How to improve team effectiveness and avoid burnout

How to improve team effectiveness and avoid burnout with Dominick Quartuccio

Take control of your life first to become an effective leader for your team

I am excited that you are joining me for an interview with my friend, Dominick Quartuccio. Dominick is an international speaker, author, mentor and veteran of the healthcare insurance and financial services industries, and a corporate trainer as well. After years of rising the ranks in the corporate world, Dominick left to start his own coaching and speaking business. Now, he works with clients on raising individual and team performance while short-circuiting burnout. He likes to challenge conventional thinking, unlock previously hidden potential and develop talented people in all stages of their career journey. He is also the author of the bestselling book, Design Your Future: 3 Simple Steps to Stop Drifting and Start Living, which hit number one on Amazon Business Skills and Organizational Change. Dominick, welcome to the Talent Development Hot Seat.

Andy, that's great. Thanks for having me here. I should put that up on my website.

You should. I pulled it from your LinkedIn profile or somewhere, but I am glad to have you on. I had you as a guest on my other podcast, The Andy Storch Show, where we talked a lot about this idea of living intentionally and avoiding drift, and how to live your best life possible. I love that conversation. I've loved following you since then on social media and seeing all the great stuff you're doing. I've been excited to bring you on to talk more about team effectiveness. What's going on in the corporate world and how do we help people work better in teams and avoid that burnout?

To borrow that quote from The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni, “If you can get everyone in your organization rowing in the same direction, then you can win in any market against any competition under any conditions at any time.” It's still teamwork, which is the thing that needs to happen in order for that to be possible. Given the fact that we're all rowing in many different directions, he or she who's able to synchronize wins the game.

It's important and by the way, one of the reasons why this show has been growing and has been successful is because I've had success in going out and getting many great guests to come on, including you and many people who work in talent development. Almost everyone I reach out to is happy and excited to come on. I did reach out to Patrick Lencioni’s PR team and they were like, “No. We’re not doing your podcast.” I need to get a little bigger to get his attention.

Soon you're going to be too big for him and he’ll be begging to be on your podcast with the track that you’re on.

I'm not going to let the ego get in the way. If he ever comes back and wants to come out, I’d be happy to have him. Let's get back to you though and why don't you fill in a little bit of the background there? How did you get to where you are now? Let's get into some of the work you're doing now.

Let's hit the quick and dirty on me so we can get to the value for your readers. I spent fifteen years at CIGNA and Prudential Financial. I was in the retirement division. I was in human resources to start my career and I moved into sales, which is a natural trajectory for most people in HR to go into sales. I have that unique background. I ended up running a sales organization that was about a $1.4 billion sales goal running, ran a number of sales functions here in New York City and a corner office in Times Square. Life was good and I felt I accomplished my mission in the corporate space.

In the last few years that I was leading people, I found this particular passion for helping people raise their games, illuminating their blind spots, accelerating their performance, short-circuiting their burnout in ways that no one had ever addressed with them in their professional careers. A lot of the people who end up reporting to me were much older than me. I had to find different ways of leading them that would provide value for them because they ended up having much more technical experience that I had.

In my personal life, I'd always been this rapacious learner around how to manage my time, my energy, how to cultivate joy in the work that I'm doing, how to break down barriers, how to lead diverse teams, and how to navigate new situations. How do become comfortable with change to disrupt myself constantly and to learn quickly? I started taking what I was learning on my own and filtering that down to the people that work with me. There was a real appetite for it.

Design Your Future: 3 Simple Steps To Stop Drifting And Take Command Of Your Life

In February of 2016, I decided to leave and start my own practice. You read the bio and that's what I've been doing for the past few years. The particular areas of focus are around helping people to raise their performance, short circuit burnout, and helping lead individuals and teams through change because we've never been in a greater time of change and dynamism. We, as human beings, don't typically like change. We are resistant to it and we can get to the reasons why, but I found some success in shaking up some people's systems and getting them to embrace change.

There are a few things that I want to pull out of that. The first one that you said that intrigued me is you led teams with people who were older and more experienced than you may be with more technical knowledge. That's something that happens quite a bit in the corporate world. In fact, I had a conversation with a friend who took a new job and she has a team of mostly people who are older and more experienced. That's a big challenge. What advice would you give to people that are in that position or who are coaching people in that position for people in talent development that have that going on in the organization?

A little bit more color around that and I'll get into the guidance. When I started my career at Prudential, I was a sales support person. I was the guy who would do all the administrative work for the salespeople and in some cases ran their coffee for them and did errands. It was truly the lowest rung on the totem pole. I moved up into a sales role and moved to a sales leadership role where I was now managing some of these people who I ran coffee for.

What ended up happening was I was truly intimidated moving into that position because I had about five years of frontline sales experience and most of the people that were reporting to me now had two decades of worth. I could tell some of them were skeptical, “What does this kid know?” The first part of it was to embrace the idea that I was going to have to do something differently. I couldn't leave the same way every other leader could. I had to figure out what was uniquely different about me and figure out why I was promoted in the first place. What did my leaders see in me that thought that I could gain the respect of these alpha dogs who were reporting to me who were skeptical?

What I found was they put me in that position because they felt that I had not only the frontline experience, but strategy and there was something unique about that and they wanted me to set the vision, but also be the guy who could help to execute. I suppose what I'm trying to say here, Andy, is for someone who's moved into that role, you have to be clear on what your unique gift is and to bring that relentlessly to your team. To recognize it may not be accepted right away. For example, when I say first started to run our team off-sites, they were used to having sales conferences be a certain way. We're going to go out drinking, it's going to go out late, we're going to party hard and sit in a room all day the next day and rant about what's not going right in the sales department.

I decided to do it differently. I said, “I'm going to bring in a meditation instructor because none of you have ever sat still for a little bit and started to create a space between stimulus and response to figure out how we can do things differently.” I took a risk. I flew out someone that I knew well to Colorado for our team off-site, introduced meditation and the team ate it up. They were resistant when I first heard about it, but I knew the right person to speak to them and I was vigilant in maintaining my values while keeping a pulse on the team. I was slowly able to shift them over a period of a couple of years, they were like, “This feels good.” The piece of advice is to get clear on what makes you different to stand in that space, to recognize you may not be accepted right away but to continue standing behind what you believe.

Also to recognize the strengths, experience and values of the people on your team. You don't want to cast that aside. Just because you're this hotshot younger leader that you don't value their experience. In fact, you want to bring that in and leverage that. You're here more as a coach or facilitator than there to tell people what to do.

That's the thing. I never saw myself as the hotshot. I was always I noticed that there was a lack of individual attention to the people on the team. What I mean by that is lack of individual attention regarding what's below the surface? Every person that's ever reported up through my organization and reported to me directly has always had a personality. They've always had a reputation that precedes them of how they become to be known, but there's always a story behind the story. I don't think that most people take the time or the energy to get the story behind the story. They see what's in front of them. What I started to find when I was asking deeper questions about, “What are you reading? What shows are you watching? What's going on at home?” It’s not this personal and invasive way, but a truly curious and compassionate way.

Listening to what people had to say, I found that there was a willingness to open up because most people want to be seen, heard and understood. In this time and era, that's those are rare currencies. Once I created and hold that space, I found truly what laid at the center of every person's motivation. When it came to difficult conversations or hard times, I knew how to connect with them at a deeper resonant level. When I was able to do that, I didn't need twenty years of technical experience. All I needed to do was connect with them at their heart level, motivation level, head level or whatever valued the most and I can speak the language more effectively than other managers could.

Continuously standing by on what you believe can give you the recognition you need from your team. Click To Tweet

Building An Effective Team

You're connecting with them, understanding their strengths, their values, what they bring to the table and making them still feel a valuable part of the team. Speaking of teams, I know you work with a lot of teams on effectiveness and this is a topic that's been discussed for years or decades and always will. There are different companies, different cultures, different things going on. There are also more distractions and more work to do than ever, especially in big companies. Everybody's always on and teams are more dispersed probably on the number because people who work in global companies tend to be all over and having virtual meetings and that stuff. What are some of the pitfalls you've seen and the keys to success that you talk about when it comes to building an effective team?

I love to share a story with you. It's a case study from Harvard Business Review. It's about a company called International Power. International Power decided to tackle something that every business complains about, but no one ever puts together a strategy to attack. The topic is emails. Emails are basically the bane of pretty much any professional’s existence. What International Power decided to do, there was a leadership team of about eight people. It was the CEO and seven direct reports.

They decided to treat email as if it were a manufacturing operation. In manufacturing, the number one enemy is waste and waste comes in two forms. Overproduction and defects. If you think about emails, is there anything that's more overproduced in the business ecosystem than email? There's way too much of it. You think of defective emails, emails that were half-written, emails that are sent to the wrong person, emails that should be phone calls, people who are on the email that shouldn't have been on it, people who are left off. It’s these kinds of things

What's interesting about International Power is they were planning on having every one of their employees go through training. Here's how you email appropriately and here's how you can cut down your emails but what they first decided to do, and there's someone in the committee who said, “Maybe we need to look at ourselves first before we ask any one of our employees to go through the training.” As you might imagine, because people don't like change, the senior leadership team bristled and said, “Why do we have to go through this first? I like my autonomy and there's a personal infringement on my style.” When they decided to look at themselves first, they found out that each person on the team was sending an average of about 54 emails a day. That doesn't sound a whole ton, but when you consider the fact that at the most senior levels, when you send an email down one layer, it multiplies.

When your email goes down a layer, it's 3, 5, 10 times depending on how many people are on that, on the CYA feelings in your organization and depending on the Red Amber Alert version of that email. What they started to figure out was they were the source of the problem. What they ended up doing was going through the training themselves. In a three-month period, they were able to reduce their email output by over 50%.

At the end of the year, what this did organizationally was they were able to get back 7% of productivity time, which equated to millions of dollars of bottom-line revenue, which they were able to sustain for a two-year period. It was also when Harvard Business Review came into the case study. The most fascinating statistic is no other layer of their business went through any formal training for emails. The layer below them, so their direct reports their seven direct reports, ended up reducing their email output by over 60%.

It’s a consequence of the top-level reducing their email.

This is a long way of me saying that when the leadership started with themselves when they look at themselves first as a team, what ended up happening was the highest leverage point was working with themselves first so that the cascading effect can amplify. To take this precisely to the question that you asked, when it comes to teamwork, it's always the leader who sets the tone. I know I'm not saying anything that you haven't heard before, but this part, maybe you haven't. I was finding that every leader was coming to me and asking me the same four questions about getting their team to do something differently. It was always the same four questions, “Number one, how do I get my team to change? Number two, how do I get to act with more urgency? Number three, how do I get them to get more done? Number four, how do I hold them accountable?”

Number one, how do I get my team to change? They're not changing. They're doing things the same way they've always done before. Number two, how do I get them to act with more urgency? They're moving, but not as quickly as I would like. Number three, how do I get them to get more done? They're not doing the things that are most important and how to get the big things done. Number four, how do I hold them accountable? If you don't have a throat to choke, people aren't going to do it. These are the terms that people use.

Avoiding Burnout: Leaders who are stuck the most are those who want to change the least.

What I started to find is that all four of those questions were pointing in the same direction away from them as the leader. None of the leaders came to me and asked, “How do I do something differently? How do I become the leader that I need to be to galvanize my team to move them through this unprecedented time of change?” I say those four questions that you're asking me are good questions, but they're in the wrong order. You need to be looking at yourself first. Start with you.

That's the name of the program that I bring into organizations, which is called Start with You. Instead of “How do I get my team to change?” it’s, “How do I teach? How do I become proficient in change?” What I found is that most leaders are the ones who are stuck the most. They're the ones who want to change the least and therefore it amplifies at their team level. They need to figure out how do they act with intentional urgency. That's the second question. What I found is that most leaders are running around with all sorts of energy but it's frenetic, fear-based and scattered.

John Kotter writes about this in a sense of urgency. He's probably one of the most foremost authorities on change management and a Harvard Business professor. He says that there's a difference between false urgency and true urgency. False urgency is frenetic, fear-based and it's, “I'm going to run around doing stuff, so that it doesn't look I'm sitting around not doing anything,” but the bottom line is it's not healthy. People are getting wound up.

The intentional urgency, the true urgency is Michael Phelps getting ready for a swim meet in the Olympics. If you remember that footage of him sitting in the dressing room, he's got his earbuds in and he’s got the look of determination on his face. There are some other swimmers bouncing around in front of him, flailing about and using all his energy. I remember Michael Phelps looked up at him and he stares in the sky for a second and he goes, “I will destroy you.” He goes back in and wins a gold medal. That's true urgency.

The last two questions are instead of, “How do I get more done?” It's, “How do I build capacity as a leader?” Which means eliminating waste as much as adding big things. The final question instead of, how do I hold people accountable, which has taken on real punitive energy it's punishing energy, it's a guillotine over employee’s necks. They can feel that which may work in short term situations, but no one wants to live in that environment. It wears people down and it makes them jaded.

How do I support progress? People are doing all sorts of stuff and they have no idea if it's adding any value or contributing, especially in some of these intangible businesses, white-collar businesses where it's hard to see the impact of your work. How do you make progress visible and support versus holding the whip and a stick? Those are the ways that I first go in. I reframe the conversation, ask leaders to look at themselves first because they are embodying the behaviors that they wish to change in their people.

It's easy to say, “We need to change the way our people are operating,” without looking at yourself. It's like the old adage or I don't know what you call it, but it's the man who says, “I set out to change the world, but I couldn't do it so I decided to try to change my community, but I couldn't do it so I decided to change family and I realized I needed to change myself first.” It's the same thing and leaders need to be looking at that.

I like when you talked about this idea of false versus true urgency because everyone is busy and busy is worn as a badge of honor in Corporate America and many parts of the world. If we don't have something that is going on that we have to respond to, that almost affects our self-worth that we don't have this project or fires that we're putting out. We don't want to be sitting quietly working on important work because then people won't see us doing these things. Do you run into that as pushback in the corporate world?

All the time. “I'm so busy,” is a complaint. It's a brag disguised as a complaint. It's a brag like, “I'm so busy,” and people like to out busy each other. There are stories of, “I was up until midnight or I took a red eye in and went right into the office.” You must be committed and people celebrate that and I'm like, “No, that's a problem.” That's not a culture that we should be celebrating. I am the first person, like you are, Andy, to put in the work, but there's also a long-term consequence to creating environments where that's going down.

Having been someone who's been in the corporate space and worked hard, left and created my own environment, people come to me in the corporate space, and they tell me what's going on in their life. They are honest with it and they're saying, “I'm meeting the objectives that are set out for me. I'm getting good performance readings at work but honestly, behind closed doors, I'm losing my mind,” and I'm sacrificing one of three categories. My personal health, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. I'm sacrificing my personal relationships. I don't spend any meaningful time with my spouse, my partner, my kids, my friends, or my family. I'm sacrificing my personal freedoms. I can't even take a vacation or work out. I've sacrificed reading,” or whatever it is that lights them up.

Culture is important in defining the success of an organization. Click To Tweet

For what?

It's for the acceptance, approval, avoiding the fear of pushing back on the way that it's being done. In the short-term, it makes sense and I have compassion. I have a lot of compassion for the people who come and share these things with me because I understand it seems a groundswell that there's one person, but the bottom line is it's not a sustainable model. Leaders and teams need to set better tones and the way that the tone is set and reinforced is by the leader.

Here's what ends up happening. Name a single business that you talk to that doesn't promote work-life balance as a part of their key tenets? Everybody does. You hear a leader stand up and talk about it and steps off the stage and it's like, “If I'm emailing you at 11:00 PM, I need you to be on it.” Even if they don't say that directly, the implication is you should be responding or by 5:00 you should be on. You're directly contradicting what you're saying on stage and people feel a lack of trust.

Going back to what you're saying about International Power and what they found with the leader sending emails is a lot of leaders don't realize the influence that they have on the power they have because I've run a lot of these workshops and you hear these senior leaders say, “I get on my computer at night after kids go to bed to catch up on stuff. I'll send some emails.” I don't expect my team to respond. They can respond the next day. There's not any urgency there but what does the team do? “My boss sent me an email at 9:00 PM and I'm still up so I need to take care of this right now because it's the boss.”

If I’ve got $1 for every time I heard that one. As a leader, all of your actions come with meaning. Everyone's interpreting something. Unless you've explicitly said, reinforced and almost verbally punish someone for responding back at 9:00 PM or whatever it is or go the extra mile and put a little delay on the email.

I do that a lot.

It’s the same with me.

There’s a nice feature that you can hit Delay Send. You can do it in Gmail too. It's easy.

Until 8:00 AM. This could be cool. If I spent ten minutes at a meeting with your team and say, “These are the new communication rules. We're not going to send emails before 8:00 AM or past 6:30 PM unless there's a special circumstance,” and we define what the special circumstances are. That should only happen a handful of times over at the course of the year that needs to go outside the boundaries, but we will signal, send or schedule our emails to be sent at 8:00 AM or after. Therefore, we can have the peace of mind that we will know that we don't have to be on call.

There was a woman who used to be a part of the training and development team of Prudential. Her name is Sarah Vita and she went on to lead sales development at AXA. She told me the way that she structured her team with emails, text messages and phone calls. They all had a different function and they were explicit with their team. It was like, “Text me if you have something urgent.” That's it. It's an urgent request that can be answered quickly, “You call me if you need me now and you email me for anything that either is complicated or doesn't require an immediate response.”

Avoiding Burnout: People only address burnout when it’s their back against the wall.

Her team was all clear and all in agreement that they were going to use it that way. Some people wanted to do it differently and some people had communication styles, but they came together as a group to say, “This is how we want to operate professionally as a team.” They also said that not only were they all clear on those mediums on how to be reached, but it also dramatically reduced the amount of messaging that they got from one another because they knew how to reach each other and they had an agreement around it.

Avoiding Burnout

While we're on this topic, let's talk about this idea of burnout. You already started to touch on that a little bit. The corporate leaders who are doing well at work, but they're always on, meeting their objectives, working all the time, not spending that much time with their kids, and not taking care of their health. We both know, this happens a lot, not in the corporate world and we both know plenty of entrepreneurs who work around the clock, sometimes it's even worse because everything is on the line for them in paying the bills. I know you've worked with a lot of people to help them with avoiding this idea of burnout. What do you see out there and what are some of the ways people fix that or avoid that?

This would be a good time to introduce the key problem that is the cause of burnout. You've heard me talk about this a few different times, which is this concept of drift. In order to introduce the concept of drift into the backstory for it, if anyone's ever read if any of your readers have ever read anything by Napoleon Hill. Napoleon Hill has a book called Think and Grow Rich, which is the number one bestselling business book of all time. It's sold over 50 million copies.

Napoleon Hill grew up during the Great Depression era and had a mentor by the name of Andrew Carnegie of Carnegie Steel. Andrew Carnegie said, “Napoleon, if you want to learn how to attract riches into your life, go study from the most successful people in the world and interview 500 of them.” That's what he did. He interviewed Henry Ford, the Roosevelts, the Rockefellers and mined their secrets. He wrote the book on how to attract a bunch of abundance and riches, they can grow rich.

The secondary piece of advice that was much more interesting than Andrew Carnegie gave to Napoleon Hill was if you want to understand the human experience, and go out and interview ten times as many of those people to find out at the end of their lives why they've had regret and why they felt they left chips on the table. Napoleon Hill took that seriously and he interviewed 25,000 of those people. He went crazy over the next 20 to 30 years. He distilled the secrets from the people who felt they lived a life of regret and he wrote the book called Outwitting the Devil. Outwitting the Devil was buried by his family for 70 or 80 years because they felt that it was too controversial. It was only released in 2011 and I ended up reading it during Hurricane Sandy here in New York City when all the power was blacked out, no lights, no running water, no Wi-Fi. All I had was a flashlight and a book.

I remember reading this passage that it was a passage that was attributed to the devil. The devil was the speaker. This part of the book and these words sunk in so deeply that it changed the way that I thought about things forever. The devil says something along the lines of this, “The way that I enter the minds of people is through habit. Operating through this principle of habit, I established a state of drift. When I can get a person to drift, I can lead them straight towards the gates of hell.”

What the devil is saying is that we think that we are making these conscious decisions when in actuality, we are on autopilot. Meandering through life based on habitual pattern, and one thing rolling to the next. We're living this life of hypnotic rhythm and it's only when an outside force thrusts itself upon us do we wake up from that slumber. It's usually something crappy like losing a loved one, your job, having a heart attack, and having an anxiety attack. I can't tell you how many men that come to me to do this work have to pull over to the side of the road because these panic attacks that come up out of nowhere. It's a theme for men in their 50s. It’s thematic. I know over ten men who have come to me with this. It comes up out of nowhere.

These crappy things can be amazing trajectory changers for you because they can cause you to ask better questions and change your behavior. I'm willing to guarantee that everyone who's reading has had something crappy happen in their lives. When they were going through it, it felt torture and now they look back on it and they say, “That experience made me the man or woman who I am.” They would never trade it for the world, but also, they would never wish that upon anybody. What I'm here to say is those are awesome moments. They're always going to happen. If those are the only moments that cause you to change, if the only catalyst change in these outside forces that are thrusting themselves upon you, how in command of your life are you?

That gets back to this question that you're asking about burnout. I find that people only address burnout when it's their back is against the wall, they can't handle it anymore, they're about to lose their stuff, they’re ready to leave the job altogether or they have some mental breakdown. Perhaps it has happened much more insidiously, and this is the worst part, where they don't have the gift of something that powerful or painful. It's something that was a slow chronic decline, until heavyweight gain, migraines, lack of aliveness in their lives and it's subtly taking on enough over time where they don't have the energy to confront it. They keep up gradually get getting used to the worse and worse feeling. That's where businesses start getting 70% of a person. That's where businesses don't get innovation because these people are too afraid to come up with any good idea and their best thinking is not coming out from that standpoint.

The number one way to reduce emails is to send fewer emails. Click To Tweet

I've probably held you underwater long enough to get you close. Let's give you some oxygen. Where I take people from that standpoint is to say, “The way we fix that is by making a conscious decision to regularly and incrementally disrupt yourself.” It can be fun. What I mean by that is your habits, patterns, belief systems, the way that you wake up, the way you go to sleep and the way that one day bleeds into the next, all these things are what keeps you stuck in that hypnotic rhythm of drift. Bit by bit, you end up in this place ten years later where you're burnt out.

The same principle applies if you're able to intentionally shift it bit by bit upwards where all of a sudden, now you have more time, more energy, more joy, you have more command and conscious decisions. You're not burnt out anymore, but it's going to take effort and it's not one thing or one tweak. It's a commitment to it. One of the things I've been shocked when I've talked to even the highest performers is, they don't have a strategy for their morning routine or their evening routine. People wake up and go to bed the same way all the time. These are the bookends of their day that determine the 16, 17, 18 waking hours in between. It determines the quality, productivity, power, purpose, and peace of mind that you have in those waking hours.

The way that a normal person's first hour looks like is their alarm clock is their cell phone. It'll go off and they'll dive right into their cell phone to check emails, text messages, social media and news. It’s a reactive way to start the day. Maybe they're racing around getting their kids ready and it is chaos in the home. You'll race to work and you'll sit down at your desk, or maybe you work from home, you sit down and you finally figure out what you're going to do that day, but it's usually you’re deflecting shots like a goalie.

You’re in reactive mode.

Putting out fires. I've seen people become successful doing that, but what ends up happening are the most important things, the strategic things, the things you said you always want to get done rarely happened in that environment. Not to mention, it's a stressful way of living. The same thing goes for the night. Most people are so exhausted when they're done with the day. They come home, they flop on the couch, they bring their screens with them, they're not focused on any one thing in particular. They're not restoring themselves. They're scrolling on things that aren't even relevant to them once you go down that rabbit hole of social media or news. You get up and do it again.

I will intervene with my clients. I'll have them design their first hour and last hour of their day. Get specific on how that can set them up for power, strength intentionality, and getting the most important things done before noon. Also, having a conscious wind-down strategy at nights you can sleep more effectively and more hours. That's 1 of 100 different things that you can do to disrupt yourself. Do a week of that and layer on something else like meditation, twenty minutes of working out, reading ritual or date night with your partner. These are all the different ways that you can start breaking free from drift and to create more intentionality in your life.

Design Your Life

I want to ask a question about that and we've talked about this. I've been on this for quite a while since I had developed my own morning routine a few years ago. I read Outwitting the Devil after I heard you talk about it. It is so powerful, this concept of drift and the hypnotic rhythm. I've done so much to try to avoid the reactive mode and live my life intentionally. Running my own business, I get to design my own life and my own schedule. Maybe that's a luxury for me.

I can hear the pushback from people in the corporate world going, “Dominick, you don't understand. I've got all these emails, text messages and I've got a demanding schedule. I've got an hour's commute and I work for ten hours and I’ve got to come home and have dinner with the family, if I'm lucky. I’ve got to catch up on House of Cards and whatever else is on Netflix before I go to bed so I could talk to people at the office about it the next day. How do I time make time for this mythical morning routine and taking control of my life you talked about?”

First thing, I have total compassion for someone who feels that way because I know what that feels like and I lived a lot of that. I can't even say that I know what it would be to add on having a spouse at home and children because I'm a single man. Layer that on, and I have compassion for you. The second thing and this has been tough medicine, which is if you argue for your limitations, you get to keep them. If you argue for all the reasons why something can't happen and can't change, your situation will stay exactly how it is.

Third thing is I can't tell you how many people who have that same exact environment that you talked about, have that same life have made gentle, incremental tweaks who have then over a period of time dramatically taken command back up their life. There's a reason why you have an overwhelming number of emails, text messages, and a reason why you feel you have no time in your life. It's because you set it up that way. Here's the thing, there are outside forces that contribute to that but also, if you are going to claim ultimate authority about how your life is showing up right now, you have to take the bad with the good. Which means the reason why you're in this chronic state of business is because of your habits and your behaviors create that.

Avoiding Burnout: Responsiveness leads you to become a very successful salesperson.

The good news is if you believe that you've done that, you also have it within your power and control to change it. I know this. For example, early on in my career, I was getting 300 emails a day. The reason why? I was a 25-year-old salesperson who looked like sixteen, and I was trying to sell the 50-year-old white-haired dudes in corporate settings, CFOs and people who are big-time decision-makers who didn't take me seriously. I didn't have the chops and the experience, but what I promised was that I was going to be the most responsive salesperson.

I was like, “Email me whenever.” People took me up on that offer, so I became the most responsive and people love that about me. That’s what allowed me to become a successful salesperson early on. I didn't have the polish and technical skills, but I was always the first one to reply. There was a currency to that. I became successful, but I was also crippled under the weight of this responsibility that I created for myself.

I created that based on how I said that I was going to provide value. A year and a half into this, I was having a quarter-life crisis. I was like, “I can't continue having 300 emails a day where I'm working seventeen hours or on the weekends and I’m burying myself.” I had to commit to finding a different way of doing it. What I found was that my value is no longer tied up in my responsiveness. My value was I understood the business and I had key insights. I was becoming polished, someone who was articulate and knowledgeable.

Over the course of that year, I subtly started to change the way that I was responding to my clients. I would take longer to respond to things. I would read every email that came in and I would discern which ones needed a response right away and which ones could sit. Once I slowed down that ping pong match, I found that the number one way to reduce emails was to send fewer emails. It's calculated algebra. If you send fewer emails and what I ended up finding was that over the course of that year, I was able to dramatically reduce 300 emails a day down to 75 emails a day that I was receiving. I continued to challenge my way of thinking in any area that wasn't feeling good for me.

I was working twelve hours and I want it to be ten. What was I doing that I could go and ask someone or read a book that had figured it out and to implement it? Also, not argue against all the reasons why won't exist in my life, but to find the way that it could fit in and make it work for me to always look for the way it would solve. That's when things started to shift for me and it became a little bit of a game. I look at someone like you. You started your own business and you've got a family and you’ve got kids. Who's in better shape than you? I'm looking at it like you're working out in the gym and you're doing push-ups with six kids on your back. How many parents will tell you that they don't have time to work out?

You're the guy who's shown how it can be done. I would say to anyone, “If you want more time, if you want less stress, look for the evidence that it can be that way versus focusing on all the evidence that has to be the way that it is.” I'll tell you, here's a secret. Do not look at your immediate surroundings because in your immediate surroundings, everyone is stuck in that same cycle of crap and they will make you believe that's the only way that it can be done. Go to the people who have figured it out and didn't drink from that. Put that intravenously and you and you'll start to find, “It’s not that hard.”

I love this topic and I love talking to people about it because you're right. The number one excuse for, “I'd love to do that or work out, but I don't have time.” I always remind people that we all have the same amount of time and if you tell someone you don't have time for something, it's a lie. What you're saying is, “I'm not making that a priority,” which is fine because maybe your job is demanding and that is the priority for you right now, but you've got to be honest about how you're setting up your schedule. If you want to get in better shape, go to the gym. I'm growing a business over here. I've got two podcasts, managing difficult guests like you Dominick and personalities but you're awesome. I make time to go to the gym every day. I have my morning routine every morning when I get up at 5:00 AM and do some reading. I write in my journal and meditate. I know you do a lot of the same things.

I could be working during that time. I could potentially be working more but I feel those things are important for my life, my business, and my productivity. They make me more productive and I've realized in cutting down a lot of the things from learning from people like you were even before that I would send less emails, take less meetings, push back on, “Do I need to be in this meeting?” which is a big one in the corporate world. Ever since I first heard you, I’m turning off all notifications on my phone and my computer and most of them off already now. They're all almost all off. You realize that you don't have to respond to people right away. You can take your time and respond when you want. As you were talking, I did realize I have a little bit of a double standard because I totally make people wait and respond on my own terms but when I send someone an email or a text message I’m like, “Why aren’t you responding to me?”

That’s the thing that's going to be detention ongoing. Everything that I send, I want it back as soon as humanly possible. I love it when a person sends stuff back to me as fast as possible. There is a value to that person but that person is now either wittingly or unwittingly creating an environment where they're creating an expectation from me. Every time I reply or I send them something, I'm going to get a response quickly. Now that becomes my expectation of who they're going to be going forward. They're in essence tethering themselves to these devices. If that's a conscious decision, great. You need to know that there's a lack of freedom that comes with that.

We're making these choices. What you and I are proposing is know what choices you're making consciously. Drifting is the enemy of intentionality. We're drifting in so many areas of our life. I'm drifting in areas of my life that I have no idea about, but I will wake up to them and I will fix that. With everything that you shared about how your morning routine is set up, it doesn't need to happen all at once. For anyone who's getting overwhelmed by the number of these things you can do, start with one thing here.

Drifting is the enemy of intentionality. Click To Tweet

I gave a presentation to a division of Delta Airlines and there was a woman. She's a full-time employee, and also a mom to four. When she wakes up in the morning, it's 90 minutes of chaos in her house. I was like, “What about you? What about self-care? What about investing something in yourself?” She’s like, “I don’t have time for that.” I'm like, “I understand. What would you ideally like to do? In your ideal world, what would you like to have before you get the kids going?” “I would love to have fifteen minutes by myself with a hot cup of coffee.”

I'm like, “That sounds great. I can even feel you getting warm and fuzzy. There's a big smile on your face you're talking about it.” She’s like, “Yes.” I’m like, “How about you try that for the rest of this week and wake up early?” She’s like, “If I get up and I leave my room, I may wake up my kids.” I’m like, “Put the coffee pot in your bath.” She's like, “That's crazy.” I'm like, “It's not that crazy. I know it looks out of place, but put a coffee pot in the room. For fifteen minutes, that's all yours.” You can see that even that felt blissful to her.

It doesn't need to be super complicated or over-engineered. It’s something that sounds and feels good to you because many of us are doing things that we think we have to do or things would be too hard. This was something that lit her up and all it requires was getting up about fifteen minutes earlier or maybe go into bed fifteen minutes earlier. I have to follow up with her to see if she implemented it, but it could be that simple.

The morning is the place where we have that opportunity and that's why my kids get up around 7:00 and that's why I get up at 5:00 or sometimes 4:30 because it gives me a lot of quiet time. I know that you're a coffee aficionado or lover of coffee me like me. I like to grind my beans fresh every morning, but I also live in a small house with not so sound sleepers. I take my coffee grinder into the bathroom every morning at 5:00 AM, grind the beans in the bathroom and brew the coffee while I meditate and get into the rest of the day, but I don't want to wake anybody up. You’ve got to get creative and don't worry about it. It’s like, “The coffee pot in the bathroom, that's crazy,” but stop worrying about what other people might think. Get creative and design your life how you want to live it, go out and take action. Try some of those things and see how it works.

Have fun with it. I'm laughing as I think about you taking your coffee grinder into the bathroom. I bought a coffee grinder. It's a manual one. It's from JavaPresse. You can grind but it’s much more silent. There's something about doing it yourself that feels good. That's another option for you.

I also come back from the gym early in the morning while they were sleeping and wanted to make a smoothie, so I took my blender out on the front porch and made a smoothie outside.

It's less convenient, but it could be funny. It's the moments that you can have gratitude for the fact that you're doing this for yourself. Once you realize that these acts of filling up your own tank are not selfish. It’s selfish not to do these things because then you walk around with resentment or obligation. I hear this from a lot of parents. It's like, “I love my kids, but I can't sleep now. I love my kids, but I have no more me time. I love my kids, but our sex life has now disappeared.”

Think of how many reasons why you have these subtle, latent resentments against your children. Even if you don't think you have them there is this, “I don't have freedom because of them.” If that's what's showing up, you're quicker to snap at them and get angry at them. Take that back because I know that parents feel guilty about that sometimes and they don't know where that guilt is coming from. If you're grinding your beans in your bathroom, having that coffee break, working out for yourself and doing some journaling before they wake up, your tank is full. It's not their fault that you're out of shape, tired or whatever because you're not feeling those things anymore. How much deeper is your love tank for them?

Create A Better Culture

When you have more freedom in life and that whole idea of intentionality comes when you take full responsibility for everything and say, “I created this situation. I own this. This gets to happen to me. How do I adopt this?” I'm here to confirm and affirm the things you're saying as a father that this is not out of left field. You can do these things. To bring things back together because we’ve got to wrap things up, take us back to an organization level. For people reading who might be in talent development thinking, “I want to help create a culture where not only do we have effective teams, but we have people that are enjoying their careers and they're not burning out,” what are a couple more things? If you could distill it down to some advice of what they could be doing to create that better culture?

What I end up seeing is, the wrong way of doing this is people will sit in a room, ask that question and write down bullet points of what kind of culture we can be creating and they'll go out and read those things to their employees. The leaders who are interested and committed to creating a culture where there isn't burnout where there is a high performance, hitting your numbers, being dynamic in response to change and being innovative is for the leaders to start with themselves and to live those lives first. It has to happen from the CEO and their direct reports on down. They’ve got to go through a first. If they're truly committed to that, then they have to look at what is out there. Whether it's working with someone, you or me or going to the human performance institute that Johnson & Johnson runs down in Florida.

Avoiding Burnout: Intentionality comes when you take full responsibility for everything.

I've gone through that program number of times. I facilitated their workshops back when I was at Prudential. They're doing amazing work. You need to get serious. Take your team to an offsite. Take them for three days and do this work. Step outside of the professional setting and break down the barriers and get serious about living this way for the next year and making it a key focus. Only then do you have the right or permission or even expertise to talk about creating a culture like that for your people. You have to live it first. There’s no, “Read this book and it's going to happen.” It's not that simple. You have to be committed and live it and you also have to do it as a team because if it's just one person, it's not going to permeate the organization.

It's the same as a strategy change, culture change, strategy transformation, digital transformation or whatever. It's got to come down from the top. The leaders have to embody the culture that you want people to follow. You can't come out and have a town hall and tell people what it is and expect them to follow. They’re going to go back to work and be like, “We've heard this before,” and that's it. They have to experience it, get a chance to practice it and see that the leaders are completely bought in and excited about it. Otherwise, it's not going to work.

Usually, the excitement is not by telling people how excited they are they can witness it. They'll see it and feel a difference. It’s like what the International Power company did with their emails. They didn't have to put a single person through any training because they created that shine and it basically amplified and reverberated throughout the entire organization. That's how this stuff happens.

There are a lot of people reading who may want to reach out to you, follow you, maybe work with you. Where do they go to get in touch, Dominick?

My corporate stuff is through DominickQ.com. You can find my speaker kit and training programs there. You can reach out to me through DominickQ.com. Anyone who's interested in doing deeper inner work, I have a website called DoInnerWork.com. It's specifically geared towards high performing men who want to go on the personal development journey, the inner journey. I have a podcast there called the Man Amongst Men. On both of those websites, I have my book lists that you can download to raise your performance to do inner work to create a future you can't wait to live into. The last thing that I might offer up is the book that I wrote. It’s called Design Your Future which you can find on Amazon.

Thank you so much. I can attest that you do great stuff on there. I've listened to your podcast and you put out some great content. I was even going to make a joke about why you only work with men and we talked about possibly getting into a conversation about diversity and inclusion, but we'll have to save that for next time.

One correction. I don't only work with men, I have a specialty working with men, but I also work exclusively with women. When I say exclusively women, I have women's groups like Women in Pensions Organization who reach out to me and One More Woman, which is an entrepreneurial organization focused on women leaders. I have specific conversations with those audiences because they need specific things. What I'm finding amazing is that women's organizations are interested in talking to male ambassadors, not being in echo chambers or talking to other women. How do they reach men who care and who can listen and influence change in a way that maybe could speed up the process? I've been humbled and honored to be one of the men who's been tapped to for a number of these groups to talk to them about how to how to create a message that can influence men to change.

I'm glad I mentioned that and that you corrected me and brought that up, so you could say that and I agree. That's a whole other topic we could get into and may have to do another interview another time. For now, we’ve got to go. Dominick, thank you so much for coming on to share your experience and especially your wisdom on these topics. I hope that people found it as valuable as I did. I appreciate you coming to The Talent Development Hot Seat.

It’s always a pleasure, Andy.

Take care.

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Thank you so much for reading this episode. I am always grateful for everyone who tunes in, reads, listens, subscribes and who have left reviews for our podcast on iTunes. If you haven't done that yet, it would mean the world to me. Head on over to iTunes, take one minute, write a quick review. It helps our podcast grow and I appreciate your support. As my gift to you, I have created a report of the Top Five Trends Impacting Talent Development. If you haven't grabbed that report yet, you can head on over to AdvantagePerformance.com/trends. You can download my report of the Top Five Trends Impacting Talent Development in 2019, as well as sign up for our newsletter to get updates on everything that is going on. Thanks again for reading.

• Talent Development Think Tank
• Dominick Quartuccio
• Design Your Future: 3 Simple Steps to Stop Drifting and Start Living
• LinkedIn – Dominick Quartuccio
• The Andy Storch Show
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
• International Power
• John Kotter
• Sarah Vita – LinkedIn
• Think and Grow Rich
• Outwitting the Devil
• DoInnerWork.com
• Man Amongst Men
• Women in Pensions Organization
• One More Woman
• iTunes – The Talent Development Hot Seat
• Top 5 Trends in Talent Development