Reaching Team Potential: Insights from the Connected Teamwork Podcast with Paul Reitz

Excellent, excellent. Thank you for having me. It's an honor to have you.

I think there's a link between competitive sports or whatever arena you choose to compete in and the aspect of business. And so what I've seen, and some of the board members have taught me in the respective companies they've run, is that if you can find individuals that have learned that prior to experiencing in business, they're going to look at it differently, digest it quicker, and be able to take actions to get through those moments of disconnectedness and challenges that we're all going to experience. So for me, I love sports growing up. I had a dad who pushed me into sports, and I went along with that. At times, probably he was my biggest competitor, and I wanted to whoop his tail as much as anybody else's. That was just a great way to learn competition when your dad wants to take it out on you and doesn't care if you lose. So for me, the failures in sports, whether you failed as an individual to not help support your team or your team didn't perform to the ability they were capable of, learning that throughout my younger years and I did participate in sports through college, I feel like that just gave me a nice leg up in business because those challenges are going to be there. And I do believe in sports, business, life, if you have a connected team, you're going to do much better than a much more talented disconnected team 100% of the time. So again, I think it's those learnings and those failures through sports taught me that let's do this as a team because we're going to be better off.

Relentlessly focused on the team and our performance every single day. We operate in a cyclical end market that is typically going to see cycles that go up and down on about a three to five year curve. So we do have experience in dealing with it, but I think more importantly, what has separated us from others during times like that is that we're absolutely focused on how do we perform at the highest level as a team, realizing that in difficult markets you're going to have failures, you're not going to feel like you're winning, but you have to perform at your best every day. That means you can't have people wandering off into the wilderness on their own, making decisions that are in their own self-interest and not doing what's collectively right for the team. The reason why that becomes even more heightened during these periods is because you can't take a step backwards; you've got to try to take every step forward, if not just hold your ground. So it's taken a number of years to do this. I can say it today on June 10th, but I can tell you it's taken a number of years to build a team with that mindset. One of the things I'm proud of at Titan is that if you look at our top management team, roughly 30 to 40 people, that entire team has been together over the last five years. So you think of all the challenges over the last five years, we've had zero people that have said, 'You know what, I don't want to be part of the Titan team.' But during that time we've had some biggest challenges you can experience right now: an end market that's down, obviously we had the pandemic. So that's one thing I'm proud of that says what we built before this five-year period with the team, with the culture of the team, is really what got us through this period. Again, I think it comes back to the same thing with sports. You're going to fail, you said it Carson, you're going to lose. Learn how to lose because in that process you're going to learn how to wake up every day, do the best you can for your team, which means you're going to have to work hard for yourself but you're not going to get the credit for yourself. It's got to be about the team winning. So again, we built that culture at Titan and I think it's really shown itself in the last few years.

It starts with trust. With trust as a basis, in a situation that you just highlighted, you need to acknowledge there's a problem, a failure, an issue, and you've got to do that quickly. So if we are failing, if we're on a bad path somewhere, let's fail fast. Let's acknowledge that we're not going in the right direction and let's do something about it. So what you'll see in our management meeting is exactly that. Let's not just walk in there pat everybody on the back and say all the good things. Let's acknowledge where we're off track. Let's be honest and forthright with each other, realizing also because we trust each other we can do that. So what I really enjoy about our team meetings, we do them virtually every two weeks with the whole global team. We get together in person, and the in-person ones are clearly better because we can get to those issues fast, but I'll say even virtually we've gotten pretty good at it. We'll spend about two hours, we get to the issues and we talk about them straight on. If this is what we need to say, then let's say it. There's going to be no hurt feelings because the process of making the team better, you're going to have some scars, you've got to build up some scar tissue. I think across the board, we operate in a lot of different countries, a lot of different cultures within the environment of our team, and I'm really proud to say that culture at Titan is consistent everywhere across the whole team.

That did take time. I think trust in a lot of cases you have to invest in it. It's easy to read about it, you can put slogans around a conference room and charts and you can feel better that you're trying to build trust, but it really comes from actions. Actions take time for people to feel confident that you've built the muscle that's there to support the trust needed to operate as an effective team. So for us, our slogans are pretty minimal. You could digest them in about 30 seconds. What we avoid is a lot of nonsense that we're not going to do. If we say it, we're going to do it. If it's printed on a wall, we believe it. With that, we built the trust in each other as a team that the actions we take are going to be in the best interest of our customers, our shareholders, and our team. Also, I have to set the right tone as a leader. I have to behave that way, and I have to do that consistently because the second I trip up, they're going to pick up on that and you're going to lose that trust with them. So it starts with me, a lot of consistency in how I behave. All those things I mentioned about when you fail, admit your mistakes, acknowledge your issues, let's get to the crux of the problem and move forward, it starts with me. So that took some time. They had to believe that this is who I am and this is how I'm going to operate consistently. If they fail, I'm not going to blame them. We're going to figure out how we did it together. The real failure starts with me. I only fail if I don't address the problem because we're going to make mistakes. So I'd like to say there's an easy way to build trust, but I don't really think there is. I think you've got to do it consistently day after day after day, like sports, a lot of practice for a two-hour event.

Yeah, that's something I've been blessed with. I've had a number of leaders around me that have imparted knowledge and wisdom. They've done it in a caring way, and I can think of a few real critical moments. But the one thing I will say, and I go back to what I said with my dad, is my dad taught me to live in the perspective of the real world. I jokingly said whenever we competed against each other, he wanted to whoop my tail. That's kind of how we live life. You're not automatically going to be a winner, and your dad's not going to let you be a winner; you're going to have to earn it. So what it taught me is work hard but live life with your eyes wide open. My dad was in sales and he started life as a finance guy, so he had these multiple perspectives on life. I went to school to become an accountant, started at Deloitte and Touche, but then I went and got my MBA in marketing. So I kind of followed his path. If you can look at the world from multiple vantage points, you're going to live your life with your eyes wide open, and what you do then is you learn because you realize that everybody sees the world differently. So when you're trained in accounting and trained in marketing, polar opposites, you can walk into the room and say, 'Well, I understand your point and I understand yours. Let's figure out how we can bring those together for the best solution.' I think that really helped me a lot. A lot of that was just luck, something my dad got into. He was a finance guy that got into sales because they had a sales opening and said, 'You better go take this job, just go do it for a year, we'll move you back to the corporate office.' He ended up retiring in sales. That lesson from him about how he saw the world from those two vantage points, I applied it early on and I think it's really helped me. It just comes down to if you can live life with your eyes wide open, there are so many learning opportunities around you, but you've got to put down your shell, put down your guard, and you've got to be willing to say, 'I don't know everything,' and there are a lot of really smart people that know more than I do. I can think of critical moments, some of them were failings, where people sat me down and said, 'If you don't change your attribute here, you're never going to get to where you want to be over there.' For a week or two I was pretty upset, and then all of a sudden it just hit me: 'You know what, I think Gordon was trying to tell me something really important here. Stop being a knucklehead with your own mind and just understand the lesson he's trying to teach you.' So I really get that ability to just live life with your eyes wide open. There are opportunities to learn, but so many of us it's easy to keep your head down and look at the world from your own lens and think, 'Man, I'm just doing things so good.' We all want to feel good at the end of the day. Maybe because my dad wanted to whoop my butt in sports when I was younger and I didn't feel good a lot of times, that helped me to have a different perspective on life. You just got to keep learning and trying. I've been fortunate, but by doing that, I've had the right moments where I had some people around me who really cared about imparting that information. That's the other part: you can't just read it in a book because that's one source of information, but you need those people around you. It could be a spouse, a friend, work associates. Wherever it comes from, when somebody tells you something meaningful and they know you, those are the moments you need to listen. Sometimes those are really painful moments because you hate to hear from people that truly know you, but those moments are so invaluable, especially when you hear it a couple times in a row. When you hear it a couple times in a row, it seems like, 'Oh, this might be something that I should listen to.'

Well, I think if all of us were honest, in the moment feedback hurts because most of the times in life people don't pull you aside and give you honest feedback and say, 'You know what, you are the greatest, you are the best.' That just doesn't happen very often, if ever. So usually the feedback you get hurts. I've had some really good people I've worked with who have gotten to know me and they saw some ability that they said, 'If I invest some time in him, I think it's got some rewards for them.' I think that's the other part: the mentors want to feel like they're going to get something from it as well. So you need to do it with your eyes wide open. The chairman of our board, a gentleman by the name of Morry Taylor, he's a charismatic, colorful guy, ran for president in 1996. Him and I could not be bigger opposites, but the adage in life and relationships, opposites do attract, and him and I have formed a great bond through really just honest, direct feedback. Whatever Morry says to me, I'm not going to take it personally. I'm going to listen, and most of the time he's good. If he's saying something, he's on the right track. If he's not, I'm going to tell him I don't agree. At other times when he's not on the right track with stuff, I will tell him, and we can be going at it for five, ten minutes, and next thing you know one of us will say, 'It's time for lunch, you hungry? Let's go.' And it's just done. I think when you find those type of people in your life, family, friends, work mentors, wherever it comes from, you can build a relationship like that where you can speak honestly and directly. One, you're going to get better, but you get better quicker. It doesn't take as long to get to the point you're trying to get to, which is we all want to get good quality feedback, work on our flaws, try to do better at what we're doing, whether it's personal relationships, be a better spouse, a better parent, better at work. But you need that feedback from people that you can trust. I think a lot of life is about trust, and I've been very fortunate with somebody like Morry Taylor, another gentleman Gordon Henry. When they give you that feedback, it's great. For Morry and I, it's a two-way street, and that's really valuable. Most people look at it as Morry's the charismatic, colorful guy. 'How do you two hit it off and have such a great relationship?' I don't know the answer to that, but a lot of Morry's closest friends have told me, and this is a compliment to me that always let me know I'm on the right track, is that Morry with his charisma, you mentioned it earlier, charisma can kind of dominate situations. Morry's charisma has a tendency to do that, but one of his closest friends pulled me aside once and said, 'You are the only human being I've seen on the planet other than his wife that when you talk, he stops and listens to every word coming out of your mouth.' So for me, that was a great compliment to know that I don't have to change my personality. I can be who I am. So again, going back to that, how do you move forward? We don't have to change who you are to do it. Sometimes when you read a book, you start trying to change who you are. You can be who you are and still move forward.

Yeah, this is an old one and I learned this going back to grad school, which is a long time ago, close to 30 years ago, not quite. There was a book called 'First, Break All the Rules.' At the time I read it, I didn't have enough work experience to necessarily apply it, but I had a good teacher that told us about the book and we should all read it and then talked about it. I went back and read it multiple times as I got more work experiences and I knew how to apply it. One of the principles in there is we all want to try to work on the people that you classify as a 100. What this 'First, Break All the Rules' is saying is put your efforts into the good folks. By doing that, you're going to rise the seas for everybody, and the bad performers either they're going to jump on the wave or they're going to get out. That really is effective. In a lot of cases, what you end up doing is dedicating too much of your energy, your time which is limited, into the mediocre to underperformers because you're thinking you could push things up. What I've seen is that's worked much better. It's just going back to this book from almost 30 years ago: let your leaders be your best people and let them pull, but at the same time you've got to make sure they're doing it the right way. So it's your job as a leader to make sure the people you designate as good are the ones that are truly leading in the way that you set the principles and the structure for the culture of your company. You can't let them do that; you have to do that part. For me, that's been very successful. I do have one quick story, I'll make it short. My daughter plays soccer and she loves the game. Her high school team here recently, it's her senior year, our high school team was struggling. They had ability, but they had ability. I pulled the coach aside and I said, 'Look, you know soccer, I do not. I do understand teamwork.' I gave him some principles along the lines of what I just said. He applied them, he listened, he applied them. We had a few follow-up meetings. He went to the underperformers, which included some of the parents who were causing some of the underperforming, and he hit it on the head, nailed it, put an end to it. Two and a half weeks ago, they won the first state championship in the history of her school, which is a large school, the highest class in the state. For me, that was some personal gratification. It's one thing to do it at work, and by the time you come home nobody cares about what you did at work, but to see it happen in your personal life for her, her as a team captain holding a trophy above her head, it really all came down to the team had some talent, the coach knew how to coach and he knew soccer, but that teamwork piece was missing because they were letting the bad underperformers have too much of a say in how the team performed. We just flipped that paradigm and boom, state championship. So good personal story. Congratulations.

This takes longer, but I do think it's the right way to do it. It starts with you. It starts with your actions. They need to see it from you. You can't just say it, you can't write it on the wall, you've got to do it, and you've got to do it consistently. You can't mess up, you can't slip up along the way. The trust that you build from it will build muscle within your team that will get you through anything. But it does take longer to do that. If you start calling out other people's problems, making it other people's issues not your own, it can get in some situations you need to do that to solve a very discreet situation. But if you're talking about the broader landscape of connectedness and building a strong team, it starts with you. Period.

No, thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity to work with you guys today. Love what you do and your insights, so appreciate it.