says, Does this dress make me look fat? Is the response, No, the dress is fine. Your ass makes you look fat. How do you handle those?

I've given that example before, and I joke that my answer is very different if it's a half an hour before we were due to leave the house versus five minutes after we were- But now you're lying.

Now you're yielding honesty for efficiency.

I'm with you. What do you think of this outlet five minutes after we were supposed to be in the car? It looks great. I think it's interesting.

But now it's laser's lie, though.

Well, I didn't necessarily say that was ours.

In that situation, how do you do that? How do you handle the... Okay, we need to- Someone once told me it takes 10 years to know if your kids were listening to you.

You're going to repeat a lot of things at 8, 9, 10, 11. What's going to be interesting for you is when your teenage kids do start calling you out on this stuff. They say, Dad, you're doing this, or, Dad, he told us not to lie, and that's It seems like a lie. It's going to at least form a discussion about values. But if you go, Oh, no, that's for me, not you, then you've lost all credibility. You've lost. All credibility. But I think this is where an intelligent discussion, and one of the things I have a mantra, there's a best version of the truth. To me, that's different than lie. The difference is a white lie is that a white lie is often incompatible with the truth. The best version of the truth could be a cliff note version of the truth that doesn't contain all of the stuff that people don't need to know at the time. But if that all comes out, it's not inconsistent. That could be, again, a discussion point with my kids. They said, Actually, you lied there. I said, No, here's the difference. I did not tell you all of it because first of all, it wasn't my thing to tell you.

And you knew some stuff was going on. So I told you the amount that I felt appropriate with, but it was not inconsistent with the truth. Yeah, and you should admit where you screwed. I remember like, You know what? I was right. I screwed up. I actually did tell a white lie there. That's the best thing you could ever... You're human, you're fallible. You don't get it wrong all the time. And you say, Look, I told mom I liked it because we're always late, and I can't stand being late, and I think it's rude to other people. So in that case, I felt like it was more important to be on time than it was to answer that question that way. And that might not be right, and they may look at you as a hypocrite, but being willing to even have that discussion and not be like, the rules apply to me and not apply to you, both in so many things that parenting is just good leadership. The thing that's driving me nuts, and that is the core of my next book, is that we understand and mostly agree on really good leadership qualities.

When you move them into the parenting sphere, we've completely abandoned them and almost do the opposite and don't understand. We know micromanagement is horrible and debilitating in the workplace. It is the default parenting approach these days.

Also, parenting is leadership, not ownership. You don't own your kids. Your goal is to help guide them to be whatever they're going to be as long as they don't hurt people. That's the thing. Don't be mean to other people. But you don't own them. They don't belong to you. If your kid decides that it wants to be a five-headed astronaut, a Penguin that dances in this area, had, Okay, that's nowhere close of what I wanted to do, but just be nice to people along the way. It's what your expectation.

You're basically saying what... I was at a leadership event where a world-class child psychologist was speaking. They said, Why do you have kids? And everyone answered. They're like, all of those reasons were about you. Yes. What you wanted and what you hoped for. Look, your goal is to transmit or transmute your values to your kids. It doesn't always work. Your values may not align with things that they think or feel, and it may go for or against. But same in a company, again, it's so interesting, the connections. As a great leader, my job is to set people up to replace me. It's not to create permanent employment as their manager. There are parents who's figuring out how to manage their kids through their 30s at this point. It's debilitating.

Right. You talk about this all the time. There's a guy, this guy named Mark Devine. Talked to Mark about this all the time. I asked him, I said, Where do... Because people don't know who Mark Devine is, steal commander.

Oh, Mark Devine. I've known Mark forever. He's amazing. Yeah, I've worked with him. Great human being.

If you ask Mark, you're like, Okay, where do leaders lead from? He goes, Leaders lead from a point where it's never from the front. They need to know that you can be led from the front, but you want your team to pull you off the line and say, Listen, you're ineffective here. I need you to keep your eye doing all this other stuff because you have all this experience, all these things going on. It's these pivots that we do. The reason I ask this, and I bring it up, Mark, is when we come into these situations and you have your values and you have someone else in your business's values that you need them to do something, right? You're like, Hey, I've got this and you're in this division. I really need this division to execute on this, this, and this. However, this division is a pain in the ass. It's always HR. It's always HR. And HR is really ABC. I will die on that rock, by the way. I got HR. Oh, God. So when you're in that situation and you've got two different orgs that are above They're two different organizations in your org, and they have different values, and they're conflicting.

How do you, as a leader, say, Okay, I know the value of Susie from HR and Billy from marketing, whatever it is. How do I lead now through this? Because it's great that I have all these values. It's wonderful. A awareness, but how do I work through it?

Sometimes awareness points out the problems in danger areas. I give an example in one of my speeches of years ago where there were two people arguing over a budget. It wasn't about the budget. The person, I'll say on the left, person on the left grew up not feeling heard, and they had this orientation of people need to be heard. It's very important to them. Include all perspectives was their core value. The person on the right grew up dirt poor and was trained to save every penny and not waste. What was happening in this thing is that the person on the left felt like this guy was not listening to her about the budget, and he felt like she's just asking for more and more and more and not willing to... So if they both knew this about themselves and they both knew this about the other person, it's not going to fix the problem, but it's really going to help knowing that, Oh, wow, this is a danger area for us, and I know this about her, and so I'm going to listen really carefully to what she says, and I'm going to say, I hear you, but what I need from you to come back with is if you want more stuff, I need you to tell me the stuff that's not working and being willing to make some cuts.

So I just think with awareness of ourselves and others, we can navigate around some of these things. All of these personality tests, where they are most helpful is in interpersonal communication problems. There are just certain styles and things that are going to butt heads on an issue. If you understand it, it doesn't make it go perfectly, but it allows you to, with some self-awareness, navigate that a little bit better.

Yeah, it lets you a little bit more prepared to be in the fight. It's like, Oh, hey, we're going to go ice-skating. Oh, I probably should bring my ice skates then.

I'm not going to convince this person that not listening to them is okay. I'm just not. If I want to win this battle, I need to be like, I actually really heard you there, and I understand that. However, X.

It's in negotiations. We talk about this all the time. You want the other person to start. Here you go. Because they're not going to listen to anything you say because they've been practicing their spiel in their head for at least the time they've been in the room, but also probably a day or two beforehand. They're not going to listen to anything until they off-gast their stuff. Their sponge is already full. You got to have them detox out their sponge. Okay, I heard you. That's what we're saying. You write down, take notes, and then. Then they're going to look into it.

My team is really clear about my better way orientation. They know I like to make things better otherwise. I actually gave them a tool to negotiate with me, which was when I give you something new to do, you are allowed to come back with me with the entire list of things that I gave you already and tell me, which one do you want me to cut or reprioritize? I'm actually giving them a tool to manage that. I'm telling them the whole thing because I realized that that is a problem, that is a downside of my orientation there.

We don't label it as good or bad. This is it. I just love efficiency. That's who I am. If you come to me in an ineffective manner, my brain is going to pop. But if you say, Hey, listen, take a moment to vomit this out for the 20 minutes? I'm like, Oh, okay, cool. That's what we're doing. And I yield. It's something I learned from a couples council where men will sit there and free one for you guys. They will ask, Is this fix it time or is it listen time? If you're a guy, 99. 9999999999% of the time, it just should fuck up a listen.

And then if they want to fix it- You've seen that it's not about the nail video, right?

No. Where's this one?

Oh, watch it after this call. Just Google, It's not about the nail. It is the ultimate parody of the conversation you're talking about.

Okay, got it. That works. When we're talking about things that aren't this, but are that, when you're in orgs and you come into orgs that are completely dysfunctional and they haven't understood their values, how long does it take to pivot things and to implement some of these changes?

Let's be clear. I'll flip in this. Now I'm talking about company values, not individual values, values of people, because you need both. Ideally, the leaders understand their values, they're connected to values of the company. But then the company says, Hey, look, generally, these are our non-negotiables. One of the things that we do, we tend to interview all the people and ask them similar questions in a different way. But to come at what do you value and what can't you stand in your colleagues? What are the behaviors that this organization really values? What we always say is we're trying to solve the see-do gap. Sorry, the say-do gap. There are things that the organization is saying that it is completely not doing. That's up to the leaders to either change what they're saying or live that standard. But then there's all these things that the people in the organization really value. Actually, even though it's not said, we're like, Look, you need to elevate this to a value. Because people clearly, and oftentimes a lot of it is teamwork. They're like, The best people here help each other and read across borders and do this stuff.

The people that didn't work out and left were selfish and focused on themselves and otherwise. We say, Okay, well, you need to take whatever version of that is and elevate it. I worked with a hospital, and it's a teaching hospital, and they had nothing about teaching. They realized, actually, the best people here teach and learn at the same time. They elevated that to a value. Very clearly, you need to be someone who learns and teaches to stand out here.

You've got a book coming out, and it talks about the compass, and it does this. When people get this and they want to implement this, because as you already know, I love efficiency, I love things that are proven, I love the things that are exceptionally tactical. When someone takes the book, is your book something that's simple? Okay, clearly, I to know my values before I can push it out in the company. If I want to level up things, if I want to do this, and they get the book, is this a sit down and read it all? What is the best way to implement your book?

The book is a parable, like Pat Lindsay and he actually blurbed. Then It tells you at the end, the framework that you've seen. You watch someone go through this process in their life. They're struggling with the big three. They get coached on their values. So people who like to watch versus be told. So hopefully it sparks that interest. You do the work, you do it for yourself. The first thing everyone's like, I want to do this for my wife. I've been in EO and YPO, and the joke is like, spouses and partners and companies hate when people go to events because they come home with all this homework. And my thing is like, do it for yourself, get comfortable with it, have someone else see the changes you're making, and then if they're interested, pull them into it.

I really want you to repeat that because that's super important because I've been guilty of this. We're talking about, go do it, do it yourself. Let them see the changes. I had a client He's like, I want my son to read more. He's like, What do I do? I said, As soon as you get home, take whatever screen you have, leave it in the front part of your house, and then start reading in front of him. She's like, Cool. When do I tell him to read? I'm like, You don't. I go, Within a week and a half, trust me, that kid's going to come over and you're going to start reading. It's see-do type of thing. I love what you brought up. They go to the events and then, Hey, honey, I learned this.

They hate these personal development events. In fact, I started bringing my wife to them because Because they didn't see the speaker. They didn't see the motiv... Once they see the speaker, then they're excited to come over and do it.

I'm just surprised you're still married since you dragged your spouse with you. Hey, I'm going to go do this. I'm surprised she still talks to you.

I told I thought it was a fashion conference.

You have a comfy couch is what you're saying. You have a very comfortable couch to sleep on. That's what you're saying. Exactly. All right, so people go in and they start doing this and they start making the changes. How do you approach it? How do you do it? If If you're a founder and you're in this thing, how do you bring it to your team? Is it something like, Listen, I found this guy, Robert. He was on the podcast. I think he's great. I read his book. I bought it to him during haggadas, whatever it is.

We're going to hire him, bring him in. Yeah, so in a perfect scenario, someone would do this work. They would communicate to their team, Hey, I just actually did this work on my values. Here's what they are. I want to walk you through them. It explains the things that I care about and that I get upset about. Actually, we're updating our company core values based on this clarity, and we're going to talk to you guys and get your feedback. I think that the best leader you will be in our company is an authentic leader. If you're really interested in doing this work, I'd love to get you a copy of the book and you can buy the course if you want to, but I'd love to see you do this work. It's not that it's selfless, but what we're trying to do is I think you becoming the best version of yourself is better for the company, and it actually pays dividends for you outside the company as well. I write a lot in my other book, we're on this company, this concept of capacity building. My book's Elevate. Capacity building is this holistic benefit for an organization.

If you help people get better overall, the company gets the work dividend of it, and the People will thank you and remember that you helped them become a better father, partner, sister, husband, that you helped them get better with patience and time management and prioritization and things that are... We're not different people at work. Tell me Anyone that hits snooze 12 times in the morning and can't get out of bed and is really good with deadlines when they get to work. It just doesn't happen. To me, this is the ultimate thing that you could help your leaders do. I'm working with, I think, some really amazing leaders and cultures. We're like, I want every person in my 200-person company to figure out their own personal core values. I want this unlock for them. And those people will be loyal to those leaders for decades.

I also think being open to that when you do bring these things and you do send people in your organization that if they come back and they're like, Hey, you know what? This isn't home for me. Honor that as much as you possibly can. Go. You have to expect that you're going to lose some people. And that's okay, too, because in the long run, it's going to be better for your org. It's going to be better for everything that you're doing.

I 100% agree with you. And those probably weren't your highest performers. If they weren't aligned with your values and they were going against them, you were probably having problems. And the fact that they would opt out and go somewhere else in a positive way, saves you a whole difficult discussion somewhere down the line. If someone opts out of your organization because they are clear they're not for their values, that is the biggest win that you could ever get from an, sorry to say, HR standpoint or just the whole thing.

Yeah, and I don't think people get that because finding good people that are talented, that you've already got your systems around because as founders, as owners, and what we do, we're like, Hey, I got this fire, and I've got to let go of it because I understand that I could brute force myself to seven, eight figures, maybe. But now I need other people to come in and help me out with the scaling of that. You're like, Hey, this person does this, this person does this. But then now there's Susie, and Susie discovered her core values, and she doesn't want to be here anymore.

I was like,.

Take the little hit. It's worth it. Take the little hit, have him do that. Can you walk through one of the... If there was something either for you or for a client that the discovery of their values just changed, it just shattered, and it blew things up, and they're like, Oh, wow. Both on the positive and the negative, where they're sitting there and saying, I've I work with these core values that I actually, I don't like HR because no one does. Anyway, they've discovered this one.

So it's interesting. I think the reason why you don't like HR is probably buried in multiple core values. I think in one, you probably don't think it's efficient. It's not efficient.

Keep going. I am not politically correct in any way, shape, or form. I don't care.

You probably have a core value of say what you mean, and you feel like everyone has to do all this window dressing and say stuff that they don't mean. It's visceral.

I'm just a fart in an elevator. There's just no way around it. I don't care what you identify as. I don't care about your pronoun. It's relevant to me. I'm happy for you. If you identify as a Penguin, Mazel tof to You and everyone's like, Can we just get back to getting this shit done? Because we got shit to do. Because I just don't care. So as long as you're not affecting other human beings, whatever. Just let's go. I don't care what you do with your own kibbles and bits. Just let's rock and roll. We have stuff to do. It's inefficient for me, which is why HR is like, Oh, we need to have this. I'm like, Jess, no. If someone's being wildly inappropriate and touching people, then they don't work here anymore because you don't get to abuse human beings. That's why my issue is with HR.

Right. I could tell. When you see that frustration, again, It is typically connected to multiple value violation. I call it the supervillain. When there's three or four core value violations in an interaction, either that interaction is a supervillant or the person or the thing is a supervillain. For For me, actually, when I figured this out, I came back and made major changes to my company. I cut our core values in half. We were growing, and I was trying to be everything to everyone, and I cut relationships down. I said, Look, this is who we're going to be, and if you want to be here for this, great. One of the things where it impacted our... We had a core value of accountability in the company, and what I was noticing as we grew was people were translating that to they are accountable for the inputs but not the output, which is totally not what we meant. They were like, I did what I needed to do, but the thing didn't work out. We ended up changing that core value to own it, which is like, Look, you own it. You own the outcome. You own that.

This is what we meant, actually. We didn't mean you did the things that you could do. There's a difference between you take... No salesperson knows where they're going to sell all of their sales in a year. They own a quota, and they own that there's ambiguity with that. We made some of those changes, and actually, a lot of our early employees that were great moved on. I think they identified that we were just... I was just really clear. There was another thing, too. We had rewarded inadvertently, I think companies do this, all-star utility players. Because they were rewarded for jumping around, and they were firefighters and all-star. So they would jump around from this to this, and they would solve problems. I was like, I need a gold glove third basement, a gold glove second basement, first basement or woman, and I need fire preventers. It was our fault because we had rewarded those behaviors. But once the company had 5 or 10 million in revenue, I didn't need a Jack of all trades. If someone was just avoiding that, it was like, Look, we are not valuing that anymore. So maybe you need to go back to a small company where we were just very honest about what we were looking for.

Well, I think that's what you're talking about more than anything else. We get clarity on our values and then we have the honest conversations. And who you were when you're an under $10 million company is not the same person you're going to be when you're over $10 million. Just like who you were before you made your first million, the whole company fundamentally changes as you step up and you level up. Because it's just the nature of the beast. I know with organizations that I run, and they will listen to this, so I apologize, they know that when it comes to HR stuff, they both talk to me. I'm like, Just go do it. I will yield. As long as you don't, go. One of my partners, his name is Darryl, they come in and they're like, Okay, is this a Charles question? Is this It's a Darryl conversation. In fact, it's a Darryl conversation? I'm like, Cool. And then he, because he speaks Charles. I speak Darryl, he speaks Charles. So when we sit down, we can shortcut it, and we know those, and we have those clarities about each other. There's a lot here that it isn't just a simple, Hey, I'm going to listen to a podcast and I'm going to go do this, and, Oh, that was enough for me.

There's a lot of work that goes into this. It's not just the book, it's also the test. If people want to track you down, if people want to connect with you and actually do this work for... Because, listen, I don't care if you don't own a business. I think this is far more valuable for you as a human being, for your partnerships, for your relationships, for your health, for your own relationship with yourself. I think this is a vastly, unbelievably important thing to do. How do people track you down? How do people connect with you? What is the best way to go forward with this?

Yeah. Look, if they want to pick up the book and you can read it in 70, 80 minutes and decide, Oh, yeah, there's something in it for me. You can look up Compass Within wherever books are sold or compass-within. Com is on the site. All of my other stuff, robertglazer. Com, glazr. Com. That's where my newsletters are, the books, the courses, consulting if you want help with this individually or for your organization. But the book is meant to be a prompt, and I think people either read it and they're like, Yeah, I want to dive into this. Everything you need is in that book. If you need more scaffolding, we're here to help.

Perfect. Then if they want to connect directly with you, is it LinkedIn? Is it Instagram?

Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. Again, go to robertglazer. Com, contact. It comes my inbox. I tell him I reply to everyone that emails to me, either than some unsolicited sales pitch for something I don't need or use. I have that promise, and I usually write back within 24 hours. So reach out if you have any questions.

I love that you do that. I am not that person. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing all this stuff. I think it'll help them pivot where they are in their lives, and it'll fundamentally create a radical change, especially as we walk into the new year, unlocking what your values I can't imagine doing anything else more important than this.

Yeah, thank you, Charles. As you said, if you're setting up goals and stuff for the year, aligning those to your values will make it so much more meaningful. My goal is to help a million people figure out their core values. I hope we can get a few from this audience, but thank you for having me.

Absolutely. That's a wrap on another episode of The Proven podcast. Clarity beats chaos. Values beat vibes. Stop reacting, start deciding. The leaders who win know who they are, what they stand for, and what they'll walk away from. Remember, if your decisions aren't anchored in real values, they're just noise pretending to be strategy.