243. From Chaos to Clarity: Transforming your Business Culture with Garrett Delph

Join us as we welcome Garrett Delph, the visionary founder and CEO of Clarity Ops, who reveals the secrets behind transforming chaotic growth phases into structured success stories. Garrett's journey of building internationally scaled businesses highlights the critical role of leadership in fostering a culture of accountability. He shares how Clarity Ops offers frameworks and tools to tackle the confusion that often accompanies scaling, emphasizing the power of a clear vision to reverse negative spirals. Discover how focusing on people, processes, and performance outcomes can transform your organization into a thriving, resilient entity.

Our conversation takes a deeper dive into the alignment of company actions with core values and the practical application of these values through leadership playbooks and frameworks like "PIE and TEA." Garrett explains how consistency and congruence in leadership can enhance employee engagement, ensuring everyone feels seen, heard, and valued. Listen in as we explore the delicate balance between delegation and empowerment versus the pitfalls of micromanagement, shedding light on how leaders can cultivate a positive workplace culture that thrives on trust and growth.

Prepare to be inspired by the "autonomy freedom matrix" and the "quad core leadership framework," which Garrett introduces to skillfully navigate the dynamics of empowerment and control. These models offer insights into when to grant autonomy and when to enforce guidelines, all while improving organizational effectiveness. Wrapping up, Garrett shares his philosophy of prioritizing people over profit, inspired by leadership principles from his favorite book, "It's Your Ship" by Michael Abershoff. This episode is a treasure trove of insights for anyone looking to scale their business with clarity and a focus on sustainable success.

🌐 Connect with Garrett:
• Website: https://clarityops.co/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garrettdelph/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/garrett_delph/

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Chapters

• 0:01 Scaling Leadership for Business Success
• 13:38 Empowering Leadership and Values Alignment
• 17:42 [Ad] Exploring Workplace Mental Health with Dr. Bill Howatt
• 18:32 (Cont.) Empowering Leadership and Values Alignment
• 21:18 Balancing Autonomy and Process Improvement
• 29:57 Culture of Clarity and Alignment
• 40:43 Reflecting on Scaling Leadership and Mistakes

Transcript

Mick Spiers: 0:01

What does it truly take to scale a business, not just in size, but in impact? The answer isn't just strategy, it's leadership. Today we dive deep into the art and science of scaling leadership with someone who knows it firsthand, Garrett Delph, founder and CEO of clarity ops. In this episode, we'll uncover the essential elements of building an unstoppable culture where accountability isn't about blame, but about empowerment. If you're a leader striving to elevate your team, scale your business and build a culture that fuels success, this episode is for you. Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Leadership Project. I'm greatly honored today to be joined by Garrett Delph. Garrett is the founder and CEO of an organization called Clarity ops, a boutique organization that helps organizations scale and grow. And today we're going to be talking a specific theme of that, which is about scaling leadership, the role of leadership in helping an organization grow and scale. But what do you need to do with the people along the way? How do you transform the people? How do you transform the business and make it something that builds upon itself? That's going to be our clear focus today. We're going to be talking about building an unstoppable culture, and one that's built on accountability. So Garrett, without any further ado, I'd love to hear from you tell us a little bit more about your very interesting background. What inspired you to start clarity ops and to help organizations the way you that you do today?

Garrett Delph: 1:40

Well, Mick, excited to be here. Thank you for having me, and I'm definitely looking forward to the conversation and hopefully bringing some value. You know, the journey to launching clarity ops was through my building of, you know, multiple businesses that scaled internationally. You know, over that the course of those businesses, my businesses have hired nearly 600 people, and have probably interviewed 10s of 1000s to get there. And, you know, sort of like life is often, and there are not playbooks, you know. And for me, I've always been growth centric, and, you know, been pretty, almost militant about winning in business, which propelled, you know, sort of pretty cyclical growth phases. And in doing that, you get into this topic called a scale and every time we would go through a growth initiative. It came with just a ton of stress and pain and firefighting and delays and confusion and chaos. And after a good, you know, eight years of this, I began to think, surely, this is not the path like surely, there's got to be a way to scale business with these great people you hire and invest in without all of the chaotic Fallout and pain to the people in order to win in business. And so I begin my own experiments, both personally and with my teams in, you know, evaluating why these things happen and what we could do to fix them. And at the end of the day, the term that came about, which is, you know, why I named my business that I did, is, I don't think it boiled down to clarity, vertically and horizontally in the business in a whole host of different ways. And I determined that when any organization profit, nonprofit, business or philanthropic, when people are clear and when they're well organized, you get this cascade of benefits. Which are, you know, you get better outcomes. You get there faster. Stress is lower, happiness is higher. Profits increase, bloat and waste decreases in the business. And in general, you beat the odds, which are nine and 10, businesses go out of business. This is just a thing, and so that's why clarity ops. Clarity Ops is a system of frameworks, assessment systems, tools and techniques that are all pre built and designed to drop into any organization so that they don't have to continue to live in chaos, but in a very fast in a fast iteration, they can get reorganized, bring clarity to their leaders, empower their leaders with great systems so that they can achieve the things they want to achieve and not go through all the pain and frustration that comes without them.

Mick Spiers: 4:55

Yeah. Really good, Garrett. There's some scary thoughts there. Nine out of 10, I'm. Not completely surprised, by the way, but it seems to be getting worse over time. We do have a lot of business failing. It is stressful to try to scale a business, and it's very confusing, which the opposite of the word clarity is confusion that does seem to happen. So what do you think is the breakdown? So we we have the leader, usually, in their mind, at least, has a clarity of where they're trying to take the business, what kind of business they want to go. They don't want to grow the business in a way that's bad for the people, which is one of the threads that you're throwing in there. But we seem to have this disconnect. We end up having this confusion. And we also end up having situations where the people feel like potentially that the business is growing in a way that they're not happy. They they have the opposite of that happiness curve that you're talking about, and the more unhappy they get, the more it turns into a spiral. How do we reverse that spiral into a virtuous cycle and bring that clarity?

Garrett Delph: 6:00

Well, I think it is the magic question, right? How do you do that? How do you do all of these things that you mentioned? And I have to disclose, there's not a magic bullet that said I have evidence based proof that when, at the very least, the frameworks that I've built, that we use at clarity ops for our customers. When you implement them, they work, and you actually see the achieved results of these things that we're talking about. And I would say, you know, to answer your question and to simplify it, I think there's just a few basic steps. Number one, you have to want it. And there's no amount of great solutions that will help a business if the decision makers, the stakeholders in the business, cannot stand and do not want chaos and confusion. So that is the first step. Like, if you don't want it, it won't happen that said, if you get a business that says, I hate our people and I hate my business living in chaos and confusion, I want to do something about it, the first place to start, or maybe that's the second step now is I like to just bucket the business into Three Pillars. Look at your people, look at your process, and then look at your performance outcomes and integrate them strategically. And so an example of people, for example, would be caring for them in a few different ways. Number one, get clear about what you value and then take these core values and publish them to the team. Weiner, who is the ex CEO of LinkedIn, he said his primary job, his primary role at LinkedIn, is to be the chief reminder officer about what they believe and where they're going. And so that's why I tend to agree with him, and I think these core values are so important because what we value is what we think about. What we think about is how we make plans. What we plan is what we do. Think some other really great things in terms of setting the stage for empowering people to be great is doing a couple things like getting clear on job descriptions. Job descriptions, literally are the DNA inside of the fruit tree, and they are these very well constructed instructions that tell everything inside of the seed what to do and where to go once it begins to grow, and that's what job descriptions are. So get your job descriptions well aligned with the vision and the mission of the business. Another thing is give your great people a career path like you want to lower your employment churn. One of the best ways you can do that is demonstrate to them you care so much about them that you have a vested interest in a plan that shows them how to get a better title, how to make more money, how to develop, how to become a better leader, right? Another great thing for the business is invest in a succession plan. I'd say, you know that is basically fire insurance for the business, which leads into knowledge transfer systems, which we may or may not talk about. So there's, you know, at clarity ops. We have, I think we have 18 different, you know, tools you can use to reset and reorganize caring for people. Once you do that, that parlays into, all right, people are set up. They're ready to go. They're clear about the mission. They're clear about the goals and outcomes. Now we have to give them instructions literally, which is process. And you know, Jeff Bezos said in a really great interview, said, You know, there's a lot of moving parts in a business, but there's only. You really one or two primary roles in the business that don't need copious, well manicured instructions, and that is at the strategy level, where you really are paid to think outside of the box and explore and really go down rabbit holes and so that you can kind of arrive at a strategy they need the freedom and autonomy to be free. The rest of us, we need instructions. You know, one of the biggest lies, I think, in this current generation I've heard in business is hire great people and set them free. If you want a recipe to crash your business, take that advice, because it will not work and it will backfire. Instead, give your great people rails for the business roller coaster. You're putting a lot of valuable customers and a lot of valuable teammates inside of that roller coaster. And if you don't give it rails, it's going to go flying off and crash. So give people instructions that that really is the nature of process. And then the third bucket is now that you've cared for the people and you've given them process to achieve the results that you want, which is basically instructions. Now what you set up is performance accountability, and where this gets really great. Mick is on the front side, if the business values, for example, accountability, and they value measuring outcomes because they want to make sure they get to the destination that they want. Well, they've already cared for the people and told the people, this is what we do, and so people will not be surprised when a leader or a manager says, All right, let's measure your outcomes and make sure that we're going the right direction. So now you have already pre planned for accountability in place. People expect it. They've come to appreciate it and even value it. And then one other thing about this performance bucket, which I think is really great as it integrates with values is when great leaders have systems that are rooted in accountability, which is valued. Then when there are difficult times, when there's, you know, missed KPIs, when there's missed benchmarks, when outcomes varied and were not consistent. A leader can go to a person they lead, and rather than point a finger at the person, they can lock arms, and they can both look at the process, and they can both evaluate the process and see what went wrong. That is a transformational approach to management that is not used mostly, but will change culture and change the direction of a business when you can manage lead and grow that way.

Mick Spiers: 12:52

Yeah, really great, Garrett, you've given us a lot to think about already. So for the audience, we've got three pillars. We've got the people, we've got the process, we've got the performance accountability. I'm going to unpack the three of those as we go, the two words that are screaming in my head as I hear you talk. And funnily enough, one's the name of your business. Clarity and alignment. So clarity of the vision of the business, clarity of the values of the business, clarity to the people that we see you as part of that vision. It's not just a vision for the business. We're going to give you a career path. You're along this journey with us. We care about you. Our values show that we care about you, and that vision includes you. It's not at the expense of you. It actually includes you, then on the clarity of process side and the job description part as well, both both going together, clarity of expectation. So here's something that I've found a lot recently Garrett, which is that feeling that people get when they're going home from work at the end of the day and they're scratching their head not sure whether they did a good job or not. They're wondering, did I make my boss happy today? Did I do a good job? If there's not clarity of expectation, it's very hard for them to know, am I on the right path or not? And then the alignment, then to the performance accountability, to make sure that the performance accountability is aligned to the things that we said were important to us. Are they aligned to our values? Are they aligned to the vision of where the business is going? So I can see how this thread is connecting people, people process and then the performance accountability. Let's get a little deeper into each one. So on the people pillar, showing people that they care and showing that the values are meaningful. This is one where I think a lot of businesses do go a little bit off the Rouse. They'll have values. They might put them on the office wall plaque, but their actions don't always in the perception of the people match those values. So how do we how do we demonstrate in lifting? Experience that our values are our most important element of this journey.

Garrett Delph: 15:04

Yeah, it's a great question. Again. I want to preface with there's not a magic pill here that said, this is where I think the power of playbooks and frameworks become essential to succeeding in this area, and so remember Jeff Weiner, ex CEO of LinkedIn, Chief reminder officer. So in order to remind people about things that you value, you have to document them. So we're going to assume that's done. So one of the ways to make sure this happen is happens is you have to have advocates, ambassadors inside of the business that are reminding one another and reminding the teams about these things. You know, what we value, where we're going, how we're going to get there. That is critical. You know, next when it comes to caring for people, I think three things come to mind. Mick, number one, leadership agreements. So if you have reminder ambassadors, there's this other framework, which we call leadership agreements, and this helps leaders calibrate and define how they're going to work together and what their expectations are of one another. Found that to be also extremely, extremely powerful. A couple of other frameworks. We use that again, because I think simplification is is really critical path to achieving these results. We have a little saying we call leadership. Should eat a slice of pie and drink tea every single day, and it's really easy to remember, and it's just a nice calibrator. Pi is an acronym and T is an acronym. Pi stands for be professional, have integrity and have a Q or emotional intelligence, and probably not enough time to get in the podcast today to break down the components of pi, but again, really easy to remember, professional integrity, empathy, EQ, and then T, te, A stands for time, energy and attention. We know that where the energy goes, the attention flows, and so for professional leaders to be mindful about their resources and the demand on them to at the end of the day, being doing what is most important, and those should be tied to the company's outcomes and what we call a chain of goals, vertically and horizontally throughout the work chart. So the short answer is, eat pie, drink tea daily and remind everybody about it.

Mick Spiers: 18:23

Yeah, I love that. And there's an element of consistency, I think there that's coming through and the congruence. So, so when, when we're out there, we're talking about these values, we have the rituals that allow us to remind people and to live the values. It's the live value. People pick up more of what they see than what they hear. So you can talk about the values all day, and that will help somewhat, but if you live the values, eat pie and drink tea, be professional. Have integrity, have the emotional intelligence. Give people time, give people time, give people the energy, give people attention. That's what people want in the workplace. They want to feel seen, they want to feel heard, they want to feel valued, and that's when they feel like they're going to be on the journey that the business growth is not at their expense. It's it's the growth with them. They're growing with the business, and they're going on the journey together. Yeah.

Garrett Delph: 19:17

That is so powerful. Mick, the idea that people would be paid to go home stressed out and then carry that stress into their personal life. Like, right? We don't want that. You don't want that for your the people that you invest so much into.

Mick Spiers: 19:36

Yeah. So I like this. I'm growing with the business. It's the business isn't growing at my expense, and I'm not going home stressed at the end of the day. I'm going home happy that I feel like I contributed, I feel like I was seen, I feel like I was heard, I feel like I was valued, and what I did mattered and it was aligned with the values of the group. And where are we going and how we're going to get there?

Garrett Delph: 20:01

Yes. And Mick, all of those are the results of managing leaders, leading well.

Mick Spiers: 20:10

Yeah, really good. Okay, all right, excellent. Now I want to go under the process one. I think you're definitely onto something here. Garrett, and this is a lesson I've been learning a bit recently, I'm going to talk to you about a continuum. And I'm going to talk about delegation, delegation empowerment as a as the continuum here, and the continuum from micro management, which people, apart from very unique situations, people do not like micromanagement, there's a time and a place for. It. It's a very, very rare time and a place, all the way through to abdication and full empowerment and trust, and go, yeah, just get on with it. And you said something interesting before, because that is a bit of a mindset. Pay really smart people and then let them free. Was the words that you said. And you can develop this mindset of, I'm going to going to empower and trust my people. I've employed the right people, and I'm going to let them go. But before you know it, they're all going in all kinds of directions, etc. That's right. And on this process, if you're going to scale a business and you're going to scale it repeatably, giving people those guardrails about what's important, etc, etc, how do we balance that? That's like, that's where my question is going. How do we balance it so the process doesn't become a level of micro management where people don't get to bring themselves to work and bring their own thoughts and their own innovations, etc, through to full empowerment and trust, through to abdication, where your professional get on with it, and now they don't have the clarity of expectation that we spoke about before. Now they're paid good money, but they're so confused as to what good looks like anymore. How do we get that balance right, Garrett?

Garrett Delph: 21:52

Yeah, so we use a thing called an autonomy freedom matrix. And I put this together because the very question you're asking Mick is super common and very relevant, and it's tricky, right? Because, in my opinion, the truth is there is not an all in one answer. And having thought through it, this is how I created the matrix. You know, you have total control, no elasticity for freedom at all on the bottom left of the matrix. And you know, in that scenario, a perfect example is somebody who is in the genba, very valued, very important. But you know, imagine they're the person on the assembly line that is responsible for attaching lug nuts to the front tire or the front rim, and they have a benchmark. It has to be done in so much time. There is zero elasticity to have autonomy or freedom in that activity like and there's no quorums about that's what you were hired to do. You knew you were being hired to do that. And if any given time in your job, you go, Yeah, but you're controlling what I do, and I don't like that. I want freedom to put the lug nuts on any way I want. Otherwise, you're a micromanager. I think all of us would agree that's silly, right? That's silly. Yeah, that's good. But as you work your way up the matrix, what I recommend a business do is understand and architect where there should be autonomy and freedom for things like continuous improvement and innovation and feedback and these sorts of things, right? And there should be autonomies and freedom built into creative thinking because it requires it. And so in my opinion, you know the answer here is, know your roles. Know how those roles were built. Know how they value chain to the rest of the cross functional departments, teams and goals, and then give freedom and autonomy where it should be given and don't give it where it shouldn't be given for the ultimate success and health of the business.

Mick Spiers: 24:16

Yeah, it's really good, Garrett, so a freedom and autonomy matrix, and really thinking about situational and adaptive leadership, to go when is it going to be appropriate, when it's going to be not. So now we can have our process rigid where it needs to be, and then have some elasticity, where there is some freedom, where this is where we can start making some some differences here, spot on. I want to throw something to you, because this is, this is one that I've embraced in in my career. I'm going to then bring it back to the empowerment and trust of the people and to tap into their knowledge and their experiences. So yes, okay, we have these processes, and we have them for a reason. They're the they're the guard rails, and they're that what drive our repeatability. So instead of one person knowing how to do something, we can now have 2200 or 2000 people that can do this thing in a repeatable way. That's right. But where the continuous improvement and the empowerment and the engagement comes in the statement I have is you hold the pen. So when you get these people and they look at the process and they go, this process is driving me insane. It's the most inefficient process I've ever seen. Why? Why are we doing it like this? Why wouldn't we do it like that? If you've got a great idea and you think the process is broken, you hold the pen. Help us improve the process. We still need the process, but help us co architect the process. How does that sit with you?

Garrett Delph: 25:45

It syncs very well with me. I love it, and I would add to it again. There needs to be a process to manage this idea of holding the pen, because otherwise, what you end up with is 1000 voices saying, I have good ideas and I have better ideas, right? And you can't manage that. So in the name of this very good idea you're suggesting, I also built a framework to facilitate and empower that kind of thinking in a business. I call it a quad core leadership framework. And what it does is it empowers managers and leaders to bifurcate focus. So you take, you know, because here's what we do. Mick, yeah, I think you know this, especially for, you know, leaders that have B hags, big, hairy, audacious goals and they're ambitious. We tend to find great people, and then we load them up and we ask them to wear 17 hats. And that's destructive to the business. It's destructive to leadership. It's destructive to momentum. We know this. So if you can bifurcate focus by saying, if you're in a strategy role, I'm going to protect you by design and not allow you to participate in people management, right? So the four quads are strategy, maintaining and supporting people process, be it building or updating or managing, and then project management. And the reason I bring this up is if we go to the process component, when a business harnesses quad core and they identify and assign a person or people to be in charge of process cross functionally, then what you have is somebody dedicated or multiple people dedicated to going around and meeting with teams and meeting with people and collecting, collecting, collecting, validating and then shortlisting prioritized needs for change and innovation. Now what you've done is what would have been total chaos. You controlled it. You brought clarity to it. You distilled it into a focused, bite sized chunks that you can now innovate and change, manage all of these processes that really needed to be changed, that were, you know, in a really great way, collected from all of your smart people, and now you did something with it, too. And I found that to be great for both sides the business and the people. The people feel valued, and they also value and respect that you have a process to deal with it, and then the business gets the value too.

Mick Spiers: 28:35

All right, really good. So we are covering really good ground here, that you can have a process in a way that doesn't endanger empowerment and trust that you can have continuous improvement of those processes. But now we're also putting the guard rails on that process improvement, because another funny thing that happens Garrett with people that have lots of great ideas about how to improve things, some of them can also think at 1000 thoughts a minute and they haven't finished the last change before they want to do the next change. So now we're getting a bit more methodical and rhythmic with it. Also love what you said about the bifurcation between strategy, people process, project management and then bringing that together. I think you'll need a very clear decision making process to bring those people together. I've seen this a lot in business, that you get your most talented people, and you keep on just loading extra things on on their list, and before you know it, they're trying to do 17 things. And we all know that if you try to do 17 things, you'll do a very bad job of 17 things so.

Garrett Delph: 29:39

You're spot on your spot. You know, unlike computers, we our RAM is not upgradable.

Mick Spiers: 29:44

Not at all. Terrible multi taskers. What will happen? Coming back to clarity of expectation again, that person's that's got 17 things in their job description, they go home frustrated, going, I didn't get anything done today. I didn't get anything done.

Garrett Delph: 30:00

Yeah, yeah, I'm with you.

Mick Spiers: 30:02

Yeah, really good. Which leads us nicely to performance and accountability. So we've looked after our people, we've started to put some process frames in place, and we've got some good ways of doing that now, how do we then get the performance culture that's aligned with accountability, to the values that we put in place to the processes we put in place.

Garrett Delph: 30:25

Well, you assign definitive values to the outcomes for each role. It's really that simple. Well, in concept that simple. It takes some time to get. There. But listen, at the end of the day, this is a journey of expectations management, and so the business needs to know that it's investment in the people and the process is going to pay off through performed process that that gives the outcome that like that's what the business needs, and so the people need clarity about what their success looks like, which typically we call OKRs or KPIs, clarity ops. We call them SKORS, spelled S, K, O, R, because we score goals so and the S stands for successful. The K is key, the O is objective, and r is results, successful key, objective results. And so you know now that we've to your point, now that we've established a foundation of core values, leadership principles, leadership agreements, we've demonstrated care. We've given rails. Part of the rails are benchmarks, and so at the process level, in which we didn't get into but part of process building is benchmarking turnaround times and quality metrics. It doesn't matter what business you're in, there's always a turnaround time and there's always a quality metric, and that gets communicated to the executor. And so whether I'm putting on lug nuts or I'm building bridges, we all have those metrics to adhere to. And so that's your performance. You go by that. And maybe it's a single one per day, maybe it's 400 per day, but these are your KPIs or your scores. And then I think also, one other tag to add to a scorecard is culture, you know, and we always encourage simple, simple scorecards. You know, if the strategy of the business is measuring both macro and micro, they're going to know if the 1000 employees collectively are achieving their KPIs, and you can always back into those. But I think at a personal level, just go having a really rudimentary scorecard for every employee that says, you know, are you a benefit to the business? Is this person a benefit to the business? Yes or No, are they hitting their quality? Yes or No, are they hitting their speed? Yes or no. That is a real fast and easy way to do on the monthly that will allow functional leaders of a functional department, it, sales, marketing, HR, whatever, to just have do a quick scan or a pulse check on how their people are doing. And then, of course, we're always going to find out, hopefully, if the business is measuring their outcomes, the outcomes will be the final determinator. Yeah.

Mick Spiers: 33:30

Yeah. Really good. Okay, so in the performance measure, what I'm hearing now is yes, once again, aligned to clarity of expectation, but now I'm getting clarity of what good looks like. I'm getting clarity of how my my performance is going to be measured. And I heard two things there. One is, yeah, it's my output, but the other one is my behaviors to the culture part are my behaviors congruent with those values that we said all the way back at the start of this conversation? So not only is my output being measured against some kind of quality measure and and metric, but I'm also getting measured. Am I congruent with the values of the group? That brings clarity too.

Garrett Delph: 34:14

I'm with you. Yeah, and it works. And by the way, it is bi directional. So, you know, everybody gets measured. You know, this isn't so like, leaders don't get a pass here.

Mick Spiers: 34:26

Yes, very nice. Okay, all right, Garrett, this has been a really interesting conversation. I want to break down a few things so, so we've got the people process and performance pillars, but the underlying thread along the way was clarity and alignment. So the clarity of who we are, what are our values? Where are we going? How are we going to get there? And the people element is, we're going on this journey together. So giving you clarity of your expectations, of your career path, how are you going to grow with this business? Not at the business is not going to grow at the expense of you. You're coming for this journey, and we see you in that vision of the future, then we're going to have clarity of process in a way that enables the business to scale and grow repeatedly, but also has that continuous improvement element. So we're bringing in the empowerment and trust. And I loved your your freedom matrix there about where it needs no elasticity, and where it needs some some elasticity and flexibility. And then we're going to have the clarity on the performance framework. What does good look like? What does great look like? How are we going to measure our outputs, our outcomes? Are we on track towards the vision that we set? It, and how are we going to measure our congruence with the values that we told the people were important to us so people process performance. I think it's really good, Garrett, and I think everyone listening to the show, you can be thinking about the way that you can follow that thread and give that clarity. And I said before, you know, people want to be seen, they want to feel heard, they want to feel valued. But the other thing they want is they want clarity of expectation. They want to know what's expected of them. Am I on track or am I not on track, and can I go home at the end of the day proud that I did something that mattered and that I did a good job. All right, Garrett, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom for with us today, I want to go to our final four questions. These are the same questions we ask all of our guests. So what's the one thing you know now? Garrett Delph, that you wish you knew when you're 20?

Garrett Delph: 36:33

My my context here will be business, but I wish I knew about how to care for people in the business through organization, I didn't know how, and all I knew was, all I knew is I knew how to be aggressive, and I knew how to try to make the business win. But unfortunately, for many years, that was at the expense of people's hearts and minds, because that's, that's what chaos, confusion does to you, you know.

Mick Spiers: 37:02

I think it takes a long time for a lot of us to learn this. And you said something interesting all the way back at the start of our discussion, and that is about the congruence of the of the performance of the business compared to whether people are a happy, engaged it keeps on coming time and time again that if we make decisions that, on paper, look good for the business but are at the expense of the people, it never ends well. We make decisions that are balanced, decisions that are good for the business and good for the people, and the people feel that they know that we care about them. All of a sudden, the people care about the results, and the results look after themselves. So we're not leaving it to chance, but we're doing it in congruence. Yeah, yeah. Really good,

Garrett Delph: 37:47

Yeah, that's right. I just realized, as you were sharing, maybe a quick way to say that is, I wish I would have learned people first, not profit first.

Mick Spiers: 37:58

Yeah, good. I can nail it all right. Perfect. What's your favorite book?

Garrett Delph: 38:02

So I have so many, but if I had to choose one, I think it would be, it's called, it's your ship by Michael abershop. Oh, and he was a decorated Navy captain and transformed, literally, the US Navy in terms of their approach to leading people, powerful, powerful.

Mick Spiers: 38:25

Okay, I don't know that one. I'm gonna have to look into that. That sounds really good, yeah, very good. What's your favorite quote?

Garrett Delph: 38:31

My favorite quote, If you don't know where you're going, you will never know if you get there,

Mick Spiers: 38:38

Yeah? Very good. Okay, there's more clarity there again. Well done. That's right. And finally, there's going to be people listening for the show going, Yeah, this is the gonna say simple framework, but, but one that can help me scale and grow my business, scale my leadership. Bring people along for the journey and give them the clarity that they desire. How do people find you if they'd like to know more?

Garrett Delph: 39:03

Oh, thank you, Mick, I appreciate that. I'm on LinkedIn. So my, my handle is Garrett Delph, and then, of course, my website is clarityops.co, if you, if you go to.com you won't find me that. I think they wanted $50,000 for that, something absurd. So.co It is, yeah.

Mick Spiers: 39:26

All right, brilliant. We'll put those links in the show notes as well. Garrett, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. For me, everything resonated with me. I was thinking about mistakes I've made in my career, by the way, and and thinking about how some of the frameworks you're talking about would have corrected those but also resonated strongly with what I believe about business and people today. So thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today.

Garrett Delph: 39:50

Thank you so much for having me on your show, Mick, it's been a conference has been really great.

Mick Spiers: 39:54

Wow, some really game changing insights there with Garrett Delph, from the power of scaling leadership to the role of accountability in building an unstoppable culture. If there's one thing that stands out, it's this growth isn't just about the business, it's about the people who drive it. We succeed through our people, not at the expense of our people. Leadership isn't about control, it's about creating an environment where people thrive, take ownership and build something bigger than themselves. And as Garrett shared, the most successful leaders don't just lead, they empower. In the next episode, I'll be going solo to share my personal reflections and biggest takeaways from this. Great conversation with Garrett and share my own real life experiences about what it looks like to scale leadership, but also some tips on the very opposite, what some of the mistakes I've made in my career where it's gone in the opposite direction. Thank you for listening to The Leadership Project mickspiers.com a huge call out to Faris Sedek for his video editing of all of our video content and to all of the team at TLP. Joan Gozon, Gerald Calibo and my amazing wife Sei Spiers, I could not do this show without you. Don't forget to subscribe to The Leadership Project, YouTube channel, where we bring you interesting videos each and every week, and you can follow us on social, particularly on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Now, in the meantime, please do take care, look out for each other and join us on this journey as we learn together and lead together.