Cord Sachs is a Birmingham-based leadership expert and the CEO of FireSeeds, a company that helps companies find and grow great leaders and “the company behind many of Alabama’s fastest growing companies.”
The full conversation with Mr. Sachs can be heard on the Yellowhammer Radio podcast or in the video above, and a lightly edited transcript of his interview with Yellowhammer’s Andrea Tice and Scott Chambers can be read below.
Subscribe to the Yellowhammer Radio Podcast on iTunes. Learn more about Cord Sachs and Fireseeds at www.fireseeds.com
Scott Chambers:
All right. Welcome back in to Yellow Hammer Radio Super Station 101WYDE. For those of you working nine to five, I’m telling you, you need to get in touch with Fire Seeds, a great company founded by our friend, Cord Sachs, back in 2011. Leveraging 15 years of recruiting and leadership development experience, our friend, Cord Sachs, launched Fire Seeds to recruit dynamic leaders and install leader development strategies in world-changing businesses. We’ve been talking about the boardroom to the family room. It’s where everyone has a job whether it’s working from home. We all have this unique role to play. You spend about 80,000 hours of your life, Andrea, at work, and if you don’t live life with a purpose, then you’re really not going to be able to lead a legacy at home. By doing the boardroom to family room process that we’ve been talking about, you get to learn how to have advantages at work that really lead to that positive impact on your legacy at home. That’s what we’ve been talking about, Cord. Welcome back into the program.
Cord Sachs:
Hey. Glad to be here, Scott, Andrea.
Andrea Tice:
Yeah. We really enjoyed having Jonathan McKinney last week, I should say, bring in his vision board and detail it out and really … We posted a picture of it, so people could get a visual idea of what he’s talking about. This was all meant for motivating ourselves at work.
Cord Sachs:
That’s right.
Andrea Tice:
But let me start out this segment by asking you, why are people led to even look beyond their work and their … When they have dissatisfaction. What’s the cause behind that that you find out.
Cord Sachs:
Yeah. That’s interesting. Because we do get to … We hear a lot about that as a recruiting company. We talk to candidates all the time, and many of them, that are looking for other jobs, of course. I would say the main few reasons we get, they all have to do with, not so much the job itself, but the feedback they get at work, ironically. It’s not that they just … They just don’t get … Some of them get feedback, but it’s too much negative feedback, and they don’t get positive feedback. So it’s this balance of getting feedback, and most of them are discouraged because they really don’t know how well they’re doing at work.
Andrea Tice:
So it has almost nothing to do with the actual responsibilities or the tasks set before them. It has to do with how they’re being perceived or how they’re being talked to or addressed in the workplace?
Cord Sachs:
That’s right. Of course, there are some that are not … They don’t like their job, and they don’t like what their doing, but most of them would say, “I don’t get the encouragement. I don’t get critiqued. I don’t get feedback, and so I really don’t know how I’m doing at work.” And so that can be frustrating to have a job and not know if you’re on track to adding value or not.
Andrea Tice:
Okay. Why would you say it’s hard for people to get the encourage or feedback they need from their boss or their supervisor?
Cord Sachs:
I don’t think it’s that people don’t know how to give feedback. There’s positive and negative feedback, and usually we’re more comfortable giving one side of that or the other. There are those that-
Scott Chambers:
Right. Exactly.
Cord Sachs:
That love to.
Andrea Tice:
Okay. You fall on one side or the other.
Cord Sachs:
That’s right. That’s right. I mean, you’ve probably been around folks, and they’re super encouraging people, but they really avoid conflict and, therefore, they never really give strong feedback, strong critique. On the flip side of that if you’ve ever worked for a boss and that’s all they do is give strong critical feedback-
Scott Chambers:
Yes, I have.
Cord Sachs:
It can be a little-
Scott Chambers:
Not now, thank god.
Cord Sachs:
Yeah. That’s a good thing.
Scott Chambers:
Right.
Cord Sachs:
But it can be a little overbearing, and it can feel like you’re working for a tyrant that has his thumb on you or her thumb on you.
Andrea Tice:
So we basically have this split, kind of glass half empty, glass half full approach, people that just tend to go one way or the other. Is there a way or a system for combining that and to know that you’re hitting that happy medium?
Cord Sachs:
Yeah, and I think that’s the key here is that everybody wants to have feedback. We all want to know how we’re doing.
Scott Chambers:
Absolutely.
Cord Sachs:
And so it’s a balance, as a strong leader, being able to give a balance of positive feedback and then negative feedback at the same time, or at least with the same individual over a season of time. And so very important to get that balance in our leadership, and that’s what I wanted to kind of share today is a little grid that we use at Fire Seeds, and how do you think about giving positive and negative feedback in your relationships at work or at home.
Andrea Tice:
Okay. We know there’s a need. It’s to balance the feedback, and now you’re saying you’ve got a system, just a practical way-
Cord Sachs:
That’s right.
Andrea Tice:
To do it.
Cord Sachs:
That’s right.
Andrea Tice:
All right. Lay it on us.
Cord Sachs:
So we got a sticky analogy here. It’s using three C’s. All right? We want to make it sticky.
Scott Chambers:
What are the three C’s?
Cord Sachs:
The three C’s. There we go. We want to celebrate, champion, and challenge.
Andrea Tice:
Okay.
Cord Sachs:
All right? So in order to maximize our influence and motivation of another person, we want to first celebrate. We want to catch them doing something great and then make a big deal about it. We want to acknowledge when we see something done well. Give me a time when you’ve been celebrated, one of you.
Scott Chambers:
Number one in the ratings.
Cord Sachs:
Okay. Number one in the ratings. Where you specifically added value and did something to move you to number one in the ratings. How does it feel when someone acknowledges that, sees that, and then makes a big deal about that.
Scott Chambers:
It makes you feel really good. You’re being celebrated, you know?
Cord Sachs:
Okay.
Scott Chambers:
You feel great. You feel positive. You want to do better next time. You can’t get higher than number one, but you want to keep doing a great job so you stay at number one.
Cord Sachs:
That’s right. That’s right. You hit the winning shot at the end of the game and guess what? You get celebrated, and that’s a great moment of fuel and motivation. Number one, when you see someone doing something well, you simply acknowledge it and make a big deal about it. But then you want to celebrate and then secondly, champion, because celebrating has everything to do with being seen. We all want to be seen.
Andrea Tice:
Okay.
Cord Sachs:
But what we really want is to be known. And so championing somebody is connecting what you’ve seen them do well to who they are as a person. And so I might say, “Hey, well done on putting together a sales display that really landed the deal for you at work, and I want you to know that that’s connected to what I see as you being a very committed and loyal employee, a loyal team member. Not only have I seen something you’ve done well, but I’m connecting it to who you are.” I saw my son this past weekend. He made a goal in one of the tournaments, had a header across-
Scott Chambers:
Awesome.
Cord Sachs:
And another one in, and, of course, at the end of the game I go up to him and I celebrate, “Wow. Great job. You did a great job making that shot.”
Scott Chambers:
Right.
Cord Sachs:
“But, Jeremiah, I want to let you know, that’s because of your commitment and your work ethic over the last few months to get better at your headers.” And so not only have I celebrated his goal, but I have championed who he is and who he’s becoming, and that combination is very powerful. That, then, sets us up to challenge. The celebrate, champion, and challenge, when we have a regular dose of celebrating and championing folks, it then sets us up to be able to challenge and critique and call them the more.
Andrea Tice:
Now, I noticed that this next “C” word that you mention is not “critique.” It’s “challenge” and there’s a difference.
Cord Sachs:
That’s right.
Andrea Tice:
Okay.
Cord Sachs:
Challenge obviously involves critique. It’s seeing something that can be done better, and giving someone very specific advice or critique on how it can improve. And so if all we do is critique, though, we’re making withdrawals from a bank account, and we’ll eventually go broke with-
Andrea Tice:
Yes. Right.
Cord Sachs:
No special capital.
Scott Chambers:
And you feel broken as well if you’re on the receiving end.
Cord Sachs:
That’s right.
Scott Chambers:
You feel broken. Now, is there a specific cadence, a perfect ratio, that we really should be apply to those three C’s?
Cord Sachs:
Everybody’s different, and I would say over a season of a relationship, a week, a month, you want to have a cadence that’s basically five to one. Social sciences would say that when we hear something negative, it takes about five positive remarks about that same scenario to overcome the one negative. If you hear a negative movie review from a friend, it will take five other friends telling you, “No, no. It really is a good movie”-
Scott Chambers:
Right.
Andrea Tice:
Yeah. That’s true.
Cord Sachs:
To overcome that one.
Scott Chambers:
Yeah.
Cord Sachs:
And so think of that kind of cadence when you’re combining, celebrating, and championing, five to that one time you’re really gonna critique and tell someone they need to do something different, and I’d say that’s even more important when you’re talking about something that’s a character issue with an individual.
Scott Chambers:
Right.
Cord Sachs:
And that’s probably where you transfer that at home, and us as mom and dads at home think about how many times do we critique or get on or discipline our kids compared to the ratio of us celebrating and championing.
Scott Chambers:
Exactly. How does it play out with your family at home. How does that play out?
Cord Sachs:
Well, I try to do it very informally just as we’re going, but then we have some formal times that we really try to teach them to make this a part of who they are, to celebrate, champion, and challenge other folks, so we do it at birthdays.
Scott Chambers:
Nice.
Cord Sachs:
I got six kids at home and so that-
Scott Chambers:
Wow.
Cord Sachs:
Comes around around rather regularly.
Andrea Tice:
So you’re doing that a lot, the three C’s.
Cord Sachs:
That’s right, and that’s right. And so sit at the table, and we all go around, and we have a time of affirmation where you celebrate and champion whoever’s birthday it is, and you say something that’s true about who they are. Even our five year old is learning how to celebrate and champion, and then at the end I usually give one challenge of how they could continue to improve and grow this next year.
Andrea Tice:
Could you give us an example of-
Scott Chambers:
Yeah.
Andrea Tice:
A more specific challenge where you’re involving critique, but you’re balancing it so that it is a challenge more than it is a critique. Does that make sense?
Cord Sachs:
Yeah. Absolutely. All right, my daughter was really struggling in school, and so she’s really worked very hard over the last season to focus more, to work harder on her grades, and so we’ve been really calling out when she brings those papers home and celebrating. We’re championing the fact that she’s really disciplining herself, something she’s never done before, and then we’re giving her a little challenge, “Hey, I want you to also this next month try to study a little bit more in this certain subject that you need to grow in.”
Andrea Tice:
Okay.
Cord Sachs:
And so just a little bit of a cadence of how it would practically play out celebrate, champion, and challenge.
Scott Chambers:
That’s awesome. Cord Sachs with Fire Seeds. We appreciate you being on with Yellow Hammer Radio. Quickly, how do people get in touch with Fire Seeds so they can make a positive impact? 10 seconds.
Cord Sachs:
10 seconds. Go to fireseeds.com. It’s that simple. Learn more about who we are.
Don’t miss out! Subscribe today to have Alabama’s leading headlines delivered to your inbox.